Welcome back to the Discount Property Investor podcast. Our mission is to share what we have learned from our experience and the experience of others to help you make more money investing like a pro. We want to teach you how to create wealth by investing in real estate, the discount property investor way. To jumpstart your real estate investing career, visit freewholesalecourse.com, the most complete free course on wholesaling real estate ever. Thanks for tuning in.

David: Welcome back discount property investors. Mike and I are back at it again today bringing an awesome guest you guys, Gavin Timms. Gavin's a personal friend of mine, known him for years. He is coaching hundreds of students, crushing it and today, we got to bring him on. We're going to actually be talking about cold calling with Gavin and this is something that Mike and I have really, you know, we haven't- we haven't done a lot of it until recently. I think as of right now, we have four dialers, four callers that are each working 20 hour shifts so you're looking at what is that? 20? 40? 60? about 80 hours a week of cold calling going out and we've been doing it for you know, what do you think Mike? Maybe three months, give or take?

Mike: Well we've had them on team for about three months.

David: Yeah, yeah exactly like, you know doing it in bulk, but again, Gavin's the master at this. He's got a course and everything so we just wanted to have him on and talk cold calling. Gavin, how the hell are you man?

Gavin: I'm good guys. How you guys doing?

David: Man, we're doing awesome.

Gavin: I appreciate you having me on. Yeah, it's always a good time, you know? We've done a couple of podcasts together so I appreciate it and yeah, especially, it's crazy when I listen to you- you know, you guys have been super successful in the business and the beautiful thing is with marketing there's so many ways to obviously get leads, right? And the fact that you guys have just started cold calling over the last few months is just crazy to me, you know, because it's my number one leadgen, but obviously whatever you've been doing is successful as well. I think that's the beauty of marketing.

David: You know what? That's the beauty of marketing like you said, there's a hundred ways to do it and we tell this to our students too Gavin is all of them work.

Gavin: Absolutely.

David: It's are you going to be consistent enough with the method that you choose, right?

Gavin: Yup, yup.

David: So, love that man, love that.

Gavin: Absolutely, and they come in at different costs as well, right? Like a cold call lead potentially is not gonna be a direct mail, is not gonna be a PPC lead, right? Well the cost of the lead is going to be much much lower and for me, you know in our business on the real estate side, 90% of the deals we do close from follow up, right? So we're not closing these coming straight in, very rarely. We just closed one in Florida last week for 20,000 that came in, we locked it up within 2 days, we sent it to closing, within 3 weeks we got a $20,000 check. I'm not going to sit here and say that happens every time, absolutely not, right? That's probably the second one all year that that's actually happened. The majority will be- you know I'm a believer in the leadgen side and the consistency of it, and if you want to consistently market, it needs to be- as an entrepreneur and what we do, it needs to be done by somebody else, right? i.e. cold callers because if it relies on us and people watching this that had just you know, they work on their own, there's no consistency there, that's where it stops and starts. We know marketing comes down to consistency as you just said, so I also seen all that having cold callers do that, generating leads on a day-to-day basis and the good thing is that- I've probably talked about this on a podcast with you Dave before but I'm- I look everything in reverse. When I get it into the CRM, the process then begins to get the deal closed, okay? Well the first phase is to get the leads in. Now if you think about it for a harper, I don't just blast leads in because everyone teaches more leads equals more deals. Now that is very very true, but if I say that 90% of the deals that I closed comes from follow up, right? Why does everyone focus on 90% of their time on leadgen and new leads, doesn't make any sense. So if you are producing too many leads and you're just talking to new people and not following up, it doesn't mean you're going to do more deals in my opinion, especially with the technique of cold calling or text messaging. So that's what we do, so I can literally play in each market that I'm in. I can deliver on how many leads I want on a day-to-day basis and we make sure we hit them first and then we go into the follow-up because we know that again, 90% of what we close will be down the line from marketing that came in months ago.

David: Man, you nailed it. I agree 100% with everything you just said, literally every thing.

Gavin: I appreciate it.

David: Follow up is the name of the game though guys. I mean, if you're watching or you're listening to this you know, 90% of people don't go past the second or third follow-up. So just think of that, you know, if you want to eliminate your competition in this business, follow up more than two or three times and you literally have eliminated 90% of the competition. So if you're following up 7, 10- I mean Gavin we have leads in our system from 6, almost 7 years ago when Mike and I first started wholesaling, before we were even working together, we each had systems that we brought in whenever we partnered up and we're still working some of these leads to where you know, our follow-up schedule maybe every six months or maybe even every year right? Where they say yeah I'm not interested today, call me in a year and guess what? We do, we do call them back in the year. So the follow-up it's so important, you know? We tell this to our students too: our average deal, you know, comes in typically between the four to six month marks, call it about five months. That doesn't mean that every lead that comes in takes 5 months to close, right? But on average, right? If you average out the last seven years worth of data, on average it's about 5 months, you know because we're following up with people and-

Gavin: Yup, 100%.

David: -maybe they're not motivated when they first raise their hand, right? But later.

Mike: I didn't tell you this, the one- that little Church Road one, I believe that one was imported into our system in 2016.

David: This is the one that we're working on now?

Mike: We're closing next week.

David: Closing next week, okay.

Mike: We imported it back in 2016, I think we did some direct mail and then we moved it over to the new system, started following up again on a different campaign and we're closing it next week.

David: How fun is that?

Mike: So again we were working on that for I mean about four years, so again it's a follow up on this lead. He wasn't motivated at the time, now he is. It's awesome.

David: This is an interesting one. Mike, tell him about this one just real quick cuz this is like a really- this is North City, isn't it? What we're talking about?

Mike: Yeah, it's in North City area.

David: Gavin, you know about North City, St. Louis buddy?

Gavin: Some degree, yeah.

David: Worst crime in the United States, it's terrible. There's a warzone, right?

Gavin: Yeah, you're not gonna hang out.

David: [inaudible].

Mike: Yeah, it's not-

David: It's not a homerun but dude, a couple grand's a couple grand, right?

Mike: So it's Baden area, so that's kind of like one of the- just from what I know, it's one of the Bible areas up there in North City. We text this person so the communication was cold texting at this point, kind of an almost a new lead I would say because we restarted our follow-up campaign. We text back and forth, put it under contract for 6000. He's out of town, had his property manager put a lockbox. I ran up there, I said: I don't want this property, took pictures-

David: Literally, I don't want it.

Mike: I took picture of it, said I don't want it, let's go ahead and market it because we've got it under contract and our phones blew up on it. I think we marketed it at 9 and somebody came in at 10 thousand cuz they wanted it that bad.

David: Paid over our ass. Man, like you said, we're only making like 4 grand, right? Not a homerun by any means but here's the funny thing is that we didn't even really want the lead. Mike just said: I don't want the house.

Mike: I didn't even want to go.

David: Did we have it under contract before we went?

Mike: Correct.

David: So he went already, he was like: I don't even want this but we already had it under contract so now he's got pictures so we're just like: we might as well just send it out, see what happens, right? And really, this is funny guys. You know the longer you do something, the luckier you get, right? Everyone knows that whole thing. So really though, we're in a new CRM now and we're still kind of learning how it works so this was just an opportunity to add photos, send it out to list. I mean, really we weren't even really expecting to have any calls at all, you know? We're just like: let's learn the system with this, so deals will fall into your lap as long as you are following up with people, it just happens.

Gavin: Yeah, well you know being in it to win, haven't you.

David: Yeah

Mike: Yeah.

David: Absolutely.

Mike: Let's get back to the cold calling stuff though with Gavin as I'm sure you have a lot of great tips. One of the things that you said was if you do it yourself, it's not going to be consistent and I guess what I'm thinking back from like a new student's perspective or a new fledgling entrepreneur. If they don't have the budget, I mean do you recommend they do some of the cold calling themselves or [audio cut]. How's does that look in your world?

David: I'm so curious myself

Gavin: Yeah, no absolutely. So, I think that is a great question. There's two types of marketing: there's proactive and reactive, right? So we're talking about a proactive marketing piece here and I believe that if you're having conversations with people, people and property, where there's people, there's problems, right? So what I teach is that you have to look for the people, okay? And where's there's people and their problems will be then there's a real estate for you, all right? But if you don't have a budget then yes, you have got to- you've got to work harder. There's three things in this business, okay? There's time, money or both, okay?

David: I love it. We preach the same thing.

Mike: Same thing, man

Gavin: 100%

David: Time, money or both, right. It's not really 'or', it's 'and'. Right? And.

Gavin: So, when someone comes- I don't like to use the word broke but let's just get to the point and be honest, so if someone is broke and they don't have any time, something's gotta give, right? You gotta find some time, all right? or you gotta find some money, right? And again, if you can do both then you can do both. For me, when I gotta go and I'd left my job, right? I didn't have the money, I had the time so I just pounded the phone and I understood early on that by having conversations and if you have enough of them, it's going to produce deals. So yes is the answer. If you don't have the funds, that doesn't mean that you can't do it. You just got to work harder than the other person that have the system, that have the VA cold callers or the American cold callers, whatever they're doing but you need to obviously get in the right headspace. I think mindset is everything for cold calling and in business in general. I mean, it's brutal. I'm not going to lie, to sit on the dialer and just start pounding the phone is brutal but if you want it enough, you've got to do what you got to do to make it happen, but you have to have an exit plan because then it's more manageable. If you go and start calling and you just don't see the end of this ever stopping, then you're probably going to give in, but if you know that you just got to do this for a month or two months or whenever to get that first deal, to make that first check, to then go and get that cold colder to then give you some freedom back to then focus on more quality leads then that's what I suggest that they do.

David: 100% agree once again, love that, love that. But you know once somebody gets beyond you know, let's say their first deal or two or five, right? And now they have some money, right? They've done some deals and hopefully paid themselves back for all of their previous marketing but now they can afford at this point to take anywhere from 10 to maybe 40, 50% even on some deals and put back into their marketing budget. From there, hire it out, what's your advice on that?

Gavin: Yeah, so if they do that which is exactly what I recommend, I'm also big on spreading the budget over multiple months to keep it consistent, okay?

David: That's it, love that idea.

Gavin: So don't go in and go make 5 grand, okay we're going to put two and a half thousand, you know, back in or we've done 10 grand, we want to put 5 grand in month one because what happens is that you will get overwhelmed with leads and then things will be missed. You're going to get overwhelmed, you're not going to work the process and it won't work, right? Consistency is the key. So if I have 5000 to put back in the business, I'd probably spread that over 3 months so I'd give myself a budget of 1600 month, whatever it would come to. So I'd have 1600 a month for then three months, okay? And then what I would do is let's say in that first month, I go and do another deal, I would then now go 2500 a month for three months and I will start to grow that out but it will- so we know it's real estate, we might have a bad month, we might not have a close but it's okay because my consistency's going to be there. So that's how I would do it and I will definitely go towards cold calling because it is a cheaper, you know, lead generation.

David: I 100% agree. Gavin, whenever somebody gets to that point where they have a little bit of a budget, right? And they don't necessarily want to trade their own time, what do you recommend personally for going out and finding these people? I know there's a lot of different ways. Some people will go to Facebook groups and find their virtual assistants that way, other people may go to, you know, certain websites to find them. What do you recommend?

Gavin: Yeah, so I like- I mean I have obviously connections now in the Philippines but if I'm just new like I was, I like Upwork, okay? upwork.com, and I keep things very simple. I don't run big ads, I run little two sentences in my ad of what I want, okay? So if I'm hiring a cold caller, it's going to be someone that's got cold calling experience, okay? Must have great English, and real estate's not a must, right? And also the dialer that they are going to be using as well, they need to have experience. So experienced cold caller within one to two years, great English, the dialer whatever you're using the platform they already need to be trained on and real estate is not a must. That's pretty much what my ad says.

David: Yeah, real estate isn't a must whenever you're doing just cold calling. That's such a great golden nugget right there is that you don't necessarily have to have [inaudible].

Gavin: If they've done insurance, they've been working for one of the airlines, I don't care. If they're used to talking to people and consistently on the go, that's what- that's all I need, okay? Cuz we have scripts to give them and they'll mold in, but when we put this ad out, you're going to get a ton of people, right? to start applying so within probably 24 hours, you're going to turn the ad off, all right?

David: Holy cow, did you hear that? It's only gonna take 24 hours to get a flood of people.

Gavin: Yeah, and then you're gonna be like this is crazy. So then there's two more steps I'm gonna give people that they need to do.

David: Yup.

Gavin: You're gonna look at the- their like completion rate. There's a percentage of what they've done on all the jobs of satisfaction and completion, right? And you want to keep that over 90%, you don't want to hire someone at 40% because obviously things aren't going well. So you can give feedback on there when they've took different jobs so you want to be over 90% and then the next move that you need to do, okay? is you send everyone a message and you say hey can you send me a recording 1 minute long telling me about yourself? Okay? So what this will do is you will eliminate a lot because they won't do it and then when the ones that do do it, you'll actually listen to their voice to say you've got going to English, no, no, no, you're good, no, no, no, your good, narrow it down three people then you interview all three. So now you've just gone from 30 applications to 3 and within a couple of days, you're ready to hire and ready to go.

Mike: That's awesome man. I love that.

David: What was the third part? Yeah, I like that, I like that. So go on Upwork, look at the completion and the satisfaction rate, keep that above 90%.

Gavin: Yup.

David: Ask them to send you a 1-minute recording just telling them about yourself and then was there a third thing I missed?

Gavin: Yeah, so once you've done that and you've then- you get them in, there's only gonna be a percentage that do it and that's how you're gonna then be able to listen to them.

David: You're narrowing down, right.

Gavin: So you're narrowing it down and then the ones that you like, well they sound great, they sound good, then you can interview them once, right?

David: Got it.

Gavin: So then you'll get on a zoom call and then you want to make sure that they sound how they did on the recorded because obviously I'm from England so I speak decent English but people can do obviously 10, 20, 100 attempts, right? to get this recording perfect so- and that's fine. If they've gone to that length, get in front of you-

David: Yeah, that [inaudible] cuz they may do that, right?

Gavin: Exactly, 100%.

David: Which is great because it makes them sound amazing with that one sentence or you know, maybe a little bit, like a paragraph but whenever you get free flowing here and you got to come up with words then they may be stumbling and/or they may have a thicker accent, you know, outside of that paragraph cuz they've studied it, right? So great piece of advice, love that.

Gavin: So on the interview you're gonna pick up on that, right? When you're engaging- so tell me- so I got your video, you know, your recording and you just engage with some questions, you know, these are really good, then it's plugging them in and within 10 minutes I believe that they should be ready to cold call. If they have hired and they know the platform that you want, they've got experience, all I say is this is how we tag the properties, here's the script, within 5 to 10 minutes, they're ready to go and then we'll monitor the progress from there.

David: Man, I love that. All right, so that's how we're going to find our cold callers guys. Keep it simple, don't overthink it. That's what [audio cuts]. There's other methods as well. Here's another place that you can go that's going to flood- you're going to get flooded, right? Go on Facebook, there's two or three big groups. I'm talking like 30 to 50 thousand people, just typing like Philipp- type in virtual assistant real estate. It's that simple. There's going to be groups of people and you can just go into these and literally drop a comment that says hey I'm looking for some cold callers, you know connect with me via this email or whatever, DM me and I'm telling you, you're going to have to delete the post after like 45 minutes cuz you're just going to get like a hundred thousand people being like I need a job or I'm ready to work or whatever so great ways- you don't get the advantage of having the completion or the satisfaction rate through Upwork so that probably is a better approach, but again, lots of ways to go about finding these individuals. So, love it. Now moving on, so we get somebody we like and you know, they are good fit. We like their energy and that's really the most important thing guys in my opinion. Is there energy? over accent. I would rather have somebody that has a really thick accent but is energetic, they're excited to be on the phone. They're not going to you know, after they get told no 5 or 6 times like, you know, just Dave- no! They're like hey, you know, we know you got this property [inaudible]. We want that energy, you know, because that's what keeps people on the phone and it makes them you know, want to talk to you. So now that you've found that person then, what do you recommend in terms of you know, softwares to get them going Gavin?

Gavin: Yeah, so there's different dialers out there and they're all good, right? It's- they're all doing a similar thing. Everyone's trying to achieve the same goal and the interface is a little different, right? The one that I've been operating for the longest time is Mojo, Mojosells, that's the one that we operate on but also CallTools is good and then there's obviously Batch. Batch is bringing out, you know, what on- we're big Batch fans and multiple products that we do with them, you know, they're coming in the game and from what they've done already, they're probably going to take over so they're getting going here on the dialer as well, but yeah, I would say they would be my top three in terms of auto dialers and what they are just for anyone listening is an autodialer is you're going to be calling multiple people at the same time, so you're dialing more people which will lead to more conversations, okay? That's what it is, spending more time on the phone and looking for the people that again, have got problems that are interested in offering, interested in selling it, and that's it for me because we have the creative side as well not just cash. You know, my script isn't just like we'll sell within 7 days, we'll pay cash blah blah blah cuz you have got the creative finance and this works with relatives as well of them leads coming in but if they're interested in offering, interested in selling, it's good enough for us to bring that lead in to have a conversation find out what's going on.

David: 100% agree. I love it. So, Gavin mentioned Mojosells, CallTools, Batchdialer, you know those guys are crushing it as well, lots of different options. There's one other that I want to mention if you are exclusively in Podio smartphone, they have a dialer as well. All these work great guys. There's really- they're all like you said though, they're all trying to accomplish the same thing and they do, shouldn't say trying, they do. They all accomplish the same thing. They're going to allow you and I actually built on what you said Gavin but I added to it, right? So you just said, you know, you can call multiple people at the same time, spend more time on the phone but really here's the cool part: you can spend more time on the phone without spending more time on the phone. Think about that for a second right? Because you're not going to be manually dialing for one, that's super time-consuming. Two, you're not going to be dealing with you know, the ringing. You're gonna have three or four of these going on simultaneously with these auto dialers, right? So you're not even going to hear any of the ringing, it's just going to connect you whenever somebody's there. You're three to four to maybe even as many as ten times more likely assuming you went and scaled up to 10 lines at a time, people do it, it's crazy. I stick to 3 or 4 just because.

Gavin: I do 3 as well.

David: Yeah, you know, but again, whatever you want to do, go do that, but man I love that. I mean, you can literally spend more time on the phone without spending more time on the phone. That's awesome.

Gavin: Yeah, you're exactly right cuz you're individually dialing, you going to pull the next lead, you're individually- all this takes time and if no one's answering, you know you might do an hour and you still haven't had a conversation yet, right? Well the dialer is just feeding you people that are going to pick up the phone pretty much, and everyone watching this as well, don't overthink it. Like people think- I come from a coaching background, right? Well people think the system is the answer, right? It doesn't matter what you're using. It doesn't matter what CRM you're using. Now obviously, some CRM's are better than others but it comes down to opinions and they're all again trying to achieve the same goal: keeping you organized, maybe some automation on there, right? All these things of organization, same with the dialer, they're all calling but people just keeps swapping dialers and think that's the answer.

David: Yeah, that's- oh man.

Gavin: It's not the answer, right? You can be more efficient and one might be cheaper. One might operate in a better way for you to use your mind to it.

David: Yeah, [inaudible] comes like that, right? But at the end of the day, they're all doing the same basic functions. They're designed to put you on the phone with a property owner or drop a voicemail so then they can call you back, but again the goal is to get on the phone and I tell that to a lot of my students too Gavin with regardless of what type of marketing you're doing, right? So we're obviously focused on cold calling here today but if you wanted to do direct mail, if you wanted to do bandit signs, if you wanted to do radio or television ads, if you wanted to do billboards, right? All of these things are collecting data or putting your marketing message in front of others so they call you. So even if you go do an AdWords campaign or a Facebook campaign, you're still just collecting data to work to then call them, right? So regardless of what you're doing, end goal. The end goal essentially is to have them call you or you call them. Even if you're texting, the end goal is really to get them on the phone, you can't make a friend via text message.

Gavin: Absolutely.

David: You gotta actually schedule some time to talk with these individuals. Love that.

Gavin: 100% yup, and that's where again, that's why people get it wrong cuz you have to- there's a point in life, right? And in this business cuz it's hard when you have to look at yourself and say am I doing the things- am I taking the necessary action, right? to get results and that's what it comes down to and of course I set systems up for people, right? But I'm also not diluted the- I have to explain that just because you have the system, doesn't mean this will make you successful. It's going to help but you have to be putting in the work and doing them step by step things, right? You know, when we talked about the cold calling calls that I have, one sections about mindset because if you don't have the right mindset going in, it's not going to work, right? And that's the mindset of a cold caller. Again like we talked about a guy with no money or the gal with no money, what does it take? Well yeah, they've gotta grind, they've got to do it, right? They've got to- they don't- if they have that time, yes you're gonna have to sit there. Maybe you can't even afford a dialer, so you are going- unfortunately, you are going to have to put each number in. That's okay.

David: Yeah and you know what? Hey guys, you can do it from your own cellphone or you can find tools like Google voice, right? They're gonna limit you on how many you're going to be able to do in a day especially if you're texting versus calling, calling probably actually unlimited, right? But you know, you can still copy and paste those over, so there are free solutions  but Gavin, you summed it up earlier when you said it's time or money or often both, right? So it's the same way. I love that.

Gavin: Absolutely.

David: So okay cool, that's great guys. So go online to find these people, Gavin recommends Upwork. I think that's a great way to do this. Lots of dialers out there, right? We recommend of course Mojo, Batchdialer is one of our favorites, smartphone 's great with Podio, CallTools, I've heard good things, never used it personally, but again heard great things and again, the reason that we're doing this is because of the autodialer capabilities, also they have many CRM's built-in. So Gavin this may seem so counterintuitive, but when we have a new student, we do not even recommend them go set up a CRM cuz it's a rabbit hole, right? We want them to get a deal or two you know, so that way it pays for itself as well. But we also want them to focus on the things that matter which is the marketing, which could be cold calling or sending mail or whatever. We don't want them spending hours, if not days, if not weeks. Mike and I probably wasted months literally.

Mike: Oh for sure.

David: Playing CRM's, playing with all the little bells and whistles and before you know it, 6 hours goes by and you haven't made a call and you're like oh our website looks really great but [inaudible] like 7 wow, you know. CRM's are great but here's the coolest part guys: these have built-in CRM's. They're not going to have all the bells and whistles to do all the automatic follow up, but you don't need it all right? Mike and I are big believers that CRM's basically provide two services with a bunch of extra stuff, but there's two that matter. It's the ability to stay organized by taking notes and then the ability to create a task to follow up, that's it.

Gavin: Yup.

David: That's all it is, and you can add a hundred bells and whistles that maybe make it easier to determine what's going on there, right? Or easier to determine those comps or even set up a follow-up that's automated, right? Very very cool features but at the end of the day, take notes and make a task to follow up, and all of these tools are going to have that ability in there too which I love and I just don't want to- I don't want to you know, not mention that because you know, we have students that are just in Mojo or they're just in Batchleads and they maybe have Propstream access and now they don't even really need that because Batch is bringing in their own list and their own comps and all that good stuff, but you know less is more so don't go get two or three of these dialers or try to do two or three types of marketing at once unless you've got one dialed in and you've mastered it. Love it. Gavin, you nailed it right there. All right cool so the systems don't matter guys, it's the people, right? You need to have one essentially if you want to automate this and speed it up, but at the end of the day, ones not necessarily better than the other, it's really just a preference. They all do the same thing and quite honestly, the pricing is pretty close. We're talking maybe 10 or 15 bucks difference between the products, you know, that we just mentioned so love it. Gavin, let's jump into you know, what the hell we actually do once we start making these calls, right? So you get a dialer set up, you go get yourself a list and you can get those lists from multiple places online or hopefully you're creating your own list via driving for dollars. That's our favorite way to create a list. So once you have the list, you import these in, you have to skip trace them of course, but then you import them into the dialer, what's next?

Gavin: Yeah, so then obviously once you've set it up in the dialer, you have to then create the categories that you are going to categorize into, okay? Did I lose you?

David: No, we're here.

Gavin: Oh you froze on my side. Anyway, I'm gonna keep talking. So yeah, once you're in the dialer ready to go, we categorize into groups so when they have conversations, we move them into groups, very simple, is into 4 categories of are they interested in selling? are they not? is it sold or do they need a call back, right? Very simple. When you're dealing with VA's or team members, right? The easier and simpler it is, the faster that you can train someone to do it. The only reason that I can- I say I can get someone going within 10 minutes is because it is so easy.

David: Right.

Gavin: I'm not saying that it's the best and I could have it like send here and zap there and zap there and do this. That's all good but then you go to train on that and then if one thing goes down, the whole thing's now stopped working. I want everyone to be operating all the time unless the dialers down, we're moving, okay? So we keep it simple. What we choose to do is that after any positive leads, we move them from the dialer so you just spoke about using it as a CRM which you can, we don't, we have a CRM and what we do is that we move them from Mojo into you know, the CRM using a web form. So the VA will actually fill out the web form at the end if we have 3 leads, they'll fill it out with the information that will populate into the CRM, alert you for then you as the investor to work that lead, okay? So as much as you don't need systems, you need them, but it depends on your circumstance, the situation that you're in, right? If you're making decent money, you're working 9 till 6 everyday and you want to be investing, when you get off work, you need leads sitting there in my opinion, ready to call. You can't be coming home, start handwriting letters, right? If you have the money, you got to invest to get them leads coming in so when you get off and you're driving home, you're hitting up these people having conversations and getting offers out. So that's what they need to- that's what we do. That's how it looks.

David: Let me interrupt you just for one second. So you move them from the dialer to the CRM after when? After they've been qualified or after they've just raised their hand to say yeah I'm interested in hearing an offer?

Gavin: Again, what's a lead to you, right? And I think if we lined 10 people up and we asked them, we'd get 10 different answers.

David: Yeah, right.

Gavin: For me, if they're interested in selling, they're interested in an offer, we gather information. There's 4 things that we try and gather, all right? It's the situation motivation by asking questions. So we're going to gather kinda what's going on. We're going to try and get a price, we're gonna try and get the timeline and we're going to try and get the condition. Once we get- if they can get all them things, that's going to come into the note. I want the acquisition on the investor to make the decision on if this is what we need or not. I don't need a VA in the Philippines having to do that.

David: Agreed.

Gavin: If they're interested in selling- I don't care- cuz one of the common things that I get is they want over asking, right? And I say: well why wouldn't they want over asking?

David: Right, everybody would, right?

Gavin: Why wouldn't they? The fact that they want to sell and they want over asking, well let's have a conversation. That's where your sell skills as investor, the acquisition comes in to break that down to find out what's going on, what the reality is and then actually get the offer out and try and get the deal accordingly, right? Not the VA's, the VA's go: well this person is interested and yeah they want 10 thousand over asking or  what it's worth. No problem, we're still going to call them and treat them and find out what's going on and then struck to the offer accordingly.

David: I love it, agreed. We do the same thing. Now, another thing I think people often overlook is you know, we have a lot of tools in our belt so you know, our- we don't even send multiple offer you know, scenarios in our offer, multiple options I should say within our offer. We're typically looking for just cash offers at a big discount. So, you know from there, we can decide if we're going to fix and flip or do the BRRRR strategy with a rental or maybe you can get it rented and turnkey it or wholesale. We have all those options at that point, right?

Gavin: Yup.

David: Forgot where I was going with that. Help me out.

Mike: Nobody ever knows Dave.

David: I'm having fun today.

Gavin: [inaudible]. But yeah, you were going with the- I wanna guess, you were going with the multiple offers. So you can make multiple offers if you want, right?

David: Oh, the tools in our belt. So Mike's a broker, I'm not a [audio cuts].

Gavin: No.

David: Me neither. So the point though and I didn't mean to interrupt but let's say somebody has a deal that comes in and they're willing to sell it at $0.90 on the dollar, well that's not going to really be a wholesale deal. Probably not a good Fix and Flip unless you can really really make it pretty for nothing, right? Or any other type of deal, but it may make for a great listing opportunity. So we want those leads that come in that you know, not- aren't necessarily pre-qualified to be a home run deal but they have raised their hand and said hey, you know, I do need to sell or want to sell this one and you know, maybe they owe too much or whatever the reason is that they can't give you that home run deal, that's still business there. So you know, sometimes that may be an owner finance play which we don't really do a ton of but we know guys that do and we'll refer those leads for a profit, right? Other times we'll say hey you know, we have some agents that work in house, you know, at the number you're asking is probably not going to work for us personally to be the buyer, but we will be more than happy to help you sell it, you know, so on so forth. So another reason why you don't really want the virtual assistants doing the qualifying. You as the investor want that because you know, basically we all throw away a lot of money in our leads that we think are trash leads that really aren't. They just require another skill set.

Gavin: Absolutely.

David: I love that.

Gavin: And we always say: no lead left behind, right?

David: There you go.

Mike: Ooh I like that saying.

David: No lead left behind. Yeah, what can we do to help this person, right.

Gavin: Yeah, 100% and that's the goal and you're not going to do that by just going cash on the front side, right? With a VA. And the other thing is by keeping it for me very general on the front is that they will run into less objections that they need to overcome, right? Cuz people say like if you got creative financial lease options and you start going- and the VA start talking about that, the questions that come at them, they're not gonna be able to answer so the call goes south real quick, so let's not mention it, right? At the end- and then we just have little pass offs: that's a great question, Gavin's going to answer that. He'll be able to look at that with you, but let me ask you this and then we ask another question, so they're not getting in to deep water. We try to keep them out of deep water by asking you know, trying to answer something they don't know but just that's a great question, Gavin will cover that but let me tell you- how old is the kitchen again? Right? They just got to interact and try and take back over that conversation.

David: Love it. So in terms of CRM's, we're not here to talk about that, we're here to talk about cold calling but I'm just curious though. Do you guys have a CRM that you like? Cuz there's a lot of them out there. Again, it's similar to these auto dialers guys, you know, they all do great things so I'm just curious you know what you guys-

Gavin: CRM's, yeah I mean again yeah, CRM's are good and they're important but they don't make you money but yeah we use- I operate in two different ones and I know-

David: Me too.

Gavin: Let me ex- I'll explain.

Mike: We got 3 now.

Gavin: Okay, yeah. Which I do not advise, I advise one, right? But we were in Podio just like you guys.

David: You know what? [inaudible]. Right. We're just trying to tell you the best way, right.

Gavin: Yeah, yeah.

David: So we're in REI blackbook for dispositions, we moved to realestateinvestor.com to help us with some of that automated follow up. REI blackbook will do that as well, but realestateinvestor.com, it was just- again, it was just a personal preference. I think we just kind of like the setup, it was a little easier.

Mike: From Podio, so we migrated from Podio to realestateinvestor.com

David: We migrate- yeah, and then we're still in Podio for everything outside of the wholesaling business, all the rental properties and the internal stuff so we got a lot going. I'm just curious what you're using.

Gavin: Yeah, so Podio, obviously been with Podio for years, we have a lot of leads. Now every CRM, they're all very intelligent in terms of when you try and leave them, they make it as hard as possible, right?

David: Yes.

Gavin: As you know, Podio you can export your leads, you can take the name and number but it won't let you take any of the notes. Well, we run the whole business on follow up through the notes, right? So we'd have to go and get a VA or a team of VA to individually do it and there's ways around it.

David: We did that.

Gavin: The good thing is- yeah, my team likes it the way we have it right now.

David: Yeah, don't change it.

Gavin: Don't change it, right? So we have that. Now what we do for clients and what- on a couple of newer campaigns is we use REI simple. REI simple is built off Freedomsoft, right? So it's Joe's software. It's Freedomsoft that we built it off so that's what we use and that kind of set people upon, you know, as well and that offers more things in one without using third-party companies. So let me explain, Podio you need to GlobiFlow and Zapier to do things. Within REI, you can have you know, you can get a phone number, you can send a text from there already. It's already built in together. You can do automation, workflows, so you can set things up to trigger in 14 days and 30 days so it helps with the follow-up as well. But there's multiple out there as well that are rarely good and it's back to using something and use it consistently.

David: [inaudible]. Does it do like skip tracing and offer sending and e-signature and all that stuff?

Gavin: Yes, yup.

David: He's got it all built- I didn't realize that Joe had that built out that great, that's awesome.

Gavin: Well it's built off Freedomsoft so we kinda you know, wide labeled it and then we just changed it to kinda tailor for more of it's lease option clients so we went and added it more the contracts and the feel and the look for lease options, the creative side but yeah, it's operated backend stuff from Freedomsoft. So, you know, we use that as well.

David: That's sweet, love it.

Mike: Cool. Yeah, very cool.

David: Cool, all right guys, we have talked about lots of things: how to hire people today, what kind of systems we're using for our dialers, how to set these systems up easily, right? Use 4, 5 different topics because it's going to make it faster to train your individual virtual assistants. Love that. Gavin's shooting to find out 4 things guys: situation/motivation, price, timeline and then of course condition of that property. Talked a little bit about some of the different CRM's. Other than that, I think the main goal, you know, when we're cold calling is to obviously make a friend. That's one of the things that you know really I focus on first and foremost is you know, make a friend with that person. They're not going to want to work with you if you aren't friendly with them and vice-versa, so you really want to make a friend and if they are motivated, set an appointment either for yourself or somebody on your team and if you're virtual, that could be somebody on your team or send an offer and that's really what it comes down to guys. We can't make any money in real estate if we don't have inventory, right? And it sounds kinda crazy but like if you don't have anything under contract, how do you expect to fix and flip something? How do you expect to ever own any rental properties? How do you expect to be able to sell a contract aka wholesale deal if you don't have inventory? So you gotta use you know, use that time on the phone to set appointments or even to send offers and then go run those appointment at that point in time. I love it. Gavin, you have an awesome program: cold calling 101, a course, let's talk about it real quick.

Gavin: Yeah, so I have a- we built a cold calling 101 at the you know, earlier on this year. It's really good, got a load of great feedback and it covers multiple things from you know, why cold calling? The mindset, you know, identifying a cold calling market, you know, building lists, skip tracing, the systems and tools to use, you know, how to actually make the calls, what to say, you know, management and responsibilities, managing the VA's, you know, keeping up with the list, when do we need a new list, kind of all that stuff and then I have a bonus section on Mojo as well that you can actually just give to a VA and they can follow the steps and actually set it all up for you as well. So yeah, it's pretty action packed, it's pretty inexpensive in my opinion for what's out there on the market. I mean people charge thousands and thousands of dollars.

David: [inaudible]. I mean these courses are for multiple thousands of bucks.

Gavin: Yeah, so you know and I think it's great, it's good information and I think it's what someone needs if they- you have to invest in yourself, right? There's a time where time is money and people need to understand that and for me, any costs that you buy, you've got to implement. If you're going to spend the money, just implement it. Module by module implement it you know and you can get this going pretty quickly, you know within a couple of days, you can be rocking and rolling and getting leads coming in, right? And that's the goal. You know we talked about what you were just rounding up with there is basically you've gotta be brilliant at the basics, right? There's 4 things: marketing, talking to sellers, making offers and following up, that's it, right? Your systems fit around that to make that possible and more efficient, but if you aren't good at them 4 things, you will not do any deals, and what this is from a leadgen cause is going to be Phase 1 of getting you in, right? of building this where you can set this up where you don't have to do it, where leads can come in so you can focus then, marketing's been taken care of consistently. You focus on them three things: talking to sellers, making offers, you just nailed it and said: if you're not making offers, you're not making money. It's a fact, I mean there's no argument. In any one across the country, the world, you have to make an offer if you going to make money and then you got to keep following up and if you can do that sequence and be very good at it in one market, right? And focus, and that's why I actually talked about identifying a market. If you don't know and don't have a market, if you want to go to virtual, that module's going to help you do that, and once you implement this and get it consistent, you're going to understand that if I focus on these quality leads, okay? And do this consistently every day, the outcome will happen, right? Most investors that I see just focus on about making- doing a deal and making money and if you or your time is focused on that and you're not focused on the day to day things, the outcome will never happen, right? So it's just rechanneling your thought process here and how can I get this cold call happening for me, right? Consistently so I can focus on them three things that are left for me to be successful and making money.

David: Love it. Guys, go check out REInetwork.com/Dave and Gavin's got an amazing course. It's a disc- he's giving us a discount which is sweet and looks like it's broken up into like 8 or 9 modules with some bonus information in there, but I know for a fact that this is going to be an amazing course because everything Gavin does is amazing. He puts out amazing content and he knows what he's doing. Gavin, how long have you been cold calling? Not necessarily you specifically but like you as the business.

Gavin: 2016. I kind of-

David: 5 years going into this thing. I love it.

Gavin: Yeah, I mean it was pretty much new to the scene and we heard about it from a realtor and you know Joe at the time said you should check it out and I remember obviously me being me, I just get a list, put it in, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm just pushing and answering, you know?

David: Yeah, I did the same [inaudible] too.

Gavin: It's actually like the way I set it up, there's like a sequence to everything so I set it up where incoming calls are going to voicemail and that's being tracked and I have all this sequence that I do because when I started, I remember I log onto the phone, I dial in and I start making calls and I'd spoke to- it was something like we made- in 45 minutes, I made 80 dial's, I'd made like 20 phone calls. I'd have to send out 15 offers and I got off the phone, I had 18 missed calls and my head was about to explode, and I'm just like- I called Joe at the time and I'm like-

David: Like [inaudible].

Gavin: Good and bad news, right? Good and bad news. And he's like what? I was like this thing is unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it and the bad news is it's too much. It's just I can't- there's too much going on.

David: [inaudible]. Awesome.

Gavin: So just a funny- but yeah, you start building out and obviously understanding it. It was like okay, I get this and that kind of goes away and yeah, I knew straight away within 45 minutes, okay this is awesome, how do I get someone else to do it?

David: I love it. Gavin, thank you so much for coming on today teaching us all kinds of golden nuggets on cold calling guys, where to find the people, what systems to use, you know, the CRM's, what to look for and really how to do it. Go check out REInetwork.com/Dave and you guys are going to be able to save it looks like $200 on the course and you have this thing competitively-priced Gavin cuz again some of these courses out there are you know, a thousand, 15 hundred, even 4 grand for some of these cold calling courses, so love it. This is- this is sweet and anybody that's interested, I would highly highly highly recommend this to you. There should be a link below this video and if you're watching the podcast or listening on the podcast, REInetwork.com/Dave to get that discount. Gavin, thanks again for coming. We're grateful for you-

Gavin: Appreciate you guys.

David: -and your time. It's always a pleasure. We're going to do this again soon.

Gavin: Absolutely. Appreciate it. Thanks guys.

David: Thanks Gavin.

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