Mailing Offer Letters—Slow And Steady Or Overdo Advantage?

Hey, it's Mark Fideliski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and on this week's roundtable, we've got the usual suspects. We got dude Buddy, the nightcap OG Scott Bossman. Scott, how are you?

Great, Mark, and you?

Good to see you. I'm okay. My back's a little tweaked, but you promised me you're gonna fix it. If you're listening to this, it's already been fixed because I, I saw Scott at bootcamp, and with a few adjustments, I'm good. So thank you for that, Scott. Future me.

Welcome.

Thanking you. We got the technician, Eric Peterson. Eric, how are you?

I'm good. Looking forward to seeing you guys in person here in a couple days.

Yeah, absolutely. You're looking good, man. You got the boot camp haircut going. A lot of us are already lined up for that today. And we've got the most feared woman in the country. And she will also be at boot camp, although just for one day. Mimi Schmidt. Mimi, how are you?

I'm great. I'm looking forward to boot camp. I love boot camp. How are you doing?

I'm great. I'm great. Looking forward to seeing you. And, you know, he just makes me feel calm. The Zen master, Mike Zano. Mike, how are you?

Doing great. Doing great. Great to be here.

Great to see you.

Great.

Great to breathe in the mailing, breathe out the marketing. The big papa Tate Litchfield is not on the roundtable, but we should give out some props to Tate. And then, last but not least, the land geek Sherpa, the professor, the brain, Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com if you're not automating your Craigslist in your Facebook postings, posting domination.com and of course, if you want to learn about anything, go to investor ninjas.com Scott Todd, how are you? Mark?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm good, I'm good. But I think we have an excellent roundtable discussion. Before we talk about that, I just want to let the listeners know that today's roundtable is sponsored by Flight School. Learn how to start your land investing business with the best in a group setting, working in real time with your group. And have Scott Todd lead you up that land investing mountain as your Sherpa. So learn more. Get on a call with the Nightcap OG or the Zen Master. Go tolandgeek.com training Scott Todd. What are we talking about?

All right, Mark, so oftentimes we See, people either, first of all, they might be just trying to start out, or they're established and they'll go out and they will make this decision. And the decision they're going to make is that they're going to mail, I don't know, like 1,000 offer letters at one time or you know, 2,000 offer letters at one time. I mean, like I heard this thing the other day that said if a little is good, a lot is great, right? Like if a little bit of something's good, then a lot of something is great. And, and I have my own opinion on like mass mailing all of these offer letters at one time. But I'd like to maybe test my thought on that and also see what everybody else thinks. Should you mail like a boatload of offers at one time, like a thousand or more, or should you do something different?

It's a great topic and I'd be really interested to hear what the dude buddy, the nightcap OG Scott Bossman thinks about this.

My father in law has a saying, Scott Todd, that's similar to what you were saying is saying is anything worth doing is worth overdoing. But with mailing I would disagree with that. I think it also depends on where you are in the spectrum when you're, when you're first starting out with this. I think a slow, steady approach is the best way for a number of reasons. Number one, you're getting to know the area, you're getting to know the pricing in that county, and you don't want to send a thousand mailers somewhere and be inundated with too much due diligence a few weeks later when you're first starting out. Now if you're, you know, down the road and you know an area really well and you have the team in place to support, you know, the ability to manage the intake that's associated with that many mailings, think so be it. You know, send out a thousand mailings, two, three thousand, I think is you need a really, really good team in place for that. So I guess that would be my recommendation, especially to beginners, to take it kind of slow and easy and test the areas that you're marketing. And you know what, if you have a bad list, every once in a while you come across a bad list. So you don't want to send out a thousand mailers to somewhere where you're not gonna get any returns.

Yeah, that, that totally makes sense. But maybe the technician, Eric Peterson, has a different view. Eric Peterson what do you think? Can you send out too many Offers at one time.

Well, what I like is sending out my mail on a daily basis. So for me that's about 30 to 35 offers a day, seven days a week. They go out all month long. And the reason I like that strategy is it allows me to adjust my offers if there's a need. So let's say I'm exploring a new area or I'm a new investor and I don't know the area well. Well, if I send out a thousand on day one, I don't have any opportunity to kind of play with the pricing as I'm, as I'm going. But if I take that thousand and spread it out over a month, in week two, if I'm not getting any response or week three or whatever, maybe I might start to explore some other pricing. The other thing I always do when I'm testing a new area or if I were a new investor, what I would recommend is testing your pricing along with the offers. So if you're going to mail out 20 offers a day, or 200amonth or whatever it is, you know, take that list and segment it out and try, you know, let's say your ideal purchase price you think is $1,000, you know, send out a quarter of that list at $1000, then maybe 1100, maybe 1200 and maybe 900, allowing you to explore the market a little bit and see where the response comes in most. And then you know, you're gonna learn something about how to buy property in that area based on the response you get from that. But you know, you could use that strategy and send all a thousand at once.

But.

Again, even if you mess that up, you don't have any opportunity to change it. Whereas if you're doing it little by little over time, you always have that opportunity to go back and adjust. And of course, you know, the rest of the business having a consistent deal flow makes a lot of sense. So you're not inundating your due diligence team with, you know, 20 accepted offers coming in on any given day or, you know, anything like that. Instead it's coming in steady, maybe a couple a week or whatever it is based on your deal flow. So I really like the strategy of spreading it out and we have the system to make that super easy. So why would you not do that?

Yeah, I mean, totally makes sense to me for sure. And I love the agile philosophy. It's kind of like, you know, software, you just want to be agile, you want to make quick iterations and the same can be applied your Offers Mimi Schmidt, the Terrorist Hunter I completely agree.

With Scott and Eric. I saw a Facebook post about someone who had made their first mailing and mailed 900 letters and only gotten two responses after six weeks. And I thought, ouch. Completely agree that you should spread them out. And it's not expensive either. I had a VA that for a year and a half sent 20 offers a day and it cost me $6 a week. So it's a better way to spend your money. And having someone help you with it is easy too. So it's not like it's adding work. If you're breaking it up and having it done every day, have someone else do it for super cheap. Additionally, even after you know your county and you want to send a thousand mailers, do you really like Scott and Eric have said, do you have the staff right? If you have one intake manager in yourself, it's going to be really hard to manage the influx. There really is. I know someone that runs his business where he buys for three months a year and he sells for nine months a year. So he really doesn't have that land business going with all the space, the plates spinning. And you know how important it is to get that marketing momentum going. So. So the whole idea that you've paid for an annual subscription for marketing platform and you're only using it for nine months, that's wasteful too, right? And rebuilding your accounts and Craigslist and getting them going again, all that momentum to have to restart that engine up every year seems wasteful. So I just think it's important to have a steady deal flow in the beginning and when you're advanced to break them up.

So.

So it's my opinion.

I love it. I love it. I couldn't agree more. But I bet you the Zen master, Mike Zano might have a difference of opinion. I don't know, maybe Mike.

Well, Mark, we also have a court at the fire department that says we can't do anything until we do everything, therefore we do nothing. So sometimes it's easy to overwhelm. And so I'll say that I have done that, sent out a thousand or more mailings. But that was at a point when I felt very confident in a certain area and I had the capital set aside to acquire, I think in the beginning and even haven't done it all different ways. The consistency approach, I think is really pragmatic. It's almost like going out, I guess, and buying a month's full of groceries and stuffing them in your shelves in your fridge, right? Not really necessary. And you might. Some things might go bad because you can't pay attention to them. So, you know, I think it could be similar, you know, if you don't have a really tight system that can handle that, you know, you could lose deals just because you can't put your attention to them. So I have done that where I've sent out thousand because I believe in dominating an area. And if I know I have the capital set aside, I certainly will when I know my pricing's tight. But I think this. There's been a lot of discussion on Facebook and people talk about, you know, how many mailings you have to send out to get to gauge an area. And I think we talked about this before, right? And this is one of the dangers. Some might say, well, geez, I, I guess I need to send out 1500 mailings and test the area. But that's not a good approach. You know, Scott Todd always talks about the market speaking to you. And if you're not, if you're not listening, which means you don't have, you have time to listen, right? You gotta have that reactive component of waiting and seeing and listening to what people are saying when they're countering or accepting your offer. So I do think it's a, it's the best overall pragmatic approach just to be steady, you know, with it. The tortoise and the hare. I guess the, you know, it's the tortoise in this approach.

I love it. I love it. And I like the grocery analogy. I have my own analogy. But Scott Todd, do you want the second to last word on this?

I do. And then I have another question too. So I'm still another question, but like, my own opinion is that it's crazy. It really is crazy to go out and to deploy a thousand. I mean, everybody's kind of said the same thing here, right? A thousand or whatever. It's a little aggressive. And what it reminds me of is like, when you learn to fly a plane, one of the things that I was taught is like, gentle on the controls, right? Like if you just imagine, like you're in the air flying and all of a sudden, like, you need to turn. So what do you do? You don't bank the plane. I mean, maybe Dave Schmidt would bank the plane when he was in the military, right, like, because he needed to. But if you've ever been on an airliner, they're not jerking the plane around up there, right? Like, it's a smooth, easy thing. It's a gentle turn. It's called a standard rate turn. Okay? So it takes light touches to. To turn the plane. And I think that that's the way it is with mailing, too. It's like light touches, right? Like, you can go in there like a bull in china shop and just smash through everything, trying to deploy as many letters as you can to, like, rush it. But honestly, if you're trying to rush this business, well, you're going to be sorely disappointed because this is not a business that you're going to rush, in my opinion, right? Like, I've never seen anybody wake up and, like, have a. Because they sent out a boatload of offers, have a boatload of properties, and then they have a boatload of sales. You kind of have to time it, right? Like, when I got going, my goal was to buy a property a week and sell a property a week. Just one a week. Let me see if I can just time this thing. And, you know, then I was selling one on a regular basis. I'm like, man, I better start buying two a week. So then all of a sudden I had to start pushing my mailings out to kind of keep up with the demand, you know. But if you go out and you buy, let's say, 10 properties at one time, well, selling 10 properties like that, that's a whole. That's a lot of work in one month. It really is. And until you build up to that, you're gonna be disappointed. You're gonna probably burn yourself out. So if you're just starting out, well, I would tell you to use some caution. But if you've been doing this for a while and you know your numbers well, then you know your numbers and you're going to listen to this call and you're like, well, whatever. But it does bring up another question too, right? And that is, I've had people tell me, oh, well, I mail out a thousand letters and I get. I buy one. And if. If I emailed out a thousand letters and bought one, I would be, like, sick, like, physically sick. So it begs the question, what is the response rate? I know mine, but what is yours? I mean, is it one per thousand or is it much better than that?

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone made a good point. And the consensus is you can send out too many offers at one time. You want to be agile. You want to have a, you know, 20 at a time or 20 a day and do it consistently. You want to be able to gauge your market, make changes as you get feedback. And the analogy I wanted to make was I love the working out analogy to this business, but imagine your first week of working out. You have never worked out before. You go into the gym and you want to bench. You know what Bossman's benching. And if you guys haven't met bossman at boot camp or Zayna, like, these are big guys, right? Like, they're probably benching 250, 300, like big numbers. You shouldn't start off doing too much that you'll get hurt. You're just literally going to hurt yourself or burn yourself out in that first month. Either way, it's no bueno. So, but to start off slowly, methodically, and build up your team so that you can handle that type of volume, there's nothing wrong with it, but in the beginning, there's nothing beats the slow and steady of the tortoise analogy. So I thought it was a really great topic and very clear. There was just no dissension that you can send out too many offers at once. Scott Todd, what was the other question you wanted to ask?

The response rate, like, is one, are you happy with one per thousand? Is that what you're getting? Or is your response rate better or worse? Like, what's your response rate? Because I hear people tell me, like, oh, I'm out a thousand offers and I bought one. I'm like, that I would be physically sick. Something's wrong. In my opinion.

Yeah, your response rate should be 3 to 5%. If it's not, your offers are too low. If it's over 5%, your offers are probably too high. You should probably be getting nervous. And I mean, these are the metrics that have been around forever. So, you know, it would be an interesting question to just quickly pull the group. Scott Bossman, what is your response rate?

It depends on the couple different areas I'm mailing. So kind of my sweet spot is I'm typically able to purchase one, sometimes two properties out of every hundred mailings. There's an area I work that's a little bit higher value land, where maybe I'm able to purchase one property of every couple hundred mailings. So I think it does depend a little bit on area. But yeah, I would, I would totally agree. If I'm sending out a thousand mailings, I'm not able to purchase a property or one property that would indicate I'm doing something wrong.

Absolutely. Eric Peterson.

I've got an area I'm mailing right now where I'm getting a higher response rate and am adjusting offer prices downward because exactly what you said. You know, I'M starting to see too many accepted offers, which tells me I should be buying for less.

All right, Zen master Mike Zaino.

Yeah, typically the 3 to 5%, you know, response, but then 1 to 2% on the close. And I think this also points to a huge, you know, this kind of goes back to another topic where people will sometimes, oops, sorry, did I just disappear on you? No, you're back where, you know, people would say, I'm gonna pick an area close to me to test this model out. And they live in, like, Pennsylvania or they live in, like, Massachusetts. And so, you know, then they're sending out all these awful letters because they've already broke the model. Right. So the model works from the beginning. It works left to right. You don't just kind of like, plug in and say, okay, well, 3 to 5% out of acceptance rate or response rate out of every hundred. Great, let me mail my neighborhood. No, I mean, there's a way and there's a reason why we go where we go and do what we do. So anyway, I think that kind of, when we see these people talk about their response, we could always. And we can always diagnose that, too. There's someone who was on our. We had a little get together last night, a pre boot camp get together, and someone had sent out a lot of letters with no response. And I said, let's sit down at boot camp. I guarantee you in two minutes we can diagnose that problem, because we see it all the time. There are some very. And that's why when you scale up, as everybody's talking about, you can diagnose quicker and at a lower price point and with less work, and it just makes so much more sense.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Mimi, how about you?

Well, I go for a 5% acceptance rate. Right. 1% buy rate. In some of my counties, it's a little different. Right. But as long as I'm buying at least one per hundred and I keep my pricing the same.

Yeah, absolutely. And I should have said that, that the response rate is different than the close rate. We are at a 1% close rate, but a 3 to 5% response rate. Scott, Todd, what about you?

Yeah, I'm right there, Mark. I actually buy about 1.7% of what we mail. And, you know, so on a hundred, I'll buy, you know, 1.7 out of a hundred. So over the long term, that's what I've hit, 1.7%.

So when I hear seven of a deal, what do you close that? Well, do you talk to the person, like, two thirds of the time, they're like, okay, that's it.

Listen, you. You got. You got to think of bigger numbers, like I do. You gotta think, like me more big, big numbers. Not little numbers, like, Yeah, I don't know.

Frontier property.

Right, Right.

Oh, man.

See, we can't just have a love fest on this call.

No, no, I'm gonna start calling you 10x, Scott. Todd. I know, I know you and Grant are, you know, flying your private jets all over town and talking about how much bigger you think than everybody else.

Listen, I'm not going for the 10x on the tail. I'm going for, like 100x on the tail. Even though his plane's probably like a hundred x mine. I don't know.

Yeah, but I think it's, you know, you have a plane. You own a freaking plane.

True, true.

That's true.

And it's probably because you have point seven more deals than me.

Yeah, that's right.

This is probably a great time, Mark, to kind of ask. Last week, you and one other person were both missing, and we were wondering, was there a joint vacation happening?

Mike, Three people.

Three. That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Mimi was accounted for. The two unaccounted are Mark and, you know, his love fest partner, Scott Bossman.

Listen, you know, look, I don't want to start any rumors or anything, but sometimes my wife does listen to the podcast, and. And she's already jealous enough of Scott Bossman, so we can't really. Look, you know, I definitely have an alibi of where I was. I was in New York.

I have a feeling.

Business conference now, you know, was I calling Scott constantly? Was I boxing him constantly? Maybe. Okay, but were we in the physical physically in the same location? You can't prove it. There's no proof. There's no physical proof.

He posted a photo of two feet in front of a campfire. I would look closely at those shoes, recognize them? Was that Mark Podolsky shoes in front of the fire?

Again, no comment. Anyways, I thought this was a great. A great roundtable interview and had tons of value. And now we're at that point of the podcast where we could put Mimi on the spot and ask her for her tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, maybe even a quote. Something actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. Mimi Schmidt, what do you got?

So this week, the tip is not really mine. John Burnett had posted this. He went and tested his deal of the week out at this website, mailtester.com and saw an improvement. His spam rate was lower, so more people were getting the deal of the week. I have my marketing VA trying it for me today, so I'm really curious to see what she finds. So try it out.

Mailtester.com all right. I love it. I love it. Well, I want to thank the listeners. I want to remind them that the only way that going to be able to convince the coaches to keep coming on this roundtable is if you do three little favors. You got to subscribe, you got to rate, you got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review to supportlandgeek.com we're going to send you the $97 passive income launch kit for free as well as our whole tailing course, which is going to teach you how to double your money in 30 days or less. So please do that again. Learn more about how you can start creating passive income just like everybody on this call@thelandgeek.com training all right, Scott Bossman, are we good?

We are excellent.

Eric Peterson, are we good? Great Zen master.

Awesome.

Mimi.

Great.

Scott. Todd. We're good, Mark. All right. I want to thank all of you. Our future me wants to thank all of you for being a boot camp. It was a great boot camp in Phoenix. So the people are hearing this. It's. We haven't had it yet, but I'm assuming it was great. It's always great, right?

Yep, it really is.

There really is nothing more special, I think, than being in that room where everybody is singing from the same song sheet. Everyone wants to help everybody else. And it's, it really is my favorite part of Land Geek is meeting everyone in person, you know, hearing people's stories in real time, watching people do the deals in real time. It's, it's transform. It's really a transformative weekend. And if you're not going to be at Phoenix, we've already booked San Antonio January 10th through 12th. Learn more, email us support thelangic.com we'll have the booking link at thelangic.com Bootcamp up as soon as possible, but certainly start planning right now. And I think we're gonna be at the St. Anthony's Hotel again. We just signed contracts. I should name the note. I should know the name of the hotel, but I'm not 100% certain. I'm pretty sure it's Saint the Anthony's, the one we were at last year. It's a great hotel right by the Riverwalk. All Right. Are we ready to do this?

Yes.

1, 2, 3, let's. Freedom ring. Oh, my gosh.

Pretty good today. Yeah.

I mean, not bad, you know. Yeah.

I've been getting a lot of phone calls and this is the opening line. I hear you coming to Atlanta.

Okay. The rumors. The rumor mill has started and I am warming up to Atlanta in October. Yes, for sure. But it's all contingent upon Scott Todd and figuring out restaurants.

Oh, I got. There's no figuring it out. I got the restaurant.

You do? Oh, I'm signing contracts. All right, fine.

This restaurant, so good. I told my wife and she's like, I might have to go there. I'm telling you.

And will you. Will you fly to Atlanta on your plane, Scott?

I'm hoping. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I've been.

I've been scoping it out. It's about. About three hour flight for me. Not bad.

Wow.

Not bad at all.

That's not bad.

I hear the Gilligan song. Three hour tour.

Might have to swoop in, pick up Eric first. Give me a little hour, you know?

Yeah. So Thursday night it's on me, I guess, to. To figure out a good restaurant for us foodies.

Not gonna delegate that.

Should I? I feel like my pride's at stake here, considering how much Tate's been talking about Orlando in Tampa, mainly Tampa.

Hey, at the. At the boot camp in August. No, April, when we're at the same hotel. Where did we eat Thursday night?

I know, I'm trying to take myself. I can't remember.

Well, it was. See, it's far from my area, so I do have to do some research. It's not. We're like 25, 30 minutes from where I live.

We didn't leave the hotel that night, did we?

Did we? I don't think we did. The hotel was good hotel at all. I don't think we did. That's pretty weak.

Normally when we go to Arizona, it's weak. Just saying.

Wow, that really. Boy, when Scott cuts, he cuts deep.

0.7%. You gotta feel it.

The food. The food in Tampa is 0.7% better.

Better.

That's all right. That's all right. It's game on now. You're. You're going to be eating your words the next podcast.

I can't. I can't wait. I can't wait to like. I'm going. When we get this call, I'm going to go and get like a graphic designer to write like 0.7. I'm going to get T shirts printed. 0.7%.

I mean, you're going to show up.

To boot camp on Friday and, like, walk in the room, and everybody's gonna be holding their point seven shirts.

Bad enough. That's like, I have to. I have to look at Eric's hashtag team Scott shirt right now. He's gonna get one that says hashtag Team Scott and then, like, point seven.

See, we're looping Eric back in.

Eric's been.

Eric's been hanging low, and somehow he got into the.

Eric, where'd you go?

He's showing you Team Eric. Hashtag Team Eric.

He's working on the logo he's working on right now. He has to. Eric, is that where you just went?

Yeah, I'm done. He's 0.7% better. I can't wait to see where we eat on Thursday.

No, it's a dish best served cold.

Okay.

My French dish. Everybody's gonna have, like, an amazing meal. And, like, all Scott's menu is gonna say in like. In like. It's like French is. Are you going to have the three course revange meal? Listen, the chef has prepared something very special for you.

I got this cool thing on my phone called, like, Uber Eats. I can have any food I want delivered. Just saying.

Yep.

Fake news. Really? That's a thing, though.

I think we should just end this call now, Mark.

I know. We really should. Okay. Yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna go curl up in the corner in fetal position with my. With my phone and do my Yelp research, and I'm bringing it.

Mark, when he. When you go for your haircut and they ask if you want the one or two, say you want the 0.7. Ah.

And on that, everyone have a great day, and we'll see everybody in a few days on point seven. So excited to see everybody. Thanks, everybody.