Your Owner Leads are Terrified with Kristen Lopez

Welcome back to Owner Occupied. Today I'm here with Kristin Lopez. Welcome, Kristin.

Thank you, Peter. I am so excited to be here today.

I'm excited to have you. This is going to be a fun episode as always. So Kristin, you and I connected through RentScale, which we're going to get into RentScale and what that is and what you're up to today. But we've known each other for a number of years. We've worked together in various capacities, and I've always admired your energy, your enthusiasm, And really your sales acumen is truly impressive to see. So we're going to dive into all that exciting stuff, but let's hear a little bit about your backstory and maybe give like 60 to 90 seconds on where you are today and kind of how you got there.

Yeah, absolutely. So I have been in the real estate/property management industry for the last 9 and a half, almost 10 years. And I cut my teeth at the very beginning in sales. I had no no sales background, and I started out as a dialer for residential team. So, I just cold called all day, every day for about 8 hours a day for 2 years. That was a, that was a, that's a long haul, but that to me was my entire sales college education was just getting rejection after rejection, figuring out what worked, what didn't work, and was just on the phone, which is a difficult skill to to build up and you really build it up through repetition. So started at the very bottom of the industry and then did some commercial work with a broker, did tenant representation for franchises. And then from there, I also wholesaled properties. So I door knocked in the San Antonio heat in the middle of the summer for some deals. And from there, I was hired on as a business development manager at a property management company. And that was my first step into property management. And I was there for about 2 years and it was so much fun that I didn't want to leave the industry. So from being a business development manager, I transitioned over into coaching salespeople. And so I coached a number of sales professionals for property management companies. And then an opportunity came up for me to be able to sell a new software. And I thought the software was very cool and I'm excited by new things. So I definitely was super stoked to jump over into that. And so I have been selling that software as well. So, that is where I'm at today.

Awesome. And I'm excited to dive into Re:SCVR, which is where you are now. We can use brand names, hopefully.

Oh, awesome. Okay, good. It absolutely is. I don't ever know, so now I know.

Yeah. Especially 'cause they, I think they sponsored a couple episodes this season. So, yeah, shout out to Re:SCVR, great sponsor. I don't know if they're sponsoring this episode or not, I can't remember. So, okay, I want to go all the way back to cold, cold calling, outbound dialing, like 2 years, did you say? Like 8 hours a day? That is wild. Like, just take a moment, anyone who's listening, if you've ever made a cold call, which I've probably made 25 in my whole life, which is like a morning for someone who does that, like, you know, professionally, imagine doing that all day, every day for 2 years. That's like this. Wild, the stamina that that would've taken and just the grit. So I have so many questions. Like, I think you said it was for residential. Like, did that work? I'm like, I get why cold calling works on these big commercial deals because if you land one, the value, the enterprise value is massive. But one residential deal, like, is there enough meat on that bone to make it worth all that outbound? It must've been, someone was paying you.

Oh, absolutely. So we— when I first started, we were getting a lot of inbound leads and we were paying $8,000 to $12,000 a month in inbound leads. And when I was hired on, I started converting those into deals so much so that they were like, we don't need as many, like we're doing fine. Let's cut back on the amount of inbound leads that we're getting in and let's crank up.

What year was this?

This was 2015, 2014 through 2016 was whenever I was doing this. So, yet we were trying, the whole goal of it was to just reduce the amount of money that we were spending on inbound leads because it was astronomical. And so, we tried out a number of softwares and the one that we landed on at the time that really worked for us was Mojo Dialer. And on Mojo Dialer, you can draw, like do geographical farming, so just draw a square Square and then go into there and find all of the phone numbers and give them a call. So my bosses and I would sit around and just throw out different script ideas, different leading questions, different things that we could lead off with, because we never wanted to call and say, hey, are you thinking about selling your house? So we, we tried— yeah, I'm actually—

I'm so glad you called, and I don't know any realtors because there's so few realtors. Like, thank goodness you called.

Exactly. And I was like, can't do that. So we would sit around and just throw ideas out there and then I would hop on the phone and I would call and then we would do that for a couple of days and then we'd come back together and be like, so that did not work. We just—

give me, give me some of these, give me some of these outlandish ideas that you would try.

Yeah. So my, my favorite one that started to work for us, it was all about just building nurturing campaigns. So I would call people and I would say, hey, you know, my name is Kristin. I work for this team at Keller Williams and we are having a hard time finding comps for our properties because so many people are doing renovations to the inside of their houses. So I'm curious, you know, if you could help me. They would always be that question, could you help me? People love to be helpful, so they'd say, yeah, absolutely. So then my question would be, have you done any major renovations to the inside of your properties, particularly in the kitchen or bathroom, in the last 2 years? And people are either yes or no. And then it's like, okay, well, great. So I, you know, last question, I don't want to take up too much of your time, but Are you considering moving in the next 12 to 18 months? Right. And it would just kind of— that would be the last question that would be in there because we would know if people had put major renovations into their house in the last few years, more than likely they're not going to sell. So they would get moved over into a different drip sequence as opposed to ones that are like, no, I haven't done anything. Once you ask that question, it starts to unlock a lot of things for people. And so you would just catch people that were particularly chatty that would tell you all of the things. And then from there, You can decide how to transition that person either into like ready to sell or they get put into like a drip sequence from there.

Okay. So you would somehow get their email like at the end of the convo?

Yes, I would. Some type of offer, right? So if we transition into selling or they mention something, hey, can I send you a market analysis? Can I let you know what it would sell for? Can I, you know, I don't know. We are— our big thing too was my other part of the role was I would attend networking events and I would get massive amounts of business cards. And I was part of like just building relationships with the community. So we branded ourselves as connectors. And so I was like, you know, are you, do you need to do anything with your house? Do you need a tree trimming person? Do you need somebody to do something for your kitchen? And always leading with that value and trying to give somebody something to remember us by and giving them something that I can follow up with them on. So that was the whole goal of all of the calls.

I think that was a really great little sort of window into what makes an effective outbound campaign, and we are gonna, we'll probably spend a lot of time on outbound since that's your focus these days, and it's also something that's very interesting to me. But what you mentioned there was like, I feel like there's two pieces of any outbound campaign that have to be in place for it to work. One is, um, there has to be some thought to the value for the person that you're trying to reach. Um, it can't just be all about the company and what they're gonna get and how they're gonna make all these calls. Like, There has to be upstream from that, some, some angle, some way, some content, some thought put into like, let me think about these people that we're trying to nominally serve in some way and what would be useful or valuable to them, even if they don't hire us. That's the step that everyone wants to skip. They just want to go right to, I need some leads. Now leads are great. And you illustrated a great example of the second part, which is How do you craft, how do you sort of construct a pathway that you can walk people down that's interesting enough that they're going to hang out and see what's behind door number 3 or whatever, right? Like, and you came up with just a couple of short questions, but right off the hook, you could tell it was different, right? Because you were, you know, the classic now, like, will you help me? Right. But how do you, and a lot of people know about that thing about people who are willing to help you, but What you didn't say was like, hey, I'm trying to make a quota. Will you help me? Or I'm trying to find people who want to sell their houses. Will you help me? Like, you have to be 1 or 2 clicks removed from that immediate outcome that you're getting to. And you have to like weave this all together so elegantly. And it's just, it's totally an art. And I admire the folks who are able to do this. So my hat's off to you. Anything else you want to chat about with residential cold calling before we move on from that?

No, I think that you— one, yes, one thing to add there, I said no, but yes, um, is just a big point. I think throughout all sales that I know that we'll continue to touch on is yes, being removed from the outcome that benefits you because the anything with outbound calling, it's not about me. It is not about me hitting a number, it is about me serving people. And that is how I feel I've been able to do outbound and I was able to do it for so long because Once I figured out how easy it was to buy a house, that you only needed a 640 credit score and you only needed 2 years of work history and you could qualify, that to me felt like knowledge that was ridiculous that I had that nobody else did. So whenever I was calling people, whether it was potential buyers or it was like people selling properties, I just felt like I had information I had to share. And so that is what fueled moving forward in sales is I would find information that felt illegal for me to know, like, what, this is it? And then I had to share it. So That really, for me, those 2 years, it was a grind every day, but I knew that the reason that I was calling people was much bigger than myself, and it was truly beneficial to people to know the information that I had learned.

Find a piece of information that feels illegal to know. That is a great framework because when I think about our property management company, the thing that comes up for me when you said that is like, it's possible to own rental property in a completely passive way. That piece of information does kind of feel illegal to know in a weird way because a lot of people, when they think about owning a single-family rental, what comes to mind is a bunch of problems, tenants, toilets, and trouble, right? Or termites, tenants, and whatever it is. So the idea that there can exist a property management company that's so professional and so organized that you could literally hand the keys off to them, go on a 2-year vacation around the world, come back and find the property in better condition than you left it, That's the kind of information that feels illegal to know that you could then use as a sort of a cornerstone of some type of campaign or, you know, on a sales call or something like that. So it's a great way to sort of start your mind working around how to, how to communicate differently with prospects.

Absolutely. Because if you're excited to share, people are excited to talk to you. And that's really the key is you have to be excited about what you are talking about because that your energy like transfers even through the phone. If you are excited and you are smiling, that was the other thing, just fun fact. My bosses bought me a mirror that was right in front of my phone and I had to sit and like smile into the mirror. And so that is, I looked at myself like all day, whenever I was dialing. So when we switched to Zoom, I was like, oh, this feels like being back on the phone. Like I can just see myself all the time. So it was having a smile on your face and really being happy about what you're talking about truly does make a difference in sales because if approaching it of like, this sucks, this is going to be so hard, this is this or that, you're not going to convert anyone. Like, it's just not going to happen for you no matter how good your script is.

Yeah. And that's actually something I've started to do even as I've gotten more experience recording podcasts is the, just like you said, if I'm smiling, energetic, outgoing, engaged with the guests, like excited, that comes through the mic. Even, even if I don't know, it's hard to articulate, but early when I first started doing recordings and especially when I first started getting advertisers and I would record the ad copy, I would get feedback from the advertisers and they were like, Peter, I love you, but like, that sounded really flat, dude. Like, can you record that with some more energy? So I would, I would sort of go way over the top. And to me it sounded when I was recording it sounded so ridiculous, like exaggerated, and then they would be like, oh no, this is great, you know? And then I would listen back and it would sound, it would sound normal. So there's truly something around that idea of like the way that you feel comes through, voice comes through over the phone, whatever it is. Yeah. Okay. So, so from residential outbound, you made your way eventually over to a traditional BDM role at a property management company, and you did that for a few years. So that was inbound primarily, I'm guessing. And how was that experience?

Yes. So it— I feel like a lot of the jobs that I've had, it's always we start inbound and then outbound becomes a priority while I'm there. And so it was the same there. Um, at— you said we can say brand name, so I worked at RentWorks with Brad Larson, and I learned a lot, uh, working there. I learned everything about property management, which was fantastic. And so we were getting a huge number of inbound leads, but outbound and networking became a huge focus. They already had realtor referral programs up and running, but it was my job to take that message even further. So, when I was there, there were two BDMs. So, it was myself and then another BDM, and we worked together as a team. Everything was split. Commissions were split, roles were split, everything was right down the middle, 50/50. And we quickly learned that my strengths laid in outbound and going out and doing public speaking and teaching. That is what I like to do. And my partner's strengths lied in doing onsite consultations, going and meeting with owners in homes, doing follow-ups and getting the close. So we split our jobs right down the middle. And so I focused on initial phone calls, doing discovery, setting up onsite consultations, as well as going out into the community, creating relationships, teaching classes, educating people, creating content became all things that I was responsible for because I liked doing them. And that was the coolest thing to me. I was like, you want me to do things that I'm, I have fun with? Like, you want me to go record videos? Okay. So we, we ended up splitting that in that way.

Awesome. And I'm so curious to hear, like, when you first started doing this, this was your introduction to residential property management and the world of our clients, the property owners. I'd love to hear what was your impression of the clients, the leads compared to your residential or commercial brokerage experiences prior?

Yeah. So, the first thing that I noticed was there was a lot more fear that people had as far as the leads. Whenever I was calling for residential, everyone's excited. They're like, oh, I'm going to buy a new house. This is so great. This is a stepping stone. Then when I transitioned over into property management, everyone seemed afraid to me. I was like, well, why are you so scared? Like, this is a very cool thing that you're doing. And so overcoming that fear to me was the first thing that I had to learn was we— I live in San Antonio, so we have a very large military presence here, which means that we had a number of accidental landlords. So especially in the accidental landlord mindset, they're afraid, what is going to happen? I've never done this before. So it's just a lot of fear that I got from people during my initial phone calls.

So fascinating. I'm like digesting this right now. It, of course, it rings true, right? Property owners who are thinking about hiring a management company, if they're accidental landlords, they know nothing. And so the unknown scares them. They don't understand what it is. They don't know what all is going to be included or what the fees are or anything like that. If they're investment property owners, they're scared because they do know about property management and what property managers can do because they probably had a bad experience. And so they're scared for that reason. Man, that's a really interesting insight. I wonder what we can do as property managers to help our prospects get over their fears? How can we walk them down the path and show them that they don't need to be afraid? Like, I'm wondering like, what if I answered the call and I was like, thank you for calling RO Property Management. Are you feeling afraid? I don't know. Just like, how can we, how can we name it? How can we like, you know, put them at ease?

Yeah, I think that for me, I tried to overcome that with just positivity of like, Congratulations. Like, this is a huge step for you. Thank you so much for trusting me, even with this phone call and just showing gratitude to people and trying to get them excited about what it was going to be. So for me, asking questions, trying to get down to the root of that fear, because it is either I'm going to lose money, the tenants are going to be bad. So-and-so, like my cousin's brother's sister had a terrible experience and that's what I'm afraid about. So for me, it was asking questions not as directly as, are you afraid? Like on a scale of 1 to 10, how afraid are you? Instead, you know, it's just tell me about your situation. What's going on? How does that make you feel? Almost like a therapist. And how does that make you feel? And really asking those, those deeper level questions because it's easy to stay surface level of like, this is what we charge, this is what we do, here's our processes, here's how we're going to take care of you. And that's great. And for people that aren't afraid, yeah, they may latch onto that. People use pricing as a wall, right? They say, oh, that's expensive. Tell me why that's expensive, right? Like, why, what are you afraid of here that is making you say that it's expensive? So a lot of the objections that owners come, come to us with, in my opinion, are fear-based, right? Most of them are, they're just presenting as that's expensive, or I don't like the way that you do that, or I want paper statements, or I want this, or whatever it is. It's all rooted in fear. So to me, it's asking not just the surface level questions, but we have to— I don't remember what book it was in, I read so many, I'm gonna not quote this correctly, but you have to get like 7 layers deep and you have to ask why 7 times and just like, why this? Why, why, why, why, why? Um, to really get down to the root of what is going on with somebody. And if you can get down to that root, in my opinion, you keep that customer longer because you're able to transfer that over to your property managers or your client success managers, whatever you call them, and let them know this is this person's situation, this is what they're dealing with, you need to talk this way to them, or you need to take care of them in this way here, so then they can just have a better relationship. So the salesperson, I think a lot of times don't go deep enough because it's like, it's just property management, it's just like Well, I can just get a PMA signed. But to me, you've got to get deeper with these clients because they're asking you to take and hold on to the largest asset that they have. And that's scary. It's essentially like, Peter, I'm going to give you half a million dollars and I just want you to hold on to it for me for like 3 years. It's the equivalence. Like if you think about it in money, they're handing you this asset that's worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. That's a big ask that somebody is doing. And a lot of salespeople I see, they think that one phone call, they should just trust me. And it's not like it has to be more nurturing than that because it's a bigger deal than how a lot of times we think of it.

So great. So many insights there. And I think to go back to something you said there was, it shows up as questioning when they're going to get their statement or a price objection. That's so accurate in that the stated objection or the stated concern is not usually the actual issue. And this shows up for us even when we've onboarded a client. Something I've noticed about our clients is that if there's a vacancy that's gone on for more than, say, 3 to 4 weeks, the property owner becomes a different person. Like the property owner that you knew and loved and onboarded is gone. They will not be back until you fill that vacancy. Someone else has stepped into their shoes and is now operating from a place of complete terror and is going to bring up unbelievable wild things like the pictures in the wrong order. You need to talk about the school that's down the street. I drove by the property and there was a man standing outside. The furnace was left on 70 instead of 68. Like, they're just going to drive you absolutely insane. And it's because they're— I think what you've correctly identified is that they're scared. They don't know what's happening. It just shows up as all these weird random complaints. So when my team encounters this, they're like, Peter, this client is going crazy. What do I— I'm like, pause. How long has the property been vacant? And inevitably they're like, oh, 6 weeks, 5 weeks, you know? Like, okay, just focus on getting it leased and then all these other problems are going to go away. Anything that lingers, we can deal with it later, but right now we just need to get it leased. Yeah. So fear, I'm going to be on the lookout for fear in prospects and in clients. So that's, that's really good. So you've been in the property management world now for a while. I'm curious what changes you've observed within the industry during that time. So, when you first took the job at Rentworks, what year was that?

Uh, 2019.

Okay, so 4 years in the industry and you came into it with fresh eyes as an outsider. A lot's gone on in the last 4 years, including COVID and transition to Zoom and video first and a lot. So, what's been your, your observation either on the industry as a whole or maybe specifically within the BDM function, the sales function? And what's actually effective.

The first— I went to my first conference, I think it was maybe Southern States of 2019, some, some conference that was held in Nashville. And I remember I was sitting outside and I don't even remember who was talking to me. I wish I could, but I told them, I was like, I'm, I'm a BDM. And they're like, property management sales are so easy. Like you literally just tell them how much it costs. And if you have the right price, they sign up. And I was like, is it really that easy?

And maybe it was that.

I don't know. I wish I could remember.

Let's go find that person.

I know it was a man, but I don't know which one.

Oh, surprise, surprise.

So that was— I was told that and I was like, well, I wonder, is it really that easy? And what I have observed is competition has become more intense. We're dealing with market shifts now because truly I mean, back in 2019, it, it was pretty easy to get management agreements signed. I don't know if that was because I was just an amazing BDM or if the market was— that's what we could handle, right? People were holding on to their properties and all of that. But once the market started to shift and people were able to sell their properties for so much money, it started to become a little bit more difficult. And not just that, there's property management companies popping up all over the place. Competition is getting more and more intense. And which I think is great. I love competition. But software is starting to streamline processes. Things are getting easier, less things are falling through the cracks because we can maintain things on a little bit easier of a level. So that has been a shift that I've seen where now selling property management, in my opinion, if I went back to it, I would feel very confident in the things that I was selling of like, yes, we are going to be able to lease your property in this amount of time and we're going to be able to do this and we're going to be able to do that. Because of the way that just software has evolved in the property management, easier property management industry, making it easier to, to be able to deliver on what it is that we are promising to people. So that has been a big shift. And then the people that we're talking to now have a different fear, and that is, I don't have enough equity to sell the property, and I bought it at such a high price That now I'm cash flow negative. What do I do? Like, what do I do with this property? And so that is a new fear that is coming up that has to be handled in a different way. So the fears are a little bit different, but I mean, the landscape is just getting easier to be able to deliver the service, which is able to transfer the confidence to the clients in a nicer way.

There's some quote about history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And you're describing the feeling of prospective owner clients is bringing me back. It's bringing me back to my first early days in the industry. We incorporated RL Property Management 10 years ago, so 2013, but I was buying rental property in Columbus starting in 2008. And from that 2008 to 2013, right around this time we started the management company, There was a lot of that. There was a lot of, I'm cash flow negative, I don't have equity in my property, I don't want to, I don't, I can't sell, so I'm going to try and rent it out. So that was part of what got us into the business was that there were so many of those folks and the market was expanding. So the folks who have been around in the industry are— Mark Cunningham even did a podcast about this recently talking about how the return of the accidental landlord And he was describing something very similar, which is for the first time in 10 years or so, he got a call from someone who said, "I can't sell my house. I want to rent it out." So very interesting. And I wonder if we're going to see a return to some of the techniques and approaches that worked back then that now are relevant again as the accidental landlord returns. So if you haven't listened to Mark Cunningham's episode, he's got a brand new podcast that's great called The— it's called Property Management Business, I think. And it's really good. So let's get to outbound. So I love talking about this and I've been interested in outbound ever since we started the company. And it's, it's, it's so— I feel like we're still in the early days. So you, you were at RentScale for a while and then you went over to Re/Discover and Re/Discover is focused on outbound. So maybe give a brief overview of the product and, and what you're doing there before we kind of get into the details.

Yeah, absolutely. So Re/Discover brings together a number of things. And so one product that we have in particular is what we call our Portfolio Finder. And what that does is it takes a county and it filters down the number of investors that own a certain size portfolio. So if my ideal customer in Bexar County, Texas, is somebody who owns between 5 and 15 properties, I can plug that into Re/Discover and it'll pull me a list back of everyone who owns between 5 and 15 properties, whether that's an individual owner, an LLC, a trust fund, whatever it is, it pulls all of that back. And so you're able to get that information. You can see pictures.

This is true, by the way. Yeah, I'm good. I'm interjecting because it sounds too good to be true. I just need to interject and say this is actually true. We, we use REscover here at RL and we've got it set up for Franklin County, Ohio, which is where Columbus is located. And literally, as you described, you can put in, I want investors, 5 to 15 properties. You can select single-family or multifamily, and it pulls back the records and shows you who the owner is. Now, of course, it's not all sunshine and roses because the county records are full of LLCs and duplicates and trusts, and there's these big owner-operators that are self-managing, and there's all these complicating factors, and it's not magic, but it does work. And it gives you something you, you can then filter and work with and tune and even make changes and save stuff. So it's very, very interesting.

So a fun story, when I was working at RentWorks, one of the initiatives was we wanted to find absentee owners. So my process that I took, it took me about 3.5 weeks to do this. I had to go to the city and purchase a list for them, them for like, I don't know, $8 or $10. And so they sold me a giant Excel file that had every absentee owner in Bexar County. And I took that list and I didn't know how to sort it. So I had one of our remote team members sort the list for me and I sorted it down to owners. I had it in different sheets, like one property, 2 to 5, 10 plus, 20 plus. I then went in and I had to pick people that I wanted to market to. So then I had to go through, I Googled them, I looked them up on LinkedIn, try to find things about them to get me to a list of about 100 people. Again, that took me about 3 and a half weeks to do. So when I saw Re/Discover be able to do that 30 seconds, I was like, oh, this is, this is a thing. Like I have, I have personally been through the long side of this to get a list and now I can do it in a matter of seconds. So this product here helps property management companies to be able to find who they should go and market to because other softwares that'll pull you back data, don't necessarily pull you back, like all of the absentee owners, they don't have them grouped together. There's just a lot of different steps that you have to go through. And this brings everything together into one page. So whenever I saw that product in particular, I was very excited about it because I was like, this is what we have been missing, the ability to just know who owns these properties. And then you can take that data and whatever your outbound strategy is, You can use that to your advantage, whether that's outbound mail, you want to retarget people, you want to do it however you can. Like now you can do it. So that is what Re/Discover is in a nutshell, and also why I get jazzed up about it because it just brings together so many things that I had to do manually into one solution that makes it easy to use. And it's for property managers.

It's got an integration with LeadSimple, so you can feed those leads into LeadSimple and set up automations, all kinds of good stuff. So, okay. So let's, let's talk about outbound generally for a second. Um, so for those who may not be familiar, and I apologize, I should have done this sooner, to differentiate between inbound and outbound, inbound is folks who are contacting your company through a form on your website, or they click on an ad or it's a referral or whatever. They basically come to you and they say, I'm interested in learning more about your management services. That's inbound. Outbound is when you are going out into the world Showing up in front of someone's face virtually, over the phone, whatever it is, and saying, hi, have you ever heard of XYZ company? We do ABC service. Can I interest you right now? You do it way better than that as you illustrated at the top of the show, but that's the basic idea. If you're familiar with the buyer's pyramid, right? There's like the bottom 3% that are actively searching. And then maybe you probably do a better job explaining this, Kristin. Yeah. So it's like the upside-down pyramid, you know what I'm talking about?

Yes. So yeah, the buyer's pyramid is exactly that. It's just a pyramid illustrating your total target market. So 3% of it actively looking, 7% of people are open to it. So those are the people that everyone is fighting over. And this goes for any industry. And below that top 10% is 30% of people that are unaware, another 30% that are uneducated or don't really understand your service. And then the bottom 30% are people that will just never buy from you. And that's an important thing to know too, is as much outbound as you do, there are simply people that will not buy from you ever. Either their cousin is in real estate, their mom is, their dad, or they do real estate themselves, or they just have firmly decided they will never, ever, ever, ever, ever work with a property manager. Some people just won't buy from you. So it's important to note that part of the pyramid as well.

Yeah. So this is so crucial. I want to just zoom in on this for a second. The bottom 3% and maybe that next 7%, that's the people that are inbound and every single property management company in your city is all interested in that group and they're developing content and they're setting up round robin settings in LeadSimple and they're doing email. Yeah. They're so focused on these inbound leads, which is important. That's— I mean, most of us built our business on inbound leads. It's good stuff. The situation, though, is that in your city— so Columbus, call it a million people— how many people are looking for a property manager on any given weekday? Do you think it's 5,000? No, it is not. Do you think it's 1,000? No, it is not. Do you think it's 100? No, it's not. It's like 4. There's like 4 people in Columbus They're looking for a property manager on any given weekday. I guarantee you that's true. I know it for a fact. There could be like on one day there might be like 9 and another day there could be like 2. So if you ever, ever, ever in your whole life for the next 50 years want to grow your company faster than potentially winning 100% of 3 leads a day, you need to develop an outbound strategy because this is going to let you reach— Kristen's just copying all this down for her sales copy for Discover. This is great. This is gold. This is like, you need to figure out how to go out to the other part of the buyer's pyramid that Christian described and get in front of them and make them aware of your service. How can you do that? You can buy a billboard, you can do radio, you can do TV ads. These are all like marketing strategies that some property managers have explored with varying degrees of success. But what we're talking about here today is like, I don't know, what would people call this? Like, Direct outbound. There's probably some industry name for like when you're, when you're doing this, right?

I don't think that there is like a, an industry term for it. I mean, I like direct outbound or direct prospecting. That is, that's the, that is exactly what you are doing is you're going direct to the consumers.

It's, it's, it's, I think some people call this like DTC, direct to consumer, as opposed to like if you were selling like kids' toys, right? One strategy would be like going and trying to get into Target, and another strategy might be like placing ads on Amazon where you, the company, is selling directly to the consumer. What's interesting is that in home services, everything is DTC. You're not, you're not, there's no like store where you can go and shop for property managers right now. Maybe that's an interesting business idea, but nevertheless. Okay, so, so when, so what, what I want to talk about now and get your insight on is like, You get some tool, maybe it's REscover, maybe you're manually doing it, whatever. You get some, some, I don't know if you would even call them leads, but you got, you have a list of people that you think own properties. And let's set aside for a minute the challenge of getting their contact information. What, how then do you structure a system that turns that list into signed management agreements?

Yeah, absolutely. So I want to, my opinion is they're not leads. Because leads are qualified people that are saying, yes, I'm ready to work with your management company, or I'm thinking about maybe working with company. The leads would be that top 10%, right, of people actively looking. These are prospects or targets, however you want to name them, but not leads. And so what we want to do with that is we want to structure a system around the person that's going to be doing the prospecting. I am of the belief that there is not one system that works for outbound sales. There is not one method that is superior to any other. It is you center your strategy around the person who is going to be doing the prospecting. And so for myself, if I was designing a system for me or people like me with my skillset, it would be phone calls, a lot of phone calls, because that is where I shine. And then I would also probably enter in some kind of way that I could get face-to-face with people. So whether that is putting together an event for investors or something like that, that would be my approach to it is I want to have a personalized approach to this process. And so it really, to me, centers around how much time do we have during the week? How many hours does this salesperson have? From how many hours, what are my strengths in the way that I can I can network with people or I can reach people. And then also, who do I want to reach, right? We have that list. So we know who we want to reach. How are we going to target them? And how much time do I have is going to be dependent on how your system is going to be set up. You're receiving zero inbound leads, none, like no inbound leads, and you're going all outbound and you're going to spend 40 hours a week doing outbound. That is going to look drastically different than let's say, if it is an owner who's running the management company, also doing sales that has 2 hours a week to dedicate to outbound, right? Those are going to be very different systems that we're going to want to put into place to really make effective on the amount of time that we have to get the biggest bang for our buck in our time that we have to dedicate to it.

And what are the, what are the mindsets? I think I heard you articulate really nicely on another show. You talked about you need two, there's two keys to success here. One is mindset, the other is consistency. What have you seen from the groups that are successfully doing outbound and have have been doing it for a while, what are you seeing them do differently from folks who just try it for a while and then give up?

So I think the mindset behind it is something that we've touched on at the beginning of the show, and that is knowing that you're calling with value. If you're calling and you're saying, hey, my name is Kristin and I was just curious, have you ever considered professional property management? That is the way that most people think to do outbound calling. You're going to get hung up on, and that's— it's just not the way to go. So really, for the people that are doing it and doing it successfully, they are calling with a purpose and they are calling with the value that they know that they are going to be adding to people. And so even if they get a no or they get hung up on or they get whatever it is, they can persist because They're spreading the message, they're spreading the word on whatever they are fired up about to talk about. And that is what allows the mindset piece to really move forward. And so you have to have a very strong mindset to do outbound prospecting because it's an endurance. It's like running, it's like exercising. It's hard and it is tiring and it's exhausting because you're using your brain all day at full capacity, trying to call people. You're getting excited when you get somebody on the phone and then there's like, you can't let the emotions dictate you. So if you have a bad call, that can affect you going into the next call. So it really is building up your mind to be able to just know that no matter what happens, my purpose for calling is greater than whatever mood this person is in on the other end of the phone. So it, it, that's really the mindset behind it is why are you doing it? Why are you calling? And the answer has to be bigger than I gotta hit my numbers or Like, I don't know, I'm behind on the quarter and I need to implement some outbound and you think it's going to be a quick fix. It's not a quick fix. It's going to take some time to get up and running. So it's just really understanding what it is you're doing. To me, you have to have a plan on how you're going to execute this, like a very well thought out, like, I'm going to do this and then this and then this and have that system set up. Because if you can take that out of the way, all you're doing is picking up the phone. And calling, and that makes it easier to do.

Okay. And you gave a great example for the residential real estate agent. Are you, are you able to on the spot give another example of like how you could engage someone on an outbound cold call for property management?

Yeah, absolutely. So, a call that I would make, so I, like I said, I've said a couple of times, I live in Texas. We have some very specific residential real estate Texas property code items that not everybody is familiar with. So that is what I— that was my piece of information that I felt illegal to know, that I was like, are your houses up to code? So it sounds something like, hi, my name is Kristin. I work with ABC Property Management Company. The reason I'm calling today is because I am giving a call to landlords and I'm making sure that everyone is aware of the new, the new changes in the Texas Property Code? Have you had an opportunity to read about those? And that's my first question. Like, have you had an opportunity to educate yourself? Have you been brought up to date on what those are? And so I'm picking the piece of information that is relevant to everyone. So whether they actually care about my property management company, actually, if they even want to move forward, they're getting a big piece of value from me because tenants are have the ability to be so educated. And if a landlord doesn't have smoke detectors in every room or they don't have like a keyless deadbolt on every exterior door, that tenant, that information in the wrong tenant's hand could be very expensive for you. So that is what's like what makes me excited is educating people. So that was my piece that I would pick to, to call someone.

So good. So good. I love that. So one more thing on the phone and then I want to move on because there's some other options here besides the phone. Um, you mentioned Mojo Dialer as a way to sort of like queue up like a whole bunch of calls. You can move through them really quickly. I'm guessing there's probably some, like something where like, as soon as you hang up, it like calls the next person. Like I'm picturing like a boiler room type thing or something, but is there, does that also work? Can I load leads from Discover or another list into that same software? Or like, am I manually typing in these numbers? How does that all go?

No, I would— you can definitely upload lists into— there's a number of dialing services now. I— there's so many that you could pick from. But yes, you definitely could. I had some BDMs that I would work with that would export their list, like their lead list or a nurture list from LeadSimple, upload that list into a dialer and get through all of their nurtures. And they would just go through and call their passive nurturers once a quarter, and they would do it in that way of just exporting the list and then uploading it. So depending on the quantity of calls that you are making, that is definitely an option. If you're making less than 25 calls, I don't think you need a dialer. If you're trying to make more than 100 calls, you probably need a dialer because 100 calls manually might take you all day. 100 calls on a dialer may take you an hour, an hour and a half. So it really can reduce the amount of time that you're on the phone. Depending on how many people you need to call.

Yeah, this is one of these, one of those things where any minor friction point is compounded incredibly because it's hard to do to begin with. It's hard to like, cold calling isn't easy no matter how many times you've done it and no matter how experienced you are and any tiny little piece of friction that slows you down or makes you do extra work is an excuse or an opportunity for you to just take a break, check your phone, you know, whatever, and just kind of stop for the day. So I could totally see why that would be effective. Moving on from cold calling, that's not the only option we have here. So one of the things that you get from any of these tools that let you look up property owners is their address typically. And direct mail is still a thing. I'd love to hear about your clients or your experience with direct mail and what kind of pieces they're sending. What's been the— I don't know what the relevant stats here, deliverability, response rate. Anything along those lines?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think my— in my opinion, direct mail is making a comeback because of how many phone calls we get a day that are scam likely. We're not answering the phone if it's people that we don't know. I don't answer the phone. My mom still does, which weirds me out. I'm like, just, Mom, don't answer it if you don't know. So there's some people that do, but we're not answering the phone as much. And so we have to figure out a way to cut through the noise. And I think that direct mail is a way that we can cut through the noise to generate interest. Right? So it's just, what is that message that's going to spark somebody to either hop on the computer, Google our property management company, or give us a call, something that is going to ignite the spark within them. And so I have a couple of companies that I'm working with now that are sending out direct mail and the direct mail pieces, it's a 6-month sequence that we are running. And in the first month, it's a very direct letter. And that letter states, I'm going to get straight to the point. I want to help to manage your rental portfolio. And then it tells a quick success story on here is this person, Jeff, here's how we've helped Jeff. And then we're attaching a Re/Discover report that then shows numbers-wise the success story, right? So I have one company who put in $15,000 or help somebody put in $15,000 to a property and then they quadrupled their rent. That's very easy to show in a report. So we're taking that and we're telling them, we're showing them, and that's going out. And then the second month is like a questionnaire. The third month is a very short letter of just, hey, do you have any problems? Like essentially is what that one says. The fourth letter is another questionnaire. Fifth letter and sixth letter is a breakup letter where it's like, hey, I have tried to reach you. It's not working. Let me know if you need anything. So there's a clear breakup point and then there's a starting point. So for the companies I'm running this with, we're only in month 2. I have people reporting back that they are receiving calls. I don't have the stats at this time of how those are being received, but what we're sending out is letters. I have other companies who have set up direct integrations through their LeadSimples that just mail out postcards. So whenever they hit a campaign, it sends them and generates a postcard that is sent out to these customers. So it really depends on how your company wants to do it. Do you want to send a letter? Do you want to send a postcard? Either way, getting something in somebody's mailbox is going to help you to generate that interest, at least to where you use this data and retarget them. Now you're everywhere, right? You are everywhere showing up for them. So depending on how you want to use it, I like direct mail as the first point in the sequence to start with, even before a phone call, before an email, before anything else, a piece of direct mail. So now there's a small piece of familiarity whenever I do call or whenever I do show up as an ad on their Facebook or I show up somewhere, they now have a connection point of who this company is, who this person is and what they're about. So now that's how I have seen sequences change is instead of leading off with a phone call, I need to lead off with a point where we're going to have some type of knowledge before I call, make it a little bit less cold.

Got it. And how you mentioned retargeting, how would that work? So if I have someone's mailing address, how would I then retarget them?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a number of different ways that you can do that. The one that I'm most familiar with is on social media. I know there are other ways that we can retarget as well, but you can upload those lists into Facebook. They have now— Meta, I'm sorry. Meta and retarget them through there because we have phone number, email address, and names for these people. It's easier to retarget them on social media. And then LinkedIn as well is a huge place that we can retarget. It costs a little bit less than Meta and it's a little bit— it's just they have less restrictions on LinkedIn than they do on, on Meta. Meta has a lot of restrictions now and how we retarget, whereas LinkedIn does not. But through a list that we have, We can upload those into different campaigns and we can start to retarget through social medias. For me, it's just where are people going to be, where are their eyeballs going to be? And that is where I need to be retargeting through. So if I feel that my demographic does mostly log on to Facebook, great, that's where I want to do it. If I have people on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, their Instagram, wherever it is, that is where I want to spend my money retargeting people through.

Okay. So Outbound, I think, is a new, relatively new concept for our industry. And Re/Discover, I'm not even aware, I'm sure there might be one or two other vendors who are kind of focused on this. What should property management company owners be looking for in terms of like an ROI or how long might it take? Because I maybe talk about how the sales cycle is going to be different just naturally and And if I, if I'm a property management company owner looking at putting together an outbound campaign, how should I go about doing that? How should I decide on a budget? And then, um, this is just, it's all new territory, right? So a lot of the familiar, um, metrics don't apply here anymore, right? Like we all know about how much we can pay for an inbound lead. We all know about what the closing rate should be. We all know what our time to payback is on an inbound lead, but this is kind of new territory for, for us. And if any, any illumination that you can shine is going to be valuable.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that the approach that we take is going to dictate your closing percentage. So if our approach is I want a list of 5,000 people and I want to cold call all of them and I want to send them pieces of mail every single month, and it's less of a personal approach and more of we're trying to play the numbers game or we're trying to just throw it at the wall and see what sticks. You're going to see a lower closing percentage on those typically overall. If again, if let's just call it 5,000. So if we have a list of 5,000 people, typically we'll get in contact with maybe 10 to 20% of those people. And of that 10 to 20%, we'll probably close 15— no, of the 10 to 20%, we'll probably close 30 to 40% of those people that we actually have a conversation with. So It depends on how, how we do that, right? So that's one approach of taking a large chunk of people and just systematically going through, not as personal of touches. What I think will yield a higher closing percentage, but will take a little bit longer to do, is take a list of 150, 200 people and systematically work them through a 6-month sequence. So to where we are sending maybe some kind of personalized gift, or we're sending a handwritten letter, or we are taking a personal approach to these people that we can see a higher closing percentage that can get us closer towards what our inbound leads convert at. But we're not converting in 30 days. We may convert in 6 months or we may convert in a year, but we're going to maybe close 50 to 60% of those people that we're taking the time to invest in. So different companies want to run at different rates just depending on what we want to do. I have some teams who want to hire a bunch of remote team members to just pull every single person out of Re/Discover and give them a call and call them every other month, every 2 months, whatever it is, but hire a lot of remote team members to just go out and cold call. And then I have other people that have in-office BDMs who are taking the more personalized approach. So it's very dependent on the company, but to me, those are the 2 ways that I'm seeing property management companies start to run with this idea of outbound.

This sounds like a lot. It sounds like a big investment. It sounds like a serious endeavor. That's not something that just can be turned on and turned off like Google AdWords. Is this something that the business owner should be doing? Or like, how can we set this up so that it is going to actually happen and continue to happen over a long period of time?

So I think that if it is the business owner. The absentee owner approach, if we're doing a personalized, like a personalized campaign to someone, you probably should only work with 25-ish people at a time to take through a sequence. Um, but if you are a business owner who is looking to do outbound, I would probably take the more automated approach of moving people over into a campaign inside of LeadSimple where you have automated postcards that can can be generated and sent out at a certain frequency. Hire somebody to write you some really good email copy and be able to have that inside of your systems there. Because if you are an owner who's implementing outbound, you have to prioritize your time. And I think that as an owner doing outbound, your time is best spent going out and meeting people and generating new thoughts, new ideas for your community And being able to teach classes, being able to partner with other people, being able to share your knowledge is your form of outbound that you can really lean into. And so if you're an owner doing outbound, pick something that plays to your strengths and then find a way to automate this absentee owner approach to make that happen because your time is so valuable. And I don't know that sitting— an owner sitting on the phone or doing a large outbound sequence is the right move. I really think go teach some classes, meet some realtors, get some excitement in your community up about your business. Whereas the BDMs, you, you better give them— like, they need to have a personalized— my opinion— a personalized approach where they are working a smaller list of people, as well as a large approach where they are calling X number of people every single day, having those metrics in place of like talking to or calling out to a certain number of people, and also having that exclusive list of people that they working through, where they are trying to create those relationships, they're taking that personalized approach. A BDM needs to have both. They need to really be doing everything that they can to be talking about your company.

Yeah, it's a lot. And I'm curious if we're going to see like done-for-you solutions start to pop up. And I don't know if you know of anyone who's offering something like this where I literally just call that company, I say, hello, I would like an outbound marketing campaign for Columbus, Ohio, radius 30 miles from city center. And they're like, great, what's your budget? I'm like, $10,000 a month. They're like, great, we're going to link up to your LeadSimple account, buckle up. And they just go and like, you know, design the campaign and hook up the Discover and like do the outbound dialing or like whatever it is that they have to do to start getting sort of verified or valid leads qualified leads flowing to my company. I mean, the value to a management company of a service like that is huge because what you're describing, what we've been talking about here is, is still— REscover is, is really taking a chunk out of the work that's required, but there's still a lot of work required. And I feel like a done-for-you solution just would be so interesting to, to like Cause that a company who was able to do that, I mean, they would be, because that's all their, that's the issue because that would be all they're focused on. They could do so much of a better job and they could do all the right tracking and all the right metrics and all the right retargeting and every, because right now all these management companies are going to have to relearn and figure this stuff out, like for themselves. And we're going to have everyone's like learning it in parallel all across the country. I don't know. What do you think? What do you think?

I think that that is such an interesting idea, and I can guarantee you I'm going to hop off of this and write out what that would look like because, like, you can't just drop ideas and not expect me to try to figure out if it would work. I think that that would be a very interesting model if done in the right way. I think that having somebody understand your company makes them that much stronger of a dialer. I think just hiring, like, remote team members to call people in Columbus and then pass them out and farm them to like 4 different companies would be a little bit more difficult for your BDM to come in and then to convert those. So I think that somehow like fractional outbound RTMs, I don't know, I think that, I think it could work if it's like one, like, I don't know, something like that. I don't have a great answer for it, but I think that that could happen in the way that I think that it would be done. And this is trademarked, copyrighted. Nobody can steal my idea. Just kidding. But the way that I think it would be done is you would have a remote team member that would be dedicated a certain number of hours a week to a company that would understand who they are, you know, any unique selling propositions or anything like that that they have to be able to inspire somebody to want to talk to that company in particular. So I think that that could definitely be viable because you're right, like it is challenging. And when building a sales team for a property management company, it's hard. Like, it's still new. Like, it is still a new concept to have a sales team for a property management company. So to then add in this new level of outbound, where does it fit, right? Where does it really fit? And so I think we're going to continue to see that evolve over the next couple of years of, does it work, does it not work, what works, what doesn't? And so just trial and error to try to figure out How can we do this? Because almost every other industry does outbound in some way, shape, or form, especially real estate agents, property management adjacent industries do outbound. We don't. So that's, that's a different point there because I think like that anonymous person told me, it's so easy. They just come to you and then you sign them up. And unfortunately, that's still a mentality that I hear a lot. So it's combating that to understand that outbound is actually needed. And then once that's understood, we'll start to see it more. But somebody has to go out and prove that it works first because I've noticed property management, a lot of owners have to see that it works first before they will implement it. It's hard for the visionaries to just see it and be like, yep, I, I can see what that can look like, so let's do it. So we'll see.

Yeah, it's like the, it's like the show me, it's like the show me industry. Like what's the show me state? Is that, Louisiana or like Missouri or something, the Show-Me State, right? This is like the show-me industry. It's like you got to show me before I'm signing up for anything, right? I think the hard-nosed property management company owners are skeptical and battle-hardened from many false promises over the years from vendors, so I don't blame them. I think you summed that up so well, Kristin. Thank you for coming on the show. This has been awesome. For folks who want to follow along with you and what you're up to, where's the best place to do that?

Yeah, absolutely. So I am active on Facebook and LinkedIn primarily, so you guys can friend request, follow, whatever that is. I post quite a lot of things about sales, sales tips, and so those would be the best places to follow me personally. Professionally, if you're interested in Re/SCVR, feel free to email me. We can put that in the show notes or however we want to do that, but kristen.lopez@re/SCVR.com would be the best way to get in personal contact with me.

Perfect. Thanks so much, Kristen.

Yeah, thank you.