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Customer Relations Management: BEST PRACTICES with Christina Krause

Mitch Stephen|By August 8, 2019

Episode 309: Customer Relations Management: BEST PRACTICES with Christina Krause

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REIS 309 | Delegating In Business

The market is about speed and consistency. It’s a race to getting to the deals first and getting it all the time, and it never stops because the market never rests. However, human as we are, we can get tired even if we are winning and doing great in the industry. That is why, in this day and age, automation and outsourcing are key. We need systems and people in place that can help us move forward. Christina Krauss of Postal Impact, LLC is someone who is a great believer in delegating tasks so you can do what you do best. She tells us all about that, and talks about lead generation and marketing, why follow-up is essential, and more. Don’t miss out on this great episode to learn about fully owning your business from a marketing standpoint.

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I have Christina Krause and we’re just winging it. I’d rather her pick up that guitar and sing us a song. I’ve been trying to get her to do it. She’s not going to do it. I was telling her I write songs for a hobby, MitchStephenMusic.com. Do you want a real laugh? Go there and see my hobby. We’re going to be talking about owning your own business. She says, “Do you perform on the weekends or anything?” I said, “No, I don’t perform on the weekends.” If I had that kind of voice, I’d have to work every Friday and Saturday and that wouldn’t be any fun. Thank God I can’t sing very good.

That’s what music is to me though, too. It’s more of a passion and I almost don’t want to attach money or obligation to it. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. I’m just saying somehow it feels like it would change it for me.

I have often said that the music is the last bastion from my childhood. It’s the only thing that I haven’t tried to monetize. I have tried to monetize it, but it’s not monetizing, so I keep it because I like it. I do houses and I do deals and it’s the same passion. I don’t know why though, because you can understand why people would like music, writing songs or playing guitar or piano or whatever. Why someone would fall in love with buying and selling crappy little houses and fixing them up, I don’t know. I have definitely fallen in love with it. You can’t do 2,000 houses since 1996, which is a house every four to five days, if you hate it. You just can’t do that. My career since 1996, I’ve bought a house every four to five days for 22 years. I like it. I started to get to where, and this is one of the points we’re going to talk to, I was getting worn out. We’re getting older. At 30, 34, 36, I was out there, I was looking at houses. You couldn’t put enough houses in front of me. Around 45, 46, 47, it’s like, “Do I have to go look at this house?” Now it’s like about that time I’m going to walk away from this business because I’m not enjoying the work part of it as much.

I certainly enjoy the profitability a lot, but I’m going to have to find some way to automate or I’m going to burn out and fade away. I’ve set out on that journey, which luckily I was successful at. That’s what we’re going to be talking about. Marketing is something that you can have it all figured out and you know how to do it and you start to do it, but you’ve got to turn it over to someone else or some other systems. You triple a go-getter ADD entrepreneur house buyer guy, you’re not going to stay with it. You’re going to do these letters for like a week and then you’re going to drift off someplace. All this stuff’s going to stop. You have to give it to someone who gets paid or you’ve paid for the system to get it done so that it gets done all the time. I found in the market, it’s about speed and consistency. You’ve got to get there first and you’ve got to get it perfect all the time. It never stops. Even when you go on vacation, that marketing’s got to keep going.

You are singing my song. Here’s the thing, and this is why I love where this conversation is going. Frankly, I’ve been doing this since 1999. I think we’re qualified at this point to speak from at least from just genuine experience. This can be a hamster wheel and you can get tired even if you’re winning. That’s important too, by the way. One of the things, one of the reasons why you are passionate and you continue to be somewhat passionate about real estate is because you’ve figured out how to do it and do it well and do it successfully. You would not be passionate about it if it wasn’t working.

Not in parts I don’t like.

That’s the key. That’s how you ultimately, truly become a business owner. What I see real estate entrepreneurs do all the time is we’re so used to doing a lot of things well, there’s nothing that any of us does that the other one can’t figure out. There’s very little. Maybe there’s some of it. My company is data and analytics, which can be really overwhelming for people. When I go out and I speak and I teach, I can teach you how to analyze numbers. I can teach you about data and you can and will learn it if you spend enough time and effort on it. The question is that what should you be spending all of your time and effort on? What are you passionate about and how do we keep you there? Otherwise, what’s going to happen is you’re going to convince yourself that you need to control all the pieces. Before you know it, you’re going to start hating real estate because you’re exhausted, you’re tired and you recognize the fact that I just can’t keep doing this.

I was going to walk away from a million–plus a year. I had it. Not because I didn’t like the money. Believe me, I liked $1 million a year plus, but I couldn’t do it anymore. What’s the point? I wasted a lot of time. It took me fifteen years. I was a strong person, headstrong. I would forge my way through and we did it for fifteen years and finally got to the point I couldn’t do it. I wish I wasn’t quite as strong mentally as I am because I should have broke down seven years before that and got a real life seven years earlier. I was going to leave. You’ve got the three types of money, Christina. You’ve got the one-time cash, the temporary cash and the forever cash. I was doing the one-time cash flips and I was making money. I was doing my owner finance strategy and getting the temporary cash and I was making a lot of money that I did one thing really right.

You would not be passionate about something if it wasn't working. Click To Tweet

I took the money I made from those two and I bought into one forever cash strategy, which was the storages. I had bought enough storages I never have to work again in my life. One thousand six hundred people owe me $100 every month. It’s $160,000 a month. I don’t get to keep every single bit of it, but I keep a huge portion of that. I didn’t have to work anymore, but the thought of walking away from a separate $1 million-plus profit center was irking me. It was like, “Am I going to drop this? All the years, all the reputation, the building of that logo, that brand, that whole thing. Am I just going to stop?” I finally got to my senses and said, “I’ve got to go to a mastermind and learn how to automate it.” I’m happy to say now, I haven’t seen the last 300 houses I bought. I haven’t seen the last 300 people that bought my houses. We’re going to talk to about how to set your marketing up like I set the houses up.

Let’s do it because I agree with you. I think we have to look at our businesses. First of all, as business owners and say, “What are all of the pieces that I can automate and outsource?” I’m a huge proponent of automating and outsourcing when you can, “Where is it in my business that I need to stay my highest and best use of my time, my highest level of contribution and what I love? How do I just do that over and over?” That’s what’s going to make you money anyway. That’s where your value lies within your business. That’s why it’s so important to outsource and automate on a huge proponent of automating when you can, because it’s important as a business owner for you to identify what’s the highest and best use of your time. Where your highest level of contribution is and what do you love doing the most? If you can figure out a way to keep yourself in that genius zone and duplicate that, that’s where the magic lies.

Genius zone, I haven’t heard that before. Your genius zone, what you do best.

You need to figure out what your genius zone is. What’s your genius zone in your business, Mitch?

I focus on raising the private money to buy everything I want. I have $16 million worth of private money and I like that because it’s a different work. This work requires that I take people out to lavish dinners, drink fine wines, meet them for lunch, take them to the basketball game on the front row. I really enjoy it. I can’t wait to get another client because I need to go to Kirby’s or Ruth’s Chris or something.

Here’s the thing, I guarantee you that is legitimately what has taken you to the next level. It’s that self-awareness and that forgiveness. One of the things that I see business owners do all the time is beat themselves up over the fact that they’re not doing something methodically and consistently. They’re going, “This isn’t rocket science. I should be able to do this. Why can’t I make myself do this?” Do you know why? Because you’re not in your genius zone.

At my office, I’m building this team and I’m constantly stressing to this team and I pay this team very well. I want to make them included and when they get through a certain part, I’ve started giving them ways to enjoy, to build their cashflow with me, not without me. I know that if they get good at everything, they’ll go on their own. I said, “Why in the world would I want to make it to where no one in the world will ever want to leave me? Why in the world do you think I’m sharing all my income with you, guys?” I tell them this because you can’t wear all the hats. “I need you guys. If you guys quit and go on your own, you’re going to figure out that you wish you would’ve just stayed and helped better the team in the monthly meeting on how do we get better. If you’ve got some grievances, state the grievances. We are all better off together.” Everyone’s focusing on one little aspect that they do and they do really kick ass at it. When I’m trying to focus on everything, I’m like half-assing everything.

Mediocrity begets mediocrity. The problem is if you don’t guard genius the way that you should, and you don’t recognize how powerful it is within your business, everything else gets watered down. You start to feel bad about everything that you’re doing because we’re designed to want to do things to the best of our ability to be the best at what we do. The only way we can do that is to identify what’s the highest level of contribution? What do I love doing best? What am I best at? Focus as much of your effort on that thing as possible. That goes for you and that goes for me. That goes for everybody within our business as well. It’s the same thing.

Delegating In Business: If you don’t guard your genius zone the way that you should and recognize how powerful it is within your business, everything else gets watered down.

I had a lot of proud moments. The first deal I ever did, I was so proud of myself. I couldn’t stand it and no one could stand me either. I was proud of a lot of different stages along the way. One of the things in the process that seemed the hardest for me to do that was the simplest when I looked back at it. I should’ve got it done a long time before. It was when I sat down and I told my wife, “I’m overwhelmed. I have so much to do.” She says, “Just get on the phone and start knocking it out.” I picked up the phone and I delegated about twelve tasks in about fifteen minutes. By noon, they were all done. I said, “That’s what I should have been doing all this time.” All this time I should have been doing, I knew exactly what needed to be done. I called the right people, I told them what needed to be done, how it needed to be done, who they needed to call, how they need to explain it or what our position was. I called the next person to do the same thing. I actually at that point said, “I might have a real business finally.” Part of this program is Christina Krause. She’s got a business that she helps you find these VA’s and give you someone to delegate to. The cool thing about using VA’s is we can get different price ranges. Are your VA’s overseas?

Yes.

They’re overseas, so you’re able to get higher quality people because of the price, American exchange rate versus whatever the Filipino, Cuban or whatever you’re using. Where are they?

Philippines.

I love the Philippines because they take great pride in working for companies that take care of them. They look at their job as they’re part of a team. The team always comes first, not 100%, but for the most part. I’ve noticed the character of that type of people. I want you to go to 1000houses.com/marketingva and there you’ll be able to see everything that Christina has. Tell me what we’re going to see when we go over there.

I own a company called Postal Impact, which is primarily what we’re known for. Everything that we do is rooted in data and data and analytics. We pull marketing lists, motivated seller lists for our clients. We also do a completely done–for–you direct mail campaign for some of the most amazing investors all across the nation. What we do from a marketing standpoint is we generally go into a territory, usually accounting, and we’ll mail out a very large database of leads, about 20,000 to 25,000 leads. We will mail those out. It’s a very specialty lead driven list. Any kind of specialty leads you can imagine: divorce, lis pendens, probate, financially distressed, whatever. We mail those leads out. As that information comes back to us, we’re studying that information to identify what are the common characteristics of motivated sellers in a particular area.

It’s different for every area. You can’t say this metric works here and therefore it works all across the nation. What we’re trying to do ultimately is create an individual custom motivated seller avatar for our clients in their particular marketing area. We’re tracking that data and what are the response rates for the different new specialty lead types? From a marketing perspective, this is absolutely critical. You must track your numbers otherwise, you’re going to be making major decisions in your business based on emotion and based on gut. That’s really dangerous. Not only are we looking at how effective specific lead types and situations are in your marketing area because we track that data all the way through the sales pipeline. How does your team convert that? Is your team better at converting certain leads than they are others? Postal Impact is primarily known as a marketing company.

We test everything and we split test everything. We test letters versus postcards and what works better. Is it a specific lead type where a letter works better or a postcard works better? You need to find out the answer to all of those things in order for you to become a master marketer. The ultimate goal is trying to identify what’s the 20% to 30% of your marketing list, where 70% to 80% of your yield is coming from. Let’s chase that so that we’re not constantly mailing out 25,000 or 50,000 mailers. We’re niching that down, we’re identifying where the highest value is and we’re chasing the highest value leads. What our company does, understanding that one of the biggest barriers, one of the biggest problems that real estate investors have is being methodical and consistent. We take care of everything. We approve the proofs, mail the postcards, mail the letters, drip it super consistently and then we track the data.

As a business owner, it's important to identify the highest and best use of your time. Click To Tweet

I’ve dropped the idea that we got a place for you to go to get some help and have someone to delegate to. We would be transparent. From what I heard from everyone that I’ve talked to about you, you’re not for the guy who’s just coming out and doesn’t have much of a budget. This is for some pretty heavy hitters that are figured out. This business is for you. You’re getting 100%, you’ve made some money, you have a budget. Now you want to go to another level and you want to shun yourself of having to deal with a lot of what this is going to require and you want to focus on closing and selling.

You’ve got a newbie audience.

I’m sure there are a ton of newbies on here. I just want to say that this is not where you’re headed. This is for probably the more seasoned guys who have a budget and someone who’s got $50,000, $60,000, $80,000, $100,000 in the bank and is ready to give this thing the time and to feed it enough, get on top because it’s like radio advertising sometimes. If you’re going to do radio advertising for a month, don’t even start. If you’re not going to do radio advertising for eight to twelve months, don’t even start.

Let’s go right back to where you were leading me because that is definitely a price point and more of a newbie topic, just the importance of follow up. I’ll pick up from there and then you guys can splice in what you want.

When you’re talking about taking on Postal Impact, what kind of budget does a person need to plan for? Between what and what?

Our minimum spend per month is $10,000 in each term.

When you’re ready to spend $10,000 a month minimum and you know this business is for you, you’ve had some success, you’ve got that kind of budget and you’re ready to go, then that’s when you would consider Postal Impact. Let’s talk about the VAs. This is really important. The new guys, they don’t have big budgets, but they’ve got to delegate to somebody something because they’re drowning in everything there is to do.

Not only that, but let’s talk about lead managers in general first. The first question that I always ask people when they come to me to handle their marketing is what kind of systematic, methodical follow up system do you have in place? If you don’t have one in place, your highest and best return on your marketing dollars is going to happen if you focus on following up first. The first thing is to identify the fact that if you’re not good at follow up, then stop trying to make yourself good at follow up. Just identify the fact that this is a huge high–value activity and you need to delegate it. What we’ve done with virtual lead managers is we pre-train and pre–screen these lead managers to get dropped into your business.

Delegating In Business: 60% to 70% of your deals are going to come in the follow up sequence. If you have somebody following up on those leads, you’re going to monetize them far better.

They already have the scripts to follow up with leads. They already understand how to watch and nurture a lead all the way through the sales process to make sure that we’re keeping you, again, as the business owner or acquisitions person, in your genius zone. Rather than have acquisitions, people look at a bucket of 100 leads and try to call back 100 leads, not knowing where the value lies. We have lead managers who do that. As soon as they identify the fact that there’s any level of motivation, now is when we kick that back to you as the business owner or now is when we kick that back to the acquisitions person so they can go kill that lead now. We’re creating low hanging fruit situations.

In San Antonio, Texas, there are 37,000 people delinquent in property taxes, but we’re not mailing all 37,000. We got a lead. We got someone, like she’s talking about, a lead manager going in and saying, “Which one are these 37,000 worth spending $1 or $1.50 to send the package to or to take the time to call.” We got someone that’s going through and saying, “We’re running them through all these data filters. How many people are absentee owners? How many people have where the mortgage is twenty years old or older where there’s some equity for us to win over? How many of these people live out of state?” You start to call it down to what she was saying even in Postal Impact is to a number that we can manage out of. It’s not costing a freaking fortune because we got the 37,000 down to the 12,000 people that were going to stay on top of day in and day out.

How many leads do you have coming into your business where if you don’t immediately get that deal, they just fall on the wayside? That’s such a waste because 60% to 70% of your deals are going to come in the follow up sequence. If you have somebody following up on those leads, you’re going to monetize them far better. Most of us let them fall to the wayside.

We’re buying about 100 houses a year for years. I didn’t know why or what and didn’t care. I was buying 100 houses. As it got tougher and tougher, you needed to start to drill down and figure out there are a lot of people out there fighting for these houses. How do I stay buying a hundred houses? We started to fight through some data and getting smarter and starting to track everything because that’s what you have to do. You have to have data so you can make decisions. We’re learning. We’re buying most of our houses after the seventh touch, somewhere between seven and twelve. We were giving up on most of ours at two or three, maybe not even three. We come to find out after we get our data, we’re leaving a lot of people behind that we should have bought their house and we didn’t touch on quite enough. What’s a touch? Tell them what a touch is.

A touch could be anything. A touch could just be the first point of contact. A touch could be, “I’ve identified this as potentially somebody who’s worth marketing to. I need to mail a postcard now.” Five to six weeks later, I need to make sure that I’m mailing another postcard because people’s level of motivation and what’s motivating them to sell their house changes all the time. You and I could think of 1,000 examples in our own lives where one day we would’ve said no to something and the very next day, our circumstances may have changed and we’d have been like, “I’m all in 100%.” You can think of 1,000 scenarios like that in your own life. That’s what happens with these people. Even people, the vast majority of deals that real estate investors, when they can’t make the deal happen, it’s because you can’t come together on a price. They want too much money for their house.

It’s not because you’re not talking them into it good enough. It’s because their circumstance hasn’t gotten bad enough yet. They haven’t hit their circumstance yet. The timing’s not right for them. The point of keeping up with the follow up in the CRM, which Christina is doing so well explaining to us, is that we’ve got to be there when that moment hits. How many times have we heard, “I’ve saved your postcard for all these times or all your postcards?” They open up the folder and there are fifteen postcards in there from me and says, “Why did you keep cutting this as well?” “We knew she was going to pass. We just didn’t know when. We knew when she passed that we’re going to have to deal with all these properties that she had.” If you had fifteen rent houses, I was like, “Am I glad I stayed in touch with this person?” I had no idea the circumstances.

Even thinking of your own businesses, how many times were you wanting to sell a house and you thought you were going to get this? You’re holding out for this price. Even as an investor, you think you’re going to get this. As time goes by and more and more people look at your deal and they go, “This is not a deal. This doesn’t work,” then you start to get more and more realistic. That’s the most common scenario, is that people start out wanting, “I want $1.2 million for my house,” and next thing you know, a month later you would look at what ended up happening with that deal. They sold it for $400,000. This happens all the time. The vast majority of deals that happen in the follow up are deals where you initially couldn’t come together on a price. Let me throw one other scenario at you because this is a really common one that people miss. You lose a deal to somebody else who offered more money and if you would find out when that deal would close, we close a lot of deals and follow up this way. They say, “No, I accepted another offer from another investor. They offered me $2,000 more. Can you come up?” You’re saying, “No, I can’t.” “We’re going to close it at the end of the month.” You ask the questions, “Are they able to close when you want?” “Yup, we’re closing May 30th.” What do you do on May 31st, Mitch?

You pick up the phone and call them and say, “Did you close?”

Figure out a way to keep yourself in that genius zone and duplicate that because that's where the magic lies. Click To Tweet

That’s exactly right. If you don’t have a follow up system in place, you’re not going to do that because all of the other things going on in your business are going to take your time and attention away from that. The vast majority of investors out there aren’t going to pick up the phone on the 31st. I could give you example after example of people that have called and said, “I know that you said the house is going to close. Just wanted to make sure that happened. Is there anything else I could do for you?” “Nope, it didn’t close. Now my back is against the wall. I need you to close this deal for me.”

“You were right, Mitch. They didn’t have the money. Apparently they were trying to flip that contract like you told me.” “I thought that, but who knows? They might’ve come up with the money. You took your shot at the extra $2,000 but are you ready to close now?”

What’s your average profit per deal?

About $20,000.

Can you imagine over the course of a year that’s happening at least one time, one scenario where if you would follow up on the leads, you close that deal? Can you use an extra $20,000? I know I can. It’s just a matter though of putting a system, an automation into place or something that is going to make sure that happens consistently, especially when you’re doing it at your volume. Don’t convince yourself that you’re going to be able to do that methodically and consistently. It is worth paying somebody and putting somebody in charge where their only job is to make sure that whatever baby comes into your business, they know what needs to happen. You need to burp it. You need to feed it. You need to change its diaper. Everybody’s different, so somebody needs to be looking at all those babies and saying, “Does this one need to be tucked in? Does this one need to be fed? What needs to happen with this baby?” They make sure that they do that.

The biggest stickler for a lot of people, they come from places where they’d been tight financially. They’re tight, they pinch pennies, and they’re frugal. I get it because you didn’t have a choice. At some point, this is how I’ve rationalized making some of these leaps myself, I say, “What are the chances?” I’m going to get a VA. Let’s say the VA is going to cost me $25,000 a year. I say, “What are the chances this VA gets up every morning and works eight hours from me doing exactly what I tell him to do and he doesn’t make me at least $28,000 so break even?” What are the chances that that would happen? You’ve got to be prepared to face up with this VA and make sure that they’re doing quality things every day. If things aren’t working or they’re not producing, you need to be the one to change and say, “Let’s find something to substitute for this activity because it’s been three months and nothing’s coming from this activity.”

The other thing she’s doing, I’m starting to see leads of pipeline fill up and everything. You can’t just blame it on the VA at the end of the day. You’ve got to look in the mirror and say, “She’s doing what I’m telling her to do and she’s doing it well. If it’s not working, I need to tell her something else to do.” The biggest way I jump off of is I don’t look at, “This is going to cost me an extra $1,500 a month.” I don’t look at it like that. I say, “How much is it a year?” They go, “This much a year.” I say, “What tasks do I give this person to do every day that I think it’s just almost impossible that they don’t make at least that much extra money for me?” If I feel good about the things that I have for them to do, then I jump. I’m prepared to do it. I take the gun away from my head and I don’t shiver all week long. Every time I got to write the check, I say, “I’m in this for $28,000. I’ve already committed. It’s $28,000. I’m going a year and give yourself a chance to win.”

What we’ve done with these virtual lead managers is the same thing that we’ve done with marketing where we’ve said, “The barrier of entry for most people is the overwhelm of training and what am I going to say and at what are they going to do?” That kind of thing. We’ve trained them, pre-trained them. One of the first things that I encourage your lead managers to do is go to your old bucket of leads and make sure you’ve got that an old bucket of leads and I guarantee you there are leads in that bucket that you had. You don’t know what the story is on that lead. Go have them figure out what the story is. Shape that tree, revive those old leads and almost 100% of the time, our virtual lead managers immediately monetize themselves by going back to that old bucket, reviving it, handing low hanging fruit back to you and allowing you to monetize it.

Delegating In Business: There are so many ways in your business that you can make money just doing what you’re already doing but better.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve talked to students. They said, “I did the mailers but I’m not getting very good responses.” I said, “How many returns are you getting?” They tell me, “I don’t know. A bunch.” I said, “How many?” They said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Do you have them?” The worst case they say they throw them away. The best–case scenario is, “I have them. They’re all over here.” I say, “Go get them. What do you do?” “I’ve got 250 return.” “What are you doing with them?” “I don’t know. What am I supposed to do with them?” You’re supposed to find out where these people are because your postcard can’t find them, neither can anyone else. This was like one of those things you’d handled that lead manager. You’d say, “Here are all my returns that I haven’t done anything with.”

We’ll shake that tree, skip trace that stuff. Have them scrub it out of your return mail. If you’re dripping seven, eight, nine times, it’s everybody too. Everybody has that stack of postcards in their office that they promised they’re going to get themselves, they’re going to get to and they keep promising themselves are going to get to. It doesn’t feel like a lot, but 5% to 6% of mail gets returned. If you never manually go in and extract that from your mail list and you keep dripping it. Do you have any idea how much money adds up with that stuff? Put someone into place. I tell people all the time, business owners, really successful business owners are self-aware. If you have a level of self-awareness that goes, “I have a proven track record of not being methodical and consistent.” Believe yourself and don’t beat yourself up about it, but put some kind of system or process into place that takes it out of your hands because you’re never going to do it methodically and consistently. Get somebody else to do it. There are so many ways in your business that you can make money just doing what you’re already doing but better. Be better first.

I’m using Livecomm because Livecomm phone numbers will capture the incoming caller’s number. I tell all my students, “Make sure that you have two numbers on your postcard. You’ve got one to talk to a person directly. There’s this other one that says free recorded message.” It’s non–confrontational, plus people will call that free recording at 12:00 at night when they’re half loaded or whatever after the party. They’re not going to call your office, but they might call the recording and we’re capturing the phone number. That was all fine and dandy and I went all that way, but guess what Mitch wasn’t doing? Mitch wasn’t checking that phone number every day to see who called last night. As a matter of fact, I forgot about it for months.

When I finally called back the numbers where people had listened to the recording, a lot of them had already sold the house to someone. I went all that way. I had it just about right. If I had a VA whose job was to check that phone number, that’s the recording on every one of my postcards to see if anyone called the recording and can call them back the next day, I would have bought three or four more houses. I know for sure because there were so many of them that I wasted time with and I didn’t call them back.

Just think about even your hang ups. How many of us go back in our business and look at who hung up? Somebody should be calling those back to find out why did they call and why did they hang up? I hang up all the time for whatever the reason, it took too long for somebody to answer. I started to call and then I got busy and I’m like, “I don’t have ten minutes anymore,” and I hang the phone up. Somebody should be calling those back. You’re paying for those people to call you. Make sure that you’re going through and being methodical about maximizing every opportunity that’s coming into your business.

I didn’t ever think about hang ups. I learned something. There’s a reason why you do these because I get to hang around with really smart people and they start dropping little hints and they’re not even charging me anything. When you go to ask someone, “Can I rake your brain and buy you lunch?” they’re like, “No, get out of my way.” You say, “Do you want to be on my podcast and have an interview?” They go, “Yes.” You get to talk them, ask the same questions. You don’t even have to buy them lunch.

I spent a lot of time in Texas just because there are a lot of things that you guys have a lot going on there. When I’m speaking or a lot of events are held down there, so I’m actually in Texas.

Do you have any giveaways or anything that my readers can go get for free?

Mediocrity begets mediocrity. Click To Tweet

Yes, absolutely. There are a couple of things. The specialty lead that we’re most known for our probate leads and by far that is the lead that it’s the most lucrative lead out there. It’s also the most difficult lead to go and gather, which I actually love. I wrote an eBook on how it is that you can go and get those leads yourselves. We have a way to get it through our business, but I’ll tell you how to do it. I’ve written that that will tell you exactly how to gather and market the best marketing practices to market to those leads. I’ll do that. Also, if anybody is interested in lead management and what are the roles that your lead managers should be performing, some best practices kinds of things, I’ve written a report on that as well. We’ll give that away whether you use our company to do that or not, if you’re looking to hire your own internal lead manager or if you’re looking to reassign that task to somebody that’s already in your office, make sure you read that report. There’s a lot of good information on there about how to follow up.

One of the most difficult leads to find, but therein lies the magic because the further up the hill the prize is, the less people are up there fighting for it. Go get the best practices right up on lead management, how to manage these leads the best. Figure out what the best practices are and what some of the leading industry home buyers out there are doing to maximize the leads that they have. Make sure that every one of them gets scrutinized to the nth degree.

Best marketing dollars you’ll ever spend and the highest ROI for your marketing dollars. If you’re not following up right now, before you spend another dime on marketing, you need to put your marketing dollars in to follow up and then scale up. Otherwise, you’re wasting money.

I’ve often said that to people like, “I want to send out 50,000 postcards.” I say, “Who’s going to handle them?” “Me.” “No, that’s not going to work. It’s not going to work. You’ve got to have some team or you’re going to be wasting a lot of money on this.” You might think you’re going to do it for a little while. You’re not going to do it. It takes one person full-time all day long just to handle these kinds of volumes. Anything you want to say to the readers, to the up and coming newbies out there?

I’ve been an active investor myself since 1999. What I would say is read stuff like this. Get as much information as you can, not to the point that you’re not taking action because I think speed of implementation is everything in this business. You’ve got to take action. What I do love about our world and our culture now is you have access to so much information, you have zero excuses. You need to study people like Mitch who’ve done what they’ve done over time. Sustained. I can’t say that enough. I’m not trying to knock any one person, but what I am saying is that go look for people who’ve actually had an extended history of being successful in this business. Ask better questions. When somebody says, “I’m getting a 7% response rate on this mailer,” ask better questions. Don’t change your entire marketing budget. Say, “How many mailers was that and over what period of time and how sustained was that result?” Just ask better questions, get the information that you need and then take action.

I’d like to thank you, Christina Krause.

I appreciate you having me.

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About Christina Krause

REIS 309 | Delegating In Business Christina Krause is a principal with Postal Impact, a white-glove marketing and consulting company for
real estate investors across the nation. Using data and analytics, Postal Impact studies marketing results
and trends to identify motivated sellers and the ideal methods to capture their attention. Then, fully
executes effective, custom campaigns.
In consulting, Postal Impact tracks company performance and results to pinpoint opportunities for
process improvement and optimize overall effectiveness.
Most recently, Postal Impact introduced Virtual Lead Managers who are pre-qualified and trained to run
tested, follow-up sequences for their clients on motivated seller leads to maximize conversion.
Christina is also the founder of Delaware Property Solutions and has been an active real estate investor
since 1999. She has owned and/or managed over 500 rental units, in addition to being involved in over
2,000 real estate transactions, from rehab to new construction.
Christina continues to use her knowledge and experience to develop break-the-box solutions