Lead generation is the process that pushes tangible results to your business. But this does not solely depend on marketing alone, especially in today’s highly complex digital world. Drew Carrell of Leadzolo sheds light on the importance of data analysis in securing highly profitable business leads. Sitting down with Don Costa, they explain why the process of lead generation must never be left to luck or chance, but to a strong business mindset and real hard work. Drew also discusses why putting ads on television is a promising move and how to avoid taking a strictly linear strategy is not always a good approach to running a business.

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Listen to the episode here

 

Lead Generation Lessons With Drew Carrell Of Leadzolo

Welcome to another episode of the show. As always, I’m here to talk about some really cool things with my guest, Drew Carrell. Before I introduce him, though, I want to encourage you to go over to FlipTalk.com and check out all the cool things we have going on in the Flip Talk universe. We have an incredible mastermind community along with some great episodes of this show, some free resources, and some other amazing things.

 

 

Drew, welcome to the show. How are you doing? 

Thanks. I really appreciate being on here. It’s an absolute pleasure. I’ve had the pleasure of tuning in to a few of the episodes of your show. It’s awesome. I’m excited to be here. 

Looking Back

I appreciate it. We’re going to talk about something that people really want to know about, and that is leads, how to get good leads, and all that cool stuff. One of my frustrations is that somebody’s back end of their business can be completely broken and all they’re worried about is driving more leads into that business. They feel like the leads will cure everything. That’s a whole different conversation. Before we get into that, though, tell us your background. You’re not an actual real estate investor, but you have built some very amazing businesses.

That’s correct. To quickly touch on that other point you had, people seem to think that marketing’s going to fix a business. Marketing doesn’t ever fix anything. All marketing does is amplify your business. If you have a crappy business or the back end’s not put together and you don’t have staff, you don’t have systems, or whatever it might be, there’s no amount of marketing in the world that is going to fix that. We say that a lot.

To touch on my background, we own two agencies. One agency is a YouTube ad agency. We work with a vast amount of industries. We have Leadzolo, which is an agency specifically for lead generation for real estate investing, which is great. That’s where our hearts are and where we spend all of our time. We have a holding company as well, because how do you start generating leads and get to know everybody in this industry and not want to buy property? We’ve started on that venture not long ago.

I have private consulting. I’ve worked with a couple of keynote speakers and people who are on the circuit. I am talking around at events and helping them put together a digital marketing strategy. There are a lot of things going on, but you’ll notice everything is focused in one little bucket. Digital marketing is where my heart is. It’s what I love. It’s an infant in where it is as an industry. It only has room to grow. I’m super optimistic about that.

Digital Marketing

It’s not an easy thing to conquer. You have so many moving parts with Facebook ads, TikTok ads, YouTube ads, organic reach, and all that kind of stuff. I’ve been picking away at it for I don’t know how many years now. I’ve taken a year off of social media because I burned myself out. That was the wrong thing to do when you have momentum, but it was something I had to do. That’s for those of you who have mastered it or have mastered something very important in the game. What made you excited about even getting into digital marketing? I want to talk about that for a minute. What drew you to it? 

Before this whole venture, I worked in retail. I worked in grocery stores, so food retail. I was a butcher by trade for years. I was a meat manager, store manager, and district manager. I did the whole thing. I wanted to leave that industry, start on my own, become an entrepreneur, and all that kind of stuff. That was exciting, but I was very smart to make sure that I at least had a skill. I was at least going to leave this industry with the skills that I could apply elsewhere. I wasn’t going to leave and quit like we all tend to do and hope for the best elsewhere.

I spent a lot of time reflecting on what it is I enjoyed about this job. Having a whole bunch of employees, 600 reports, and stuff like that wasn’t it. I was then like, “What do I like if I spend all my time talking and whatnot?” What it turned out to be was that what I thought my job was, which was eight hours of talking, wasn’t what my job was. My job was to identify an issue or something that needed to be changed in the business based on data, and then I spent eight hours a day selling that vision, if you will, that problem, or that solution to hundreds of people all day long. It was like, “Go find something, an initiative, that’s either going to increase revenue or profitability or decrease liabilities or shrink in this industry, and then go sell it.”

Once I realized that, it was interesting. I’m more of a data journalist, if you will. My job is to analyze data. That’s what I was doing at these grocery stores. Food retail is a very tough business because most of your food turnover is a matter of days, like 2 to 3 days. It’s not just about, “Last year, we sold $1 million widgets, so buy $1.5 million widgets for this year.” It’s, “What did I sell last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday? How is this week so far varying from last week?” It is so they can make an accurate forecast as to what to buy again this week at that time. It was data-driven and relatively complicated for good or for worse.

Once I got a handle on, “That’s what I loved,” then it was a matter of, “Where can I apply this skill?” I am fortunate that my brother has a PhD in pure mathematics and works at Shopify. Quickly, it was like, “That’s what my brother’s job is. He’s the lead data engineer. His job is to mine data all day long, and then go to a leadership call 2 or 3 times a week and repaint the vision for them based on the data. This probably happens everywhere. I’m not aware of it.”

I’ll cut out a few stories in the interim. What I ended up landing on were Facebook ads and Google ads. My father owns an auto body shop. He needed some more traffic and some more business. I was like, “This digital marketing thing is really interesting. I feel like it’s where I want to be. Let’s do it.” We put together a budget and it was the worst marketing campaign in the world.

I’m pretty sure that he lost a whole bunch of money and got zero customers, but it reaffirmed what I wanted, which was that I fell in love with the data. From the data, I can make better choices the next time I run that campaign for him. That’s what we did over and over again and iterated. I am blessed to be able to do that on a much larger scale for larger companies and make a big difference.

It really is the same when it comes to marketing within your business as a real estate investor or anything. I can be the KPIs in your business. These businesses are way more data-driven than the average real estate investor gives them credit for. You’re speaking my language. In 2018, I sent out 1.2 million postcards because I wanted to figure out what worked and what didn’t. I tracked everything like a crazy mad scientist. In 2019, I subsequently sent out 800,000 from what I learned and made more money. Since then, I’ve always been tweaking and twisting the marketing to try to figure out what works better.

For the sake of conversation, a lot of people that get into this business, it’s like the Wild Wild West. They’re throwing things against the wall to figure out what sticks and try to see what works and what they think and feel. There’s no data behind the decision and then they wonder why they’re not getting ahead. I appreciate the fact that you are a data junkie like me.

What you’re saying is so true, not just in this industry, but in most. People are legitimately trying to play the lottery. I feel like most people do get it. They’re like, “I get it. It’s going to cost $2,000 in leads to get a $10,000 assignment fee. Hopefully, if I buy this one lead for $200, I’ll get that lucky one. If I get that, then I’ll reinvest.” You will. Everybody who gets that lucky will do that, I would hope.

You can’t play that game. That’s like going and buying GameStop. Why? I get it. It’s fun. It’s a fad. It’ll be a great Wednesday, but you’re not buying GameStop to build any sort of legacy, lifelong business, or long-term wealth. It’s all a flash in the pan. Frankly, it’s dumb. Unless you’re a smart momentum trader and you’re great at that stuff, then go for it.

If you’re ever looking at business through a GameStop lens where it’s like, “We’re either not going to the park this week or I’ll move on to the next,” then you’re not in business. You’re in gambling. Go get a 9:00 to 5:00. Go buy some lottery tickets at the end of the week. You’ll probably be much happier. That’s what most people need to understand.

If you are running a business without clear goals, you are not actually in business. You are just gambling. Click To Tweet

Everybody wants to talk about business. There are a million social media influencers out there. Let’s talk about Hormozi because everybody will know Hormozi. Hormozi is great, but what’s Hormozi doing? All Hormozi is doing is reiterating the same thing over and over again. He reiterates the exact same thing from his mentors even, which is, “This is not complicated. It’s simple,” but it sure as heck is not easy. It’s hard.

The people who win this game understand it’s a numbers game. They wake up and make 100 calls to qualified prospects, in this case, every single day. Even if they got three contracts yesterday, they come back tomorrow and do another 100 calls. Those are the people who are successful. Anybody who thinks otherwise is going to cause more pain for themselves. If you think there’s an easy win, then you’ll always be disappointed.

I agree. To translate what Hormozi is saying, the fundamentals of the business are easy, but the work behind it is hard. You got to put the work in. That’s really what it comes down to. It’s simple math. Buy a deal at a discount and sell it for a profit, but you have people, markets, and all kinds of other things you have to navigate that complicate it. If you’re not paying attention to your business and your KPIs, you’re going to overwhelm yourself.

One hundred percent. It’s the same as media buying. It’s the exact same tale of the tape. Maybe that’s why my partner and I got so lucky. We have a couple of companies that are quite successful. It’s because we started with data. A lot of people would do themselves a lot of good if they started data first. If you get a couple of doubles, a couple of triples, or maybe a home run in there by getting lucky with the odd lead to begin with, that’s really what compounds a lot of successful businesses.

I finished re-reading The Psychology of Money. It’s a great book. He tells a story about how most successful people come with some luck, but it’s not the luck that makes them successful. The luck amplified the trajectory they were already on. What most people see is that lucky moment and think that they need to re-facilitate luck. The luck helped propel them. They would’ve been successful regardless.

The story is about Bill Gates and how he was lucky enough at the time to be a 1 in 1 million in terms of his high school having a computer in it. When they’re analyzing these successful people and they’re talking about luck, they’re not talking about getting a $20,000 assignment fee off of a $179 lead. What they’re talking about is that they were lucky to be around a certain group of people. They’re lucky to have access to something.

What people don’t dig into is the fact that Bill Gates didn’t know what a computer was when he was in high school. All Bill Gates knew was that he was super intrigued by it, that it likely had a massive future based on how it had come about, and that he wanted to be involved in that. Anybody coming into business with that mindset where it’s like, “I’m excited to be here. I want to learn everything about it,” look back in ten years and you’ll find all of the correlations of luck that were in your path. You’ll notice that it was quite noticeable, and it stacks up.

Elon Musk is another one. You can look back at his lineage and see that there was luck involved in a lot of his entrepreneurial journeys. The luck only came about because his mindset was right. He was excited to put in the work and to do the same thing over and over again for this big, compelling future that he had. That’s what a lot of people should reflect on. Luck’s important. Luck will come along, but luck is an amplifier like marketing was in how we started this conversation. Marketing, luck, love, relationships, all of these things are amplifiers of people. These are not things that make people or break people.

Lead Zollo

I agree 100%. Let’s jump into the conversation about what you guys are doing over at Leadzolo. You got into the digital marketing space. What made you think, “I’m going to run ads and drive leads for real estate investors.” What got you there?

My partner has a friend who’s a real estate investor. I had no idea what he did. Kyle, my partner, had no idea what he did. We were talking about all the clients we had. At this time, the YouTube ad agency was taking off. We had some big names and stuff, so we were pretty excited. Preston was like, “You should really run lead gen for me and get me leads up here in North Dakota.” We were like, “For what?” He’s like, “I’m a real estate investor.” I’m like, “You’re a realtor.” He’s like, “No, I’m a real estate investor.”

We had to spend a bit of time peeling back the layers on what the difference is between the two. It was quite important for me to understand that because what I’d known of realtors was a 1.5% fee and 3% if they got both sides of the deal. Also, what I knew at the time was that they were lazy. That was a personal bias I had because I’d run some ads for realtors in the past. The biggest issue I had was that they weren’t calling the leads.

With those couple of things on top, I was very wary, and on top of the fact they don’t make a lot of money. The ones that do make a lot of money have their shit together on the side. The people who aren’t making a lot of money aren’t making a lot of money because they’re not highly motivated. They’re typically doing it part-time.

In talking to Preston, Preston was like, “It’s a little bit different. This is what I need.” He told us, and I remember it to this day, “What I need is a hoarder house that somebody inherited in another state. If you could get me that lead, I can make $20,000.” I was like, “Even if it was some rundown, double-wide whatever?” He’s like, “Absolutely.” I was like, “Okay.” We had the ad agency, so we put together a little swat team. We built a funnel, did some copywriting, figured out what needed to happen, put together a bunch of ads, hired some actors, and did the editing. We’re up and going, running ads in North Dakota.

Another quick caveat here for anybody who has run paid media, the smaller the segment, the higher the CPM. By that, I mean the more you slice up the audience that you’re targeting, the smaller it gets. The smaller it gets, the more expensive it is to advertise. All app platforms generate on this general premise. We could split hairs and get into it, but I don’t think that will be of much value here.

 

When we’re targeting North Dakota, CPMs or the cost to advertise is really high. We overlooked this at the time because we didn’t think much of this other than that we were going to put in the ad spend and Preston was going to give us 50% of the return. We did it. Long story short, I can’t remember if we spent $10,000 or $20,000 on advertising, let alone all of our time to build all these funnels. We sent Preston a whole bunch of leads.

I remember I went to North Dakota. I was meeting my business partner. We met with Preston for what I assumed to be a breakup lunch to be like, “This was fun. Colin and I are out of a lot of out-of-pocket money, so we’re going to move on.” What it turned out was Preston had a check for us. He made over $70,000 off the leads that we had provided for him. He hadn’t told us yet because he was so excited. It was one of his first few leads he closed for $20,000 or something. He was so excited. He was ready for this lunch to hand us this check.

Up until that point, I still really thought you guys were a bunch of realtors and that Preston was doing something weird. When he handed me that check, I was like, “This is real.” He pulled out his phone and brought me to a couple of what would be competitors. At the time, we didn’t think anything of them. He brought us to all these sites and showed us what people were paying for these leads and what he was paying. He was like, “I pay $300 a lead for leads in this area from this place. I pay $600 a lead in this place. I don’t like to do it, but I do it, and I do it profitably.”

That was the catalyst. Seeing all of what would be competitors’ pricing was the catalyst. We sat back and went, “It was costing us over $200 a lead, but that was in North Dakota. Imagine if we could target the whole country. What could we bring our cost per lead down to?” We then decided we needed to rethink the whole agency model. We weren’t going to take people one at a time, set up a separate campaign, charge them a retainer, plus get them leads that’d be well over $200 or $300 in some cases in these markets because that was not going to be competitive. We’d be another one of our competitors. I’m not interested in that. We were like, “Let’s make this different.” That’s what we did.

We ended up creating software or a platform where you can come on and put your credit card in a wallet. You pick your counties. We do nationwide advertising. Let’s say you wanted Harris County, Texas. A lead comes in from Harris County and it goes directly to you completely exclusive. One hundred percent. It’s yours forever. If we have multiple people in Harris County, it would be a round-robin. It would evenly distribute over time. That’s how it works. This way, everybody gets leads.

Everybody gets the cost benefit of doing a nationwide campaign and the benefit of 800 people on our platform. It’s like having the data of 800 different campaigns. Media buying is not linear. It’s not like the old days where it’s like, “Bid on. Sell my house for cash. $20 a click. 1 in 3 will convert. $60 leads all day.” It’s not how media buying works anymore.

Media buying works and is designed to work for scale. It’s designed to work for Coca-Cola. It’s not designed to work for you or me. How do we become Coca-Cola? That’s how we dominate an industry. Once we’re Coca-Cola, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and all these people look at us going, “These guys are spending $20,000 a day,” which is legitimate, then they look at us very differently than the people who are spending $100 a day. We’re getting discounted inventory, preferential placements, and a higher impression share. Not only are we able to fund this through a bunch of people, but Google is giving us a better cost, which means we can pass on the better cost and the savings. Everybody wins. 

Marketing Tips

Let me ask you this. I always do this. If somebody wanted to be crazy and try to do something like this for free, what advice would you give them as far as where they could go to learn to run YouTube ads or Facebook ads? What courses are available that you know of that somebody might want to delve into?

My partner has a YouTube ad course. I don’t even know if it’s up on his website anymore at AdLeg.com. Aside from that, I don’t know. Kyle’s course is really good for a media buyer if you want to learn to be a media buyer because it goes through the intricacies of things. If you’re trying to be a business owner and get your first ad up, my suggestion would honestly be YouTube. You’re not going to find anything industry-specific. Any of these big-level courses aren’t going to teach you anything on a general scale.

What I would say is this. Know who your customer is. Know them really well. We have tens of thousands of leads. We’ve had the privilege of learning a lot about our leads, so we’re able to target them better. Most importantly, learn who your target market is, like who your avatar is. Design an ad around that and make variations of the hook of your ad, so the first three seconds.

Learn who your target market is and design your marketing strategies around them. Click To Tweet

In the first three seconds, it will give you the first two lines of a Facebook ad, YouTube ad, or TikTok ad. Instagram is the same thing. Split test those first three seconds. That’s 80/20. 80% of your results will come from those first 3 seconds of an ad. That’s what I would be monomaniacally focused on. What gives me an indication that this hook is working? Click-through rate.

Focus on an ad. Make sure it’s screaming at your ideal client, calling them, “Do you own a house that’s a pain in your butt?” That’s a literal line from one of our ads. “Are you a tired landlord sick and tired of following up on getting your rent paid every single month?” I’m calling out my ideal market and calling out their pain. If you’re a landlord in that situation, your ears would’ve perked.

That’s what you want. You want an ear-perking first three seconds. You then drive them to something as simple as humanly possible to collect their information and give them a good reason to give it to you. For us, it is, “You get a zero obligation and free cash offer.” Anybody reading this can use that. Most people have a landing page. Carrot does a great job on a landing page. You drive people there. Focus on that ad and get people’s attention. Get it clicked and get people to your website, and then worry about the conversion rate. The website would probably be number two that I would be focused on.

Don’t get overwhelmed with audiences, targeting, and things like that. Almost all, even TV, and we can talk about TV if you want in a second because it’s something that we’re getting into, they all use machine learning. They all have AI. Their whole job is to try and get you what you’re asking for. If you spend all this time doing all this research on audiences, you could spend a couple of hundred bucks on ads. You got a few conversions. Whether it’s Facebook, YouTube, or whatever it might be, we’ll start to learn from those conversions. The more conversions you get, the better your campaigns get.

To pull it back to why we do one massive campaign nationwide for hundreds of clients is exactly that. We have more data than anybody in the industry. Nobody could knock us off the data points we know. As a business owner, that’s what you need to think of with advertising. It isn’t, “Can I put $3,000 in to get $10,000 out this month?” That’d be ideal, but what if you put $3,000 in to get $3,000 out but you got 30 conversions and your pixels trained? Maybe next month, you can put $3,000 in to get $3,500 out. maybe the month after, You get 4,000 out. everything needs to be thought of long-term in marketing as well. 

TV Advertising

Everything needs to be thought of long-term because any marketing channel, no matter what it is, takes time to build momentum. That’s what you said. I’m dumbing it down a little bit. Before we dive in, I want to dig into Leadzolo and the leads from Leadzolo, how it works, and all that. Before we do that, let’s talk about TV. What are your thoughts on TV? I know TV is big for some people in this industry.

All I’ve heard is, “TV is a disaster. Don’t go into it. It’s a waste of money.” That gets me so excited. I love to hear that stuff because it’s like, “Somebody’s making money.” Cost is margin, and margin is indicative of supply and demand. They’re in demand. It’s not just Coca-Cola. I see terrible local TV ads here in Toronto. They’re awful. This guy that I’m thinking of, and I won’t say his name, has been on the air for twenty years and is selling jewelry, gold, and stuff. There’s money to be made there.

 

All I hear when people are screaming that it doesn’t work for this industry is that nobody has figured it out yet. We’re very focused on figuring that out. We learned a lot of things from TV in terms of talking to local stations and aggregates. I didn’t realize there were a lot of TV aggregates, but there are. A lot of them, like YouTube, Facebook, and everything else, have built-in AI.

How TV networks understand that you’re watching their TV is based on your IP. Let’s talk about basic cable. Let’s say you buy basic cable. Rogers or whoever up here is giving you that cable. It knows your IP, so it can report back to the channels when your IP was watching a certain channel based on time and all that kind of stuff.

What’s great is that you can put a code on your website. You can track an IP when it hits your website. What these aggregates and whatnot are doing is they offer a service to marry them up. That’s conversion tracking through TV. When you can watch an ad but you’re not clicking on the ad and you’re pulling out your phone, going to my website, and filling in that form, I can see which ad at what time on what channel produced that conversion. That is miles above TV advertising over the years. It has been very blanket. You’re worried about conversion. We have hundreds of more data points that we get to focus on, which gets us super excited. With QR codes, there are a million things you can do.

Why Choose Lead Zolo

That’s awesome. We have somebody that we work with pretty closely. I don’t personally do TV, but in our mastermind community, one of our members is Tony Javier, who is a big TV guy in the space, 10x TV. He has been on TV for years, and it has worked really well for him. Like any marketing channel, what the magic is is consistency and then paying attention to the data. That’s what it comes down to. That’s very cool. Leadzolo, tell me about it. Why would I want to be a customer of Leadzolo? Sell me on why. I already know why, but give me your answer.

You can get PPC leads for a guaranteed price, which you can’t do on your own. If you go run a Google ads campaign by yourself, you’ll notice your cost per lead varies. Depending on the market, it dramatically varies. What you get with PPC is complete consistency. You’ll know exactly how much you’re paying per lead, whether it’s nationwide or county-specific.

That’s the benefit as well. The lead will come in specifically in the counties you want should you choose, whereas PPC can’t promise that. You might be targeting Harris County in Texas, but you could get a lead from somewhere outside of Harris County because somebody drove through there or they landed at an airport there last week, or something like that. You get the confidence of a guaranteed price and the confidence of the guaranteed location. Plus, you have a team in a dispute policy. If it’s on the MLS or something silly, you email Dani and she fixes you right up. You have all that.

The other pro to that is that you’re not paying a retainer. If you’re typically working with an agency like us, you have to pay us a retainer. We have to pay your staff, our actors, and our editors. Instead of everybody paying us this retainer, everybody’s paying us a small percentage on each lead that comes in, which then funds all that. What it allows us to do is to dramatically simplify our business.

We have two companies. A YouTube ad agency and this agency. The YouTube ad agency is a retainer agency. We have an entire department for communicating with clients and billing. It’s a headache to get billing done. Leadzolo will do three times the amount of revenue. We have one person, Dani. She spends more time out shopping than she does responding to emails because it’s so simple. It’s an email. She has an answer for everything, and she knows exactly what needs to go on. There’s no confusion. There’s no flop. 

Our team is 1/3 the size of the other team. We are even doing three times the amount of money. Our payroll is less blah. Since we get to put all of this together, the huge benefit is the savings that we get to pass on to everybody. I can generate a lead and sell it for nearly the same price that I generated it. Since we do thousands a month, we still make enough profit to generate, keep going with our business, and keep scaling our company. That’s why you’d want to work with Leadzolo. We’re here to crowdfund the largest real estate investing marketing campaign in the world. We’re successfully there, but we’d like to 10x it still.

That’s very cool. I am an advocate of pay-per-lead. I have done a lot of outbound marketing through the years. Going back, the highest direct mail year I had was in 2018. I spent $560,000 on direct mail that year. It has only gone up since then, cost per piece. In the process, since I own multiple businesses, trying to simplify my real estate investing business, it’s like, “Where can I capture opportunity without the ongoing spend and that kind of thing?” That’s where my head’s at. Opportunities to work with companies like Leadzolo are one of those things that I’ve looked at very deeply.

We mentor a lot of people in the real estate space. When I’m talking to somebody that’s getting going and they have a limited budget, the pay-per-lead services seem to be the right direction for them because they don’t have to go through all the grind of trying to figure out how to cold call, door knock, and do all that kind of stuff. They get a decent lead and have a decent conversation. If they’re cutting their chops properly, they’re converting those leads. It’s a cool product to have, for sure. 

I like what you said. It was interesting. Coming from my last industry, the number one metric we looked at all the time was sales per man hour. Our controllable metric within a grocery store was sales per man hour. There are two levers to that. One is increased sales. Let’s say we have 100 hours of employees. We can increase sales and it’ll increase the sale per man hour price or decrease hours. We cut hours and send people home.

In this type of industry, other startup industries, and stuff like that, it doesn’t map very well. It’s hard to really understand how that relates to this. I love to relate it in terms of investment on time as a personal sales per man hour, every hour that I’m working in this business, and how I increase it. I don’t want to get people too lost.

A lot of people get lost in this where it’s like, “If I’m a CEO of three companies, my calendar is full. I could spend every Monday morning and probably delete six hours of useless meetings. In those six hours, I can do higher priority activities.” That’s very true, but what’s more important is doing that from day one. If you can do that from day one, you’re guaranteed to get there by the time you exit your company or you’re done with your company.

The way we start anything is the way we finish anything. If you come into your business with the focus on, “I don’t have time to be door knocking. I don’t have time to figure out direct mail. I don’t even know what that consists of. I don’t want to know. It seems overwhelming to me,” what is your goal here? Let’s say your goal is $1 million a year and then it’ll be $1 a month. How are you going to get there? What’s going to be your biggest leverage point? Figure that out on day one.

People have spent so much time, like three years, in their company going, “I shouldn’t be setting up this Zapier.” You’re right. You shouldn’t be. There’s somebody for $3 an hour that would love you. You would pay their mortgage and put all of their kids through school to pay them $3 an hour to do that. You could be off on a sales call. Figure that out.

I say this a lot. Anybody who has heard me speak before has heard this before. Figure it out and get really good at one thing. I suggest the one thing in this industry to be good at is sales. You can outsource TC. You can outsource dispo. You can outsource marketing. Don’t outsource sales for no other reason than if you want to move on. It’s the most transferable skill of all of them. It’s also the biggest personal leverage point you can have. You’ll always find somebody better than you at marketing.

Do not outsource sales. It is the most transferable skill out there and the biggest personal leverage point you can have. Click To Tweet

This may be specific to me. You’ll always find somebody more detail-oriented and who’s going to do a better job on TC, but there will be nobody who will be better at talking to a seller than you. If that’s your motto from your first day, you’re going to have tremendous success as the years go on. I made sure to make that an absolute staple in all of my companies.

I don’t do sales calls. It’s not that I dislike sales. I had a really hard time coming over this hurdle to stop doing sales calls because I like it. I like to talk. I had to figure out, “What’s a higher leverage activity for me?” For me, it ended up being webinars, speaking at events, and doing podcasts, which is a great transition for somebody like me.

If this was day one, I would be looking immediately to find somebody to do the Zapier integrations on the backend and somebody to get me leads, and I would sit here and talk to people on the phone all day. If I only got two leads, God help those two people because I’d call them twelve times every day to make sure that I’m in front of them and still not get wrapped up in the other BS.

It’s not time. People look at everything so linearly. It drives me nuts. They’re like, “I have nine hours in a day, which means I’d spend 13 5-minute tasks and 7 20-minute tasks.” You’ll get six tasks done if they’re easy. You’ll get two done if they’re hard. Know that about you and commit to that. If you try and do too much, six months from now, you’ll be flipping burgers at Burger King because it feels like an easier job because it is. Know what you’re capable of getting done, do it great, and then go spend the rest of your day doing something you love because then, you’ll be recharged to come back and do this. 

Pay Per Lead Service

I couldn’t agree more. One hundred percent. I got one last question, and this is straight from watching people be timid. This goes more for newer individuals. When they go to a pay-per-lead service, there’s that apprehension of, “What if it’s not a good lead?” You mentioned it briefly, but I want you to hit on it again. If somebody gets a lead from Leadzolo and it’s listed for sale, what happens then?

Send an email to our support, which will be Dani. She’ll immediately credit your account the amount that came in for that lead. That’ll be it. The lead’s still yours. If it comes off the market in 30 days, I suggest still calling it. Dani will immediately refund the money to your wallet, so your next lead is free. If a mobile home lead comes in and they don’t own the land, she’ll refund immediately as well. You will have to email or fill out a form. You shouldn’t see mobile homes. We liquidate those elsewhere. For invalid contact information, if somebody put in some random stuff because they didn’t want to talk to somebody, we would credit that as well.

What about someone who is not a title holder? The daughter wants to sell the house she lives in, but mom’s the actual title holder.

I’ve seen that once in 30,000 leads. We’ll credit it. I don’t know enough about it, but my inkling is that it does happen very often.

I’ve had a pay-per-lead come through. The mother had the deed and the daughter wanted to sell the property. The mother wasn’t on board with selling the property. The other one that comes up a lot is when somebody fills out a form and you call them three times a day every day for the next ten days, but they do not answer their phone or do not answer text messages. What do you guys qualify those as? 

What that would fall under is a non-contact lead. We used to credit a long time ago for non-contact leads. The unfortunate part for me is that I don’t control everybody’s sales process. I don’t want to. I’ll tell you a quick story. This is the reason we don’t credit those at this point. This is back when we were selling leads at $350 a pop, which is where we started, to a lovely lady.

She pulled the trigger. She spent $10,000 with us for 30 leads. She wanted them immediately. She wanted them that day if we could. It was a Thursday or Friday. We got everything set up. We probably started the campaign on Monday or Tuesday. We didn’t hear anything from her. We ended up fulfilling it by next Tuesday. We were calling her going, “What are you doing? We sent you your leads. You spent $10,000.” She was one of our only clients at the time, so we were pretty high touchpoint with them.

We didn’t get a hold of her until the following Friday to find out that she went on vacation. Also, she called all the leads that morning and only got ahold of eight of them and wanted a credit on the other 22. At the time, we were ignorant of everything. We didn’t understand. We were like, “What happened? Why are none of these leads responding?” We had our team reach out to them. Our team ended up getting a hold of twenty of them over time with follow-up and ended up sending them back.

What we learned was we can’t control the sales process. There are people who will not call a lead because it’s 6:00 at night. If you don’t call that lead until 6:00 the next day, I can’t be accountable for them not answering the phone and/or they’ve gone with somebody else and they’re not interested anymore. That’s the decision we had to come down to. There will be cases where if we skip trace the property and none of the numbers or the email addresses line up at the property, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s bad information. You should get credit for that. For people not answering, I can’t simply because I’m not owning the sales process.

 

Fair enough. Your leads are not $300 a lead anymore, right? This is for the sake of the audience. They’re way cheaper than that.

Yeah. They’re $179 for county-specific. I’ve talked about this a bit because I’m never 100% sure. 

$139 national and $179 county pacific.

Thank you. 

Episode Wrap-up

Is there anything else that you feel somebody needs to know about what you guys are doing over there?

We’re doing great things, and we’re super excited. We plan on 10x-ing what we’re doing and taking over this industry from our little piece of it over here because we’re in love with it. Come be a part of it with us. We don’t overcharge anybody. We make very small margins specifically so that we can be the number one place that everybody wants to buy leads from. Come set up a call. You’ll fall in love with our sales team. If not, Dani will hook you in for the long run once you buy a lead. That’s all I have.

If you are interested in checking out Leadzolo, go to Leadzolo.com. Make sure that you let them know that you knew about them in this show. They will make sure you get well taken care of. I appreciate your time. Thank you for being with me.

I appreciate you very much. Talk soon.

 

Important Links

• Drew Carrell
• The Psychology of Money
• AdLeg.com