Should I Expand Into Multiple Cities To Get More Leads?

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“I’ve been using the Push Button Automarketer system for some time now. I don’t seem to be getting enough leads. I try to scrape Craigslist daily and often get 30 or 40 on the list. Should I expand my criteria to a larger area even though it’s out of my driving range, or should I just try a remote city and hope for more leads?” – Dave Dewart

Joe: I think that you should expand your area. If you’re in a very small town and there’s only 30 or 40 properties a day that are happening in there, it’s going to be hard to use the “Automarketer” that effectively. Although that still brings you in 300-400 people every week, so that’s not too bad. If you’re getting a 2 or 3% response on that, that’s not bad at all, so you’ll have people to talk to.

Joe: Depending on your skill at talking to sellers is going to determine your conversion rate on these lease option memos, and if you don’t have a good conversion rate, then you’re not going to get very many memos signed. The goal here is to try to get good at talking on the phone and putting these deals together as absolutely possible, so that’s where I would put my focus.

Joe: I would also use voice blasts and text blasts. The way I’ve been teaching everyone to do this in my mentor program lately (and this has been sort of new for us) is first on day one of the week, you pull up everything that came on the market the week before. And by everything that came on the market, I’m talking about all of the ads on Craigslist and for sale by owner and in the for rent ads – our system scrapes all of those, so you can pull all of those up and then you’re going to send out an email to everybody that posted an ad during that week. That email will say, ‘Would you consider selling your home rent to buy rather than just renting it?’

Joe: At the same time you send out an email, you’re also going to send out a text blast to that same group on the same day pretty much at the same time. The emails take a long time to go out simply because of the way Craigslist is set up and the way that we have to send them out. We can’t blast Craisglist, otherwise all of the emails would get blocked and nobody would get your email and we won’t get any responses. So the emails have to trickle out, whereas a voice blast – that can go out to everybody.

Joe: Now about 70% of the ads on CL have phone numbers, so you can send a text blast and you can get responses back almost immediately. Within 20 or 30 minutes, you’ve got people calling you back with responses. So if you send out to 100 people, the likelihood that you get 5 or 10 responses in the next hour or two is pretty good. So definitely do the text blast at the same time that you’re doing the email blast, so you’re doubling up on these people.

Joe: Three days later, you’re going to do another blast. This time it’s going to be a voicemail blast. So you’re going to send a voice message to this same group one more time. Now, there’s going to be some blowback – there are going to be some people that are going to say, ‘Why do you keep bothering me? I told you no. I told you no.’ – Don’t worry about it. Just do it and apologize to them if you need to or just ignore them and move on because its not going to create any real problem for you most of the time.

Joe: So, by doing that, you’re going to optimize the leads that you’ve got and make it more likely that you’re going to have more people that are saying yes to you right from the get-go. You’ll hit them more times.

Joe: If you look at any kind of direct marketing, with the old fashioned direct marketing, they say you’ve got to hit people eight times before you actually get them. Now, a lot of the people that we’re going to be hitting – we’re probably going to be hitting them the following week, too because they’ll repost their ad and our system will go in and send to them again, so keep that in mind as you’re going through this process. Sometimes it takes a few weeks before people will make a decision and say yes to you and want to talk to you about what you’ve got to offer. Alright, I hope that helps.