You're listening to the “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords Nerds, a high-tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition, and live a freer, more awesome life. And, now, your host, Dan Barrett. [00:34.6]
Dan: Hi everybody, welcome to this week's episode of the “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from adwordsnerds.com then this week I have an incredible interview with Damon Remy, the brains behind the software called REI Blackbook and we get into a really, really wonderful conversation. Before I get into that, I feel like I have to say a few words about the coronavirus as I'm recording this, the Corona viruses, you know, becoming more and more of an issue of the United States. We've got restaurants kind of being shut down and people limited to gatherings of 10 and it's a little bit wild out there. I'm not gonna lie and I am preparing and we'll have an entire episode on how this is affecting the online marketing world. So I'm going to pull data from all of our clients. I'm going to have actual numbers for you so you can look out for that episode next week.I just need a little bit more time to get some numbers together and really figure out what's going on. [01:45]
But I do want you to be able to turn to this podcast as well as our Facebook group, which is the REI marketing nerds Facebook group that's at AdWords nerds.com/group for realistic and clear eyed information. I will say that it is easy to, you know, feel nervous and feel anxious in times like this, but we don't really know what's going to happen to the housing market. We don't really know what's gonna happen to the online marketing space. And I want to make my own business decisions and I want you to make your business decisions on real data, on real world numbers. And I want us to try to be as rational and reasonable as possible. So with that in mind, I'm going to do my best to turn this podcast into a really great resource for you. Like I said, you can follow me here. You can find us on the REI marketing nerds Facebook group again, AdWords nerds.com/group I will be posting in there regularly about the data that we're seeing in Google as it results to the Corona virus and how it's affecting finding motivated seller leads online right. [02:51]
Now, this week, I'm actually going to leave this interview up and do this this week because actually this week's interview directly deals with one of the most critical factors for turning motivated seller leads into deals and that's follow-up. Damon has thought a ton about this, the software that he uses, REI or not that he uses it, he created REI Blackbook is a really, really amazing in terms of being able to do a whole bunch of stuff. It's a CRM and follow-up system and all this stuff. So this is, one of those things because as we get into, you know, let's say we go into a market that's a little bit rougher than you may be used to, or maybe a market that's rougher than we've had in quite a while, following up with leads and being able to consistently do that over time is going to be one of the critical components sustained, profitable during this kind of like wild times that who knows, maybe we were entering into. [03:47]
So without further ado, let's get into this interview with Damon Remy from REI Blackbook and like I said, tune in next week, we're going to do an entire episode on how the coronavirus COVID-19 is affecting the online marketing space for real estate investors. All right, this is Daniel Barrett here and I am with Damon Remy from REI Blackbook. You can find all about them at reiblackbook.com Damon, my wonderful friend. How are you? What's going on man?
Damon: I am good man. I appreciate the the opportunity to come chat with, with the audience. I gotta I gotta admit, man, I'm a, I'm a little bit more excited about this interview than most.
Damon: Because you know, every time you and I chat, I think we connect a very similar sense of humor and perspective on the world, man.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: So I'm excited to be here and kind of chat with your, your tribe. [04:47]
Dan: Yeah, man, I'm, I'm a, I'm very, I was very excited to, to have you on and I gotta say so, right literally, and this happens, I would say like maybe 10% of the time when I just podcast, but literally right before we got into it, I'm saying your name, like I'm doing a little intro thing and I got super paranoid that I'm mispronouncing your last name. Like we met and I just said it wrong and that you'd never corrected me or something like that. And now it's like, it's too late. So it is, it's Remy, right?
Damon: You know, that's a really good question, because honestly if you mispronounced it, I'm not sure I would know. So I went my entire life hearing it both ways, so much so that I don't even know anymore.
Dan: Alright.
Damon: You know, so I believe it is a, I believe it is Remy. I say Reemy a lot, but.
Dan: You people say Reemy?
Damon: Yeah, I used to. I actually, I'm telling you, that's actually how I used to say it. There's a whole long story about boot camp though. And I'll tell you that next time we're together when we are having a drink.
Dan: Alright. But what did your parents say? What did your parents call you? [05:48]
Yeah, they say Remy cause is it like a, so I associate the name Remy with like New Orleans and like they buy you and stuff something like that. I think because Remy is the name of Gambit from the X-men and like he is from New Orleans. So I don't know, like is that like..
Damon: It is a French origin. You know, so. So you've got kids. Have you guys ever watched Ratatouille?
Dan: I have never seen Ratatouille.
Damon: All right, well you got to go watch Ratatouille. That needs to be on your top list now.
Dan: Okay.
Damon: Of things to do. And you'll see that the French, the French chef.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: Who is a mouse is a, his name is Remy. So
Dan: Okay.
Damon: So..alright, here we go.
Dan: Well, this is the type of hot real estate tips. Well, all right, so let's move this to the real estate world. Although I'd rather just talk about Pixar, but we can talk, we can talk about real estate world and you know, you are kind of sort of the mastermind behind this, this incredible piece of software. It's called REI Blackbook, right? And it does a 1,000,001 things. [06:49]
And I want to spend a lot of time talking about that kind of stuff because I think it's super, super valuable for this audience to hear. But before we get into that, why don't you just walk people through a little bit of your story? Like what got you into real estate investing, this kind of like weird world that we're both part of.
Damon: Yeah, absolutely man. So I would say that journey, well, there's a couple of pieces that are important to understand. My tech journey, the technology piece. I really kind of found that love in the military. So I did a lot of really cool stuff, some research and development in the military. When I was super young and somehow got out of the military and ended up working in the mortgage business and we're talking the mortgage business in the height of, you know, if you had a pulse and could, could fog a mirror, you could, you could get alone, right?
Dan: Right. [07:44]
Damon: So, so there's massive mortgage boom is going on. Super competitive, tons of mortgage companies, tons of loan officers. And you know, really what I truly love, the two passions that I love, and I almost say three, but really the two drivers, I love marketing and I love technology. And then we've really kind of added that third component real estate. But back in the mortgage days, we were basically just trying to stand out, right? How do we market ourselves a bit differently than everybody else? Because everybody else on the radio and TV and print was all advertising the lowest rate. Right?
Dan: Right.
Damon: Well, the interesting thing about that whole business is that we're all selling the same money, right? So we literally have access to the same banks, the same loan programs, and it's really pretty much typically this very similar to the same rates.
Dan: Right.
Damon: And so yeah, so we really started focusing heavily on real estate investors. Now most loan officers didn't want to service real estate investors because you know, you've got to do the same amount of work for a much smaller loan size. And they typically get paid commission, right? Based upon the loan amount. [08:56]
And so not many folks focused on real estate investors, but we figured out that if you focus on real estate investors, real estate investors would do multiple deals a year. Right?
Dan: Right.
Damon: And once you did one loan for them, you already had all their, you know, their there, their pay, their pay debt, pay stubs, basically tt's like an assembly line, if you will. And so long story short, we really started focusing on the real estate investor market back in 2004-2005 and you know, to stand out in that space, we just said, okay, what can we do to help a real estate investor? Right? So the age old rule of marketing is just provide value, right? So what value could we add to the real estate investor? Not necessarily thinking about our end result yet. Although that's where it ultimately leads to, but we basically just said, okay, if we can help them buy more properties and do more deals, right? [09:47]
Help them manage those properties and exit the properties faster, then they would need to come back to us more frequently. Right?
Dan: Right.
Damon: So, so that was really kind of it. That's how we actually got into it. And so that's how we got focused on real estate investing. Of course, you know, start hitting, hitting up all of the local REI clubs and meetings and just really dive into that whole world that I don't know, that I knew existed.
Dan: Right.
Damon: You know, at that time in 2005-2006 and then got heavily involved myself. You know, I've got, I've got a couple of properties, you know, rentals, myself, rehabbed a couple of properties. But really what I was doing back in that day was using what I knew, which was marketing and technology. And we built a handful of tools too. We actually, I'll tell you we actually kind of had the idea for Facebook before Facebook. We just didn't know it, right? [10:41]
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: We've, and we, and we did it on a much smaller scale. We did, we did Facebook basically for real estate investors.
Dan: Yeah a lot.
Damon: Here in the St Louis market. So we were able to allow all the investors connect and do deals on a platform so they could post their deals, they could share deals, we would build websites for those deals. They could, you know, go search the deals. That was really how REI Blackbook started and it was completely free. So we gave that away 100% because at the end of the day, we knew that if we could help them do more deals, they needed more money, which, you know, they'd come back to us to the loans.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: And it worked great. I mean, we were recognized as one of the top top brokers in, in the area and a national recognition, you know, I had two guys on my team that were, you know, more loan volume transaction. [11:28]
They're in the top 200 loan officers in the entire country. I mean it was going well until 2008.
Dan: So wait, hold on. What happened in 2008? I'm not sure. I don't remember. I'm trying to remember back.
Damon: Yeah. So, so, so you know, there's probably some, some folks on your on your podcast right now. They probably don't remember.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: Like literally, right. You know..
Dan: It's very true. And it's a, a running theme. It's so interesting to me that like a lot of the people that come on and do interviews, right, they have like a 2008 story.
Damon: Yeah.
Dan: And it's like, you know, it sounds like everything was like this until 2000 a day and then it was like something else. Right. And you know, it's, it's been really fascinating because, you know, we were talking about before, before we jumped on the call and we were talking about, you know, coronavirus as we record this as kind of a big deal. [12:20]
And you were talking about like sort of historical precedence, right? Like there are other times that diseases have kind of come and gone and you know, what, what were those like, you know, like, you know, in statistics we would say like referring to the base rate, right? So it's like, one of the things that's really fascinating to me is, and one of the things I think brings a lot of value of having those conversations is like now when I talk to investors, especially recently, a lot of people are like, “Hey, it feels like we may be headed towards something that's similar to 2008. Right?”
Damon: Yeah.
Dan: And it's like, of course everything's cyclical. Oh, is, yeah. Sooner or later, like, you know, bell bottoms are popular, then they're not popular and then they're popular again. It's like, right. Love the housing market is kind of the same way. [13:01]
So hearing the 2008 store is always so fascinating to me because it's like, well, cool, like how do you adapt and change and not just survive, but grow when like you're in the mortgage business. Hey, that whole business kinda like got turned upside down. So yeah, I think it's, it's always a really interesting thing to kind of touch on.
Damon: Yeah, so 2008 since I was in the mortgage business, you know, affectionately call that the mortgage market meltdown, right?
Dan: Hmmm.. MMM.
Damon: So it's, it it was very devastating, you know, impacted obviously real estate investing retail real estate, you know, just the economy as a whole. And it really is crazy to think, man. I mean, that was 12 years ago. So I guarantee you, you've got, you know, some 22 year old know that's listening to this call right now. And they were 10 and probably didn't have as much impact for them directly, you know, maybe their parents or something like that. [13:52]
But it was pretty devastating, man. So, you know, that was the year, I think I, in 2008 I think I made about $16,000 that year. Right.
Dan: Wow.
Damon: So it was a, you know, another record setting year. Just the other way.
Dan: Hey you could set records in any direction, people will think about that. Right.
Damon: Right, exactly. You know, you set the bar low enough, you know, but yeah, so it's, it's really hard to adjust your lifestyle, man. And, and I, you know.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: I'm not driving it, or anything like that, but it was really facing foreclosure, bankruptcy, the whole nine man. I mean, it was just really devastating. And I remember, you know, we have this set of tools and we didn't call it REI Blackbook then, you know, but it was this whole set of different kind of hodgepodge of, of tools, software tools that we knew were helping real estate investors. [14:46]
And the interesting thing is, is in 2008 and 2009 for the investors that were prepared, it was one of the best opportunities to go and buy real estate.
Dan: Right.
Damon: So we knew that our, our clients were gonna continue to do deals. It's just they weren't going to be able to use our right commercial money, if you will. Right.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: So they had to go find, and now, you know, we see, we hear about private money and hard money and you know, so all the institutional lending really wasn't available to them, but they kept doing deals. And so we just ask ourselves a simple question, man. We said, “Hey, you know what, if instead of giving the tools away, what if that was the product?” [15:24]
And we turned it into a subscription service. So October 1st, 2009 we sent out an email and it was, by the way, I mean, I know you're a marketer man, and you'll probably love this stuff, but it was probably one of the highest open rates I've ever had. Okay.
Dan: Really.
Damon: So, you know, so 2004, five, six, seven stated income was huge for real estate investors, right? But in 2008, when all the banks started closing down, that was one of the first loan programs that they took off the table, right? Because it was, it was so risky. So we sent out an email that said the subject line was ‘Stated, Income is Back.’ Now this is also when I learned about congruency and a truth in marketing because it was not true. So as soon as they open up the email, we said just kidding.
Dan: Ohhhh. That's pretty, that's pretty ballsy to open with. Just kidding. Usually it's like, you know, it's like it's 75% into a, you know, a 10 page copy written letter or something. [16:29]
Damon: No no man, it was, well, so what we were doing, literally we were, we were announcing our launch party, so we were going to launch the software. We had repackaged it up and so October 1st, 2009, we were going to do this big party.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: And I was ultimately a launch party for our local investors and literally we did send out the email that said stated income as back and open it up. So just kidding. Well, we do have free pizza and beer come hang out and you know, we've got it. It's definitely high, super high open rate, but a lot of response as well. And not all it was very nice. Right? [17:01]
Dan: Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, the free pizza, beer is pretty sweet, but yeah, I can, I can get that.
Damon: But yeah.
Dan: So, so you guys launched REI Blackbook. It's wild to me because if anybody's listening to this, if you remember used REI Blackbook, it is an incredibly deep piece of software. It kind of goes in a million different directions. There's one of these things where, you know, if you want to do it in terms of you know, helping with your marketing or running your follow-up or managing your deal flow, all that stuff. If you can think of it, you can kind of do it in REI Blackbook. Right. So when you think about REI Blackbook now kind of flash forward to the present here, right? [17:46]
Damon: Yeah.
Dan: Like how do you think about what REI Blackbook is? Right?
Damon: Yeah.
Dan: Because it strikes me as like it would be so easy.
Damon: It’s a really good question.
Dan: Like, you know, spread into a million different directions. So like, how do you think about like where it fits like in real estate investors business or in the industry or, or kind of where it is currently?
Damon: You know, it's, it's, it's really interesting man. So if I think I'm going to think back for a second to 2009.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: If I would've known then what I know now, I don't know that REI Blackbook would exist in the way it does today.
Dan: Huh.
Damon: I think that if I went to if I went out to California and went up to silicone Valley, I think most of the software guys, most of the tech companies, they would, they would tell me I'm crazy because we didn't necessarily focus and go all in on one particular tool. [18:36]
Right.
Dan: Right.
Damon: And there's strategies behind that and I totally get it. Like, let's just say, so texting is one of the really big things we do, right? So if I just build a texting tool and that's all I did, I could become the category King of texting.
Dan: Right.
Damon: Right. And it would be so much easier to sell and to market that product. It would also be easier to support it and to continually develop it, right? So if I just built a texting tool, right? So much easier. But if I, I, I mean, I, I'm, I'm thankful that I, I didn't know what I know now because I think truly the challenge with that, there are so many “Category Kings” out there.
Dan: Right.
Damon: So now I've got to go get a software for my contact management system. I've got to go get a software system, different system to manage my websites. [19:26]
And then I've got to have a platform for email marketing and then text marketing and then know if my phone rings, how do I manage the incoming calls and how do I, and most importantly, how do I see the data and the transaction across all of these different platforms. And so now all of a sudden you typically, what happens is you go out and you, you subscribe to all of these different “Category Kings” and then you have to try to figure out how to integrate them and how to make them talk, right?
Dan: Hmm hmm.
Damon: And so again, if I knew how difficult this was going to be, I may have just said, ‘”Hey, let's be a category King.” I can see a thousand reasons why people do that. But I still think that's the wrong thing for most small business owners.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: And a real estate investor truly is a small business owner, right? [20:10]
And the statistics don't lie. I mean, the majority of businesses in this country, you have 20 employees or less, and I'm talking like, you know, 80% plus that's 20 employees or less. But I think of a small business as typically five employees or less. And quite frankly, there's a huge percentage of what we call solopreneurs, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: Individual entrepreneur out there on their own. And so I know that's where most real estate investors get started. And so the challenge for you as a solopreneur and you're just getting started now all of a sudden there's a lot of things you have to do as a business owner, right? And I don't know that technology, it should be super high on the list that you have to figure out how to integrate and build this dynamic system so that I've gotten visibility into my business and I can know what's working right. [21:01]
I should be able to plug into a platform that kind of already does all of that for us. And so I think the term all-in-one definitely gets overused and overhyped in our space.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: But you know, that's always what comes to mind. But I don't know that it's still, it's quite fair because I know there's a lot of folks that claim to be an all in one, but yet then they don't, they're not a phone system or maybe they don't do follow up.
Dan: Right. Yeah I know ALL, it is a word.
Damon: Right.
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Dan: Yeah. And it's, it's really fascinating to me.You were talking about it and it really encouraged me cause you know, you're exactly right, there's kind of like this division between the people who, you know, they, a lot of pieces of software like REI Blackbook kind of, it has everything that they need or, and I'll tell you that this kind of like what I do in my business, right? Like I'm subscribed to 500 software as a service companies.
Damon: Right.
Dan: And we connect them all with something like Zapier or whatever. But what ends up happening, and I'm kind of dealing with this now, like you know, just kind of making it personal, right? And I'm dealing with this now is that that system, although it's a very flexible in the sense that I can remove a piece of, I know like it or you know, the individual pieces of software extremely well kept up or whatever it is, it's very brittle in the sense that the connections between everything are the point where the breakdown happens.
So for example, like we you know, we run a lot of Facebook ads and we run the Facebook ad to like a click funnels landing page and the click funnels landing page has this app that puts it into active campaign. And then active campaign, puts them into our sales funnel and sends the emails. And we were split testing a page and we sort of put in a different form, but because the form had a different like form ID, it didn't send those through this app.
Damon: Yeah.
Dan: Right. And after campaigns, so you know, we recently hired someone to come in, you know, it's like, I would say like the, you know, the cobbler's son has no shoes, right?
Damon: 100%.
Dan: So Facebook ads for clients all the time, but I just didn't have the bandwidth to run my own. So I brought someone in and they're great and he, you know, he specialized in kind of agencies. [23:46]
So he went through our whole funnel and he's like literally on every page something's broken, for instance, like 400 pages of broken stuff. And it's because of the way that that kind of system is set up, it's easy to miss that. So it's, it's fascinating to me the kind of what you're talking about is because you guys do everything in house, it's more complex for you to keep everything updated, keep everything managed. Right. But if you don't do it that way and you do it kind of the way that we're doing it, that complexity of management, it just is on my shoulders now. Right.
Damon: Yes.
Dan: It’s not on your shoulders, on my shoulder. Right cause I have to sort of Frankenstein together this giant thing. And I think you're absolutely right. For the, for the average investor who is not technical, they do not want to be kind of, you know, waist deep in Zapier integrations and all that stuff. So yeah, I think that's a huge value proposition. [24:40]
Damon: Yeah so that that really has a, what's allowed us to stand apart if you will, and become an industry leader in the real estate investing space. I mean, that still is our niche. That's still is our focus. We do have a whole separate small business tools and things like that, but we don't really, I don't really talk much about that.Because we've been in the real estate investing space for so long, but you know, the key there, I think that that, well another piece I should say is that not only does the complexity get passed to you as the business owner, if you're going to do this multiple system, you know, chaos if you will. But then the really hard part comes in and it's like, what is the central source of truth? You know?
So now all of a sudden this platform says you've got a hundred leads. This platform says you've got 150, what's the gap? Where is it? You know, and just some of the complexities, there's little bitty things that I think that you could do. And so for your audience, you know, if they're really thinking about paid traffic strategies, whether it be Facebook ads or pay-per-click or, and I know SEO is not necessarily considered a paid traffic strategy in my world, I still say it is because you're going to pay for it and time or money or hire somebody.
Dan: Yeah, the sweat of your brow, you still gotta put the, put it in. Yup.
Damon: Yup. But you know, the, the importance of the immediate response whenever those leads inquire is absolutely critical, right? So now all of a sudden they go to the Facebook lead ad or whatever and they opt in.
Then we want to be able to shoot them a text message right away. Right? And if we want to assign a task to our, a sales rep or our, our, our inside sales agent, right? We want to make sure that they call the lead back ASAP. And if they don't call back, then I want to make sure if they're tagged to call them back again the second day or the third day. If I want to call back 10 times, whatever your process is, you should be able to define the process in a system that can do all of that extremely quick. And you know, my counterpart Josh who heads up my marketing team is as you know. [26:44]
He's got some great stats and I wish I knew them off the top of my head because you know, but it talks about the increased conversion or the increased opportunity. If you can respond to a lead within the first five minutes.
Dan: Yes.
Damon: It’s something like 100 X. So it's not even like a small thing.
Dan: Yeah, yeah.
Damon: It's something like ridiculous. You increase your chances if you can respond quickly, which I'm sure you could probably attest to with the clients that you have and, and, and the world you're in.
Dan: Well literally I was going to say, so like while you're talking the one in five, the, the within five minutes number is a very real number. So we, we found the exact same thing totally differently. We were looking at all of our clients who have the highest close rates and almost to a person, right. The sooner that they followed up, the higher their close rate was going to be off the exact same leads and in fact the whole within five minutes thing. The way that we found that was a one of our really early clients actually. [27:41]
So there's a good Joe McCall who does a lot of education in the space around lease options and stuff like that.
Damon: Yeah, I know Joe well.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: And is actually in the mortgage business. This is crazy connection.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: Back in that mortgage business, he was one of the clients that we provided the mortgage and everything else way back in 2006, eight nine.Yeah, absolutely.
Dan: Oh that's wild man. Yeah, and he is, I would say like of all the investors that I've known, maybe like the top three in terms of like being systems oriented and like automation oriented and like his whole thing is like every time I talk to him he'd be like, “Oh, I'm with my family in Prague, we're like backpacking, Prague. Well my business runs itself”, you know, so, but in any case, his team would routinely every single time follow-up within five minutes. And so we would always compare like closed rates, right? [28:30]
So we'd say like average national close rate for direct mail leads typically is like one out of 30 and then for online leads, it started at one out of 20. Over the last like three or four years, we've probably gotten it down to about one out of 10. So like average client closes one lead for every 10 that they get. Joe, and this is during the days when it was closer to one out of 20 was routinely closing like one out of six, one out of eight like, and that's a huge deal.
Damon: Absolutely.
Dan: Like it's a little way spread out over the course of a year or five years, that kind of like systematic advantage is absolutely massive. But it is, it is. I will tell you this, Damon from one of the reasons I wanted to have you on, it is so hard to get investors to do that. Right. And with good reason, like I might probably my email response time in my own business, probably like once a month, right. Which is why I hire people to respond for me. Right. But it's like I get it. So you know, we can say that like, yeah, you've got to follow up within five minutes from a sort of like tactical standpoint, like are there ways that you can make that easier? [29:41]
You mentioned texting, right? Like what, what can investors do in order to close that gap so that they can follow faster, talk to more sellers, more sellers, close more deals. So how do we actually do that?
Damon: Yeah you know, well, I think the first thing is to make sure that, and I honestly almost take this for granted, because to be in the game, you have to have a website that converts if you're going to be doing online stuff, right. So for us, what that means is proven templates out of a box that you can set up within five minutes, right? And have your website set up, proven templates that we know convert and then how can you easily just, you know, select your follow-up and if follow up is text, then fine, you can add a text, you can create tasks and we call them workflows. But all of that stuff is just in the, in the system right out of the box. Right? And so the, and the key to this is the key to business period. And I've been doing this business for a long time too now and, and I face all the same challenges. No different whenever I get leads, you know, my leads are different though, right? [30:46]
No different. You're an agency owner, right? I'm a software provider, we're talking to real estate investors, but we all have the same problem. How do we ensure consistent follow up with every prospect that comes in our door, right? So that we maximize every opportunity. And so, you know, we do that. Whether it's text, ringless voicemail, emails, tagging yourself for live follow up, direct mail, whatever it is, it's all ready to go inside of an easy follow up builder. And again, what we do is we kinda, we kind of take, took that complexity on and said, look, we're going to go make all of this stuff can happen in the backend. You from the small business owner, you just need to say, this is the workflow that I need. We do a ton of training on this as well. I keep referencing Josh, he actually just did a, a really good training that I'll make sure we, we provide to your, to your audience. [31:34]
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: But it is the, basically what we call the perfect follow-up, a seller acquisition follow-up, right? So what does that look like? Whether they came in via Facebook, whether they came in via your website and the other, the other thing that I think is really important, we're talking about online ads. So, so naturally, most people immediately think, “Oh, that starts at my website.” Not always as, you know, they could call in.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: And so now all of a sudden if you can create consistent follow-up, whether they called in, whether they text in, whether they went to your website, whether they submitted a Facebook lead ad, you know, any of those, it doesn't matter how they get into the system, the system should consistently follow-up.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: And do it quickly. And I was doing some math just to on on your, your numbers with old Joe.
Dan: Old Joe.
Damon: Joe and I go way back. [32:24]
He and I are in a few masterminds together still today.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: But yeah, so Joe's a good dude. In fact, our kids play in a a basketball league. So we used to see him every Saturday, but
Dan: Oh cool.
Damon: So if, if, if Joe's doing one closing one out of six and you're average, your average Joe is closing one out of 20.
Dan: Average Joe and above average Joe. I like it. It's good. It's good.
Damon: So you know, let's say that a deal's $10,000. Okay, so what do you, what do you, what would you guesstimate the cost of generating those 20 leads would be?
Dan: A…..depends.
Damon: And that's all over the board.
Dan: Depending on the market between 102 hundred bucks a piece. So you could say anywhere between $2,000. Well, what am I saying? Is that right? Yeah.
Damon: You have to be 102 to $4,000. Sure. Yup. So two to $4,000 that I would have to spend to generate those 20 leads. [33:15]
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: Now here's the interesting part. If your average deal is $10,000, Joe spends, let's just use the $4,000. Joe spends $4,000 and generates $33,000 as opposed to $10,000, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: So your average Joe is generating $10,000 on that, on that same ad spend, and you're above average. Joe is making $33,000 and it all becomes, it's just that one key piece is super-fast response and then continuous follow-up, right? So it doesn't just stop. And that's actually one of the things that we do in that the seller acquisition training that Josh does because we kind of show you like, Hey look, it doesn't matter where the lead comes from, they call where they fill out a web form, text in, right? So we do keywords, all that good fun stuff. That triggers, well we call the 10 day follow up, right? So in that 10 day window we increased the frequency and the urgency of the messaging and then if we don't really get a hold of them in the 10 days, again, a lot of people stop. [34:18]
But then we just drop them into what we call our one year follow-up. And we got this from one of our, probably one of our most successful students, I don't say most successful but super successful. Her name is Marcy. She's out of out of Texas and she implemented a follow-up campaign in our own business about a year ago. She had been involved in real estate, was kind of working full time. I'm sure you know the drill, right? Working full time had done a deal here there. Wasn't finding any consistency had all these leads that were dead leads in her, her mind, in her own words actually.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: And in January, you know, she actually built out a follow-up campaign that was one year follow-up and she just put all those dead leads in that one year follow-up and it was like 400 leads. I talked to her by July. She was consistently doing two to three deals a month. [35:07]
Dan: Wow.
Damon: You know we interviewed her for on our podcast, we kind of talked, well not really podcast, we do a Facebook live series, but we interviewed her, kind of chatted through her with her and it was like what is the key difference? And it's like, well like I literally, as soon as the lead is “Dead” and I can't get ahold of them, then I just drop them into this one year follow-up. I forget about it. I don't have to worry about anything because the system is going to continually touch them and then we've got it set up so that whenever they respond, so now that prospect is, is engaged. That's the key from a marketing perspective. I know you know this better than anybody on the planet. Like we don't know when they're going to respond. [35:42]
Damon: We don't know what that triggering event is for them to be ready to sell their house.
Dan: Right.
Damon: Something initiated that first call or them to fill out the web form or to click on that Facebook ad. Something initiated it at that moment, but then life happens, right? So it's, it's super important for them at that moment. They know it's an issue, so it's, I got a couple of minutes, let's go ahead and fill out this web form, and then all of a sudden something else happens. You know, it's, it's baseball practice, it's dance recitals, it's, you know, the job, I got to go on a trip, I'm whatever happens and we don't know that.
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: And we don't know what's going on. So we can't necessarily sit there and say, okay, well we followed up for 10 days when we increased the frequency and the urgency and they just weren't interested.
Dan: Right.
Damon: Well, they just weren't interested during that period, so we've got to drop them into another follow-up sequence. That's really kind of what we focus on. [36:30]
Dan: You know, if I could implant something inside every single real estate investors mind before they do any kind of marketing, I mean offline or online, online specifically, it would be that, right? Because it is the multiplier on everything that you do. And the flip side of that, right is like let's say just like you said, like I'm producing more money for every dollar spent on marketing. That actually gives you a bigger budget, means you can spend more, you can, you can afford to acquire leads at a higher cost that actually gets you a bigger percentage of of the market. And then on top of that, if you have a systematic process, something that's happening to every single lead, you can now start to test and improve that process over time because it's uniform. You can be like, well, what happens if, you know, on day 10 I sent out this email versus the first email. [37:22]
And you could watch that over time. The compounding effect being able to systemize or systematize your marketing is, is huge on multiple levels. So it's a multiple levels. So this is one of the highest leverage things you can do. No, we're coming to the answer was a couple of things. I want to say. First of all, you mentioned this you, you, you sort of blew past it, but I want to say this too. You guys do an incredible job of educating the marketplace. You put out a ton of educational material. So I really want to lodge you guys for that. I know you've invested a lot in that part of the business and I think it's, it's absolutely massive. The other thing is that, so we have a link for people that want to jump in. So typically when people jump into REI Blackbook, they have to pay a licensing fee. It's like almost, it's like $1,000, right?
Damon: Yup.
Dan: But for listeners to this podcast, we're going to waive that, right? So if people are interested, just if you're curious, want to check out the software or whatever, go to REIblackbook.com/nerds. It's REIblackbook.com/nerds. That's the link you get that thousand dollars kind of waived right away. So it's the significant savings there. [38:34]
When go to that link, like kind of what, what can they expect? What's going to happen if they're curious about checking out REI Blackbook?
Damon: Yeah, there'll be a, there'll be a little bit of a demo video there. It's going to list out all the features are going to see everything that we do. Again, we provide, we provide websites, we provide your phone system, we provide your text messaging system, we provide email marketing, ring less voicemails, we provide your complete contact management system, and then that's helps you on all of the lead generation and marketing, which we've obviously heavily focused on on today's call. But then there's transaction management. How do you actually manage the deal? How do you disposition? How do you manage your buyers list? Do you want to text out that deal to your entire buyers list? Then, okay, do you need to be able to do that easily? [39:15]
How do you segment your contacts? Right? All of that stuff is completely available and we're going to give you an entire list of everything that we do right inside the platform. And you know, there's one other thing I just kind of want to mention here as I'm thinking through it though, because you know, a lot of times people, and it depends upon where you're at in the business. And if you're listening to podcasts right now, you could be seasoned, you can be brand new, and then you know, if you're fairly new or maybe you don't have deals consistently, you very well could be asking yourself, okay, well when is the right time to put a system like this in place in my business?
Dan: Yeah.
Damon: And I got to tell you guys straight up before I got into the mortgage business, I had a stint in between my military career and the mortgage space, right? [40:00]
I really focused heavily on business consulting and IT technology systems and things like that. And I'll tell you right now, it is 10 times harder to go put in a system to an existing business, right? So if you're just getting started, the best time to put these systems in place is right out of the gate. And then the question becomes, you know, well, what about affordability? Can I afford it? Right? And we've got different plans anywhere from 97 to $297 a month. Right? But let me tell you, just think about those numbers. Do you want to be average Joe? You know, spending $4,000 to get 10,000 or would you rather spend that $4,000 and get $33,000 back? And I'm telling you the key difference between, you know, the Joe McCall's of the world, you know, Matt Terrios, you know any of those guys, it is because they have systems in place that allow them to basically take more profit off the table and reinvest back into their marketing to grow and to scale their business. [41:00]
So don't make the mistake of saying, I'm not ready yet. Right? So take, take a look at that. You know, early on in your business, you want to put those systems in place because it does become infinitely or I guess I should say exponentially more difficult [inaudible] to implement systems after you got an established business really up and running.
Dan: Yeah, my friend Nick has a great metaphor where he always says, you know, it's like your goal is to fill up a bucket and you got a bucket, you got like the foster that comes out of your house and you got a hose and he's like, you should probably hook up the hose before you turn the faucet on. [41:35]
That's probably a good idea because when the water is coming out and you're trying to look up the hose, you're going to get wet and all the water spraying everywhere. I used to look like kind of an idiot. So maybe the first time, and it's, it's true man. So yeah, Hey listen, everybody guys and gals, lads and ladies that are listening to this, Damon is you know, he's he's he's got a a kind voice, he is a humble man. 90% of what he said is just like hot fire and you need to just put it in your business right away. It's like literally, this is some kind of potentially life changing stuff. If you haven't been thinking about this, this is your clue to wake up and start thinking about it. [42:19]
So Damon, I just want to say thank you so much for coming and talking to everybody. We will put the link to REI Blackbook up on the show notes, which is the adwordsnerds.com/podcast but everybody should go out check a check out, REI Blackbook and everything that Damon and his team are building over there. It's very impressive and yeah, man, this was a blast. I really appreciate it. I always have fun talking to you and I just appreciate you in general, so thanks for coming on.
Damon: I appreciate that. Appreciate the time man. And likewise man. Always a good time chatting.
Dan: Alright. I hope you enjoyed this week's interview. I certainly did. Like I said, we're in sort of a weird time. So next week I'm going to do an entire episode on how the Corona virus is affecting the marketing world for motivated sellers. [43:08]
So make sure that you tune into that, but if you want kind of faster updates and I'm able to do here on the podcast, I'm going to be, you know, doing my best to post a whole bunch of our kind of private dataset from you know, nationally investors across the world going after motivated sellers. I'm going to be posting that in our Facebook group. So you can find that at adwordsnerds.com/group it's completely free to join. I'm not going to be putting any of this like behind a coaching program or anything like that. Want this to be freely available cause really during this time I feel like the most value I can provide to our community is to educate you guys and be honest and clear about what's going on in the space that I have knowledge in, which is the online marketing space. So we're going to be watching how the number of searches is going up or down over time. [43:59] (43:59):
We're going to be watching how the types of searching changes. We're going to be watching what happens in Facebook, what happens in Google, what happens in SEO, what happens in advertising. We're going to be watching that. We're going to be giving that information to you guys, so tune in next week. I'm going to try to summarize a bunch of those thoughts in next week's episode and then make sure you join the group for faster updates. It's AdWords nerds.com/group that's ad words, nerds.com/group and we'll be happy to have you. All right everybody. Have a great rest of your week or the rest of your week. Stay safe, stay healthy and I will be talking to you soon. [44:35]
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