Hey, everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams from the REtipster podcast. Today, I'm talking with Nicholas Nick from Lead Mining Pros. So Nicholas specializes in cold calling and texting and lead generation for real estate investors. Today, we're digging into something that sounds simple on the surface, but honestly, most investors completely butcher it. We're talking about lead conversion. So not lead generation, but conversion, actually getting leads across the finish line in closing deals. A lot of people think that lead generation is the hard part. They think that if they just get enough inbound calls and enough text replies and enough seller leads, the deals will magically happen. And there is some credence to that, getting a lot of leads, but that's only part of it. Nicholas has a different perspective on this. He's thinking that leads don't just die naturally, but investors kill them by following up poorly or asking the wrong questions or giving up way too early and not following up at all. We're going to talk about what good follow-up actually looks like here, when to follow up, how often, what to say, how to recognize real distress and respond to it without putting people into neat little boxes, and where the line is between persistence and just being annoying. So with that, Nicholas, welcome. How's it going? Well, first of all, that was beautiful, Seth. You just did an amazing job of embodying everything.

Like all of my expertise, you just killed it. Your intro just like pumped me up. Big time. Mission accomplished. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. So to kick this off. When you say lead conversion, what exactly does that mean to you? So here's what I tell clients. The first problem you have is, where am I going to get my leads from? Okay, now I've fixed that. You now have leads. But now there's a new problem. What am I going to do with all these leads? So for me, simply put, lead conversion is what you're supposed to be doing with the leads. Okay? And I have a very simple process on how to handle it. I teach it through integrity. I have this course, and I probably said the word love 20 times. You want to get the seller to love you is what you want to do. And even if they don't, you want to get them as close to that line of love as possible. Maybe you're just best friends. Maybe you're good friends. Maybe you're just friends. But if you shoot for love, you will win every time. And so I teach these strategies about how to convert a lead using integrity. Well, that's really interesting. So how do you get people to love you? What's the trick to that? In my course, I talk about doing what you say you're going to do. Showing up when you said you were going to show up. Being transparent. Being in communication with them. One example is you call them when you say you're going to call them. Whether they answer or not is irrelevant. You call them. And then, you know, when they miss that call, you can text them and say, hey, I was just calling for our scheduled appointment.

Nothing wrong with it. They might have forgot they scheduled it with you. We're creating an agreement. We're honoring it. We're keeping it. Whenever it comes to talk about the property, I have this great strategy where we ask them what's wrong with the property or we find out the due diligence. And then when we make the offer and they say, oh, that seems low. No, hey, I totally understand that. You mentioned the property needed to be cleared. Were you going to clear that or did you want me to do that?

And what I call this is creating like an itemized checklist. Your offer isn't just your offer because it's a number you pulled out of the thin air. Your offer is your offer because, hey, you said you had an endangered owl on the property. That's going to be about $8,000, you know, to get that owl offer there. I'm going to cover that. You know, you mentioned it didn't have utilities. You know, that's about $15,000 install to get utility. So it's like I train my clients to make it all make sense, right? And I think when we interact with someone and we feel transparency and we feel communication and we feel integrity, them doing what they said they were going to do, we automatically begin to like that person. I'll give you a great example. Literally, one of my first customers ever at Lead Mining says to me, he goes, Nick, man, I didn't close a deal, but you know what? You did exactly what you said you were going to do.

Boom, that guy still uses me nine years later. That's how I set it up, is that there's no smoke and mirrors. There's no intimidation, right? There's no takeaways, no aggressive negotiation. I don't teach any of that. I teach showing up, making it make sense, being in integrity, because here's the philosophy. Deals aren't taken, they're given, right? This person could sell this piece of land at a discount to anybody that they want to. You want them to pick you. How do we get them to pick you? So that's how I like to think about it. And then the other important aspect is one of the tenants I teach is always think about the seller. I think it's very easy and common for us to think about ourselves, right? But we really need to be thinking about the seller and what they're experiencing and what they're going through. Stop thinking about your bottom line and really lean in to what's going on in their world. So I'll give you two questions real quick, if that's okay. So first is the opener, okay? Hey, you spoke to Nick about the three-acre property in Texas. Is that right? Oh, yeah, yeah, I sure did. Okay, well, hey, well, so Nick told me you might be interested in selling, but why don't you tell me how did you plan on doing that?

That question is going to give you the keys of the castle. You're basically asking them in a really tricky way, so what gave you the idea to sell in the first place? But if you just came out and said it, they'd say, because you called me. That's why I want to sell. But when you say, how did you plan on doing that? You're massaging the relationship. You're getting a deeper answer with a very easy question. So that's number one. My next favorite question that I started having my clients saying is, is there anything about this property that's causing you to lose sleep? And this is a really powerful question. Because again, it's our way of asking, what do you hate most about this property? And if you just come out and say that, they might say nothing. But they could now say, well, you know, the tax bill, every year I pay it. I have to get it mowed once a month. You know, my wife has been on me about selling it because she wants to go on vacation to Disney World. I learned that question through my own examples. Is I actually own a four unit, and I started losing sleep over it because I had a really bad tenant in there. And then it hit me that I think as soon as any of us lose sleep over anything in our life.

We either got to solve it or we got to sell it. Okay. So asking that question, is there anything causing you to lose sleep? That's a real distressor. If someone's in bed and they're like, oh, my God, you know, that's really the root of what's pissed off. So I like those two questions. And again, we're playfully getting these questions. So we're finding easy ways to get hard answers. Yeah. I'm curious about the cadence and the process this goes through. I don't recall exactly how Lead Mining Pros works, but many cold calling outfits that I know of, it sort of starts with this initial call that the cold calling agency handles to figure out, do you want to sell or not? That's call number one. Then there's call number two, where it might be the investor who's stepping in or maybe like a lead manager that's like, you know, ushering it along to the next step and then possibly call three or the actual like negotiation and possibly, hey, we'll send you a purchase agreement. Like that happens. So when you talk about building rapport and getting them to love you, when is that starting? Because like if I'm coming in on the third call and that's when I'm closing it, like can I really get them to love me in one call and close a deal all in one sitting? The real strategy comes in as you should really be the second call, right? So I'm called number one.

Okay, I generate the lead. With the good first call script, you shouldn't have a VA handling that if you have a good first call script, you know? Sure, if you have tons of leads and maybe they're like known to be low quality leads, having a lead manager is brilliant, right? But even then, you should be cherry picking the hot leads. Lead managers only get obviously bad leads. Any lead that looks good should go right to you. So here's what I teach. I'm the first call.

The cold call. You are the next touch. How did you plan on doing that? The other thing about this call that's really important, and my customers have been loving this, that call is what I call imaginary tea time. So I don't know if you have kids, Seth. I don't, but I remember being one. And if you have a daughter and you're playing with them, while you're playing with them at the park or during tea time, this isn't the time to confront their realities. Isn't the time to talk to them about their behavior in school. This isn't the time to bring up anything negative at all. You are in their world during imaginary tea time, right? And that's what I recommend my clients do with the seller. We're not arguing about price, confronting them about any realities. We're not doing anything that could hurt our first impression on that first call. We are playing with them in their space on that first call. We do have a couple of questions, but we're not rebuttaling, we're not confronting. And then I always point out, I said, when was the last time you met someone and they argued with you the very first time you met? And what does that relationship look like today?

Okay. I guarantee you, anyone who argues with you the first time you meet them, you do not like that person. So the first step I teach is to be really playful on that first call. Then at the end of that first call, we ask permission. Hey, so here's what's going to happen. I want to make sure this property is right for me. So for the next two days, I'm going to do online research. Don't say comps. Huge mistake. Say language they understand. Okay. I'm going to do some online research. I'm going to make sure this property is a good fit. If it is a good fit, I'm going to make you an offer. Could we set up a call in about 48 hours, two days, and then I'll do the research and then we can go over what that offer would look like. So we're asking permission for the third call.

So the way I look at it, I'm the first call. The second call, I call it putting on our customer service hat. And the third call, we're putting on our sales hat. Now on that third call, we are mildly confronting and maybe I'll even call inquiring. Okay. Because we still don't want to beat their door down. Now we need to ask more due diligence questions. Now we have to make sure it's a fit. So we get a little bit tougher on that call, but it's not a tough in a way that they experience it. We're just not being total pushovers playing 100%. So that example you gave earlier about the endangered owl that costs $8,000 to remove. So you're not saying that on call number two, the first call that you have with them. That's exactly right. Okay. So if they bring that up, you just say, oh, okay. Or I guess that would be something that you found in your due diligence that you save for call three, basically.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And then, you know, if you do find it, maybe you could, have you looked into getting that fixed? It's like you're talking to a best friend about their life, right, kind of thing. And it's good to know, it's good to probe. It might be great if they're a vibey conversation to figure out how far they've ran that solution down because that could be another pain point. Oh, you know, I don't know, man. I looked up one thing, it was 5,000. I had to call the Wildlife Federation and boom, another distress marker, right? But we don't twist that arm until the third call because we want to be all good times. Another thing I may have skimmed over is I say, look for a friendly seller, okay? I think people, they often do this. If your seller is easy to talk to, that's motivated. We have to look at it like that. Because even though, yeah, they might not say what we want them to say today, but you know what? If they're easy to talk to, they might say it tomorrow. They might say it next time. So one thing I do in my business, here's a great strategy we use as well. One is when we get off the phone with the seller, Here, note their energy.

Okay. And then also know what we think is stopping us from taking this to the next level. What I do with my acquisition managers is I have them make those two notes. And then once a week, we have what I call a battle plan meeting. Okay. And then we talk about all the objections we received that week and how to move forward through that lead together. And I think that's really important, but also the energy is important. If someone's very grumpy and they're like $600,000 and don't ever effing call me again. Click. Okay. That guy, maybe we leave alone. Okay. But if someone's like, hey, pal, you know, I get calls like this all the time, you know, and me and the wife, we're just kind of tired of it. And, you know, we want about $600,000. That's someone we can massage a little bit. That's someone that we can focus on. So I always say, look for friendliness as well. And feel free not to waste any time with an angry seller. That person is going to make you miserable all the way to the bank. And then they're probably going to cancel the contract the day before anyways, right? Those are some of my theories to just have a more frictionless conversion. And that's because, you know, with my strategy, calling and texting, we're going to get you a lot of leads. So what I teach my clients, the last thing is to grade their leads. And this is to your lead manager point, A, B, C, and D.

You work A's and B's, lead manager work C's and D's, okay? Or if you don't have a lead manager, don't even work the C's and D's until all the A's and B's are done. Because if I'm sending you 40 leads, I want you working on the 12 that are A's and B's. That's where I want you, right? And then when those 12 are done, then goes the C's and D's. So that's the other thing I teach. I'm not telling anyone to waste time with the lead that doesn't look good, But I do want them to prioritize leads that look great first. I always say, everyone hates shitty leads until there's no leads. Then we're like, hey, where'd that lead go?

We got nothing fresh to work today. Where's that one guy? So that's the other strategy I teach. And then those would go to a lead manager for sure. And the lead manager can decipher the A's and B's. Just by looking at the information that you provide? Or do they have to call to figure out if it's an A or B? I tell the client to decipher the information, right? Now, if you have an American lead manager, they can decipher stuff. I don't think a VA should ever be making a decision that makes you money in your business personally, right? So I tell my clients, you know, you get a lead. If it's a hot one, you work it. If it's not, feel free to give it to the lead manager. A couple of my clients have like some standards, like did they give us a timeline? Did they give us a price? So they'll have like a little checklist of like, hey, if they were easy to talk to, if they were friendly on the call, if they told us a timeline and they told us a reason to like answer like four of our 12 questions, I'll work it. If they were like messing with the cold caller or they were vague, then the lead manager would work it. But I have my clients generally discern that. But if you create a checklist like I just mentioned, you can totally give that to a VA. But then you just have to make sure the VA is following the checklist. And actually, just to make sure we're on the same page with this. So when we talk about a VA versus a lead manager versus an acquisition manager versus you, like, who are all these people and what order they go in? So my understanding is step one, right at the very top. That's where a company like Lead Mining Pros comes in, handles that first call.

Step two, that's where we're talking about. This could be the lead manager if it's like a low quality lead and they need to work on it. Or it could go right past that to step three, which would be like the acquisitions manager. This is the person involved in like actually negotiating the price, set of the purchase agreement, like getting the thing closed if we can get it closed. And then this VA role that you're talking about, where do they fit in this at all, Nicholas, when you say that? I consider the lead manager a VA. I was interchanging those definitions, right? Now for me, if we were to define it, a VA itself might just be an administrative person. Another thing I would say, just to let everybody know, is lead manager, VA, no matter what it is, They should never do something you haven't perfected. So here's what I teach my clients. Oh, I want to have my lead manager do it. Great. Have you ever spoken to these leads? No, I haven't. Okay. So here's what I tell my clients. You need to work the first 50 leads and figure out what your lead manager should even be saying.

Hiring someone for 10, 15, even $20 an hour does not mean that they're qualified or know what they're doing. It just means you don't want to do it, so you hired someone to do it. But what I really recommend is how I work. I want to do the first 20 to 50. I know this works. I know this doesn't work. As soon as you know what does work and doesn't work, then you can train a lead manager on that. So one thing I would just stress is make sure you know how to do it. Because if you don't know how to do it, you can't audit them. You can't double check them and you're not in control anymore. If you don't know how to do it, you are a victim of whatever they do because you can't step in. You can't coach. You can't help. You can't guide. So all my clients, do you got to do the first several? Create the process, create the script, then pass that off. But even, like I said, after you do that, now you have to hold that mechanism, who's giving a VA or a lead manager a script doesn't mean they're going to follow it. You know, I like saying all that because so often people think they can outsource so easily. And the truth is there's so much that can go wrong when outsourcing. And if you haven't perfected it, it's going to be like a wild goose chase.

Yeah. So I totally get why you're saying that. I don't disagree with anything. But for the land investor out there or real estate investor who is hiring this role because they're terrible at it and they know they're terrible at it and they know they shouldn't be in that role. So they're trying to hire somebody. Do they basically just need to get over it and figure it out and get good at it and then hire it? Is that the answer? Absolutely. Well, who are they hiring? Hiring someone for $5 an hour to do something you're not good at? I mean, saying that out loud, like does that even sound like a good idea? No, not at all.

But if they come recommended or referral, not recommended from themselves, oh, sir, I close lots of deals. I closed a ton of deals. No, not you. Tell me about your last boss. Why are you not working for him anymore if you did such a great job? So I will say vetting them for experience is likely very important. But here's what I tell myself, because I have 40 employees, which means I have 40 jobs I don't want to do, right? In my company. That's what an employee is. They do a job I don't want to do. And I've done all of their jobs. Absolutely all of them. Now, I'm an ex-restaurant manager. And if anybody knows restaurant managers, When I would get hired at a restaurant, there's a three-month training program as a manager, and they made me work every position for one week. So I do come from a different cloth when it comes to working. If I never was in the dish pit, I can't tell you how to be in the dish pit. If I never flipped the burger, I can't tell you how to flip the burger. Now, here's the way I look at it.

Because it sucks. In doing work, you don't want to do sucks. But what I do to calm myself down is I go, just one month. I just have to do it for one month. And if I do it for one month and I take good notes and I pay close attention, I will never have to do it again. You know, when I created Lead Mining, I was our only employee and our cold caller and our sales guy and the guy who did all the data stuff, okay? And after three months, I did it all myself. I was so busy. It was a beautiful problem, but I'm like crying at my computer. I'm only me. I'm working 75 hours a week. I can't do any more. It was crushing me. And then that weekend, I made a post online. I hired five American cold callers. I trained them all myself. It was a four-hour training that started at six in the morning. We covered everything. From that day forward, I never made another cold call. And so when you do it I always try to give myself A graduation date I only want to do this for one month I only want to do this for three months Those little sayings.

Give us the courage, in my opinion, to help muscle through things that we don't want to do. And the better we are during that month, the less we'll ever have to do it again. And you might have to revisit in six months. You know, one thing about employees and systems is my employees, nine years in business, they'll just wake up one day and start doing something different. Okay. So there is that. You got to get in there and wrangle everybody back up. But that's also why you also need to learn how to do it, because they're going to lose track sometimes as well. Well, it's interesting. In your restaurant example, I think that's really cool that you have to do every position. But what I did not hear you say was that you got really good at all these different positions. Kind of sounds like you just slogged through it and it was kind of miserable and then you couldn't wait to be done. And now you can tell them what to do. But do you have to actually get good at talking on the phone in order to tell other people what to do? So there's a couple of answers to that. Number one, the worse you are, the better it works.

Our newest cold callers often do great because they're not polished, right? So it's like, there's a couple of things that one is when it comes to talking, when they can tell that you're a little new at it, it's actually kind of endearing to the seller, right? Everyone else sounded so polished and so good. So I don't think you necessarily have to get good. That's what I like to do, you know, but you do have to understand the role. You do have to know how to coach them through their problems. No $5 an hour employee is ever going to call you and tell you about their obstacles because they don't know what they don't know, right? So we do need to maybe gain a philosophical and fundamental understanding.

Of what they should be accomplishing. So one example of that would be, and I teach this to my team. So what I do is I use Kanban boards. In Stride, you guys have the same thing. You guys have those lead flow boards. I teach my employees and clients. They start on the far left Kanban. It's our job to push them to the right, right? Over here is new lead. Over there is closed deal, right? So we got to figure that out. So that's a good fundamental. So then I can just log into my CRM and see where they're all bottlenecking. So this is a great point. Now, I don't need to be good at it, but I need to be good at managing it, right? So now I can see they're all bottlenecking at contract sent. I think we've all been there, right? I've learned that the hard way. Contract sent sometimes could be easy to get to, but contract signed can be quite the hump to leap over, right? And so then we go to our guy and we're like, hey, I see we're bottlenecking here. How can I help? What are we getting stumped with? I call this role being the consultant in your own business, right? Because again, I don't need to be the master here. I am really smart. I'm really good at solving problems. I may not be good at the emotional intelligence or talking to the seller, but I am good at working with my employee to overcome the problem, but it's just identifying it. So it's kind of a long answer, but you don't necessarily have to get good at it, but you to understand the fundamentals and be able to hold them accountable to a high standard.

Employees perform at whatever standard they are held to. Okay. And so if you can't hold that standard or have that standard, then they're going to sink down a little bit lower. But if you can get it in a way where you can't hold that standard to them, then it's going to go over really well.

Yeah. I just think of my friend, Kieran Sheel, who had a conversation with him about a year ago, and he was talking about like sales was not his forte. Like talking to people on the phone was not something he enjoyed, but I feel like he was a little bit unique and rare and that like, he just embraced it. Like he just leaned into the discomfort. He got really good at it. He is good at it. And so now he's like, I would imagine a pretty good manager of salespeople. But a lot of people, I don't know if it's by choice or by denial or what, but like they just struggle with it. And it's going to be a tall order for them to ever get good. And I'm just wondering, like, do they have no business doing a land investing business? Do you kind of have to be good? But it sounds like as long as you can kind of understand the fundamentals, maybe you can survive, squeak by. So when you outsource like that, there's a lot more obstacles. Are you hiring correctly? Are you training correctly? It's now on your leadership. So what I will say is this to everybody watching. If you're not good at it, you better be a hell of a leader. If you're not a good leader and you're not good at it, just go back to work. And that's not an insult. That's not a jab. But I am a great leader and a great doer. My restaurant years for 13 years of experience, I didn't even realize all the treasures that gave me until I owned this business. And all these poems kept coming up. I'm like, how do I know all the answers? My restaurant industry taught me. So what I will say is, you're killing it with the point you just made. If it's not skill set, it's leadership.

We have to have checks and balances and quality assurance and accountability and write-ups and improvement performance plans. And some people would wager to say that's even worse than just cold calling. That's really the battle, the internal struggle we're having. Do I want to build out a corporation with all these systems and processes, or do I just want to get at it? And the last thing I'll share is this.

When we talk about getting good at something we don't want to do, I didn't want a cold call. The reason why I started cold calling nine years ago is I saw other investors making a killing. I used to be an executive at an education company, and they only taught direct mail. In the end, a lot of the clients were hurting financially with direct mail because they paid for the education, then the mail, and then like, crap, the phone didn't ring. Now what? And they just felt hurt. So my solution as an executive was, hey, calling's free, baby. So I started teaching everyone to cold call. And then when I was teaching them all to cold call, they were really successful. Then I went home and I started cold calling. Now here's what I did to get really good in the shortest period of time possible. I cold called every day from my cell phone, but I opened up Zoom in the background and I recorded me cold calling. At the end of a four-hour cold calling shift, I'd go out to dinner, most likely, or eat, come back and I would watch the video of me cold calling. It was the cringiest, most painful. Oh, why did I say that? What am I doing? What's going on? But I have a rule.

Embarrassment is the mother of all teachers. Okay. And what is better to be embarrassed by yourself to yourself? No one's even watching. I'm the only one watching. I watch these videos for three months. I'm not kidding. Four hours of calling a day, four hours of video watching in the evening. And I got so good, so fast. I founded this company after three months of cold calling. Now we make over a million dollars a year in sales. So it's like doing it and overcoming it, man, you're just awesome. Now I can run a team of effective cold callers because I created the script. I created the process. I did it. And you know what? I haven't cold called in seven and a half years. But again, that's the perk of muscling through it. But on a separate point, We also have to realize what we're capable of. The clients call me all the time. This is why they hire me. Look, Nick, I get home from work. The kids need me. The wife needs me. I don't have time to be cold calling these people, right? That's why a lot of the times life does rear its ugly head. So I do think it's important to have a proper conversation with yourself and see what you can actually take on. Real estate investing itself is something to take on.

Cold calling and lead conversion is something to take on. It's also very important not to overwhelm yourself. So I don't say jump in your business, try to be the best at everything. Focus on what is the most important and maybe even focus one thing at a time until you have it. So I'm not telling you to overwhelm yourself. I'm not telling you to learn every aspect of your business, but I am telling you that, you know, let's compartmentalize it. If I'm learning land investing, learn it. And I'm going to teach myself to cold call or I'm going to teach myself acquisitions. I'd like to just eat the elephant one bite at a time. I know one of the big things we wanted to talk about in this conversation was this idea of not just lead generation, but lead conversion. And you have said that there's no such thing as a dead lead, only you killing it. So in your experience, like what are some of the common ways that investors, accidentally kill leads without even knowing it? All I do is generate hundreds of leads for people every week. I meet with them biweekly on Zoom calls. I had a guy say that, Nick, man, these leads suck. Yeah, tell me about that. What's going on? I read the notes.

And these aren't good leads. I go, okay, you didn't call? No, I didn't call. Read the notes. I just told her the leads suck. Okay, well, I really highly recommend you call the lead. So the first thing is inaction. How do we kill a lead? We talk ourselves out of calling it. And I get it. I said it earlier. Your wife needs you. Your kids need you. Your job's chipping away at you. You really want to get home from a nine-hour day and call nine strangers I sent you today and then to have a talk with them you've probably never had with anybody before and then, you know, fail through that. That's tough. That's a tall order. I respect it. But I ask my clients, the first step is to catch themselves when they talk themselves out of calling leads. Okay, so I have a couple of rules. The first rule is every lead's worth two to five minutes of your time. I'm like, Nick, I don't want to waste my time. We're going to waste two minutes? What are we talking about? You call a lead, it takes one minute for a phone to ring and a voicemail to pick up. Okay, it takes another minute if they do pick up. And if they're happy, the call stays on. If they yell at you, the call ends. So worst case, it's a two-minute phone call. So you waste two minutes of your time. So what I try to do is I try to teach my clients these fundamentals to take action and knock it into their head. And I also say, look, I looked up the lead on Zillow. It had a different owner. This didn't match up. So I didn't call. Stop researching the lead. Call the lead. Ask them, how did they plan on selling?

We need to be aware of creating doubt in our mind and that doubt causing us to not take action. That's step number one. So the first way we kill a lead is we disqualify it way too early. That's number one. Number two is we kill a lead because they say something, and this is going to blow everyone's mind, and we just don't know what to say, That's it. We just don't know what to say. I had a guy be like, Nick, these weren't good leads. I called them. You wanted 200,000. Okay. Got it. Yeah. What'd you say?

Oh, well, I told him it wasn't a fit and I hung up the phone. Okay. I wouldn't do that in the future. So now what I do, and I'll give you the link to my scripts as well. So your audience and anyone watching can follow, but I give my clients a script with six most common objections and three rebuttals per objection, because I realized that my clients were accidentally killing leads just because they didn't have the language of what to say next. They want more for the property. Great, how'd you come up with that number?

All right, wonderful. Well, hey, tell me more about the property. I would love for the property to be worth more. That works great for both of us. So is there a mountain range or a lake on the property? And I call it getting stumped by the seller. That's the fundamental. Don't get stumped. When you get stumped, you're gonna hang up the phone. It's okay to get stumped once. It's going to happen. People are going to say things to you. You're not going to know what to say. When we get stumped and we end that call, we need to figure out what am I going to say, Next time someone says that to me, and that's what I teach my clients is it's okay to get stumped, but you need to jump online. We have AI now at our fingertips, which is huge. I mean, geez, if we had AI 10 years ago, this whole world would be different. But now we can go, hey, a seller said this to me. Give me four objections. You know, AI might not even be great, but two of the 10 rebuttals they give you might be amazing. But so I teach my clients that as soon as you get stumped, just make sure that question never stumps you again. And so that's the other way we kill leads is we instill doubt and we give up. We disqualify too early. And then the other way is we really don't know what to say when they say certain things to us. And then I call it playing dead. We're like, oh, I don't know what to do.

Calls over. That's the other strategy. So in that moment when I am stumped and I realized, wow, I got to listen back to this and not get stumped out again. But still, I'm in that moment. I don't know what to say. What do I do? Do I hang up or waffle around and make something up? Or like, how do I not make a fool of myself and not make it worse? First, you were probably just gonna hang up the phone anyways, right? So anything better than that is probably good. Now, even if it's like, hey, you know what? Let me do some research. I'm gonna get with my partner. I'll make sure I call you back, like with an answer on that. Let me get to the next question. That could be one strategy. We shelf it. You take a no. The best thing to do is if you're stumped, just say nothing and move on to the next question. Notate that and bring that up on the second call. Is probably going to be your best move to do. The other part I would say, we don't really want to lead them on to our lacking knowledge. Okay, great, boom, on to the next one. I think that that is going to be our best move. Or if we do get stumped, and we do freeze, and we do hang up the phone, because you're going to make that mistake too, take it from a cold caller, you're going to do that. I would get the answer, just try to call them right back as quickly as possible, pick it up where it left off. And that's the other part is, these leads don't die the way we think they do. I have people get leads from us.

And they'll get 20 leads. Oh, Nick, I got 20 leads two weeks ago. Life happened. I never called them. I never called them. They go, I'll call the next ones. No, you call those ones. You got 20 leads waiting for you. I always just try to really just encourage my clients that it's never too late. Of course, when you got the lead was the best time.

But just because it's been three weeks, two weeks, four months, you need to just call that lead. And the other fun part I teach my clients is the uglier the lead, the more fun you should have with it, okay? So maybe try that experimental script. Maybe try something you haven't tried before. You already think it's going to be a bad experience. You might as well learn on that experience. How would you have fun with a bad lead? It sounds miserable. So I'm trying to figure out like what would be fun about that. Well, I'll give you an example. So a lot of people will be like, hey, I want $500,000. Oh, great. So normally, I would never call that lead, maybe, because I like talking myself out of calling leads. But the truth is, you don't have the language. I heard you say the guy at $500,000 and the guy, you know, I looked at the properties in the area. They're only worth about $200,000. So are you just messing with this? You don't want to sell?

So like maybe something you would never say before, if that makes sense. So I would say as a Hail Mary, right? As like, how can I just throw a Hail Mary out there, see if the language works, come up with better language. So when I cold called him.

My rule was I was going to say the same thing five times in a row. If that did not work, I would change my word, my tone. I would change something in the sentence. Okay. Over time, you find out the way language works is that when you say the right words in the right order, it totally unlocks that level in the cellar. So what the part of having fun is actually you playing with your language. Because if you can convert a grumpy, crappy lead, imagine how good that language is going to work on an easier one. So if we already think it's going to waste our time, we might as well throw a Hail Mary, try an experimental line, try to break through that barrier. And then if it works, pay attention when it works. You did something right. And I'll give one quick example on a question I learned. So when I used to cold call myself and they were not a lead.

I always said to my clients, the next best thing I could do is get your phone number on a sticky note in their house. That was the next best thing I could do. So it took me a long time to get to this language I'm about to share with you. But when someone says they're not interested in selling, what I used to say was, I totally understand. Would you maybe mind taking down my direct line and if anything ever changes, just giving me a call? When I said maybe mind, if you actually think about it I'm tricking them because hey do you mind no I don't mind.

Well, no, I don't mind. It means yes. Yes, I'll do that. That also means yes. So I found out in my language that when I said that, 40% of people took my number down. Okay, so that's kind of what I mean by like a Hail Mary. It's like getting fun with it, seeing if we can overcome that obstacle. Hey, call them anyways. Try the line. To me, that's having fun because if we figure that out on a lead that was going to make a zero, A, I might make 30K and B, I might also add new language to my script. Well, regarding the quality of a lead, I know you mentioned earlier sort of classifying as like, yeah, this is an A or a B quality, or this is C or a D, or maybe it's E.

I'm trying to figure out like, what is not a good reason to disqualify a lead and why not? It sounds like too high of a price, not a good reason. Or maybe there's a point at which, yeah, the price is really getting up there. Okay, now you should disqualify them? Like, how can I actually comfortably look at this and say, I'm going to abandon this, and that is the correct decision? How do I know that? To me, the only way to do that is to talk to the lead, right? I think if you disqualify a lead before talking to them, that you are really asking for trouble. We need to talk to them. Their energy is way more important than the notes. So one of the things I would say is never let a note stop you from calling a lead. And the reason why is that was the first time I tell all my clients, that was the first time they spoke to me, okay? Why would they be honest? I say this too. My father had cancer for eight months before he told me.

The closest person in the whole world to me didn't tell me he had cancer for eight months. So why do we often expect a seller to say everything that we want to hear on the first call? I try to train my clients, don't read notes and get discouraged. It's important to understand them. It's important to come up with rebuttals and stuff like that. But let their energy be what allows you to disqualify. Let their angriness, their grumpiness, their bad attitude, dude, let that be a reason never to talk to them again, not the notes made from a text message or from a cold call. So if I'm hearing you right, if there's basically never a situation when you should disqualify a lead without talking to them first, then why have a cold caller at all? Like why not just literally go through the phone book and call everybody that owns land because they're all worth talking to. That is what we do. But our clients don't have time to do that, right? So that actually is what to do.

But at the same time, you know, that's why people hire me. They go, look, I don't have enough time or I hired a VA and they totally sucked. And especially with land, the lead generation rates with land are extremely high, you know, for calling and texting. With land, I also say they're either building or they're selling. What are you doing with it? If the answer is nothing, you should be open to selling. So land, I think, is even more low-hanging fruit. But yeah, I think the answer to your question is, yeah, we absolutely should do that. But no one has really the time. So you outsource that to like someone like us, or we do our text messaging platform and stuff, and then we get the lead to it. I'm looking at this one through the lens of like, okay, the cold call has already happened. Now the lead has landed in my lap and there's never a situation where I shouldn't call them. Even if it looks like an absolutely awful lead that they never should have called in the first place, I still got to call them. That's what you're telling me to do, right?

That's right. So if that's true, if there's never a situation I shouldn't call them, then why don't I just call everybody if they're all worth calling? Like, why have that first line of defense that you're there for? Well, if we only have a 5% contact rate, so we called 1,000 people.

To get 500 on the phone or 50 on the phone. So you don't have time for that. Instead, I'm calling 1,000 people, getting 50. Out of those 50, 10 are becoming leads. So those 1,000 people were seven hours worth of work, right? So that's the exact point. That's a great question because we are shaving. Do you no longer have to do seven to 10 hours worth of work to get these 10 leads? That's time you bought back. And that's why you should call them because you know someone actually already called 1,000 people, 2,000, 5,000 people to generate these 15. And that's the attitude you should be telling yourself. The only people who think they shouldn't call leads are people who aren't confident when you're new low confidence is normal. But I have people talk about their acquisition managers all the time. Oh, my acquisition manager says this. Yeah, because he's not comfortable talking to that lead. That's why he doesn't want to call them. That's why he doesn't want to do it. And so the other part about calling these leads is it builds comfort. You need the reps. You know, I can't go out and build houses and not swing hammers, right? Like I need the reps to also get there. So the one thing I teach my clients is you need the experience. So why wouldn't you call a lead? Do you know what a lead looks like? How many leads have you closed? Do you even know what's good? What's not? So it's almost like they just don't want to do it. Cause that's really what happens. That's what I teach people. Like the truth is you just don't want to do it, right? Just like if a friend invited me out to dinner and I didn't want to go.

How many different excuses were like, Oh, well the kids and we got to cook, we got to party this weekend. You know, we got to do all this stuff. Yeah. You just don't want to do it, but there's a big difference between dinner with friends and trying to quit your job or trying to build wealth for your family, calling all leads, especially if you paid someone to generate them for you, is about you getting experience way more than you closing deals. Once you get enough experience.

Guess what you do with that experience? You close the deals. And so it's more like don't shy away. Stop thinking every call is a closed deal. If it doesn't close, I should be learning. And what did I learn no matter what? So that's the philosophy I have about calling everybody. What makes one of your callers call someone a lead? Is it just if they picked up the phone and talked at all? Or what would cause your call to say, this is not a lead. I'm not going to pass it along. Like how bad does it have to be? Well, they have to tell us they want to sell. That's what a lead is. Okay. Gotcha. A lead is a seller. It's a seller lead. It's not a hello. It's verifying that it's like a real person. It's a real line. Somebody's going to pick up the phone and they've said, yes, they want to sell. But that's pretty much it. We do more. Well, here's our process. So we ask them, hey, I'm looking for the owner of the three acre property in Galveston, Texas. Yes. Right person. We got the right person. Got it. Okay, great. My name's Nicholas. I was wondering, have you ever considered selling before?

Yes. No matter what, that's a lead. I'm going to send that to my clients no matter what. So they might not want to sell now. They just wanted to sell 10 years ago. If they say yes to that, that's a lead? Sure. If they ever considered selling, but yes. So the goal is to cast a wide net. If I call them and say, hey, have you thought about selling in the last 48 hours? That would not go over well. I mean, maybe selling right now would be the way to word it. I wouldn't word it like that though. We don't have a problem with our clients converting leads, right? It's important to cast a wide net. So why not classify that now is what we're talking about? How does that hurt the situation? Because you're creating a narrower path. Isn't that why I'm hiring you though? Is to narrow it down for me? I am narrowing it down for you because I called 2,000 people to get the 20 leads that we got. Even if they don't want to sell right now? Well, you tell me, is a lead that doesn't want to sell in the next two weeks a bad lead to you? Is a lead you make $80,000 on in six months a pain in your ass or is it $30,000 in six months? I had a client call me up and go, all these leads want to sell in three months.

Well, great. Guess who wants to buy in three months? You do. And it is a part of the game. So we get leads and some sell today, some sell tomorrow, some sell in three months. That is your job. We have to stay organized there. If I own any business, if I own a painting business and someone says, hey, I got a mansion. I want it painted in six months. I wouldn't say, kick rocks, buddy. Get out of here. Call me in six months. I only deal with people who want to do this right now. And what you're talking about is the biggest misconception of every real estate investor in the world is you're forgetting, maybe not you, but the person you're referring to is forgetting they're running a business, not a slot machine, not a poker table, a business. And no company in the world turns away a customer in six months that says they're interested today, right? Or at least not a super successful one. So it's like everybody wants that person too. That's why it's up to them to create the system.

To work that lead, right? So it's like if people are maybe looking for a bunch of right nows and they're all in there. I didn't get to it yet, but we asked 12 questions after they say yes to figure out everything, right? So someone's not gonna sit through all this stuff and one of those questions, you know, what's your timeline to sell is one of our questions. So we do ask all that, but that's not what we consider a qualifier. How pissed would you be if someone told me, yes, they did want to sell and because they didn't say one answer right I thought you were incapable of working it. But the question you're saying, and I know you've thought through this very clearly, every word matters because you've done this for so long. The question is, have you ever considered selling? Not, are you considering selling now? So you're talking about like any point in history and that's still good enough. Yes, because that's not the way people understand language. If you talk about, have you ever considered selling? If I say, are you considering selling right now? Is that what you have your cold caller say? If somebody were to say like, yeah, I thought about it 20 years ago, but I'm not anymore. Like, is that a lead? No. Someone says they're not interested in selling. That's not a lead. I guess if they've made it clear. Exactly. Right. And that's what I'm saying. People don't hear the question like that. That's what I'm getting at. What that question is actually doing is allowing us to like, hear them to hesitate. Ah, yeah, no.

Oh, sure. It certainly sounds like you thought about it. You know, oh yeah, you know, me and the wife been talking about it, but you know, we're at odds and blah, blah, blah. Now that's becoming a lead. You kind of follow me on that. So it's like, they aren't computing decisions from like 20 years ago, right? Even though the question is that broad, right? But that question does not hurt. Yeah. I guess that's a good lesson though, that like a lot can be said in a person's tone and in their pauses that you can't see in a spreadsheet on a screen when you're deciding it's not a lead. Like there can be a lot of nuance that you're never going to know if you don't call them, right? To your point. And that's what I tell my clients, they'll say to me, are the leads hot? And I'll say, you know what needs to be hot? Your process.

It doesn't matter how many leads you get. If your process is cold, you're not converting leads, right? I give my clients the process to work the leads. But it's like, if you don't work them and you don't have a great process, it doesn't matter how many leads you get. But the other thing is, the minute you close a lead that you were about to discard, what does your new company policy become? And the thing is, I'm trying to shortcut that for them, right? So, hey, I thought this lead sucked. I just made 50K. I can't believe it. One of my clients, I have this video on YouTube. We send him a texting lead. He calls the guy. He goes, Nick, this lead made no sense. He wanted too much and his wife was a realtor. The next time I called, he talked himself down and said he didn't want to list it with his wife. I guess they have one of those relationships, which I can understand, right? I actually don't want to list it with my life. He drops the price. He calls him again. He drops it. He goes, Nick, I didn't even bring out price drops. This guy ended up saying, well, hey, I'm actually about to put 5K into the property so I can sell it. But if you can buy it as is, I'll take 8K off the price or like some kind of crazy stuff. And so I love this story because if we read too much for the property and his wife was a realtor, people wouldn't call that late.

But when that person does call that lead, that guy said that was the fastest he ever closed a deal. It took him two and a half weeks from contract to close to close that deal. And that experience changes that guy's entire story about leads that he should call or not call. So a part of what I do is I try to stop my clients from getting in their own way. Because if you at least call everybody, you're going to be able to sleep at night. But if you get 20 leads and you only call three and then you don't close a deal, you could blame your lead gen provider if you wanted to. But I mean, that's really on you. You know, now if you call and my other rule with my client says, I only like it when my clients complain about leads after they call them. Okay. So like, if you just read the notes and you want to call me to complain, I had a client to do it the other day, you know? And I said, I can tell by the way you're talking about them, you never called the lead. He goes, yeah, how'd you know? Well, I can tell. And I said, look, I understand you think that they don't look great. I want you to call all the leads and then call me back. You really don't know yet. And written on paper, if you're not in a great mood, you read notes and you're not in a great mood, you're going to disqualify yourself from calling that lead. And that's the other part. The other thing is too, I'll share with people is when you get a lead, I want people who are like, I'm about to make $20,000.

That's the energy we bring to the leads. Not, this is going to waste 20 minutes of my time. It comes through, I'm sure. And it's an energy. If I'm at all pissing myself off while reading the notes, I'm going into that call with an attitude, whether I feel it or not. One of my business partners used to say, Nick, read the notes and lie to me. He used to say. I'd be like, what? He'd be like, tell me how bad they want to sell their house. And it's because he understood that his energy meant more than the notes. And I think that that's a cool button on that because it's like we can overcome it, but not if the notes are bad and our attitude is bad. I think that is a really good distinction. If the notes don't look good and our attitude doesn't look good, it's not going to go well. But if the notes don't look good and our attitude is strong, we can intervene with those results and make them better. Well.

Can you think of any examples of things that sellers say that sounds like a rejection, but actually means you should keep following up? Like any typical wording that they might use that almost kind of puts you off. It's like, no, no, keep doubling down on this. Anything come to mind? There's one little thing. Let's say the price is too high. Here's what I tell my clients to do, for example, if their price is too high. Our goal is not to always negotiate it, but we want to get them to admit that they made it up. Okay. If I were to rephrase it, What is something a seller says that we can then use against them in follow-up? I'll kind of rephrase your question a little bit, okay? Well, I want $500,000. Oh, great. Yeah, so tell me, how'd you come up with that price? Well, that's how much I want.

That's it. That's it. I know it's worth $250,000. I want $5,000. That's that. Okay, not a problem at all. I don't really know if it's a fit for me at $5,000, but I would love to get permission. Could I follow up with you in about 30 to 60 days and just see if anything changes? So then...

We follow up now, it's a call. Hey, Billy, how's it going? Yeah, so I was just calling the check-in. How's that price been working out for you? Has anyone sent you a contract on that $500,000 price yet? Oh, no, man, no, sure haven't. Oh, great. You still want to sell or do you want to stick to that price? Where are you at with that? The cool thing about getting them to admit that they made it up, I think that's beautiful for follow-up, right? The elephant in the room has been identified. It's a number they made up. We could use that number against them in the future. Well, has anyone else sent you a contract? What's everyone else been saying to you? Well, actually, I dropped it down to 400. Well, okay, great. We're heading in the right direction. And how's 400 been going? So I like to use that. I like to try to get them to admit that they made it up, to notate it, to then use it against them in the follow-up. Yeah. No, that's great. I love that because that happens all the time where they just make stuff up. Great to kind of like put a label on that. A hundred percent. And that's kind of what I'm getting at is I have a lot of these rebuttals for leads that overcome the issues, but it's just because I've been doing this for nine years working with clients, right? But the point when I say about calling every lead is the amount of experience you get verbally overcoming their BS is so good. And if you're thinking optimistically and you're thinking through problems and you're even making them laugh, you know, I called this guy once, he's yelling at me on the phone. He goes, what do you think, you're cute?

I said, well, I actually do think I'm pretty cute, sir. I'm not trying to be cute with you at all right now, okay? He started laughing. He cheered out. Well, what the hell are you calling about for? That gave me the green light. So I also learned that pushing back, sometimes people are rude to test you.

And so if you can take it, not get sensitive and throw a little jab back that maybe they don't even realize is happening, you'd be surprised how much further you're going to get in that call. And again, that still doesn't mean you're going to close a deal. But that skill, that skill is going to cause you to close the deal when it comes your way. I teach lead gen as a platform for building experience to close deals.

Does that kind of make sense? You can tell me how to build a house all day long. If I never swung a hammer or poured concrete, you know, it's never going to happen. And that kind of goes back to what we were talking about our first point, which is should we learn the role ourselves, which is kind of why it is really important. And it's a lot of emotional intelligence. I mean, everything I'm really talking about is just simply put emotional intelligence, right? And then not getting discouraged when the negative stuff comes at you and trying to take the negative stuff and use it against them. It's a little aggressive, but it's kind of like warfare. You know, so another thing I do, I mentioned this earlier, I call it battle planning. When my acquisition manager tags their mood and their objections that he doesn't know the answer to, we meet once a week for a battle plan. And then I work with him. And the truth is, I don't necessarily know the answers either. Right. But I know both of our brains together, plus good notes, gives us something to say to the seller next time. You had mentioned you have like a six or eight point checklist for how to follow up with somebody. I'm curious about getting specifics on this. Like when you're following up, is it always happening by phone or are you texting them? And like, how long do you wait between follow-ups? And is there anything about this that can be standardized or like, no, it's unique for everybody? There's two answers to that question. One is there's two kinds of follow-up. One is I got the lead from Nick.

And I got to get them back on the phone. The not spoken to yet follow-up is a follow-up system. So that one, I believe, I don't even know if systematize the word. Here's what I teach my clients. If we haven't spoken to the lead yet and we're having a hard time getting them on the phone, this is the strategy I teach. Double dial every time you call them. And don't be afraid to triple dial every once in a while, okay? Everyone might know this. You might not. I just found this out like four years ago. A double dial breaks through D&D. So if you call someone, it goes right to voicemail. Call them right back. It will ring. You just broke through their D&D. And now you know their phone's ringing. Okay. Boom. So first thing, double dial. Okay. If they don't answer, they get a text message and a voicemail. All right. And the text message, hey, it's Nicholas. You spoke to Sherry about the three acre parcel of land. We're just reminding them why we're calling. Hey, you might not have my number stored yet. In business, I miss calls all the time. They're like, Nick, it's me, Jimmy. I'm like, oh crap, I need to talk to Jimmy. He's calling me from a different number. Let me get him. So we throw that out as a text. We throw out a voicemail. Voicemail's vague. Hey, this is Nicholas. I was just calling about the three acre property in Texas. Give me a call back. Right? We don't want to be too specific on the voicemail. So I teach that eight times over two weeks. So if you.

Double dial them eight times over a two-week period, it's a 14-day period, pick eight days, whether it's every other day or whatever you want it to be. So that part I think is systematized and that doesn't have to be unique to anyone's needs. Then, now I've spoken to the lead, they're not ready right now, this is the other follow-up. My theory here is that they need to be called at least once a month and I would follow those exact cadence. Maybe we don't double dial eight times through the eight touches because we already got them once, but we do double dial, text, and call on that once a month follow-up touch. A rule I used to say is no matter what they say, call them in half the time. If they say eight weeks, call them in four. If they say six, call them in three. If I'm being honest, I just think everyone should live in a like once a month cadence that should be touched. And the reason we're doing these eight touch points is basically to get them on the phone once, right? And once we do that, then we're following up 30 days from then? It depends on where their call takes them. But if they're not a right now lead or they are a follow-up lead, but yeah, the first aid touch is just the initial touch to have our discovery, playful call that we have with them. But the cadence goes when you do get them on the phone.

Then you're going to try to book a call in two days. So ideally, it'd be like the eight touches. Hopefully, we don't get that far. Then call, set up the second call. We have the contract ready. We cover it on a second call. Then maybe it might end up being kicked on to a follow-up process. Or I say we call these leads until they tell us never to call them again. So your long-term follow-up sequence, you know, after you had that initial touch, maybe you call them back another month. Is it like once a month, once every 90 days, once every year? Like if you're literally never stopping until they tell you to stop, how frequently do you keep calling them until the day they die?

A couple of things depend on that, right? So one is if you don't have any fresh leads coming in, this is all you got. So there's a caveat, right? And as I get those fresh leads coming in, you know, we always work fresh first and then we work our follow-up system. You know what I mean? But if your system is organized, so like if you're using Stride or something like that, they can put people in a bucket and that every two months, every month, they do get follow-up texts or follow-up calls or some kind of outreach, right? Or even a notification, a task reminder. It's the rainy day fund, right? If we've got hotter leads to work, we're prioritizing those leads. So the other thing I would say is we're only following up when we have no hot leads, because making sure we prioritize is really important. But in my opinion, those leads really don't go away. I have my team right now working leads from a year and a half ago. They still want to sell. They still want to do this. And the other thing I try to tell my clients, just the optimistic outlook that is like, maybe they needed.

The last six months. We gave them the idea six months ago. Maybe that sparked the idea. They've been marinating this whole time and now they're ready. So I like to have like insane optimism a little bit whenever trying to get people to do this because that is kind of how it works. If we think positively, we're going to show up better to the call and that outcome might be true and then just kind of go from there. Hot leads first. I don't necessarily say follow up into oblivion. If you don't have any new leads, or any fresh leads, and that's all you got, then the fun part might be finding a way to disqualify them or really figure, I mean, if someone's really talking to you, I had a guy tell me, he got a lead from me, he's a realtor, he got a house lead from us five years ago, she wasn't ready. Three months later, she referred her sister. The sister closed the property. She sold her first property six months later. Then she sold her second property six months later, then sold her primary residence four months. He's like, Nick, one lead I got from you, I closed five times.

Think about my perspective. All I do is hear stories about people working leads. And then what I try to do even with this is I just try to weave that into optimism and hope for everybody else because I hear it all. You know, the guy who was complaining to me about leads he read the notes of, I was like, Tony, you're getting the same leads everyone else is getting. And I spoke to three clients yesterday who closed deals. That's the other perspective I have is I have half these people giving me excuses and then I've got an 86-year-old woman closing deals. With no CRM and a pen and paper. I can't say that to people, right? So I have to then find, like, I was like, she's just doing it.

And a lot of people that close deals, just so you know, like for real, especially their first deal, they're really excited and I really pat them on the back and they all say the same thing. Nick, failing was not a choice. And I think that that is just a really important attitude sometimes to have. Do you know anything about what is differentiating those people? Like, is it just the fact that they're following up at all? Or is it more to do with their skill on the phone when they do follow up? It's their desire to win.

100%. It's their desire not to fail. I had a woman call me up. This was like three years ago. Nick, I know this is going to work because my mentor told me this works and they only tell me things that work, is what she said to me. Her very first lead, she got under contract and closed on it. It was only a $3,000 lead. It was like a $28,000 house. No experience, never closed a deal before, never done any lead gym before, everything that. That just shows me that someone's straight desire to do it, someone's confidence, not skill. That's a really good question you just asked. I absolutely believe desire supersedes skill 100% of the time. I don't disagree with that. I think that is a crucial ingredient to the recipe of winning. But on the other side of that, I know people, I'm in regular conversations with them now, who have been toying around with this land business idea for years and they have not closed a single deal yet. So like the fascination is there. The desire is there, I guess. But like they're clearly just not doing something right or they're not doing the work. When you talk about these people who are like, I've got clients and they got the same leads and they're closing deals. They must have something on the other people, right? I mean, they must like know what to say or just be willing to like call until their fingers bleed. The simplistic perspective is they're willing to fail forward. They're not reading a lead looking for everything that's wrong with it and every reason to not call it. They literally need to make $30,000.

Their life might depend on it in a greater way. I had a client hire us for 300 bucks, close a $35,000 deal, not tell me for nine months, message me nine months later, tell me he made 30. And I was like, where have you been? And he goes, oh, I paid off some debt. I did this other thing and I, look, some people are actually more happy with their lives than they let on with. And they're not willing to get uncomfortable. Acquisitions is getting comfortable having uncomfortable conversations.

And I think these people that you're referring to that have all the desire and all the will, I guarantee if I met with them, I said, tell me your lead source. Tell me what you're doing. Show me your script. I don't have a script. My mentor said we don't need scripts. That's bad advice. That's bad advice. You don't have to follow the script like a robot. No one's saying that. But if you don't know what to say, here's what processes, scripts and processes do. They stop us from being emotional, right? If we're emotional, we both talk that we both didn't get a lot of sleep last night before this thing started. Today, any decision I make based off emotions I feel today is not going to go over. It's not going to go over well, any decision, right? And so the process that all of us have allows us to not worry about our emotions for that day. And so that's really something that I teach. And if I met with those people, which I do invite you, if you ever want to connect me with the one-on-one call, do it completely for free. But I can ask a series of questions and then we can actually create a game plan. You know, I'll give you one quick example. I had a client get 115 leads from me. And he's like, I only got three contracts. I go, that is crazy low, bro. You should be getting at least one contract in every 20. You should have at least five to six contracts by now. That's low. Tell me what you're doing.

Oh, well, every time you send me a lead, I'm blind texting them an offer on the property. And I'm like, that makes sense. I understand why you're doing that, and that actually makes sense, but we don't start that way. Okay, we start by calling them, having a conversation, finding out what's going on in their world. I said, I do like that strategy. Then we end with that strategy.

We begin with the friend, with the love, with the conversation, with the rapport. Then if they're not receptive to any of that, yeah, feel free to blind text them an offer. So this is what I told them to do. I said, I want you to take 20 leads and I want you to follow my script, my process, my everything. Don't blind text. Even if you already blind text them, call them anyways, who cares? They don't know it's all you, right? So I'm like, call them anyways, follow the process. And so what some people do, again, when we ask the questions, we begin to see the potholes. And that's the downside.

This is why people need us. Because when someone is under their own devices to figure everything out, that wasn't a bad idea to blind text an offer. That's not a bad idea. It just was at the wrong point in the process. So I helped him define a better process. And I think that that's a good example of like, someone could have all the will and even do all the work, but they just like do it like in the wrong order of operations. And then it just lessens their success. Yeah. Awesome. Folks, if you want to check out Lead Mining Pros, you can go to retipster.com forward slash Lead Mining Pros. That's the REtipster affiliate link. You want to check out Nicholas's script, you can go to the show notes for this episode. That's retipster.com forward slash 275. Nicholas, is there any other final closing thoughts you would leave us with? I really, really like this call because I love what we ended on. I think we ended on like such a perfect point. And what I would just say to everybody is if you don't know what's stopping you from converting your leads.

I would book a call with me. We don't even have to talk about my sales or my service or anything. But feel free to call me and talk to me about your process. I can tell you that I'm going to ask you some questions and it's going to enlighten some things, right? It doesn't mean you'll want to do the work. You might not want to make those calls. You might, well, I do texting because I'm shy and that's why texting works, right? For me, because it suits my personality. But we can come up with the process because the way processes work is we execute the process and then we get the results. And if we don't get the results, we get the experience from it. So I just want to share that if you're struggling with this and you have leads.

It's most likely something in your process that could be stopping you from being successful. So just find out what that is, whether you book a call with Seth and you cover that whole process with him or you book a call with me. There's something that we're doing that's causing a narrowing. Something we're doing is narrowing our success at some point. And then what we have to do is reduce that friction, reduce the narrowing of our success. You're really going to find what you're looking for with land. Honestly, one in 20 should be your goal with a decent process. One deal in every 15 leads with a great process. And one deal in every 40 leads with a crappy process, right? That's really kind of what I tell people, right? So it's like my goal isn't so you're suffering at one in 40. My goal is to get my clients to one in 15, right? So that's kind of my whole stick. You know, one in 40 is like a blind squirrel finds a nut kind of thing. But we want to chisel that down and we do that through improved processes.

I'm curious, how often are your clients able to just like hire you and like they're hitting those numbers right out of the gate? It seems like I'm clearly just thinking through myself, the lens of me, I feel like I would need coaching on this. I could get there for sure. But to just like know that and like know what to say and have the right mindset and all this stuff, I would need somebody to come alongside me and like help me out a little bit, like help me think correctly about it. I don't even know if you know this. I love that you said that, but I offer all that for free. So I give all my clients an hour. Everyone gets my cell phone number and they can live call me. A lot of people don't take me up on it, but I'm like, when you get a lead, you can call me.

And I'm like, I'm not kidding. Call me. You don't know what to say? Call me. You're confused? Call me. You're upset? Call me. Like use me as like your chat GPT. So that's the first step. I also give them a course. It's an hour and a half course where I teach them how to work the lead. I help mindset them. I tell them in the course, hey, leads suck, but good news. I'm going to teach you how to make them great, okay? Because they do suck. And if we don't say the right words, then it's going to be even harder. And you're 100% right. This is a lot of mistakes people make when they go in-house. As they think just hiring someone to generate the leads, we actually need to work on what your process is, what's actually happening. So all my focus now, ironically, is not even on leads. It's actually on conversion. And so in that course, I give them scripts, rebuttals, mindset, and what I would consider the fastest process. Those two questions we spoke about, how did you plan on doing that? Is there anything causing you to lose sleep?

You get answers to those questions, there's a chance one in 15 of those will probably close, right, if you actually get the answer. So I teach that kind of strategy because it is hard. Last thing I'll say, a lot of clients, they say, I don't need another course.

I don't need another one of them. And I'm like, look, dude, first of all, what I'm giving you is not a course for newbies. What I'm giving you is a course built off all the mistakes of my customers that came before you, right? Because I am so hands-on. I do do all these things. I already know all the mistakes every other client has made. That's built in to the course. So I remind them that this is not a course for newbies. Newbies love it, but it's not for them. So if you think you're seasoned, and I love that you said you would need guidance because you're right, everyone does, especially Actually, if you're used to only direct mail, I send you a cold calling lead, you're going to be like, dude, these suck. And the reason why is because you're working them like a direct mail lead. And we have to respect that the source it came from needs its own process kind of thing. So you're 100% right. Customers need to be shown that. And now to answer your question, how many customers actually hit those numbers? And this is a big brag on me. And I'm very thankful for this.

If they follow my process, now I can't make them, but if they do, they will absolutely be closing one in 20 worst case scenario. I had a guy call me the other day. I've got the call recorded and I'm gonna turn into an email. He got 12 leads, okay? Only 12, which is very low.

Out of those 12, he said he called 10. 10 picked up the phone. Out of those 10, five of them, one of them is a contract he already has for a teardown. He's a realtor investor, and he's also doing houses. And then he got four of them to agree to listings. Now, that's extreme. That's honestly probably the best ratio I've heard. But that is what happens. And he even told me, he goes, Nick, I'm using your script. I'm using your lines. I'm using your stuff. And I just want to share, it's not that my stuff is amazing, but it's a good process. And I think that's just what's important. When you have a process, you just follow the process. Think about the stress that takes off of anyone who's just failing forward. Oh, I hope I'm saying the right thing. I hope, because I learned that the hard way. Nine years in business. The reason why I made that course is I actually started feeling bad that my clients were hiring me and then doing the first five things wrong. And then I realized I'm actually responsible for them doing the first five things wrong. I need to be better. And that kind of birthed that course that I offer. Great, man. Again, if you want to check out LeadMiningPros, retipster.com forward slash LeadMiningPros. Check out the show notes, retipster.com forward slash 275. Nicholas, always good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on. And all the listeners out there, we will talk to you next time. See you guys.