Episode 173: Automate Your FOLLOW UP with REI Blackbook

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: Hey guys, looks like we’re just getting started here. My man, how we doing buddy?

Josh: Good man, coming to you live from my dining room cuz I’m still working from home and this is where I get the best Wi-Fi in my house.

David: Hey that’s all right, man. Nothing wrong with that, whatever we got to do to get it done, that’s what matters here. So guys, Josh works over at REI blackbook, he’s been there since I can remember, I’ve been a customer since I think 2014 so going on like 6 years. And this is going to be a fun, quick 30-40 minute presentation, maybe we’ll go an hour, but I doubt we’ll even need that much time, but I just wanted to highlight how awesome REI blackbook is. I have a couple students that have just recently signed up with the- with my coaching program, and I’m pushing them to get into REI blackbook as well as how to automate their follow-up, but also all the crazy amazing other things that it has like a phone system and the ability to automate your file. And that’s really what I wanted to talk about today. We’ve done a couple videos in the past that talks about the disposition and if you guys want some information about that, head on over to my YouTube channel and you can see one that I just did with Josh just maybe three, four weeks ago that really focused on the disposition side of things. But today, I want to really focus on the acquisition side of the things right? Now, as investors, as wholesalers, we all know that it all starts with marketing, right? So we got to do marketing to get the phone ringing and if we’re not doing marketing because we’re new to this business or we don’t have enough money or we can’t afford it, that’s okay. But instead to get in front of these motivated sellers we have to trade our time right? So when it comes to marketing, you either have a monetary budget that you use to spend money to get your message in front of these sellers face so they call you, or you trade time to get your message in front of them by cold calling, door-knocking, cold texting, hanging bandit signs even, right? Whatever it is that you want to do to get your message out to them. Often times you have to bring the message to them versus when you can spend money on marketing and advertising, you know, they come to you. So that’s where it all starts right? But once you get- sorry something just popped up here- once you get motivated sellers coming in the door, you’re starting to you know, let’s say you get a dialer or you’re using batch leads tracker, which I absolutely love, and your cold texting people, right? Once you get that information, you need to store it somewhere. You need to keep track of what the hell is going on, right? You need to know when you talked to them last, what that conversation looked like, right? What was talked about? then you need to have action items at the end of that conversation, you know, if you’re interested an appointment, great. If you’re going to send a contract great, but if you’re not right? you need to have action items so you need to create tasks that say: Hey, I spoke to Josh 3 weeks ago. He was out of town or he’s busy and he wanted me to call him back, you need to remind yourself. If you don’t have a CRM, it’s going to be impossible. You’re basically, when I first started I had a folder and it was the worst two, three months ever because I was just losing information, I’d forget to call people back so you need to put together a system to automate this process. Even more importantly than having the system is having this- having a system where we bring an REI blackbook today, of course to show you how you can simplify the process and actually go about automating some of that follow up right? Mike and I, and he just walked out, maybe he’ll pop in here in a second, we just got done recording a podcast but you know, we tell people all the time, you know, the average deal that we do takes four to six months, right? We closed 2 deals this week, I thought it was going to be three but the third one got pushed to Monday. So, you know essentially 3 deals this week, but we closed two of them. We do a lot of deals, not saying this to brag to you guys, I’m saying this because we have systems in place that help automate the follow up so we can do these deals, right? Can you get a call today and have an appointment set for this afternoon or tomorrow, get it under contract that day or the next day and have it sold a couple hours later? Well absolutely, but is that common? Does that happen a lot? Well no, you know, I mean, it’s maybe 1 in 30, 1 in 20 for me right? somewhere in that range. The other 20-30 leads that I go on appointments or talk to people about require a- pardon my language, but a shit ton of follow-up and that’s where the money is made in this business. It’s following up with people, here is why, and I think Josh can attest to this, motivation changes very very very rapidly, but it doesn’t necessarily, you know, these people you’re talking to, doesn’t  mean that they’re going to have a very high level of motivation the first time you talk to them.

Josh: Yeah

David: So why you touch these people, and we call it touches, which can be a phone call, a text message, an email, my personal favorite just resend the contract to them. That’s an

email, that’s a touch, cold call them, door knock them, send them a letter in the mail, I mean there’s lots of ways to touch them: RVM messages, text messages, all these things, but you got to keep touching them and the reason is because when the motivation goes from “eeh” to “I got to sell this property tomorrow”, you want to be the guy they call or you want to be the guy calling to follow up with them while they’re going through that crisis, right? Now, I don’t say crisis like every motivated sellers in a crisis, but we’re either in a crisis or exiting the crisis or about to become or about to be a part of a crisis, all of us even me, right? That’s just the nature of life. So it’s about timing, and that’s why follow up is so important because if you don’t follow up with these people, you’re never going to have the ability of the option to be there for them when they need you. They’re going to go find somebody else. So that’s why having a system to remind you to follow up or even better, to automate that follow up, not only will help you close deals if you’re not doing them now, because that’s probably the piece most of you guys are missing, or it’s going to take you to closing 8 to 10, maybe 12 deals a month like Mike and I are doing, and I don’t work like 40, 50, 60 hours a week like most people think. Like, when I started I did, I really only typically work like 2 or 3 hours a day, guys I’m kind of lazy but it’s because I have the ability to be lazy, right? because I’ve automated-

Josh: Yeah, putting systems in place allows you to be lazy and I think people you know, a lot of times people use that term like: hey, I’m actually pretty lazy and I don’t think- I mean, first of all it’s not true or else you wouldn’t even put all these systems in place in the first place because truly lazy people, they never even have the motivation to do that right?

David: Yeah, absolutely but I work hard when I want to but the goal here though is- you know, I got into real estate for freedom right? Just a quick second Josh, let me interrupt you buddy. But like it breaks my heart, when people come in and they quit their job or they try to do it part-time and oh like, I wanna do real estate cuz it gives you freedom right? Well, it can but it doesn’t typically, and the reason is because people don’t put together the right processes and the right systems to automate the business and keep it simple. This business is so incredibly fucking simple, if you don’t like my language, I’m sorry, but I’m passionate about this. It is so fucking simple, it is so simple, but it’s not easy. That’s the difference, there’s two different things between simple and easy alright, it’s somewhat difficult, but it’s simple. So how do you make it easy? You automate it, you put systems in place that will follow up on your behalf because once you start doing enough marketing, what ends up happening is your phone starts ringing a lot, and then you get overwhelmed with all this new leads but what are you doing with the follow-ups on those old leads? You forget about them, and that’s when you start spending a bunch of money and you do no deals. So if you want my advice about how to do deals and how to get the most out of your money, it’s get REI blackbook and we’re going to jump in a minute here and we’re going to show you all the cool tips and tricks, and features, and bells and whistles that this has but this is more than just a software guys. I run my entire freaking business on REI blackbook. It ain’t the cheapest out there either, I’mma tell you straight up. If you can’t afford it, still watch it because later you’re going to want it. And if you can afford it, you should get it, okay? It’s going to bring back freedom into your life, which ultimately is going to make you happier. You’re going to make more money and you’re going to work less. Now, it’s not just one of these things that you just get and flip a switch. There’s a learning curve and this is- I’m all about transparency Josh, there’s a learning curve. It may take you a couple weeks to figure it out but are you willing to invest a couple weeks and a couple hundred dollars to have a lifelong, you know, a system and process in place to go do more deals or even your first deal? I mean, it’s a no-brainer. It’s a rhetorical question, right? So I’m going to yield the floor to Josh. I’m passionate about this, I’ve been a customer since 2006 okay? Full disclosure, I love transparency. I get a little piece of every subscription that I help sell. It ain’t much, it’s a little piece, but this isn’t about that. This is about people that want to get a CRM that they can put together a process and automate their follow-up because ultimately that’s where all of your deals are going to come from. 4 to 6 months, I’m gonna repeat myself: four to six months is my average deal. We did three this week, closed 2, 1 Monday, but it’s 3 this week that we basically confirmed that we’re going to get paid on. The first one was 10700, the second one was 9000, and the other one that we just got confirmed but will close Monday, I think it’s about eight or nine grand. So this week alone, I’m not bragging guys. I couldn’t have done it without REI blackbook, that’s why I’m telling you. This week alone our business generated 26, 27 grand. Our market- now, we have a marketing cost, our marketing spend is about 5- 4 to 5 thousand a month, so divide that by a week, that’s about a thousand- call it 1500 bucks. We spend fifteen hundred bucks, make 26, 27 grand. Couldn’t have done it without REI blackboard and every one of these deals, every one of them is 3, 4, 5 months old from the initial time that I talked to that seller. So if I didn’t do any follow-up, I wouldn’t have any deals this week. Follow up, follow up, follow up. Josh, I’m done with my pitch. It’s important though guy’s and I’m not going away but I do want to let Josh take over because he’s the pro, that’s why I’m bringing him on. Mr. REI blackbook himself, I fucking love this guy. He’s the man, but let’s start talking about- let’s just talk a little bit about REI blackbook big picture first Josh. You know, I want to really jump in and dive deep on automation.

Josh: Yeah, so I’ve got a little presentation that I would like to run everybody through. It’s about 20 minutes and then we can get in to uhm.

David:  Let’s do it.

Josh: We can get into the software cuz it’ll really- it’ll really drive home the you know, the reason that you need follow-up and also I’m going to show you a framework that we just call the ‘seller acquisition workflow map’ and it’s basically a system to help you build out the type of follow-up- the same type of follow-up that Dave and Mike and their company has built in their business. So I think I can share my screen, right?

David: You should be able to.

Josh: Can you see my screen here?

David: Yup, I can see it. Yup we are good to go. I’m gonna have to do a little live YouTube on this one as well but don’t worry about it, it’s behind the scenes on my end. So yeah, just take it away Josh, you got the floor my man.

Josh: Perfect, alright. So this presentation is something that I put together for a talk that I did a while back and it’s called ‘how to close 2 extra deals a month with less money, stress frustration and overwhelmed’ and so basically, that’s what David was talking about at the beginning of this call. You know, the majority of the leads he closes are from follow up so he’s not having to spend- if he wanted to close-

David: And when I say majority guys, I’m talking like 18-19 out of 20. It’s almost all, you know, I’m not that great of a salesperson but I am really good at solving problems, right? So yeah, I get these- I get them from time to time where I get the one call closes guys, but 18-19 out of 20 requires follow-up and I didn’t mean to interrupt Josh, it’s just-

Josh: No, you’re good man.

David: I am so passionate about this. If you are not following up, you should not even be in this business. You shouldn’t even be spending money on marketing, you are taking money and you are throwing it into a fireplace. The name of the game is follow-up. Period. Josh, all you bro.

Josh: Yeah, and if you guys wouldn’t mind, in the chat if you could Dave, if you could kind of feed me some of these answers, if you guys could let me know how many deals a month you’re doing right now? And if you’re not doing it-

David: Also, let us know where you guys are at. Drop a comment on the city that you’re in as well as how many deals you’re doing. I’m curious as well, I’ll help you out.

Josh: Let me also know how many you would like to do, what’s your goal? So where are you at right now and what’s your goal? Because like we were saying before, let’s say, you know right now they’re doing, they just did 3 deals this week. So let’s just say, they’re doing 9, 8-10 deals a month. To do that without follow-up, you would need to spend 15/20,000 dollars a month on marketing if you’re just relying on hot leads. And so the reason why I can say you can close 2 extra deals a month with less money, and on top of that less stress and frustration and overwhelm, is because people that you talk to that might have said no, you know, three four five six months ago are going to reply to your follow-up you know, today and they’re going to be ready to do business and you’re going to be one of the only people that are actually following up with them. So this is actually- this is an hour long presentation, but I’m going to condense it down to about 20 minutes.

David: Great.

Josh: So we can get some questions in and I can also show you some of the tools in REI blackbook. So the thing you have to have in your business is what we call a ‘proven process’, right? And so that’s just a process that you’re going to run all of your leads through, so if somebody- you know, what happens when somebody calls into your business? What happens when somebody texts you? What happens if somebody goes to your website and fills out a form on your website? Do you have a proven process in place for making sure that that person is being contacted right away? and do you have a proven process in place to make sure that if they’re not ready to sell their house, you can still follow up with them? So that’s step 1 and we’re going to go through them, I’m going to show you what that proven process is because you got thousands of investors across the country that use our tools and we’ve gone and kind of looked at all of their businesses and pulled out all the best pieces of all their businesses and put them into this framework and that’s what we’re going to talk about in the call today. And so this is the framework that I’m talking about, which is the seller acquisition workflow map and I’m going to break down all the steps in this framework on this call, okay? Do we have any answers to that initial question Dave?

David: I got a couple here, so it looks like Steve on the call said he’s doing about three to four a month. Steve, how many are you trying to get to? Brian Lee says: just started, got a website and signs, business cards, no deals yet just joined connected investors and  something else here looks like, I don’t know what the PenV4 software is, but not yet on his end. So yeah Brian, he’s probably trying to do his first deal or two, obviously-

[inaudible]

David:  So this is going to help- oh he said he’s doing 0 and he wants to do 3 or 4 a months. So we got two guys that are looking to get their first deal. Boom.

Josh: Perfect, alright. So what this is gonna do then is it’s also going to give you the confidence. If you’re not closing deals today, it’s going to give you the confidence to go out and spend a couple thousand dollars on marketing because you know your leads, even if they’re not going to be ready to sell right away, you know they’re not just going to go into a black hole never to be heard from again and this is a system that you want to implement in your business, and whether to use REI blackbook or not, you know, you can use different tools to get this done. The importance is really understanding the framework that we’re going to talk about, okay? So another important piece here is realizing that growth does not always mean more, okay? So you don’t always have to pour more money into the business to close more deals. You don’t always have to spend more money or hire more people or build a bigger team to close more deals. You can keep this- your team the size it is and it might just be you right now or you and a business partner, and you can have a modest marketing budget of 3 to $5,000 a month and you could do 5 to 10 deals a month right? And a modest marketing budget or you right now, maybe 500 to 1000 dollars and that might get you, you know, a deal- one deal a month, or a deal every you know five or six weeks or something like that. But you don’t have to scale to this massive company to build a business stuff that helps you build a lifestyle that you’re looking for because I think most people on this call, just like Dave, got into this to you know, for the freedom, right? You want to build your business so you can live the life that you want to live and you know, if you just build this gigantic business or you build this business that you know, everything’s stuck in your head and there’s no processes in place and you end up just creating another job for yourself and it’s more hectic than just having a nine-to-five cuz you can never turn it off, right? So growth does not always have to mean more. I want to tell you real quick about a story of one of our users here, her name is Marcy Martinez, this is her speaking at one of our events and when she started out, before really putting systems in in her business, she was sporadically closing deals. She didn’t have- there wasn’t really any rhyme or reason to why she was closing deals, every once in a while somebody would respond positively to one of her mailers and she would kind of trip over a deal every once in awhile, right? But she never really knew when her next paycheck was coming and so she could never quit her job because she didn’t have steady income. After she implemented a system in place, she was consistently closing 2 deals a month and she was able to quit her job and now has a steady flow of new deals. She’s now actually closing 4 deals a month on average, every single month and she’s looking to build a team. So before she didn’t want to build a team, she wanted to do everything by herself, but as she started building her systems out and she had everything- she had everything processed out and built out, and had her systems in place, she saw how easy it would be to plug in an acquisition manager when before, everything was just in her head. So it’s really hard to train somebody if there’s no system to actually plug them into and maybe you don’t want to hire somebody, Marcy definitely didn’t. I remember talking to her about 18 months ago and she absolutely did not want to hire a team, didn’t even want to hire a virtual assistant, she wanted to do everything herself because she didn’t think anybody could do it as good as her but once she saw what happened to her business once she put a system in place, she realized that she could take the one or two things that she just hated doing, like a lot of the admin work, and she could outsource that to a virtual assistant and it’s easy to plug them in because the systems already built. And if that person doesn’t work out, then it’s easy to then take them out and plug a new person in, okay? And this was all due to her one weekend just sitting down and taking all the processes that were in her head, writing them down on a piece of paper similar to the framework that I’m going to show you today and just processing it all out and then going into REI blackbook and building it. All right. And so one thing that she really wanted to focus on was stopping talking to unqualified sellers. So she wanted to stop talking to people that just continually told her no and no and no and she was following up with them and they still said no. Because that just- it creates a lot of burnout and it creates a lot of frustration. And so of course, when people call in the first time, a lot of people are going to say no, the majority of people will, but you want to put those people on autopilot so you’re not having to talk to the people that say no and you don’t have to feel like you have to use high-pressure cheesy sales tactics to get them to you know, sell their house cuz at the end of the day, you’re not going to- no amount of salesmanship or you know, great copy on a website is going to get somebody to sell their house. They have to be motivated to do it and you have to be there when they need your service, right? So this isn’t like an impulse buy, it’s not like buying a stick of gum on the checkout aisle. This is a big decision and people- there has to be motivation there, right? So we want you to focus on the people that actually need what you’re selling or need your services. And so that’s going to be the top, you know, 3 to 5% of leads that are coming in and let the the other 95% of leads just warm up in the background. And let your automated  “sales team” do the heavy lifting and your automated sales team is really just the system that’s following up with text messages and emails and ringless voicemails every few weeks. And after you do that enough, you know, two three four, five, six months, people start just responding to these and then all of a sudden you’re getting new leads coming in but you’re getting interest from your you know, you’re cold list of leads that you talked to three, four, five, six months ago, like Dave was saying at the beginning of this call. Most of the deals he closed or all the deals he closed this week we’re from leads that his, what we just call automated sales team, follow up with right? So it’s like having a sales floor, you know making calls for you all the time, but it’s just a system that’s sending out text messages and ringless voicemails and emails. Super powerful, so you can really go from selling 1 to 1, to 1 to many because now all of a sudden you can have 80, 90, 100, 200 people that are sitting there on your follow-up campaigns and at any given time, their motivation changes, like we were talking about the beginning of the call, and they get their tax bill or you know, who knows what happens right? A tenant stop paying rent, whatever that trigger is, the motivation changes and then two days later they get a text message from you saying, you know, hey, this is David with  discount property investors, you know, we’re still looking to buy a house in your area, if you’re still interested in selling, just reply to this text message. And people start replying to your text messages, they’ll start replying to your emails, they’ll start calling you back, you know, a lot of people will use direct mail to follow up as well. So once you- once people you know, express interest but they say: hey, you know that offers not going to do it or no, I’m not interested in selling, you can continue to send a direct mail, maybe it’s just a little bit of a different mailer, okay? But you go from selling 1 to 1, to 1 to many and the whole game changes. So we’re also going to talk about the tools you need to build this out and again, these tools are all built inside of REI blackbook, but if you don’t want to use REI blackbook, we do also have a special deal for you that were going to talk about if you stick around till the end of this call, but I don’t want you to feel like this is just a gigantic sales pitch for REI blackbook, cuz the strategies were talking about are system agnostic and you can use these if you wanted to go get a bunch of tools off the shelf and build them yourself. I promise you it’s easier if you do it inside of REI blackbook, but what we’re talking about today are strategies that will work no matter what tools you’re using, okay? So one thing that I want to get clear, that you need to understand is that you do not have a traffic problem, and  what I mean by traffic problem is you don’t have- I don’t want to hear or a lot of times I hear people say: I just don’t have enough leads. I can show you nine different ways you could go generate leads. You can do Direct Mail, you can do Facebook ads, you could go you know, do Google pay-per-click, you could go spend a few hours and hammer bandit signs. It’s not that you have a traffic problem or a lead problem, you have a follow-up problem and a lot of times, you have a lack of confidence to drive traffic to your business because you know that that traffic is not going to be followed up with properly, right?

David: Right

Josh: You know, a lot of times, if you don’t have systems in place, leads come in the top and then they fall out the bottom just as fast, and the problem is these are deals that are falling out the bottom, right? So the deals that you guys closed on this week, there’s no way that you were the only people that they were talking to, I’m sure they were talking to other investors. You guys are probably one of the only investors that continued to follow up. So while they were probably shopping around for different offers three or four months ago, you guys were the only ones that were really following up and so these deals closed but the other investors missed out on them because they weren’t following up, and the good news for you guys is most investors, they don’t follow up, they might follow up a couple times but they don’t follow up you know, to the extent that, somebody like Dave and Mike are doing.

David: We follow up Josh until the property sells to either another person or we buy it.

Josh: Like, yeah or they opt out.

David: If they tell us to stop calling, we’ll stop calling. Obviously, we’re not trying to do anything you know, negative along those lines, but even if the property- even if the seller dies, somebody is going to inherit that so we’re still going to call, you know, maybe not that seller anymore but we’re going to track down those people as well too, so once we get a lead in our system and Josh, let me look and see how many we got in the system just to kind of give you guys an idea of how important follow-up is. Right now I have-

Josh: Sorry if you can hear my dog barking.  

David: You’re fine. I have 5676 leads marked as to follow up with. Now obviously, we don’t call everyone of those everyday, some of these are on a yearly follow-up schedule but most of them are on either in every other week or a monthly schedule. It’s not always calls, but you know, we touch them, I should say either every other week or monthly on average, but I have 5676 leads in my follow up. Josh, I want to ask you just a quick question before we jump right back in.

Josh: Yeah.

David: If I were to stop doing all the marketing, like, zero right? today. I could still close deals for like 5 years right?

Josh: Yup, 100%

David: How many deals do you think I can get out of that 5676 leads that are marked ‘follow up’?

Josh: Yeah, it totally depends on how you follow up and the quality of those leads.

David: How you follow up and how hard you work them, but I mean, I’m thinking at least a hundred.

Josh: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

David: A hundred deals and I could stop. So I just want to reiterate how important it is to have a good system for follow up.

Josh: And there is- you know, you do have to invest in the system, right? It does cost money but the thing is, is that’s the cost of doing business. If you were to start any other business, you know, you would- there’s start up cost. You know, it doesn’t matter what business you start, there’s startup costs and there are certain things that you can waste money on when you’re getting in business and there’s certain things that are going to help you make money. And a system like this is something is going to help you make money because if you know that hey I’m sending out a thousand postcards a month and I get you know, whatever the math is there, 50 calls every month? Well at the end of the year, you’ve got, you know 600 people that you can follow up with and maybe you closed, you know, 10 deals out of that or 12 deals or 15 deals but most investors throw those other leads away, literally Marcy, the woman I was talking about before, she goes to RIA clubs and now people are kind of on to her so they don’t do it anymore. But she goes to RIA clubs and she used to buy peoples dead leads lists for like a hundred or two hundred bucks and she closed the leads from people that-  just leads that they threw away, she would just buy them and now-

David: What an amazing strategy, I’ve never-

Josh:  Now she does JV deals with people that just don’t have their stuff together right? They don’t have their systems together and so she goes-

David: She has a system, they have a lead and she plugs it in and automates it and then they’re ready to sell again. Like I was saying earlier, when the motivation shifts and it happens very very very rapidly, it sounds like somebody all of a sudden wakes up and then they’re like, well maybe I’ll sell next Tuesday. No, it’s like: well shit I got this bill in the mail or I’m getting relocated or death, divorce, disease, lots of other things that you know, are typically the underlying issue. It’s not the property but all of a sudden they can solve the underlying issue by selling the property and they’re ready to go. They’re not ready to go next Tuesday, they’re ready now. That’s why you gotta be following up guys.

Josh: Yeah and the tools and stuff is- they’re important but you have to understand the strategies first and really why you need them, and that’s why I want to go through this presentation before we just jump in cuz it’s easy for people to say: oh, it’s 2020, you need a website for your business. Well, of course you do, but if your websites’ not really built to convert visitors into leads, and when you get that lead, you don’t have a- you know, if you’re putting them into a leaky bucket like this, then it’s kind of all for nothing, right? So moral of the story here is you have to follow up right? and so, there’s been some studies done and this is kind of industry, you know, this isn’t just real estate but this is kind of just across all industries. Typically, what’s going to happen is: in sales 2% of people are going to say yes in the first touch, right? So the one call close, it almost never happens, if it does, you feel like you’re a great salesperson, but then you go on and you talk to 50 other people that tell you no.

David:  What did I say? 19 out of 20 is not a first touch, so it’s about in line with that, yup.

Josh: Yup and then 3% are going to say yes in the second touch, 4% are going to say yes on the third touch, 10% on the 4th touch, most people don’t even get there, but 81% of sales that occur, occur after the 5th touch and most actually from the 7th to 12th touch

David: 7th to 12th, right yup.

Josh: Okay, but most people for that matter just don’t follow up, 44% of people give up after the 1st touch, 22% give up after the second, 14% give up after the third, 12% give up after the 4th and that means 92% of people give up on an eventual yes, right? So we talked about that leaky bucket where leads are just falling out the bottom, most people aren’t following up to catch those leads so that means that 8% of people are there to fight for 81% of the business just because they’re following up so it’s a whole different game.

David: Damn.

Josh: You’re playing an entirely different game if you’ve got follow up in place, so somebody like Dave and Mike are playing a completely different game because they’re not always on the front line battling for hot leads, their kind of sitting back, they’re dealing with people they’ve already talked to and they contact them when they’re ready. Just because they’re sending text messages and emails and ringless voicemails, it’s much easier- it’s a much easier business to run and this is how you build predictable growth in your business because you’ve now got a way to ensure that you know, those- out of 600 leads that we were talking about before, maybe the you know, 585 that told you no are being followed up with and then, you know, next month or next year, they’re going to pop out and actually turn into deals. Cuz if you plan on being in this business for more than three or four months, it makes no sense not to operate without a system cuz you’re just going to be spending your deals the entire time.

David: I totally agree. You got to have a system guys, it just makes my- it makes me cringe when I hear people spending money on marketing and they’re just like working off a notepad.

Josh:  Yeah, if you’re spending $1,000 on marketing and you don’t want to spend a 100-200 dollars a month on a system, you know, a CRM or follow-up and everything like that, then, you know that thousand dollars you’re spending is being wasted more than the- you feel like, man I don’t know if I can afford $100 a month or $200 a month to build out my system and if you’re spending money, you can’t afford not to cuz you’re going to waste the majority of your marketing budget.

David: You’re going to be wasting it, right.

Josh: These are just some screenshots from some of our investors in our Facebook group and this is our REI blackbook account, they take screenshots of so- you can see these are just messages that landlords are responding to. So this one said: yeah, I’m ready in about 30 minutes, we can talk. This one says: it’s for sale already why? This one if you could continue to read it, it basically says: I was actually just cancelled the contract with another investor because they weren’t professional, so I’m open to talking, and these are just follow up messages that go out. Here’s another investor that triggered a long-term drip on their old leads a couple weeks ago and just contracted a sub 2 deal. This one I think is really really awesome, so this was a screenshot that Sally Riddle sent us and this was from the seller so, you know, it says: no rush, I have to say you were the most responsive person I’ve ever worked with. A lot of people think follow-up is almost- is bothering the seller, remember that they contacted you most of the time right? If you’re doing any kind of inbound marketing like direct- like people are sending out direct mail and they’re calling you and they opt in to your website.

David: Direct mail, ad words, radio advertisements, bandit signs. I mean, there’s a million things you can do to get your message out. I know people that actually leave business cards on the table at restaurants when they walk out. Anything that you can do to market to get somebody to call you is inbound marketing guys.

Josh: Right, yeah. And remember that they called you. Even if they told you no, think about the millions of other things they could have done that day besides calling a salesperson right? So there was some sort of motivation there, maybe it’s not high enough to sell their house today but you want to follow up with people and well, a lot of people think follow-up is, you know can be bothersome or annoying. If you think about it, it’s actually good customer service if you do it the right way and you can see this person was actually appreciative cuz they want to sell their house and this person was initially contacted on October 7th of 2019 and then this text message went out and it was responded to on November 1st, so that was about a month, right? And then here’s another one, this is Marcy. Marcy is the woman I was talking about before and she’s like a- she’s not an actual engineer, but her brain works like a system engineer, so what she built was is these cool, we call them workflows inside of REI blackbook. And so she’ll just send her text messages out when people tell her no, she’ll send her text messages out and you can see some people will reply: stop and it automatically opts them out, but she set it up when people reply: ready. So she’ll just say hey, you know, if you’re ready to sell your house just reply ready and what that does is that’s a keyword, and in our system you can set up these keywords, and so when somebody replies ready, it sends her a notification that she’s got a seller, she needs to call and it sends them a text message automatically that says: hey thank you, we’re going to be in contact with you shortly to get your offer. And so you can see here, this is one, two, three people that within a couple days that replied ready from leads that she probably had that were months and months and months old and some people, you know, of course they’re going to say, who is this? stop. You know, no thanks already sold. totally fine.

David: And if you’re not getting those type of responses, then you’re not sending out messages to numbers that work. You’re going to get that type of stuff guys, you got to have thick skin in this game. We made 27 thousand dollars this week, right? Flipping houses this week, we’re going to get paid on that third one on Monday, right? But at the end of the day, you have to invest into the marketing, you got to be following up. This business is so incredibly simple but it’s not easy however, this system can make it easier. I love it.

Josh: Yup, alright now we’re gonna get into the framework. Okay so this is the seller acquisition map that I was talking about. Again, we’ve got thousands of investors across the country and what we did was we looked at all of their businesses, not all their businesses, the ones that we know or some of our best investors and we asked them what they were doing and and basically from the systems that they’ve built out, we’ve created this framework that you can now use in your business. So one of the keys is having processes in place for ensuring that your marketing is going out every single month whether it’s direct mail or you’re doing some online advertising like Google ads or Facebook ads or you’ve got, you know, property finders out there, bandit signs. I mean, I can tell you the most common way that people are driving traffic right now is either direct mail, bandit signs typically for just getting started, but a lot of people will graduate to just taking that money and doing direct mail and or Google ads. Google ads are definitely more expensive, it’s a little bit more sophisticated and you have to you know, usually hire an agency to help you do it. But regardless, however, you do it,  I’m going to tell you about a creative way that one of our members kind of took the concept of bandit signs and flipped it on its head a little bit. You have to just have a way to ensure that new fresh leads are coming into your business every month, okay? you know, if you have systems in place though, it doesn’t have to be this massive surge of leads, you don’t have to have hundreds of leads coming into your business, but you do need a fresh supply of leads every month and you need to systemize it. So if you’re doing direct mail, the easiest way to systemize that is find a direct mail house, give them a list, a lot of direct mail houses will help you pull a list and just say: hey, I want to send this postcard out every single month for 6 months, and you said it and forget it right? and you don’t have to think about it. You have to do that cuz you’re going to get busy, you’re going to forget to send mail out or it’s just going to stress you out cuz you know in the back of your head, you have to do it and then you don’t, then you feel guilty, you get anxiety. Just set it and forget it, right? So this is that investor I was talking about, his name is Abel Pacheco, he also spoke at our our last event. What he did- so he’s now closing 3 deals a month, so he actually started in rehab-  he was rehabbing houses, but he started generating so many leads that he couldn’t flip houses fast enough, so he started doing wholesale deals cuz he was flipping about one house a month I think, and he also does some commercial, but to supply his business with his flipping, when I say flipping, rehabbing business, fix and flip. To supply his business with leads, what he did was something that we call ‘Bandit sign on Wheels’. So he focused heavily on his one traffic source, and it’s taking the concept of a traditional bandit sign that says: ‘we buy houses’, but instead of putting it on a sign on the side of the road, he prints it out on a white vinyl sticker and puts it on the back window of people’s cars with a unique extension. So REI blackbook has a phone system that allows you to use extensions and so anytime somebody calls that phone number, and again, he puts it on the back of other people’s cars so we can do this at scale, so he’s actually got 390 vehicles on the road now, it took him a year to get that many. He’s got 390 vehicles on the road and he’s generating more leads than he can handle at this point because of that and they come in every single day because he’s now got 390 vehicles on the road and what happens is when they call in, they dial a unique extension and he knows the car that that lead came from so he could then pay that driver out for that lead or for that deal, okay? So again, he knew that he had to have a reliable way to get leads to his business cuz it’s great to have a follow-up system in place, but if you don’t dump leads into it, then that doesn’t matter either, right? So you have to have both, but this is just one example of a way that you can systematically and predictably drive leads to your business and it’s not too terribly difficult to implement. So people say: hey, you know, okay, that’s great but like, how do I get traffic right? I think it’s kind of interesting to think about it is: is you go to the traffic store, right? So there’s all these traffic stores out there, there’s direct mail houses, Google, there’s Facebook, there’s YouTube, there’s you know, there’s list source where you can go buy a list, so just like you would go to the grocery store to buy fruits and vegetables and food and toilet paper right now if you’re lucky, you know, you’re going to go to the traffic store to get leads, okay? so it’s you know, that’s why I said at the beginning of this call, you don’t have a traffic problem cuz there’s plenty of traffic out there to go get, all right? So when people ask: does direct mail work? do Facebook ads work? do bandit signs work? Yes, it all works.

David: It all works, yup. And props is one of my favorite places to find lists as well too. Real quick guys, I did bandit signs on wheels and got up to like 10 or 12, I thought I was crushing it and I was getting deals from it and I just got lazy and just kind of let it go, but my partner, Mike who you guys all should know, he had like over a hundred of them at one point. Bandit signs on wheels is one of my favorite types of marketing even though I’m not actively doing it.

Josh: It’s definitely a slower burn. If you start today, you’re probably not going to get a deal from it for a while because it’s kind of a slower burn. I mean, the best way to start would be direct mail to a targeted list and just make sure that you’re capturing and following up with every single lead that comes in the door and you have to realize that you know, the way that you acquire leads is just one part of a bigger system, right? So it doesn’t matter how you get the lead, you got to get them into your system, that’s the key. Cuz there’s a big break down between marketing and sales, okay? So marketing brings in the leads, sales closes the deal right? And you know, you may be doing all of this right now, but don’t matter if it’s a department or what but the function of marketing brings in the leads and then the function of sales takes those leads and converts them into appointments and deals, okay but there’s this company, it’s a great article, you can just Google- it was posted on Forbes. You could Google Forbes why most companies waste leads? something like that and this article will pop up and it’s a really good article, but it shows- they secret shopped over 10,000 businesses across a bunch of different industries over the course of a couple years and they found that it took the average sales rep 46 hours and 53 minutes to pick up the phone or respond to an inbound lead. And reps that did call, they only made 1.3 call attempts before giving up okay, so the problem with that is- also went to do a little bit more research and they found that: if you follow up with leads within the first 5 minutes of them calling you, if you’re able to do that, the likelihood of you qualifying that lead goes up 100 times, so not 100% but a hundred times.

David: 100 times not a 100%. That is an incredibly crazy statistic guys. I can’t even comprehend that. I mean a hundred- basically, if you get a hundred calls, right? and you follow up with these people, you’re a hundred times and within five minutes or you answer, you’re a hundred times more likely to do a deal then if you don’t do it in 5 minutes.

Josh: Well, it’s a hundred times more likely to to qualify the lead is what that is. But still, I mean it’s super important to be able to follow up with them and I realize a lot of people have jobs, you know, or you’re just busy, you’re out. You’re out in the field, so what REI blackbook allows you to do is at least have a stopgap so is somebody calls in and you don’t answer, if somebody goes to your website and opt in through a form, they’ll get a text message right away that says: hey, thank you so much, we got your information or hey, I’m so sorry I missed your call, I’m in a meeting, can I call you back shortly? So while it’s not as good as actually being able to answer the phone and talk to them, it does at least provide a- it gives you a little bit of of room and it lets them know that you got their information, you’re going to be following up and they can expect the call. So that does help actually get people on the phone cuz that’s one of the hardest things that if you’re doing marketing, you’re not there to answer the phone. It’s tough to get them when you’re ready, right? Because then maybe now, they’re busy and then a week passes and then they forget about it and it’s really really hard to get them on the phone so you’re wasting a lot of that money. So again, this is why you got to build your proven system and your system is really like the plumbing that runs through your business right? So think about like plumbing in your house, when you turn on the sink in the kitchen, water comes out right? If you had a leak in your basement or if you have a leak underneath your sink in the kitchen, you would fix it right away, but most people have leaks in their businesses and they just kind of go on like there’s no big deal. Right? So you don’t-. if you have leaks in your businesses, you want to make sure that you patch those up and this is how you’re going to do that. So once you start generating leads, in a perfect world what’s going to happen is, you know, they’re going to either fill out a form on your side or they’re going to call you and you’re going to answer the phone, you’re going to talk to them, they’re going to say: yes, I would love for you to give me an offer. So you’re going to analyze the deal, make an offer, you’re going to present them with the offer, they accept it, you close and then you choose however you’re going to disposition that property right? So if you’re doing wholesaling, you’re going to go create property listings, add it to your website, send out text blasting, blast, all that type of stuff. Now, the reality is: that doesn’t typically happen right? most of the time-

David: It’s so true.

Josh: Yeah, so most of the time, this doesn’t happen. A lot- most of the time, you get caught up here and you’re not even able to contact them. The next point of failure is you give them their offer and they don’t answer, they don’t talk to you or they’re just like yeah no way that offers-

David: You get unlimited access to their voicemail. Unlimited.

Josh: Yeah hahaha. So if we can- so what I want to show you is what a small boosting conversion will do to your business and this is a super important series of slides here. If you can get this, if you can understand this, then you will see the power of having a system. So let’s just do some quick math here so if you get a hundred leads into your business and you talk to about 60 of those leads, and one out of six of them turns into an appointment, and you’re able to close 2 deals. Alright? Sorry let me get back, and you’re able to close 2 deals out of that so now you got 2 deals that you’re doing out of 100. All right, so that means you got 98 leads that you weren’t able to get ahold of for whatever reason, okay? So again, that would give you a 2% conversion rate if we’re talking about deals to leads. So 100 leads, 10 appointments, 2 deals. I said 6 appointments on the other one, sorry for the bad math but- 100 leads, 10 appointments, 2 deals, let’s just say on average you make about $8,000 per deal.

David: That’s about what my average is, so that’s awesome. Yeah.

Josh: Alright, so if we could just double your conversion rate, which going from 2 to 4% is not that difficult with a system in place. What that would mean is all of a sudden you’re able to go on 20 appointments, you get 4 deals and now that’s $32,000 instead of 16 and $16,000 is still a nice chunk of change.

David: That’s a ton of money, but we’re talking about the same amount of marketing spent.

Josh: Right, correct, correct. So with the same amount of marketing spend, without having to scale your budget, you’re now able to double the revenue in your business because you’re just getting a hold of more sellers. You know, again, a 2% bump or I’m sorry- yeah a 2% bump in conversion rate from 2 to 4%.

David: Now, that’s a 100% bump, right? But it’s only going from 2 to 4, that is nothing and if you’re only getting a 2% conversion, you know as is, I think that’s a little low. I’m just an optimistic guy, right? I think my conversions are probably four or five, but if I do a hundred percent increase on that, which is really the goal here is a 100% increase, so that 4-5 goes to 9 or 10.

Josh: Yeah, just from following up, without having to spend more money on marketing. So how do we do that? Okay. So again, assuming everything doesn’t go as planned cuz it almost never does. What’s gonna happen is you pick up the phone and try to call them or they you know, they call and you missed the calls so you try to call them back and they don’t answer, so again this is the first point of failure. So what you do is inside of REI blackboard, we can create these follow up drip campaigns and so what a lot of our users do is they create a 10-day workflow, some people call it 10 days of pain, I don’t really like that cuz you know, you don’t want to think you’re putting your leads through pain, but you may have heard some people call it that but basically what it is, it’s 10 days- every single day, they’re going to get some sort of a touch point from you whether it be a manual phone call. Most of what we do is automated just because most people are super super busy cuz you know, it’s 1/ 2/ 3-Man teams, but they’re going to get an automated text reply from you, a ringless voicemail, some sort of an email and then maybe yeah, you get reminded once or twice to pick up the phone actually call them. Okay, so most- a lot of the people, maybe not most, but a lot of people at this point- there’s about I think 10 touchpoints built into this 10-day workflow. Most people are going to reply one way or another at this point and typically it’s either going to be: take me off your damn list, it’s going to be: hey, I’m actually not ready to sell right now or it’s going to be: yeah, hey, when can we talk? Okay? As long as it’s not a take me off your damn list, and it’s not- and if it’s not a hell, yeah, when can we talk? Cuz if they say yeah, when can we talk, then we get back into here, which is great. But if they don’t respond at all or they say: hey, I’m not ready right now, then we put them on a 12-week follow-up workflow or some people make these like 6 months, doesn’t matter right? but this is more of a long-term drip, it follows up with them a couple times a month. So maybe once every two or three weeks and it’s just saying you know, hey we’re still looking to buy houses in your area, just wanted to follow-up, I know we chatted awhile back. If you’re still interested in selling, we’re still looking to buy in your area, reply to this text message or give us a call back and we can present you with your offer. And so if they still don’t respond, this thing’s just going to go on a loop forever until they either call you back or they can opt out themselves, they can reply stop and then I’ll just drop them out automatically. If it’s an email, there’s links in the emails at the very bottom that allow them to opt out, but if they do respond, then you’re back here going down the green line and making them an offer, you’re analyzing the deal and you’re making an offer right, which is great. So now we’ve- and most of- this is where most people get hung up and from here, just doing this will give you that that bumping conversion where you can all of a sudden start to close an extra one, two, three deals a month just cuz you’re following up with people. It sounds very simple, but it’s incredible the results you’ll see. The next point of failure that you’ll have in your business is people don’t accept your offer or they ghost you after you give an offer right cuz they’re either insulted by the offer or whatever the-

David: If they’re not insulted by the offer, you’re probably offering too much and my favorite way to follow up with somebody is to just resend the contract. My favorite way cuz then they might- let’s say you haven’t talked to that person in two or three months, you just resend them a contract versus pick up the phone. What happens is they get that email and they call you and they’re like: hey, what’s this? And you’re like: oh I just was going through some contracts that I had sent out recently and I still want to buy it so I just figured I’d send you the contract again and you guys would be surprised at how many people will respond to a contract getting sent to them over a phone call, a text, all of them work, all of them are great, but that’s my personal favorite: just send the contract.

Josh: Yep, and so what this will do is you can set up, I just call it a ‘did not accept flow, you can call it whatever you want but basically, once a quarter or you can say, once a month, but once a quarter, it’s going to send you a task and remind you to review the property or you can send this to a VA. This is great work for a virtual assistant to do cuz it’s very repeatable, you can create simple videos to show them how to do it. You know, go research the property at the County assessors website, see if the property sold. If the property did sell, see how much it sold for and see if you can contact that person and ask them if they want to be on your buyers list. If the property did not sell, resubmit them either a letter of intent through email or you could resend him a contract. And so this is a good way to pick up or to pick up more deals and so Dave, you know, Darren Buttram don’t you? St. Louis guy.

David: Yeah, I met Darren, oh yeah.

Josh: In 2018, I don’t know what  he did in 2019 but in 2018, he was able to close an extra 37 deals just from doing this.

David: Hahaha. 37 in a year? Extra. Let’s say that each of those was $8,000 and let’s just say, I’m going to go stupid high, let’s say his marketing spend was a thousand. So he only netted 7 thousand. 7000 times 37 deals, that’s 260 grand extra.

Josh: Yeah, crazy. He’s an REI blackboard user, he’s been a long-time REI blackbook user but yeah, so this stuff works. So, and again, this is your automated sales team. This is that automated sales team I was talking about and this is where the money in the business is made right here, right? Everybody thought- everybody wants to watch webinars about the latest and greatest marketing hack and trick, but this is the foundation of your business that if you don’t build out, it doesn’t matter how many leads you generate cuz you’re just going to be blowing cash. You’re just going to be blowing money, might as well light it on fire cuz you’re not going to be able to handle that- those number of leads anyways. And you don’t need to hire sales people to do a lot of this follow-up for you, sales people need to be talking to people who are actually ready to engage and talk. You don’t need to be following up with you know, tire kickers that aren’t going to sell their house for 8 to 10 to 12 months, right? Not unless they raise their hand and they express some sort of an interest, right? So yeah, the tools you need- we’re going to go run through this real quick, so you need a website, some sort of a website. REI blackbook provides very easy you know, one click websites, drag-and-drop, you can customize and you can do everything you want, add your logo, they’re fully customizable, which is pretty cool. Your website should have a clear call-to-action on it, a single web- or a simple web forms so you don’t want like a gigantic webform asking for a bunch of information. These web forms are really nice because when you start typing an address in, it’ll auto populate the address, so that makes it a lot easier for people to opt in, they don’t have to go and find their zip code if it’s not their main residence, right? All those little things help increase conversion rate on your website and so, you know, we are always up-to-date on what you know, what’s working best from a marketing perspective and so we’re always updating our websites. But we make it very very easy to capture leads and then also, when you capture the lead, you can see here the lead should be delivered to your CRM and followed up with immediately. Since REI blackbook is an all-in-one platform, on the website- when a lead is captured on your website, it goes directly to your CRM and that seller gets a text message right away so I’m going to demonstrate this here in a minute. You also need call tracking phone numbers so you know-

David:  And when you demonstrate that, I just want to emphasize something. When they get a text message right away, that’s you touching base with them within 5 minutes automated, so I could be you know, I could have my phone off and be in an airplane, flying across the country to go on vacation and somebody submits a lead and then they get a text right away and they don’t know that that’s from a computer, they think it’s from you right? Love that, I mean that it’s huge.

Josh: Yeah, 100%. And you also need call tracking phone numbers because if you’re using your cell phone for all of your marketing, number one, it’s going to be really really hard to you know, hire an acquisition manager or to offload your calls because everybody’s got your cellphone number.

David: Or just be able to have some family time, right? because your phone’s blowing up. You gotta have a business phone that you can then point at different people, at different times of the day or month or whatever, as well as be able to automate it. I mean, that’s the whole reason that we have these systems is to automate it.

Josh: And you want to be able to track- you know,  use these phone numbers on all of your marketing so your direct mail, all your different direct mail pieces, bandit signs, billboards, radio ads, your website so you know where your leads are coming from, cuz then at the end of the month, or the end of the quarter, at the end of the year, you can go and you can look and you can say: hey alright, we did 35 deals this year, where did these deals come from?

David: Yeah where did they come from guys? Why would you want to know that? So you can stop wasting money on marketing that doesn’t work and then even better, double down on the stuff that does work. So, you know, right now I probably have 30 or 40 phone numbers. 30 or 40 right? And the reason is you know, 1 numbers for mail, 1 numbers for AdWords, 1 numbers for bandit signs, 1 numbers for radio and I have multiple ads on the radio so I have different numbers for those stations and different stations. I used to even send a different number on a different segmented list when I would mail, so I have one number for probates and I still do that. I don’t do as much mail these days, but I love mail. I mean, there’s just so many different ways to find those motivated sellers, but it would be really nice to say: okay, at the end of the year like you had mentioned, you know, we did last year 98, right? so we can go in and we can say: oh damn, we did 15 from bandit signs, we did 23 from radio ads, we did 15 from direct mail, but then we can even break it down even deeper and say: oh, from the direct mail of those 15, 13 of them came from vacants. Well, what does that tell me to do with my mail next time? mail more vacants, right? I mean, you got to be able to track it, so having KPI’s is just as important as having the system to look at all of it and track it all.

Josh: Yup. Yeah and as a bonus, if you can allow your prospects to text those phone numbers, it’s gonna increase your conversion rate. Some people like to text, some people like call, ok? Ultimately then, you need a CRM- Contact management system to house all those leads. So you can see here, when people call in to phone numbers, you can see- maybe we don’t have their name cuz it’s just a phone number, but when they call in, they’re automatically added and you can- and they can be tagged depending on where they came from. So this one’s direct mail from a probate list and it’s a seller lead so that all happens automatically with these call tracking phone numbers that are built inside of REI blackbook, which is super super important again, cuz you want to be tracking your marketing and knowing where it’s coming from. So this is the inside of a contact record, you can see here when somebody opts in, you can see that yes, they’re being tagged over here and then they’re getting a text message delivered to them right away. So it could say: hey Johnny, this is Josh from STL home buyers, thanks for your request for an offer on your property, we’re currently working on your offer and we’ll reach out soon. If you have any questions, just give us a call back at this number. So it’s very personal, you also get an email right away and then a member of your team gets a task that they need to pick up the phone, then you review that lead, pick up the phone and call them right away. You can see this lead came from the seller website.

David: And if you’re in a one-man show, you get the task.

Josh: Right.

David: Right, but the cool thing is you’re not having to go back later and rebuild something. When you hire somebody, you just go into the system, which is this system here and you just say hey when a new lead comes in, instead of tasking me, task Dennis or Wess or whoever that virtual assistant that you hired is, so they can then pick it up and those- when you hire them, that’s their full time job so speed is of the essence here. Whereas, you as the business owner, you want to be working on tasks that are you know, $500 an hour or more. You want to be running your appointments or making offers, right? Everything else you want to try to automate, so they just make it easy. I love it. Very cool.

Josh: Also follow up campaigns so this is a screenshot of our workload builder inside of REI blackbook and so this is what it looks like when you build out your follow-up campaigns. So as you can see, you can build in delays, so right up here, this is that first text message or not that first one, but this is a text message that’s going to go out then it’s going to wait a day and at 1 o’clock the next day, it’s gonna send a ringless voicemail, it’s going to wait 3 minutes and then send a text message and say hey, I just sent you a voicemail, just wanted to follow up to you to see if you’re still interested in selling your house, right? So again, most people are not ready to sell their house today, you have to follow up with them and if you can automate some of that process- so we’re not trying to you know, I’m not a fan of people that- they necessarily scream automation from the rooftops and makes it seem like it’s just so easy because you know, everything is automated. What we’re trying to do is we’re just trying to automate the re-engagement process really is all we’re doing, because once they reply to a text message, all we’re trying to do is get them to raise their hand and re-engage in conversation cuz every once in a while maybe, I mean I’ve heard of some people, you know, kind of like doing a deal over text message, but usually you’re going to have to pick up the phone and talk to a human being right? I know a lot of people don’t like to hear that but that’s the truth, right? You’re gonna have to talk to people, this is a people business.

David: Yeah, if you wanna get paid, you gotta talk to somebody. I mean, it’s just the way it works but you can automate the processes to get them on the phone, that’s the main thing. Otherwise, you’re going to be spending your wheels man, you are just going to be wasting time.

Josh: Yeah, I mean the moral of the story, we’re kind of beating a dead horse here, but they’re going to respond when they’re ready and this allows you to focus on the majority of your time on hot leads okay, so- And then you need some way to market your properties and right now, Dave I don’t know if you’re experiencing this or not but a lot of them bastards I’m talking to- the disposition side of their business just became a whole lot more important because for a lot of folks that I’m talking to especially, you know, higher-level investors like yourself. A lot of them have shut off their front end marketing for the most part, maybe they kept a couple channels open, because they’ve got thousands of people that they can just go back and market to. So like you said, you got five thousand people that you can follow up with. So a lot of people are not spending as much money right now on front end marketing, I know a lot of investors that are actually doing direct mail right now to build their buyers list to try to find people that are still buying to make sure they’re still buying during the pandemic so they know if they go and get deals under contract that they’ll be able to sell them. And so whether you’re in a good market or a bad market, right now obviously, you know, everybody knows what’s going on but you know again, assuming you’re going to be in this business for the next number of years, you need to systemize every piece of your business, so once you get a deal under contract, you need an easy way to then create property listings and market that property and it doesn’t matter if you’re doing a fix and flip or a wholesale or you’re renting it out. We’ve got property marketing websites that make it super easy for you to market your property and builds marketing assets, like single property websites, property flyers whenever RIA clubs open back up, a lot of times people will bring their property flyers to the RIA club if they’re doing wholesale deals, email and marketing text blasts so we can syndicate to some third-party websites. This is an example of a text blast that you can send out and text messaging is one of the best ways to stay in contact with your buyers list. It’s just says: hey John, a new investment property that meets your buying criteria is now available, you can check it out here and this is just a link to your website inside of REI blackboard which is pretty cool. So again, the idea is everything is in one platform so you don’t have to go out and you know, subscribe to four, five, six different tools. Number one, it costs more to do that but number two, it creates a lot of technical issues that if you’re not super super technical, and even if you are, it’s kind of pulling you out of the real estate business and thrusting you into the IT business half the time cuz you’re worrying about the broken part of your system. So you want to make sure that you have a way to market your properties. So the bottom line is like I was saying before, you really got, you know, two different ways you could do this, hopefully at this point, we can all agree the importance of having a system in place, whether you use REI blackbook or not, I promise you you’re not going to hurt my feelings, but I do believe that we have the best platform in the industry for real estate investors to build systems like we just talked about, because you could go and you could kind of piece together a bunch of these systems off-the-shelf. A lot of these these systems exist. You can get a website and you can get landing pages and you can find a CRM, you can get  call tracking numbers or you could use you know, a system like REI blackbook that has it all built in one single tool. So if you build it yourself, it’s going to cost a lot of money, REI blackbook cost anywhere from 97 to 297 dollars a month. Most of our users are on the $197 plan and we typically have a $997 license fee which Dave has a special link that he’s going to share with you and you can actually waive that $997 license fee, so you can get started for just $197 plus.

David: So yeah, that’s the coolest part guys, you can waive the license fee. When I signed up back in 2014, I paid it. I believe, 997 and 197 a month and I’ve been paying 197 a month ever since and its the best 197 a month that I spend. Josh, can I take over screen share for just a quick second?

Josh: Yeah, for sure

David: I wanna wrap up here in 3 minutes, 4 minutes, because I don’t want to go too long. But yeah, let me know when you get that off and I will share mine.

Josh: Oh, I got to stop sharing don’t I? Here you go.

David: You got it, you got it, okay. So guys here is my- inside my REI blackbook. I’ve closed 513 deals in here. Okay. This is just a quick look on what it looks like on the inside. If I go to my property pipeline, I can see all of the deals that I’m working right here in the status of these, it’s amazing. This is my disposition site: discountpropertyinvestor.com, that’s the podcast right? These are all the properties that we are working on right now. We have all these properties under contract: Talbot, Clover, West Milton, there’s a property for 1.5, that’s probably a package in historic Soulard, Maple, Burnett and Sea Lane, Hillcrest airport. These are just properties that I have under contract, my team and I, that we’re selling. We have 433 Gene and 5028 Raymond, these are properties that we’ve actually sold already. We haven’t bought any of these properties guys, we don’t typically buy properties that we wholesale. We just get them under contract and we sell the contract. So this website right here that I use to run my entire business from, this is the disposition side, is REI blackbook. These are where and how  I go about marketing these, I do my text blasting and my email blasting to my buyers list from this same website. It’s over here in the back end or you know, the REI blackbook side of things. Now, if I go to this side and I type in /VIP and you can have it any which way you like, this is my buyers list. This is how people opt-in, you know, someone have any buttons them to go back right? It’s very simple like, type in a name, a phone, an email, a company and then they click the boxes in which they want, it’s auto set to be for all if they don’t click any. Let’s say that you have a buyer that’s looking for only North County and only Central Corridor, well he typed in his information and he gives- and he gets added to my buyers list. Well, guess what happens when I come across a property in North County, I email it to all the guys that are looking for North County buyer- or North County properties. That is how this business gets done. Okay. So again, Josh had mentioned that you guys can save 997 and basically waive that license fee. Here’s the domain that you guys are going to want to use: it’s REIblackbook/DPI, I dropped it in the comments and I’ll send you guys all an email with this as well but basically it’s REIblackbook/DPI that’s the URL right there. REIblackbook.com/DPI it’s going to auto forward and then- but this is where you can go guys and you can learn a little bit more about it and watch a demo if you want, but the coolest part is these guys are waiving the warrant- the $997 fee, they’re waiving it okay? When I signed up in 2014, I paid that so I just want to say thank you to Josh and all the guys over at REI blackbook for hooking us up today with this discount and basically waiving a 1,000 dollar fee to join, it still does cost $197 a moth but like I said, you guys just saw my system. I just showed you my REI blackbook, I’ve closed 513 deals since I’ve been doing this full-time for about five years. That’s about a hundred deals a year, and I’m doing it entirely with REI blackbook. So guys REIblackbook.com/DPI if you’re interested, go there, you’re gonna save a thousand dollars when you sign up and if you guys have any other questions, I want you guys to reach out to me. Send me an email david@housesoldeasy.com is my email. Let me know what questions you have. I’m happy to answer these questions for you guys or if you guys have any questions live, let’s maybe give it about another- we’re way over but that’s alright. This is a lot of- this is a ton of value here. If you guys have any questions live right now, let’s open up the floor for a couple minutes before we end and we can take some of your guys’ questions live. Again, REIblackbook.com/DPI to save $1,000 on that license for you guys .I love it. So if anybody has any questions, let me know, we’ll open up the floor for you guys and we can answer those for you real quick. You guys got to have something, Brian, Bob, Ken, Steve what you guys got? I know there’s some questions for you guys on here. We’ve been- I’ve been using this for 6 years, Josh builds this stuff so he knows it. So I mean, if you guys got questions, we’re here to help. Can you write the website? Brian said, Can you write the website? I don’t understand that one so much. Website again, I’m doing screenshots- oh! I got you, it’s REIblackbook.com/DPI. Sorry, bud I didn’t understand what you were saying there. I just copied that in there again, and I’ll do it over here.

Josh: Yeah, and there’s some demo videos if you go there and you scroll down to the different features, there’s about seven or eight different like 1,2 minute demo videos that will just show you some of the the different features that we’ve gotten. So there’s task management built-in, you can do some cool stuff with property analysis and build out some property analysis reports, but the biggest thing is really is the follow-up. Building you know, the call flows and the work flows and making sure that all of your leads are properly being manages as they’re coming into your business. So let me see.

David: Cool. So Brian said thanks guys. Bob said what type of system support is available when you create yourself? I’m not that tech-savvy and I get it, I totally get that. I’m going to yield that to Josh.

Josh: So we’ve got a full knowledge base that you can go through and you can watch support articles and read support articles. We got some training videos, we also do Wednesday Q&A webinars every single Wednesday at 1 p.m. Those are about an hour long where you can get on and just ask any questions that you want, get help. If you want us to actually build out your system for you, we do have implementation packages ranging anywhere from I believe 1500 to 3000 dollars depending on what you want built out. For that, you could basically get your you know, you’re- the system that we showed you built out anywhere from about 1500 to $3,000 if you just want to say hey, it’s cool but I don’t want to mess with it.

David: You just want to have them do it but guys, you can learn. It’s really not that hard to learn it and they have a shit ton of resources. You guys have a whole library.

Josh: Yeah so-

David: And content library, document library, support center. I mean, there’s- you can learn it on your own. I mean if you’re just lazy, you can pay these guys.

Josh: Yeah, but the tools built in a way where it’s you know, it’s intuitive enough, especially with the support articles, where you could you can build it out yourself. I mean it might take you, you know, a few weekends to figure it out or a few long sit-down sessions but I mean it’s going to pay off because the beauty of it is: once you build it out, you really don’t have to go back and mess with it a whole lot. So, you know, you take a little bit to build it in the front end, but then you just start running through it.

David: And I was very transparent, there is going to be a learning curve guys, there’s always going to be a learning curve. It’s going to take some time to learn this program, right?

Josh: It’s harder though to go find- to go build it with a bunch of different-

David: Oh you’re trying to go back, I mean, look at it this way guys, I put in some time and I did that in 2014 and I’ve been using this software for 6 years without having to do anything along those lines. I set it up and I forget it. Occasionally I’ll go and I’ll tweak it cuz I’ll find a little better way to do it or a way that I may like it to work a little bit better, but it’s it’s so incredibly simple. I actually love this. We’ve got another question here from Ben, Ben raised his hand, but he also sent over a Q&A that says: what about contracts and are there forms perhaps for each state? so-

Josh: No. We don’t-

David: That’s a no, I mean we don’t really have contracts or the e-sig in here. That’s a totally different beast and totally different ballpark, but Ben, I have contracts that I give away for free over at freewholesalecourse.com. So if you haven’t already checked that out, I highly recommend you start there. freewholesalecourse.com. That’s the domain and the name of the course all-in-one. We have a free purchase and sale contract and we have a free option agreement in there. We also even have a joint venture agreement in there that you guys can use and an assignment agreement. We have all the agreements you need. But when it comes to contracts, I’d say two things: one, don’t overthink it. The one- the contract that I’ve used to flip 500 properties over that is the one I’m giving you guys, it’s one page, one page. AIright? Don’t overthink it. The other option is that you can use like, the board forms that you can get from an agent in your state or a broker, just contact them and ask them to use those. The reason I say two and not just one, is because if you’re dealing with agents, they’re typically not going to want to work with a simple one-page because they were trained when they went to school to be an agent that they’re not lawyers. That’s literally one thing that they train you in real estate school is you aren’t a lawyer, so don’t try to act like one. So instead use these simple forms that the whole entire state uses and then you can get those from a real estate agent. But if you’re dealing with an off-market property owner, you think that they want to try to read through 8, 9, 10 pages of stuff? Hell no. They want a one-page contract that’s super simple to read and super simple to fill out that a 7 year old can essentially read and understand and that’s what I prefer to use. I like simple, I like easy so go to free wholesale course and you can get a copy of that agreement. Otherwise, talk to a local real estate agent, broker, appraiser, any of those people, they can all get you the board certified forms for each state. Love it. All right guys, we got time for one more? I got to get home to the wife here in a second. We got time for one more question. Josh, in the meantime while we’re waiting for that. I want to thank you so incredibly much for coming on today, sharing all your insights, I’m like the biggest- I’m like you guys’ biggest fan with REI blackbook. I love it, it enabled me to make multiple millions of dollars flipping houses over the last five years. And as you guys saw, you know, I have done to date- what was my number? 513 and we  just broke that 500 number maybe, you know, a month-and-a-half ago, a month ago so we’re over 500 deals today.

Josh: That’s awesome.

David: And all of our follow up, all of our dispo, all of everything, the phone systems you name it, it’s in this system, it’s all in one place. The only thing that it doesn’t do is send contracts with the e-sig. I’m sure that that’s probably coming down the road at some point right?

Josh: I hope so.

David: That’s kind of a whole different beast, this is more for automation, keeping track of things, touching people, phone systems. I mean, it’s basically everything but that thing right there, it’s amazing. I love it. All right guys, 30 more seconds. Any more questions, let us know. I will be emailing everybody the recording of this webinar. Ben said: got it and thanks for junior contracts are lengthy. Yeah, so are those Missouri ones guys, like 8 or 9 pages. I hate using them, sometimes I have to but I do sometimes. You guys have definitely been way more informative than anyone I’ve paid attention to. Well thank you, Ben, we appreciate it. Bob said: good stuff and thank you. Awesome, I think that’s a wrap.

Josh: Cool. Hey dude, thanks for having me on man, I appreciate it.

David: Hey, thanks for coming on Josh. I appreciate you and I know everyone listening appreciates you. I’m grateful for your time, we’ll have to bring you back on again soon. Guys, if you have questions about REI blackbook, email me. Don’t bother Josh, david@housesoldeasy.com is my main email, send me over your questions or if you want more information or just want that link and last thing I’ll say before we drop this or in this particular webinar is save $997 in the license fee. All you got to do is go sign up at- I’m sorry- REIblackbook.com/DPI, which is discount property investors’ initials. All right guys, signing off, until next time- We will see you on the next one, thanks Josh!

Thanks for listening to the discount property investor podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, share, and subscribe to help us reach a wider audience to jump-start your real estate investing career, visit freewholesalecourse.com- the most complete free course on wholesaling real estate ever. We would also appreciate it if you left us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. Thank you in advance for your support and remember you make your money when you buy, you get paid when you sell. Now let’s go build some wealth.