Podcast Episode 70 Transcript

Episode 70: The Power Of The I.S.A.: How Inside Sales Agents Are Creating Great Opportunities For Agents

Another scenario is this is the more common Real estate, agents you know who you are. You're buying those leads as a team leader and nobody's calling them. And this happens. It only happens 99. 9% of the time, right. The team leader is upset that their agents are not following up with these leads. They're not calling up fast enough. And I'm making enough of those touches for these leads. And in fairness to the agents, we asked them to wear a lot of hats, right? They got to be great at marketing. They got to be great at follow up. They got to be great at closing deals. They got to be great at showing those homes managing the transaction. Sometimes as you scale a team, you realize relying on people who can do all those roles is not a good idea. Welcome, everyone to the show. We have a treat for you today. It aligns beautifully with what we're doing here with the new brand and some of the exciting things that we're trying to work on. He's got an interesting background, and he's had wild success doing some amazing things. We're really excited. Honestly, we were talking before we went live, and I was telling him we're interested in your services also. So this just happened to align perfectly. We're joined today by Gustavo Munoz Castro. He is the founder and CEO of Power ISA, Gus, for short, thank you so much for taking the time out today. And thanks for joining us on the show. Yeah. Definitely excited to hear. James, I love your show. You got to really mix it up with a diversity of folks on here, different parts of the equation to help solve that problem for investors. So I'm glad to be here. Well, as you're going through this in real time, right. And having the real estate background that we have and being investors ourselves, business is an exciting time to be in the business. But the business has become complicated, right? There are so many different components of it. Now, as the digital world continues to give us these different tools, you really have to mix it up. You have to build a strong foundation and understand everything from deal sourcing and the technology that's associated with it, how to properly comp, how to properly identify how to close. And then once you've closed, is it a short term rental, long term rental, residential commercial? How do you market the assets? And, of course, how do you build the pipeline? So each one of those different disciplines carries with it a whole amazing box of tools. So for us, it's been great to take this journey. We have a book club here, Gus. And I was telling the agents book club has had a huge impact in what we do. But the podcasting is the single most impactful thing that I've done in my 25 year career. And it's not even close. The connections that I've made through the show and the things that I've learned through the show have opened so many doors, have opened my eyes to amazing technologies and methodologies and investors and just great people. And once you get in this world, there's like this amazing community of people that are just willing to help. I don't know if you've had that experience as you've grown the company and we'll get into your history in a moment here. But I was absolutely floored by how many people want to just offer advice and have you on their show. They come on your show. As you're thinking about this, at least for us, we were like, Gosh, are we going to be able to land a guest per week and we want to have consistency. And when it starts to take hold, you're just flooded with requests. And it's just like one guest is better than the next. So again, I appreciate you coming on the show. I want to get into, of course, Power Isa. I want to talk about who and what you are and the different services and how you're doing, what you do. But your history is really relevant here. So if you could share with the audience a little bit about the background, and I think it would give a better context for what we're going to talk about as we move through the show. Yeah, definitely. Thanks for that. Intro. Gustavo Munoz Castro. People call me Gus. Originally from Mexico. I grew up on the border town right across San Diego, California. Born and raised there. And I speak English like a California because I spent all my weekends as a kid over in San Diego. I have a lot of family in the US, so I grew up really close to that culture. I went to school in Mexico for engineering. Actually, it wasn't real estate, it wasn't business. It was software because I went to school in the late 90s. And if you wanted to be successful in life, it was like the Internet eats the world. Right. And technology is going to be we were in the peak of the Internet bubble. Okay. Let's call it the first Internet bubble back in the day. Hey, I got to get it. This is going to be the place for me, right. And I got recruited by Microsoft early 2000s, and I went up to Seattle to work full time in 2004, and it was awesome. Hey, Microsoft. And this is a long time ago. You'll know this, James, but please might not know. Microsoft used to be Google Plus, Amazon Plus, Facebook plus, Apple put together, right? Yes. Everything came from Microsoft when it came to Internet technology, PCs, gaming, browsers, phones. Everything used to be Microsoft the only game in town, right? They just owed everything at that point in time, early 2000s, it was like joining the mothership, right. Like going to the dead star on their side. Welcome to welcoming you. It was a great experience. Great company. I became a minor celebrity. Funny story. I became a minor celebrity in my hometown. This guy made it. This is awesome. I gave him a talk in my high school. You can get the idea. This is a big deal. My parents are, like, through the mood. It was amazing. However, we'll say this great company, great. Everything. I was not a great software guy to be really honest with you, right? I'm a smart guy. I learned fast. I learned quick. I adapted to the company. I started to rise through the management ranks. I became a first level manager, senior engineer. That level. It took me almost ten years to get there wasn't easy. I got there, and I'm like, okay, I climbed this first non made the senior. I'm a manager now. What's next? Right? Because I don't think I want to go to the next eight other levels. I was at a point where there's a 50% drop off. Half the guys who go to Microsoft make it that level. The next one is not 50%. It's like, 90% drop off and so on and so forth. Right? Going Where's my talent at? What am I good at? Right. And my wife is the one that really jumped in. She's from Mexico as well. Joined up in Seattle, and she became a real estate agent in 2008, 2008. And that was a really interesting time to get into business. By the way, the world was ending, right? Doom and gloom. It was like, yeah, it was kind of crazy. And I got the experience of that. I met a lot of investors through that market. The early short sales reo that whole bit. And I got to meet a lot of folks because everyone like me was afraid of the marketing. Investors took it out their pockets. They took out the checkbook, and they went to town in that part of the country, I'm pretty sure everywhere. But in Seattle, it was kind of crazy. People were quiet. It was time to buy. It was time to buy. It was blood in the streets, like I said. And it was a really interesting dynamic to learn. I was fascinated by it. I didn't come from a business background. It wasn't, like in my DNA. At least I thought it wasn't in my DNA. My wife came from an entrepreneurial background, so her whole family were self employed, doing commerce, doing agriculture, doing anything and everything. So she's like, hey, let's go into this. This looks fun. Profitable. What's going on? And it was crazy. My family in Mexico bought a property in Seattle. We helped them do that. It was our first fix and flip. We're doing deals on the side to helping all our friends in Microsoft buy property. As the market started to turn in that area, 2012, things got completely different. Like a switch went off, and that seller's market has been going on since 2012 in Seattle. It's crazy. Right? So that's when things started to turn this. Hey, this is getting this is going to go to hyperdrive. This is going crazy. Things are going nuts. I was having more fun in my nights and weekends job because I got licensed in 2010. I'm a real estate agent in 2010, working full time at Microsoft 60 hours weeks Monday through Friday, Saturday, Sundays. It was a tough job, but I would find time to help my wife out. Go help with technologies. I was the it guy. I was a manager. I built teams. Let me help you build a team here and fast forward to 2013. And I said, you know what? A lot of things happened that year. They just gave me the sign like, this is the time. If I'm not ever going to give this a try now it's going to be never. I was 32 years old. So 32 have been a corporate guy my whole life. My first job out of College, Microsoft. That's been my life for the last decade. And I said, I want to try this real estate thing out. I'm going to take a sabbatical six month sabbatical, going to help my wife build her team, set her up. And then I'm going to go work either back to Microsoft or some other company. That was my initial plan. And it's been eight years since that in a few couple of months. And I haven't looked back, right. I became a real estate agent. We started our team, and then we started this is a company as a side hustle, a side project to help us and other people in my brokerage. And then that really took off. It was kind of crazy. And now I have 120 full time employees working virtually in the US and Mexico, where I'm from servicing, doing this inside sales lead conversion, appointment setting job for investors, real estate agents, loan officers all over the US and Canada. Pretty crazy. Yeah. So amazing story. We talk about this not as often as we should, but we're trying to talk about it a lot more now, when we went through, this is our third major adjustment, if you will, in the market three and a half. Really, it was 911, obviously locally had a profound impact on the market. The 2008 crash had a profound impact on every market. Superstorm Sandy, locally devastated. There you go through. You're right. That was another tough couple of years for again, a number of reasons. And of course, the pandemic has certainly presented its set of challenges. But in those two resets, when you have those true resets across the globe or at least the country, that does create a very unique opportunity in that two year period. So we're at a point now where with this new brand, part of that is a fund. We want to be able to backstop our agents deals and we're preparing for we think 2025 is when the music stops, at least when it gets reported. So I understand what you're saying in 2008, your wife jumping into the market at that time. It's a tough time. But necessity is the mother of all invention. Right. So as an agent and especially a new agent, you end up in the short sales, and you end up negotiating these packages just because that's the kind of work that's available during that time. Right. So you do get a crash course in some of the disciplines that perhaps you wouldn't have contemplated on the way in originally. And I wonder if that was part of the mindset as you got into the investment side. But now you've got essentially one of the largest inside sales teams right across North America. And if you could just take a minute to explain what inside sales means, right. I think that that would absolutely help. Absolutely. Yeah. And that role, it comes from the software industry, Isa inside sales agent, which for them means you're in the office making calls all day. You're a telemarketer for real estate. It's kind of essentially another way to call that. And that is the person. And there's two main roles they play on the team. It's a single title, but they can play two main roles. One of them is the outbound prospecting role. They're taking truly cold lists. They don't know who the hell you are, someone their name is on the list because you filtered it that way. You put them on there and there's 100 people on this list, and we got to contact them and give them the pitch. Right. We want to set up our acquisition team or the investor themselves. We want to pitch it to them and just make their time more efficient. They want to be attending two appointments a day. They want to make two offers. Let's say two offers a day. You want to make two offers every single day, got to make those calls, got to make those contacts, make those follow ups and get them in front of our investor every single day, the outbound prospect. But the other role, which I think is different enough that we actually separated and we recruit differently for it, is what we call the lead manager role. That is a little bit different because once you get I think all investors start in that prospecting role. Either they're driving for dollars or they're mailing, or they're doing that kind of like marketing to those lists. Once you kind of move up the chain, you can market for inbound leads. You can generate inbound leads through ads, through content, through podcasts. You can generate these leads a bunch of different ways, but they're coming to you because you're putting that offer out there. You're putting the offer in front of them. They're seeing it. And then they're saying, okay, let's see what James has to say. Let's see what Cassandra has got out there. It's interesting. And I think I meet that need let me see what they can offer me. Those inbound leads. It's a little bit of a different beast. It's different, right? It's different than that cold call. They have no idea who you are. They have no idea what the context is. Why are you calling me? Versus hey, I'm calling you back. It's more of a customer service kind of experience. You still got to get the offer out there. You still got to try and close the deal. It's just a way different approach to do. It's more of a diligence customer service scenario. And the people who do it at a high level are different than the cold callers. And they're just different, right? The cold caller, it's a shark. That guy's like hitting the phone. They're hitting their forehead against the wall 99 times a day. That one solid lead is good to go. They can make that offer happen. They're profoundly different roles. If you're intimately aware of the nuance that goes along with a cold call, right. And having to basically start from scratch. And it's a special personality to be able to pick that phone up and have that resilience right. Bridge. I like the word grid. I like that a lot, because that's what that is. Right. And Interestingly enough, it's the hardest thing to determine when you're bringing someone in hiring, recruiting, training, someone other than getting on the phone and seeing what they do. The only way we found to really measure either have grid or I haven't found a way to teach it. If you find a way to do, let me know, because you find these people, they got the grid. They've got the drive. They've got the energy to do that 8 hours a day, day in, day out. It's pretty impressive. Yeah. You can't teach it. You either have that or you don't. I completely agree. And then the second role, we call it our lead coordinator. You're calling it the lead manager. There's a vested interest, folks. Right. This is when someone is acting proactively and they're calling inbound to whatever the company is. So let's talk about what type of companies are you performing these services for. If we could just run them down quickly, one at a time. Let's take it from the top. What type of companies are you providing these services for? Yeah. So we have a couple of different profiles. We work with individual real estate agents. I like to call them small teams because they usually have an assistant. If you're a real estate agent, your first hire should not be an inside salesperson. You're probably doing it wrong. Probably not have the budget for it. If that's your first person you hire, usually we're talking about individual agents that have small teams. Administrative assistant, transaction coordinator, marketing assistant. They've got something they're established, right. So they're generating leads, either they're prospecting based, which is awesome. I love seeing that. And the agents are prospecting based. Even in this market. There's some and they want to free up some of their time. They want some of that prospecting to be handed off to someone else, and they want to handle the more qualified leads, and they want to attend appointments. That's really the biggest thing for them. They want to hand off some of the activities. Another scenario is this is the more common R1 estate agents. You know who you are. You're buying those leads as a team leader and nobody's calling them. And this happens. This only happens 99.9% of the time. Right. The team leader is upset that their agents are not following up with these leads. They're not calling up fast enough. And I'm making enough of those touches for these leads. And in fairness to the agents, we asked them to wear a lot of hats, right. They got to be great at marketing. They got to be great at follow up. They got to be great at closing deals. They got to be great at showing those homes managing the transaction. Sometimes as you scale the team, you realize relying on people that can do all those roles is not a good idea. It's very fragile. Right. So the team specialized, they've got transaction people. They've got people that do marketing, and they've got people to help with the lead conversion, which is what that Issa does. They follow up with the database, follow up with the inbound and make the second call. The third call. Agents can make the first call. They're pretty good at that. The first call, anything above that is like up in the air most times. Right. So the Isa makes those additional calls. So we help that that can be like a small team to a very large team of highly specialized team, which I love working with because the Issa was in there to fulfill a very specific role. Great. This guy calls our database and that's 30,000 people go, that's what they want them to do. They have everything else handled, the new inbounds, the prospect, everything's handled. They need Isa. They're still specialized. They need someone just to call their old leads. That's it. And guess what. They make a lot of money that way. That's why those leads, they can get a huge return on that ad spend because they're going to call those people until they buy or die. Right. So that's a role we fulfill on the retail side. On the investor side, it's kind of a similar set up where we work with a lot of small individual investors, and I classify that by are they making the offers or are they closing the deals? Are they going belly to belly with the owner and going out there and putting pen to paper when the Issa gets an appointment? Right. We work with investors like that. It's a small team, a small team. They're typically going to be prospecting based. They're building lists. That's the game. In those stages of the business. You're building a list, your list building ability list building mojo is going to be what's going to set you apart or you drive for dollars. You might be in a super interesting market where you can just go around and find deals in your car. Maybe right. There's less and less of that. Now, maybe you're lucky, but you're usually building a list and you're marketing to that list through mailers through door knocking through cold calling. And the Isa is one more way to try and reach out to that list that investors spend some money on. That's a huge advantage investors have on a lot of the real estate agents. They know the value of the data. They understand how valuable those lists are and that it's 100% of follow up gain to get. I don't have to convince many investors of that agents mother story. It's challenging sometimes to get them to understand that, but the investor can understand. I see investors pay $10,000 for databases, $15,000 $25,000 for a large amount of large database for an entire county, entire state. Right. Because they understand the power of good data. Qualified skip, trace accurate numbers. They'll pay top dollar for a quality list. So that's a big advantage the investors have. So we help them market to that list as the team scales up. Like I mentioned at the very beginning of the show, right. You've got the marketing, the acquisition person. The Isa is there to set up appointments for the acquisition first, as the team grow scale and specialize, the Issa is there to keep the appointments full for those acquisitions people. And it could be one acquisitions person. They could be a team of acquisitions people. I think the largest client that we've worked with is probably like a 25 person team out of the Dallas Metroplex, working all of Texas. But they were based in Dallas, and we had acquisitions people in different offices. But most of the team was in one location out of Dallas, and they had multiple people on the phone going through their lists, calling their inbounds texting potential leads, all of these things. And the Issa's role was set appointments for the acquisition specialist. That was the game. They had to set a certain number per day to keep that team rolling, keep the deal flow coming. So usually that's the scale changes there, James, but the role is really similar. Get the most out of that list, get the most out of those inbound leads that are coming in. Set those appointments. Now. We're covered a lot of ground there. So I think the largest challenge that deal makers are facing today speaks exactly to what you're solving for. The reason that we decided to launch a new brand was we wanted to take the best elements of Cassandra Properties. It's a family owned business. We've worked 25 years now. I was with the company, and there is a homegrown feel and certain elements of the personal service and the personal touch that are absolutely irreplaceable. We wanted to take the best elements of that, but we also wanted to blend it with the technology and some of the broader, if you will, approaches that would allow us to scale, to scale locally and to scale across the country. The most difficult thing we have found in probably what does the most damage to a seasoned deal maker is all of the things affiliated with anything other than making the deal right? There are the outstanding deal makers there. They really are finely tuned machines, and they want to be in their space doing what they do. But all of the things that have to get done in order to generate that opportunity is when you start to see the diminishing returns. And as real estate has evolved over the last 15 to 20 years, we've seen nothing but additional things that you need to do. That kind of knock you off that Mark, right. To remain competitive and relevant, you have to be out there competing with SEO and with your website and with social media. You have to be out there generating leads from a wide, wide, wide array of places. When I started in this business, we got a book that was this thick, right? When the listings came out, you literally thumb through the entire you could find deals off the MLS. That's when I started investing. I open up the MLS and see which one would cash flow the best. I know that sounds like a crazy term. West coast people. You could find cash flowing properties off the MLS back in the day. Back in the day, of course. Yes. And if you wanted to market a property for an agent, you had one or two places. That was it. You placed your ad, and that was the long and short of it. Right. The phone rang, you took the call and you worked it now as there are so many platforms, and there are so many lists. And there are so many places that are Legion specialists. The agents we found as we started to experiment more and more with different lead Gen opportunities, they became more and more frustrated. Right. Like you said, maybe you get that initial phone call, but they didn't want to set up drip campaigns. They didn't want to make the follow ups. They're not in that mindset. So the way we solve for it was we created this lead coordinator role, which was going to vet stuff that came in before it went to our agents. And we completely took a separate division for our buyer's agents. So we have our sellers, agents, specialists that are they're not interested. If somebody calls, they don't care if it's a $5 million home. If it's not the $5 million home they have listed, they didn't want to deal with showing five, 6810 other listings, right. They're focused in their fiduciary. They feel is I want to sell this property that I'm marketing, and then this property and then it grows. But they want to stay in that funnel. So we're doing now a completely separate buyer agency program, because that's a totally different mentality. Right. And those folks are focused on what you're talking about. When the phone rings, what's out there in the market, they're not worried about satisfying their seller, quote, unquote. They're just going out and selling whatever it is that's presented in the market is what they're showing. So let's talk about the outbound and the cold calling specialist. First, I want to engage with your firm dusk. Do I get randomized people that are making the calls? Is it one specific person that's assigned to my company or my team? How does that engagement work? Yeah. Great question. We assign a single person. So it's a dedicated Isa campaign. That's the only way we've ever run it. It's the only way to really build expertise in the script and the offer in the area. And usually it's the first 30 days, the first 30 days, they're getting familiar with your value proposition. They're getting familiar with the kind of list you're calling and they're getting used to the area, right. It might have never heard the word Hobo thing before. Right. You're part of the country that's really specific names, right. And luckily, it's also really international part of the country, too. Right. There are people all over the place, but you want to get some local knowledge. Local knowledge is a huge advantage in this business, right. You have to understand the area, the geography. It takes time. So those 1st 30 days are about getting that person weathered and understanding your team, your process, your offer and the geography. But, yeah, the only way we found they do that effectively dedicated personal work. Okay. Great. So we have a specific person, as you said, we can kind of bring them up to speed on how we do things. And you can bring us up to speed on how you're going to do things. We work on the scripts and we're ready to go now over the years, one thing we've done exceptionally well is we recognized very early that data was going to be paramount. Right. So we've begun cultivating lists years and years and years ago. We have over at this point, 150,000 people that we've come in contact with. That we've done business with in one way or another over the years, and we market to them. We do some soft pedal marketing to them. But we've been blessed in that we don't really look backward to the list. Often the phones continue to ring. So there's always those new prospects that we're moving forward with. But in this new model, we want to get lean and mean. Right. We want to scale now, we want to grow significantly. We want to bring on a lot more agents. And in order to do that, I need to tap into that 150,000 person list. So is this something where you're taking company based lists that they've cultivated internally? Or is it just third party lists that are being purchased and is it just phone calls, or are you doing phone call outreach? Email outreach, text message outreach. What is the package look like? And is it internal or internal and external lists? Yeah. Good question. It doesn't matter where the list comes from. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day, I think you have to know the scenario when you buy a third party list that's, let's say, a high equity, above 65 year old owner kind of list. I mean, that's good to know, because you want to make sure it's accurate. You want to qualify the property, you want to qualify everything. It helps to know where those came from. But at the end of the day, you're just trying to connect with the person and deliver the value proposition. That's the gist of it. Right. The intro is a little bit different. Or if it's a probate, you get those from a third party probate list. Very different phone call, then like a true cold call. Right. It's like if you connect with the right person, they're going through, typically a pretty bad time. So you have to show up. You have to accelerate the empathy, listening to the folks. Right. But again, once you're past that intro, you're qualifying the property, qualifying the owner. I think you want to get to that as soon as possible. And if the list comes from your database, that is the best ROI, the best algorithm. That's like, amazing. Right. So when you send 150,000, I go. Yeah, you do. Well, James, because whoever has the data, the best data is going to win. Right. And you noticed this a while ago. This is the name of the game right now. Even the way where, like, Facebook and Google Marketing is going, I don't know if you're aware of this. They're doing away with their retargeting ability. The technology has gotten too good. People don't want to be tracked. They don't want these cookies and pixels knowing them anymore. So they're recommending this coming next year. They're recommending, I hope you've built a customer list because that's going to be it next year. There is no Pixel. There is no automatic tracking. People don't like it, right? Europe is three or four years ahead of us. We're getting there. We're getting there. Thank you. Apple. They're going to do away with that tracking ability. Your customer list always has been your business. Now. It actually is your business. It's all you actually own. You cannot rely on the platforms to tell you who your customers are. You better know who they are and you better have them in your database. So, yeah, I 100% agree with everything you said. We work with both of those. We work with both of those and we rely. The Issa is at their best when they are doing phone calls with people on the phone or they're texting messaging people to get them on the phone. That's the goal. You're not going to close a deal over text message. Some people prefer texting. I think it's something like some of our campaigns. 50% of appointments are set over text 60%. It's insane to me. This is doubled and tripled over the last four or five years since we've been in business, it used to be 10%. The first time we measured it was 10% to 20%. Wow, that's impressive. This year it hit 50%. You never even talked to them. The first time they talk to someone is when the acquisitions guy confirms your point. Like, hey, great Sam from my team was texting back and forth. I want to go take a look at your property at once. You see the main street. No one has spoken to them since then, so the texting can work as well, but you're usually calling them or you're texting them to get on the phone and make the deal happen. Qualify the property, qualify the owner and see if they qualify for one of your offers. And that's key. All of those. The only one that I think is I'm not a huge fan of for Isas is email because I think the automation is so good with that, the Isa really add a lot of value there. Unless you have a really well managed list where you're throwing out one time offers or you're throwing out very actionable emails that people will click on. Right that people will reply to. That's rare, though usually email is the longing. It's like the nurturing you're giving a little breadcrumbs to keep you pay top of mind. Keep them aware of you not really great for appointment setting. And then we measure this less than 1% of appointments we were seeing that were interactive and started on the email very small percentage. It's really going to be a common and texting game. The best use of your Isa is making those calls, responding and interacting with text. Now, are we responsible for setting up the Twilio plugin? And you guys are utilizing the Twilio? Yeah, the Issa comes in and plugs in like another member of your team. If you've got a CRM system in place, they are another seat in that system. Typically, once we set up with the same value that you have, if you already have that set up, we can help you set that up. If you don't have it with some investors, we do set it up from scratch. Some real estate team. We set it up from scratch for them because they haven't used a voice over IP phone system. If you already have that, it's one more seat in that system. Perfect. Voip is, of course, set up here. We've got the dialers. We have a really strong cultivated list, but what we have not done, candidly is we have not gone out and secured lists from third parties with any measure. And I mean, any measure of success. So do you offer guidance on? Yeah, because again, we've been blessed in that way where the phones ring and the teams out there doing what they're doing. So for a number of reasons, we kept the team around 2025, but now we want to significantly grow under the new brand. So this is now really relevant for us, right? Literally. This podcast could not have aligned from a timing perspective any better. So now we want to engage with you guys, and we say, okay, we've got our existing list and we'll work, I guess, collaboratively on a script for the existing list. Right. To try and turn the book and generate new business. We call it a rekindle campaign. Those leads probably have never been called by you guys. They might even know who Cassandra is. I know clue how they got in that list. Whatever. That's great. It's awesome. You have to just break the ice one sentence and get right into it. Just go into the value prop right away and try and get the pitch out there. Okay. So now beyond that list, again, we're talking about scale. Do you offer guidance on the third party vendors that we can go secure lists from? Is there any advice you can offer and where we should be securing lists from of clients that have had some level of success? Yeah. And we can definitely make suggestions. I want to be clear. I'm not like a list building guru. I don't want to oversell. I've just worked with a lot of people that have been very successful building these lists and for them. And I think they have an advantage in the way over you guys where the phone never rings. They have no deals, right? When you've got nothing coming in, you better work those lists to the bone. Right. So I think, in that sense, again, smaller business, probably. But they've got to find a way to get some good throughput some good connections, some good deals out of that list. I think one of our best cases happened this year. This single investor, single investor, one person team. We started hired two Isas in December. This is Austin, Texas, one of the hottest markets in the country. Austin, Texas, started wholesaling in December. By May of 2021. He was doing new construction deals like tear downs, take out a three bedroom, one bath and put a duplex or two units on the property, all off of calling lists, calling cold lists. He had a great offer, though. He was able to outbid other investors and even retail buyers. He started just leveling up. He could pay more for those deals because he was going to transform them, change the footprint, add square footage. And again, this is Texas. So anything goes wrong. You can do anything in the zoning and everything. He has an advantage there, but he can really make some changes and outbid the competition. So what he needed was just at bats. He needed appointments because he had a great killer offer killer offer. He just needed to get in front of as many people as possible. Didn't have the budget for Google, and Facebook, couldn't afford it, couldn't spend 510 thousand a month generating Google leads or Facebook leads. Distress sellers are the most expensive online lead to generate. We're talking about best case, $25 to $30 a pop. Best case probably going to be 40 to 50, maybe in the area. You're in $60 a week because it's just that it's a lot of competition. They're expensive to generate per lead per lead. So your cost per acquisition is in the thousands of online lead generation. You have to be really careful with online lead generation for investors, but, yeah, the lists are definitely the way to go, and it could be as simple as your title company, this investor I'm talking about he's from Silicon Valley. He wasn't an engineer, but he had an engineer buddy, and they came up with some bets and said, hey, I wonder if we can find people high equity, a certain age group, certain zip code. And they didn't want to go too much further than that because they had Issa power, right? They had Issa calls like everyone that meets that criteria in the whole zip code. And let's try and carpet bombing kind of that way. Right. So they took a really interesting approach to it. They didn't come up with some amazing algorithm or some awesome third party data provider title company, but they were really clear what they wanted to do. I think probably what was Peter's success is they were able to trace it very effectively. They got a really high hit rate on their list. Probably going to be where they're going to move the needle the most. When you're talking about building these lists, you can make up the best list ever. If it's poorly skipped trace, you're not going to talk to anybody or you're going to talk to the wrong people. You're not going to reach the owner, right? You're going to reach their son in law. I don't know what you talk about buy. So I think that's probably where and there's a couple of vendors that I've heard over and over again for investors that are probably doing a really good job with that. But there's a lot of people who can do skip tracing at a high level. I think that's where you want to be careful when you're list building, connecting them to a valid or multiple phone numbers. Try multiple phone numbers, for record. That is going to be a key thing for success. But at the end of the day, elbow grease kind of hitting that phone and making those calls, making enough calls to really put a dent in those lists. And like I said, if you got to get an offer. It's just getting you in front of enough people to get that. This investor did 23 transactions between wholesale and true flips, 23 transactions in those first six months. 23. I was like, blown away because when I saw it, I'm like he was netting $5,000 for the first couple of deals. I'm like, you had no money. You were handling these wholesale. Yeah. As he grew, he started doing full flips, and the last couple of deals he closed of those, 23 were new construction, nine month projects, twelve month projects. Wow. He was getting under his belt, but he started from zero. Right. So I was very impressed by that. I was like, I grew up with a lot of investors, nothing like that. And the simplicity of it. And in one of the most competitive markets in the country, it works. Right. I think few people have that they've got their back against the wall and going to make it work. I'm going to put the effort behind making sure that the calls get made, the appointments get attended. You're always going to again, $5,000 is not much. I know investors would throw those deals handled out. They're not going to go work for $5,000 pay day. It's not worth their time. This guy did the work and kind of grew from there. Well, I love the idea that he adapted and went from wholesaling, right. Where he's just taking a little bit of a piece of the pie and there has to be enough room in there for that next investor to step into those shoes and to complete the transaction. But once he found and it sounds like it was a lot of good old fashioned elbow grease. But once he found the model that worked on the wholesale side, then the premium and the opportunity there is once that model works, you do have the ability to pay more, because now you become the end user. Right. So you don't have to worry about that gap that you have to get these deals in at X so that the wholesaler can step in at Y and complete the transaction at Z, when you're going from X to Z and you are the end user, there's the benefit of that step in the middle where you step it up. Yeah. So that's really interesting. All right. So we have our list. We want to work with you on. We have lists that we're going to secure from third parties. What about Facebook campaigns and Instagram campaigns and leads that are generated through social? Are you acting as an intermediary and calling those leads back as well? What is the experience like inside your company for that? Definitely. And if the teams have the scale of the budget to go into online, I mean, online can be great because it's one of the few ones that will generate leads every single day. Right. People are coming through the pipeline pretty consistently. It is 100% a follow up game at that point, they're coming in. It doesn't mean they're going to pick up the phone that day. It doesn't mean they want to talk to you right away. There might be five other investors. They're talking to be real, especially in some of these hottest markets. So you want to get in front of them right away. You want to understand if they're talking to multiple, you want to understand you're in a multiple offer situation. So ultra important to evaluate the property, evaluate the seller and kind of see, what is it that they want, right? They've got a valuable property who's going to be able to secure it? Is it just about the number? Is it about the terms? Is it? What the hell is it about, right? Do they want it as it's conditioned? There's always something, right. It's not always about the number. It might be speed. It might be something else. So, I mean, that's really important. I see a lot of those deals come through on the online that people see it and they're clicking on your ad. They're clicking on somebody else's ad to be honest about that, too. So speed to lead is key. You've got to be reaching out to them right away, and you want to be the first person in front of them. You want to go belly to belly because that's where the investors can shine. Get me in front of somebody and we're coming out with a deal somehow, one of the truth coming out of here and they're going to have signed on the dotted line. So I think that's really important. And that's a function of that follow up text message calling, ringless voicemail, which I'm a fan of sport. I don't love them as a consumer, but they're effectively work, right? You're using all of these avenues for them and you want to try and get them. Google and Facebook advertising is very straightforward in the sense that you just put the offer out there cash right away, as is conditions. Money now, no questions asked, right. Kind of situation. I will say this about both platforms. Facebook is much more challenging to get up and running because of all the regulations they've got around real estate and about advertising and the kind of language they want you to use. It's really challenging to get your ad out there once you get it approved. I've seen people get it approved the same day immediately. I don't know how they made it happen. Some folks didn't have to go through two or three rewrites of their ad or they're creative or whatever. But once it's out there, you can get it running and kind of see what kind of results you want, but yeah, definitely. But again, caution for the folks, right. It's the most expensive lead to generate on Google and Facebook. It's the most expensive real estate lead to generate in those. So that should give you some you have to have a pretty good process to convert leads before you've got to put thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars into those to start seeing some return. And then it's going to take you three to six months to start seeing net positive results. Positive ROI. It's that kind of a system. So you got to be really careful with that. All the implications of running a big budget marketing engine. Right. So are you also working with two different lead sources entirely? Right. There's the investment play where, again, you put the offer out cash buyers. And like you said, I don't want to get off on the tangent about deal making, but reminder to the audience price is often not the determining factor when you're making these deals. It's how you connect with that person and identify with that person up front. It could be money. It could be time. It could be a myriad of different things. So don't get hung up on. They might like you more than the other guy. They might like you more than the other guy. That's right. We'll take that deal. I might have been feel about bad. That sure. Yeah. So now let's talk about if you're an agent and you have product that you want to sell. Are you guys working in that capacity? We want to put ads up for specific properties. We already have listed that either we've bought and renovated, we want to go to market on, or we're representing our sellers and we put the ads out and we're getting the leads in. Are you also working in that capacity? Yeah. I'd say that's the majority of the ads that get run that we make calls on. I would say there's probably two categories of ads. One is the homes list where you don't have properties you want to get buyer leads. It's a buyer focus ad. You're just putting out lists of properties that are backed by the local MLS. That's it. And people will click on those. Right. If you have to craft them a certain way to make it interesting. The best single two bedroom homes under $500,000, they have to make it interesting for them. Or homes with the basement. Homes with the pool home with something. Right. The homes in your top school district around this area click on that. So it's got to be attention grabbing. Click on that list. The other ones that we work with. There's a single property listing. Those are great. Again, a lot of these areas of the country, we're strapped for inventory. So anytime someone puts out a property, you typically don't want to put out the price, you want to leave a little bit behind. You don't want to give everything out there. Hey, property just listed. Attention, neighborhood area. People live in this area. New listing coming up right now. Take a look at it. It's going to go fast. Let us know if you're interested and get more information about the property. Great. They want to click on that ad. Single property ad in some markets, single property is King because they're so strapped for inventory in other markets. The home list with people. It's not that crazy. You just want the general information. You always have to test out both. You got to test out both because you want to make sure at the end of the day, they're both really effective at generating buyer leads. That's what you're getting from those. Maybe for the property, but at least for your team and your business, you're generating a consistent level of buyer leads depending on the market. Maybe 10% of those are going to own a home, maybe up to 20 in that range. I'd say anything more than that is gravy realistically. One of the ten and one of the 20s and have a property to sell. You've got to build that rapport. They don't want to tell you they have a property. They know how valuable that is. They might already have an agent they want to sell the property with. You got to play the rapport game. You've got to build trust. You want to meet face to face, either at a showing or at a consultation. In some markets, you can run these ads where you run the home list. But it's an off market property list, right? Wherever that's allowed. That's a gangbuster that people will be knocking on your door to get that list right now is really hot markets. So they want to meet. They will meet with you and look at that off market property. I only show this list to my most qualified clients. Would you be willing to go through a pre approval process? Absolutely. Give me the list. Give me the list. Give me more. Give me that. Right. So you're going to get these different kinds of buyers and a certain percentage are going to be double ended deals. You want them to come clean and tell you they've got that property and it's probably the biggest challenge that we see. People assume that they're all buyers and they're all renters. Not true, not sold. That's not backed by any statistic. A good chunk a third a quarter. Half of these owners in some of these markets are moving up. They're moving up. They're catching up that equity getting next property, moving to some other part of the country because of cold. It retiring, whatever it is. Right. But I agree 99% are going to tell you they don't own the home. That's true. I'm sure of that. But are you going to build a relationship with them for them to come clean? And that's the challenge. It is such a relevant segment that we actually put one of our CTAs now is, do you need to sell in order to buy right. As people are looking at these homes and they're getting the Oohs and the odds and they're interested and they're thinking gosh I need to sell to make this happen. So we put it right out there as one of the CTAs, and we're able to track how many people are jumping from those buyer based ads to get them in, and then they're looping out to. Okay, if we want to list, what does that look like? And what are the services that are offering significant correlation? There's a lot of fear in that scenario, right? Like, how the hell am I going to sell this thing? And then how am I going to buy? Am I going to be homeless for six months? Do you have to get an apartment or what do you do? How do I manage this? I think. Yeah. If you're going right after them in that sense, like calling them out, you better have a solution for that, right? Like, oh, I know how to do this. We know how to do. We do this every day. We can manage that and make sure that you're protected. That's a lot of the value that, for example, these Ibuyers have the big Ibuyer companies. That's one of their ways they get in, like, hey, we make this super easy. You want a lease back, get the lease back. It's all yours. It's seamless. And that's a big part of the value proposition. And if agents can do that, then that's amazing. Okay. Have you found that on the Facebook or the social media based leads? Have you found that a significant percentage of them when the Isas are making that first contact are like, what are you talking about? We're not interested in this at all. You finding that there's a significant number of those leads because that's been a frustrating piece of this for us. I can tell you're a practitioner, right? That's a practitioner question. This is probably the number one objection with Facebook leads, because you're right. I mean, again, look at the context of where leads coming from. They're scrolling probably on their mobile phone, looking at their, I don't know, friends pictures that they went drinking last night, their branches, kids, whatever. And your ad pops up. They might have clicked on it by mistake. If anyone's clicked on a Facebook ad recently, they might be an instant lead form. They don't even fill the information up. Just click on the Adage gets sent. Right. So if you're having a significant issue with that, then you move away from those instant forms. You actually don't want that. You actually don't want those people clicking on your ad. You want to make it harder. You want less people to come to, not more. That's the challenge with Facebook. It could seem like you want those 50 cent leads. Those dollar 20 leads. You actually don't want a dollar 20 lead. I think it's more worth it to generate a $5 lead that actually responds to you. That's a better use of your time. Probably. So we want to call long form leads. I don't know if you've heard of it, but you want them to jump through the Hoops. And I think that's really only to give you an example. The typical run of the mill Facebook lead, like a lead for that's called those instant leads. 90% of them are either not going to respond or they're not going to want to have any kind of follow up qualification or any kind of conversation. 90% typical response, about 10% of them. You can have a conversation with qualified. They even need for an appointment. 10% average if you implement this long form thing, I'm talking about. That number goes to 20%, and if you're in the right market, it can go to 30%. Right. So if you do the math, your costs because you're doing the same work, whether they're 90% useless work or 70% useless work, do the math on the technology, the time and the frustration your team feels, and the cost per acquisition at the end is going to be less, even though you're paying more per lead. Cost per lead is a very bad indicator of anything, right? It's how much does it cost to get the deal? If you put more friction and eliminate more of those, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Leads wasting everybody's time, everybody's time. Your cost acquisition goes down. We've measured that. It's pretty awesome. You can almost triple the cost per lead, and you still make more money because you talk to more people. You talk to more people, the cost per appointment goes down, the cost per acquisition goes down. End of story, right? Yeah. And if you don't have the benefit of an Isa, which I strongly recommend that you do really, that's the diminishing returns I was speaking about earlier, your deal makers get frustrated and they get annoyed and then they don't contact any leads. That's the thing. So it's not just that they get frustrated. It's they're like, oh, another Facebook lead. Oh, I'm busy. They don't even call them anymore. Right? I'm talking about you have to talk to nine of them to get to the ten. They're not going to get to the third one. They're not going to get to the fourth. Now the return is zero on Facebook. It's not low. It's zero. That's the challenge, right? Yes. The only ones that we're doing now, we put them through a process where they click. Then they have to manually input or confirm. Then they go to another screen that says, Are you sure that you want to see the information? Right? Because otherwise it's maddening. Everyone gets hung up on the numbers. And like you said earlier, the cost per lead and the amount of leads is not what's relevant. It's the process by which you generated the lead. It's having the right Isa from a team like Power Isa, where it's an instant. It's right away. They're contacting them immediately. You have a phrase you mentioned earlier that I picked up on multiple places on your material speed to lead. That is the name of the game. If you're not getting back to these folks in the moment the attrition rate starts to just fall off the table. Right. So make sure you're putting them through the paces, really putting them through the paces before they have the opportunity to submit it. And then you've got to get back to them right away. Okay. So I think I've covered outbound side of this pretty extensively. So we're crossing over a bit here, but could you talk just briefly now about the lead manager role and some of the differences from what we've touched on earlier, although I know we kind of did cross over a bit here. It's a little bit right. The way we set it up is we would classify a Google campaign, a Facebook campaign as an inbound campaign. Right. And the reason for that is because it just takes the edge off that call. It's very different to call a Facebook lead than the cold call. If you don't believe me, try to get your team to do both. Let's see which one they prefer to do every day. Right. So very different kind of a personality profile, very different kind of a kind of a set up for it. And just mentally, people handle it differently. And I thought it was funny. Gary Keller, who had fallout of his content, would always laugh, saying the Internet, it's a better version of the phone book. He could never understand why people thought that calling the Internet leads was better than calling the phone book. He thought it was essentially the same. There's something to do that. But I think that fundamentally, people treat it differently, and I roll with that. I don't argue with it like, Gary, right. It's a different approach. That Isa is different in a couple of ways. It's more customer service focused. They have to kind of bump up the empathy as well. And their tech skills are different. For me, that's a big deal, because a lot of times I don't know what it is about the callers, but they're not great on computers or grammar for that matter, right? They're like, get me on the phone. They're Hustlers, they want to go to sales, they want to close the deal. They're like, they want to talk to people and they want to find on the phone. That's a thing for them. But do not ask them to follow a 15 point checklist to enter that lead into your system. You're kind of asking for it. In that sense, we've gone to the extent, James, to have, like, a virtual assistant for our Isas to do data entry like that. In some cases, it's really extreme, because sometimes the disparity on phone skills versus computer skills can be kind of steep. That's one big difference. The lead manager has to feel very comfortable with the technology because they're managing safe searches they're managing pipelines and their job is to keep your pipeline clean. There's no leads that stick in any stage for more than a number of days. Hey, how did that appointment go, Mr. Agent, how did that go? Not attended. Well, thanks for letting me know. Let me call them back and get them back in the pipeline. They kick them back to the Issa. These leads come back if they're actionable, nobody left behind. That's what the lead manager should do. They are going to fix those leaks in your pipeline. Where are those leads going? Got to call them back. Got to call them back, get them back into the pipeline, get them re qualified, reset the appointment or even better live transfer them to the closer. Like, have the closer talk to them no matter and not let the time pass because half the time I was frustrated when they say, hey, this Facebookly ghosted me. Those leads are no good. No, my man, I bet you someone with skills call that person and convert them into a client. That's why they never got back to you. They got a better offer. What would you do in that situation? A lot of these ghosted leads. I mean, they're ghosting you because someone beat you to it. And the lead manager is to help stop that from happening. Some of the best leads that we've had our lead coordinator was through live transfer, not giving them the opportunity to get off that damn phone, getting them directly. They're there. You want to have it. And also you get rid of the hand off problem. That's a big problem. Handoff Isa, the agent is treacherous, treacherous. Right? Live transfer. You're done. There is no hand off problem. You're right there. The hand off is 10 seconds like 5 seconds. Hey, got a live one. He's looking for a home in this area. Boom on there and just introduce them immediately. Hand them out. The most effective thing, I think for our team, I think the goal has been for Facebook. This is just generic Facebook 10% conversion to appointment. And of that, 10%, half has to be live transfers. Half of converted leads have to be live transfers. And that's a solid goal. I can teach my essays to do that. You should be teaching your agents and your in house is to at least do a number like that. Okay, so on the lead manager side, we want to engage. We want to bring in one of your lead managers. Gus, are you going to have the expectation that we're going to tell the lead manager the process and where to look and what to do? Or does the lead manager offer advice and say, hey, I've seen before here's different ways that we can do this. And are they going to get into that side of it as well? Or is it strictly they're doing what they're being directed to do? So I think the way it works. The best to be really honest with you is when you've got an established process that the Issa plugs into. That has been the best experiences that we've had. And the likelihood of success and speed is much better. If your things are kind of like sideways number one, we try to fix that before the Issa gets in there. So we have an onboarding process. You're talking to expert members of my team, my staff, not the Isa. They're like, oh, wow. James, you've got a mess here. We got to clean this up first, right? That's the first step, because we don't want the Isa to have to go and problem solving that in that respect, what's the right way to manage this database? We want to avoid that, depending on the experience of the ISC, they might come in and say, that, right. We don't want to bank on that, right? Oh, yeah. They've got through five different campaigns. The best Isas don't change campaigns. We're always bringing new people, forming them, teaching them, training them, getting them ready. That's another key thing. And I'm being honest with you and your audience, the best Isas don't become available. You're always training new folks with talent, the raw skill set, they can jump in and do the job. Someone's let me ask you, give me one of your experience. I say the best ones, those guys, they've got campaigns, they're killing campaigns. What do you think is going to happen with those guys? They're going to jump off the next day? Of course not. Right. So there is a level of wrapping up and onboarding that happens on the campaign. And that's why my experience. You have a campaign coordinator that just manages a relationship with the client in the campaign. They've got a supervisor, they've got a customer success manager that just handles inquiries from the clients, helping out. All of them have done the ICA role, by the way, they were all promoted out of the great Isas, which is why they're in those positions. And we have a quality control team also staffed by former Isas. So you're not going to get I mean, we've got a lot of controls in place to make sure that these guys do a great job. So a lot of it will be helping control that we can handle. And yes, part of it is hoping you guys or is helping you guys get your Ducks in a row and have a good a good business, right? Yeah. But without a doubt, I love the idea. And I'm a big believer in which is why I take the time to go through these processes myself. I've educated myself on each one of these things because as a deal maker, I've been on that side of it, and I've kind of graduated to a different role now where I'm trying to pull it all together for other deal makers that I've been blessed to have on my team. So I understand and appreciate very much the way you're structured. Let's talk really quickly if we can. How are you handling time differences and so speed to lead, right. Leads are coming in if it's not a list. Right. So that's easy to solve for. But if it's a campaign where the leads are coming in, what hours are your Isas available to respond to these leads as they're populating into the CRM, how do you handle that? Really good question. So we schedule our Isas that are all of them are full time employees with us. So we schedule them out for 9 hours a day. That includes lunch break. That includes a couple of breaks. We do not allow the Issa to be in the seat on the phone for more than 2 hours at a time. You get diminishing results. It's a very bad idea. They're going to be burned out and be tired. Got to get up 15 minutes, walk, go to the bathroom, get a snack, re energize recharge. Right. It's not useful for anyone to be on the phone for more than sitting down in the desk in 2 hours. Not healthy, not sustainable. That's number one. And they get a lunch break and they get those two breaks in those two chunks of time. How we shift those 9 hours? I think the earliest we start at 07:00, a.m. Central time and the latest we go to 11:00 p.m. Central time that usually covers a good chunk of the country, US and Canada. For the most part, you're always going to get leaves coming in outside of those hours. 100%. I think the latest would go. This might have been a campaign out in Hawaii because we would do the night shift for one of these teams because again, Hawaii is a weird market. You get people from all over the world long ago in Hawaii, so they would get leads literally 24/7. They get a lot of leads 24/7. So we covered one of their night shift for them because we're like 5 hours, 7 hours ahead of them. Right. Sorry. I think it's 5 hours ahead of them. So it's a little bit of a new situation, but typically we're going to manage that phone man. That CRM either 07:00 a.m. At the earliest, all the way through 11:00 p.m. Central time at the latest. And if people need more coverage than that, we would like to do a combination of either two full time people that overlap or part time and a full time and then weekend coverage. There's another request that we get very common requests. We have campaigns that either run Saturday, Sunday and then another three days. We'll take the middle of the week off. That's one option the most cost effective. Or we have seven day campaigns. We have lots of those, too. We have a weekend person, right. And we got a Monday through Friday person weekend person. But this is another thing that I'm going to share with the audience. To be really honest with you, the best people want to work Monday to Friday. That's just a fact. That's the fact there is a certain talent difference between my weekend guys and my Monday to Friday guy, because the Monday to Friday guys, they got to pay the bills, they have monthly fees and they're going to get the job done no matter what. The weekend situation might be a bit different. I'll just leave it at that. So, I mean, we can cover it. You can help with that. But your money is going to be made Monday to Friday. That's when the town that's where they want to work. Okay, so you answered both components of the time difference in the scheduling because these campaigns something. Again, a lot of folks don't know if you go in and you stop a campaign for more than I think it is 36 hours. Facebook restarts the algorithm and you're back to ground zero, right. As you're running these campaigns, they hate that. The smarter right, the smarter your campaign will get. So pausing it on weekends. And I'm glad you have a solution for that. It can be damaging to the campaign over the long run. So last question is pricing. How do we get pricing? Because again, I want to engage with you here now as we scale, I want to be able to contact you and go through this. So how do people find out pricing and what's the best way for people to reach out to you? Beyond me, to the broader audience? Yeah, I don't want to share pricing on the area because they might be listening to this a year from now, right? Yeah, sure. But it's on our website, powerisa. Com. Take a look at the section on our services, what we offer and all the pricing information is going to be in there. That's the place to go. Parisa. Com. That's also the best way to reach out to us. Get in contact with us. We also have a free Facebook group. We'd love to have that that people join. Again, I appreciate you drop a link in the show notes that can join our free power. I say marketing Mastermind Facebook group where we talk about all these things calling and dialers and lists and Facebook marketing and trends in the industry. We're talking about Ibuyers this week. A lot of stuff going on in that group. Love it. People join us another way to kind of continue the conversation and learn stuff from what we're doing. Well, you'll definitely catch me in the group and I definitely will be reaching out. Gus, I can't thank you enough for the time today. This has been for me. It couldn't be better timing, super informative. I think the audience is going to get a lot of value out of this one. Gus from powersisa. Com thank you so much for your time and for sharing so candidly with the audience here. This was a great one. Really appreciate it. Yeah, I appreciate it. Love it. Now. You do a great job. I can tell your practitioner. Those are the best conversations. I had a lot of fun. Thank you, James. Thanks so much. As always, everybody out there pleased. You stay safe.