Mike: Welcome back to the Discount Property Investor podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. I am super excited to be talking about the speed in this game.

David: Speed to lead.

Mike: Speed is the name of the game. My name is Mike Slane, joined with co-host David Dodge. David, how are you?

David: Hey guys, I'm doing great. Got my work out in this morning, feeling good.

Mike: I like motivated days. Some days Dave comes in after his workout, he is rip roaring ready to go. David is the partner I love working with.

David: That's right.

Mike: Dave, what you got there, man?

David: I was just going to skim through the book, man. There are so many awesome things in this book. I can't believe how long this book is, man.

Mike: Me either.

David: We were writing it, it's 270 pages, 273. I am holding 'The ultimate guide to wholesaling real estate' in my hands, the book Mike and I wrote, if you're not watching us, if you're listening to us here.

Mike: Yeah we wrote it, again, I did not think we would come up with a 270 page book. I thought we would have more of-- 150, like almost a pamphlet as opposed to a book.

David: This is full blown but it is truly the ultimate guide though.

Mike: I think it's a good title.

David: Guys, if you haven't checked our book out, go on Amazon and purchase it. We also have it on audible. I checked it this morning, we have 59 reviews on the book.

Mike: Do we really?

David: 4.5 stars.

Mike: That's amazing, I had no idea.

David: I know. Also if-- sorry not the book, the podcast.

Mike: Okay.

David: I am messing my things up. The book only has a couple. We need to get some more reviews in there, guys. If you're listening, if you're a fan of us, we would appreciate you guys heading over to Amazon and leave us a review too.

Mike: You know what we can do, if you go out there and you order the Amazon version of it, because I know you guys are listening to us, that may be your preferred consumption, if you listen to the book, leave us an Amazon review, send us a message with a screenshot or something, we will send you guys a free copy of the book.

David: I love that idea. Let's do it.

Mike: Send you a signed autographed copy of the book. We will sign it too.

David: Even better.

Mike: There you go. Shoot us an e-mail with a little copy of that, and we are happy to do that for you, we appreciate the reviews.

David: Speed to lead, guys. As you can tell we get side tracked sometimes. It's all good. What is the need for speed? It's simple; it just means-- not need for speed, speed to lead, it just means that the time in which the lead comes in to the time in which you reach out to that individual is very important.

Mike: So step one, or priority one is always been my message or my mantra, answer your phone. When somebody calls you, answer your phone, so there is zero lead lag time. That's really what we are trying to decrease is the amount of lag time from someone reaching out to you, and you contacting that person. That's the speed to lead. So if you get a phone call, answer it, guys. If you get a phone call answer it, that's all there is to it. Zero lag time, that is speed to lead right there. So you have to answer your phone. That is true of all the calls, unknown numbers especially. I answer the phone--.

David: Unknowns, blocks.

Mike: We did this morning. Are they prank calling you? I don't know, I just answer the phone. I still do it to this day. It's a habit I've build, I constantly do it, even though the majority of our leads go through our central office now. It's a little bit different, but I still answer it because people have my cell phone, and that's what we're going to do, answer your phone. The next speed to lead thing, okay, so let's say you are not able to answer your phone, Dave. What do you do?

David: If you are not able to answer you phone? Then you need to call them back right away, as soon as you possibly can, or shoot them a text that just says, hey I'm sorry I can't answer your phone call right now, but I will get back with you as soon as I possibly can. There is actually a system out there that we use that when calls come in that don't get answered, they get an automatic response from us. So even if it's 3am, they get a response say, hey I saw you called, sorry I can't talk right now, I'm in the middle of something, but I will call you back as soon as I can. So that's one option would be just to call back. Number two would be send a text. Number three would be send them--.

Mike: Why is this so important? I think we jumped right into the need to do it. Why is it so important though?

David: Speed to lead, that's a great point, let's back up a sec here.

Mike: Yeah.

David: We are getting a little bit ahead of ourselves this morning. A lot of coffee.

Mike: We are all amped up in this office.

David: That's right. Why it's important, let's put ourselves in the shoes of the motivated seller, so I am just going to throw out a crazy scenario here. The spouse left, I'm getting divorced, and I have to sell this house. I waited until the last minute because I am in denial. This is not an abnormal thing, it happens all the time. I am not saying this is a good scenario, because nobody likes-- hardships, including me. However, if somebody is in this scenario and they wait until the very last minute, and now they need to sell the house because they can't afford it anymore. They have to sell it quick, so who do they call? They call people like us, but that's the problem, and that's where I am going with this, Mike. They go online, and they Google people that buy houses in their city, or maybe they are already getting postcards, so what do they do? They start calling people, start filling out web forms for someone to come out and give them an offer on their house, and talk to them. If they call us for example and we don't answer, do you think they are just going to sit around and wait for us to call them back? No, they are going to go to the next person in the Yellow Pages, or the Google results, or so on and so forth.

Mike: Exactly, I don't think it is always necessarily a matter of motivation or procrastination as Dave mentioned. That is a big factor. But, one of the big things too, we have trained ourselves as society. We have become so-- what's it called? Impatient, but it's on demand. We expect everything to happen right away. With the internet, when we order something on Amazon, we expect it there when we get home.

David: When I order my jimmy johns, I want them knocking on the door before I hang up the call.

Mike: Before we even paid for it.

David: It's usually really quick.

Mike: It's not necessarily a bad thing, but we are so accustomed to a high level of customer service, that you have to provide that as well.

David: I love it.

Mike: That's really I think what we are trying to get out is that has to be number one.

David: Speed to lead, guys, it is super important. If you don't answer the call, they may leave you a message, they may not, right? What's going to happen is they are going to hang up and they are going to go to the next result in their phone, phone book, or the internet or whatever they are looking up, they are going to search for the next guy, and often times they are going to have three, four or five people that they are even going to get a hold of, even if you do answer the phone. They are going to want all these people to come out and give them offers on the house, which makes sense. That is the logical thing to do; get multiple quotes, get multiple bids, right? But often times if you're first, and you beat everyone to the punch, and give them a fair deal; they may even have an appointment scheduled, but you can get it under contract before those people. Regardless of all those things, speed to lead is super important.

Mike: Another reason why it is important though, you are paying at this point for people to call you. You do not necessarily want to lose out on that opportunity. You are creating opportunities for yourself. You can't pass up on those opportunities. You can't squander those opportunities. That's really-- that's how I look at it.

David: You're paying-- a ton of money, or you're paying a lot of time. It doesn't always have to be money, guys. We talked about the time and money budgets for marketing. Even if you didn't spend a ton of money getting the lead, you may have spent a bunch of time--.

Mike: It's true.

David: -- driving around, door knocking, cold calling, Zillow, Craigslist, Facebook people.

Mike: Even if you call-- say you call like Dave said, you spend a lot of time, you are dialing, dialing, dialing. Even if you saved every number that you dialed in your phone or in your directory so that it would pop up. They could still call you from another phone number. It could still be an unknown number, you have to answer that phone number.

David: You have to answer it.

Mike: Again, it is an opportunity--.

David: I was looking for a couple of-- analytics on the case, because I know there are some analytics in terms of-- I don't know the exact figures that I was searching for. I know that if you can get back to somebody withing five to seven minutes, you have like a 90% higher chance of working with that person, than if it's over five to seven minutes. Getting back to them immediately-- I mean it's huge. Ten times more powerful than waiting an hour.

Mike: What surprises me--.

David: What can happen in the hour? They can call ten other people.

Mike: Or the other guy called them back, got an appointment--.

David: Boom. Or it's already been sold, could be sold within the hour too.

Mike: So what surprises me the most is that the conversion or the response time on internet generated leads matters.

David: Any lead.

Mike: What surprises me-- is what I'm saying.

David: Oh okay.

Mike: Is that if someone goes out and fills out a web form on one of your websites. They fill it out, and you just wait for 24 hours, you are-- it's pretty unlikely you are even going to get a hold of that person, let alone close a sale.

David: Let alone get in front of them.

Mike: This is something we talked about with Josh, maybe we should circle back to those statistics. He was mentioning too I believe that if you get back to them within five minute, like you just said, five minutes or less, you are ten times more likely to be able to do business with that person.

David: But you brought up a good point, Mike. Often if you wait too long you can't even get a hold of that person.

Mike: Yeah it happens way too-- super frustrating.

David: Whereas if they call you and you call them back, even if it's not five minutes, let's say it's twenty. The odds of you having them answer are so much incredibly higher than if it's four to six or even twenty four hours later, I love it.

Mike: It is, an hour or so is probably about your threshold.

David: Basically if it's over an hour it might as well be a day.

Mike: Might as well be a cold lead at that point. Think about how much time you spend on the internet. Most of us it's a lot.

David: Oh yeah.

Mike: Again, what did you do an hour ago? I don't know, I don't remember filling that out.

David: Let me look at my browser history and tell you exactly what I did. But, there are going to be thirty different things that I did in that hour. I am jumping all over the place all day. We all are.

Mike: I try to rein Dave in. I say, look let's focus. But he still got to find that next stat, it is what it is.

David: Got to get it, man.

Mike: Speed to lead, okay, the one thing we talked about, answer the phone.

David: How to increase speed to lead; answer the phone.

Mike: Then Dave said, what was the next one? Call them back as soon as possible, right?

David: Call them back as soon as possible. If you can't answer the phone-- the number one is your default. Answer, answer, answer. Stop what you're doing, answer the phone, if you can't do it, hire someone to do it.

Mike: This costs you nothing, it's just building a habit, answer the phone.

David: If you're new to this, there is zero reason not to answer the phone, because you don't have that many coming in anyway.

Mike: You don't have an assistant, you don't have any excuses.

David: You probably don't have any deals to sell, and we talk about this all the time; without inventory you can't wholesale.

Mike: Right. So answer the phone, it's not a big deal, just answer the phone.

David: Number two, if you can't or you don't for whatever reason, call them back immediately, absolutely. Call them back immediately.

Mike: And then-- I think we didn't even really finish it, the thought is we have software that will text them back right away.

David: Right.

Mike: If you are using your iPhone, if you are just a solopreneur, and you are using your iPhone, very cool because you can click a little thing to send a message--.

David: I love that, it's a quick response.

Mike: Exactly a quick response. You can type a little message saying, hey sorry can't answer--. Maybe you're a work, maybe you still have the full time job, that's okay. Just send them a text, I will call you back in ten minutes or whatever.

David: A, you have reached out. You have made that communication. Sometimes they may text back and say, hey okay cool, or great I am just trying to get an offer on A B C property or whatever. You may even be able to communicate with them that way. But either way, you have to do one of the two; call them back or send a text in my opinion, absolutely. Do it immediately.

Mike: If you're using a CRM, and we highly recommend using the one which is REI Black Book, there is ways you can-- when someone calls in, automatically send a text message to them if you didn't answer.

David: Yep. So you get your phone numbers through REI Black Book. Then you just put together these little automation trees, they are so simple, workflows. You can basically have different flows. One for if you answer, do nothing, or answer and create a lead and a task to call them back in a week if you haven't talked to them since. If you didn't answer, you could send them a text. The cool thing about it is if you didn't answer, and it sends them a text, and you are not able to get in touch with them again, you can put them on a drip where it will continuously text that person until they get back to you. Yes, REI Black Book is awesome when it comes to lead management, but more importantly automation of followup.

Mike: Cool.

David: That's really what you're doing. If you didn't answer the phone, even if you call them back in two minutes, that's a follow up essentially, right? It's making that second contact.

Mike: On REI Black Book we will talk about our little link that will get the sign up fee, what's it called, Dave? The-- license fees are waived. REIBlackBook.com/DPI. That is going to give you basically a thousand dollar value. Click that, sign up for REI Black Book if you want to try that software. We highly encourage all the people in our mastermind group, our coaching mastermind group to-- sign up for REI Black Book right away. Again, it is almost like we can't--.

David: Mike and I have been using it for five years together.

Mike: And we both used it prior to that.

David: That's right. We don't push anything that we don't use. We were just talking about this the other day, I don't know if it was you Mike I was talking to, or somebody, I think it was Travis, but you might have been there. We were sitting there, making follow up calls for about two hours straight. We each probably made 50 calls. We both had phone calls come in at the same time and we both answered them. We were on the phone for like three minutes a piece, and we both hung up those calls at the same time, it was kind of weird how it happened. We both looked up over and we were like, I haven't talked to that person in like six months. Thank God for the CRM go look up their name or phone number, and immediately we were caught up on what the conversation we had with that person six months ago, because we had left notes. It was like, last time we talked to them this person's daughter was moving out, and they didn't have time to talk. As soon as I read those notes I am on the phone and I'm like, hey did everything go smoothly with the daughter moving out? They are like, how did you remember that? I'm like, I haven't forgotten about you, I don't tell them I am reading notes. I say, I haven't forgotten about you, man. You told me that and it stuck with me. I really want to come see that house, I have been waiting for you to call, or whatever the scenario is.

Mike: That is-- it's awesome, but that is also instant rapport. If you remember something about someone from six months ago, by remember I mean you have your system pop up in front of you and you can see that, it's instant rapport, guys. That is huge.

David: Another thing that is really cool about getting that information if oyu didn't take notes is that you can go back and listen to the calls, because all of them are recorded, or you can set it up to be recorded.

Mike: REI Black Book has become a beast. It has become an amazing software. I used to-- we used to use a couple of different ones. We are all going back to REI Black Book. We are all in on it because it's so cool.

David: Less is more.

Mike: Anyways we are digressing. So use REIBlackBook.com/DPI, you will get that fee waived. Helps you with the speed to lead if you can't answer it. You can also take incoming leads and send it to a VA. If you are working full time you could hire somebody else, and have them answer the calls for you. There are a lot of services for that like PatLive.

David: You know who else has a great service and is coming in tomorrow? You are going to meet him, we are going to do a podcast with him. His name is Ryan [00:17:28.16 - inaudible] and he is in one of my masterminds. He is the creator, founder, organizer, whatever you want to call it of Call Porter.

Mike: Sweet.

David: Which is basically very similar to PatLive, but it is all US people, which I don't know if they do, maybe they don't, but it doesn't matter. It's another service. But we are actually going to have him on the podcast tomorrow. He is going to tell us all about Call Porter, as well as Ball Point Marketing, which is another one of his companies, where he does hand written notes, very cool.

Mike: Sweet. Anything else on speed to lead, guys? Or else let's wrap this episode up.

David: I'm with ya. Speed to lead. I would just say-- the speed in the speed to lead is the most important part, guys. It truly is. You want to act with haste. You want to call back, you want to text, you want to answer. If you can't do those things right away, then you need to get a system in place that can help you do those, hence the one was use, REI Black Book.

Mike: We have a team of people that help answer the phone for us--.

David: Or get a third party service. There are so many different options.

Mike: You can have a team by using Call Porter, PatLive or any-- there are a number of them out there. So very cool.

David: But it's very important, guys, speed to lead. We are going to wrap up this right here. If you can get back to the lead within five to seven minutes, you are 90% more likely to work with that person. That's it, it's that simple. It's the only fact you need, 90%.

Mike: Thanks for listening, guys. We will catch you in the next episode.

David: Signing off.