PODCAST

CRM And Automated Follow-Up With Donald Ross

Mitch Stephen|By December 31, 2019

Episode 344: CRM And Automated Follow-Up With Donald Ross

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REIS 344 | CRM And Automated Follow-Up

Underrated as they may seem, CRM or Customer Relations Management is worth a lot of money in real estate, especially if you do it right. Here to offer his insights, wisdom, and expertise around this topic is Donald Ross of REI Automation Squad. Together with host, Mitch Stephen, they discuss the ways using CRM helps keep your connections with existing and potential clients. They also shed light on some of the struggles that many faces with customer relations and give out some tips and tricks on how to overcome them. Donald then shares with us the amazing things he and his wife are doing with their Beast Mode CRM and how they add a personal touch to an automated system.

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I’m here with Donald Ross. I didn’t miss this very important interview because it’s about CRM, Customer Relations Management. That’s worth a whole lot of money, especially if you do it right. Donald, how are you doing?

I’m doing great.

We met at a mastermind in San Antonio. I also met your partner and I think CRMs are very underrated. People make them over-complicated sometimes or at least should have the basics. Let’s start with this. Let’s get in with what’s your background and then we’ll start talking about the CRMs.

For me, I was in my later years at the 22, 23 time frame and I joined the Marine Corps. That’s where a lot of this started. I joined the Marine Corps specifically because my father tried and got in an accident a couple of weeks before boot camp. He got medically separated out. I joined in 2007. I did that for seven years and did some deployments. I was part of the contracts department as one part of my job and had to manage the contracts for the entire base of North Carolina. I built an access database, which anybody that knows the backend of Podio and what we use, it’s very similar to that. I went to YouTube University and taught myself how to do some of that. I always wanted to go to school for computer science, but I never went to college for that.

I wind up doing the Marine Corps instead. Thankfully, after I came out of the Marine Corps, I’ve got all my digits and everything that came with me. It was a great time. I got medically retired out after I blew out my back from there. From there, I built out a CRM. It was about a year and a half after I got out off of Podio. That was the big rant and rave of the thing that everybody was using several years ago. I figured out how to use it and how to code it. I wound up taking myself into that and where we are now is from that.

First things first, thank you for your service. All of my family are jarheads. I did not serve myself. I have been through a lifetime of bootcamp, “Yes, sir. No, sir. Thank you, sir.” If I didn’t, you got slapped at the side of the head. I’m very appreciative of that discipline because it’s taken me places that I probably would’ve never ended up just because they teach you how to act.

My dad was a perfectionist. He owned a hot rod collector car shop where I helped growing up. He was doing high-end shows where every little detail mattered. When they got into the high high-end shows, they would start pulling off pieces off the car to make sure it was that original. When I got to the Marine Corps, I was like, “I’ve been through this all my life. Good luck.”

Without you guys, we wouldn’t be where we are at all. We couldn’t even do what we do. That’s the biggest thing. How did you end up in real estate? Did this lead you to real estate or did real estate led you to the CRM? How did it happen?

The more personalized direct mail pieces are and not just the run of the mill corporate styled, the better. Share on X

When I was a young punk, eighteen out of high school and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life when I graduated, I literally opened up the old phone book and decided to start calling construction companies in the summer. I wanted to work. I wanted to make money and I started calling them. I was lucky enough that one of them said, “Come down and see me.” I went down and talked to him and he said, “Get a tool belt and show up tomorrow.” I worked in construction for a few years before I joined the Marine Corps. I did big houses. The small side was 4,000 square feet and the biggest one was 12,000 square feet, all new build and it was all him. He bought the land and then the people were building the houses. It was all custom houses and most of them were out on the lake out by us in Wisconsin. There are a lot of people from Illinois for lake houses.

Is that what opened your eyes to real estate? This guy is building one-off houses for people. He’s not doing spec. He’s doing custom homes. Is that a cost-plus job for him or do you even know?

It was. He did quite well for himself and we were a small little crew. There were five of us, but it was a tight-knit family. It opened my eyes at least to the development and buying land and making money from that side of the house, but until I got out of the Marine Corps in 2014, that was when I started my journey of the real estate investment side and what I wind up further doing with buying houses remotely.

Tell me about your first deal. When did you do your first deal on your own or when did you do a deal that you originated?

In 2014, I think it was roughly June, July time frame. It was in California. I was doing deals in Wisconsin. I grew up in Wisconsin and lived there for 22 years. I knew the market somewhat. I wind up doing a lease option of all things. It was a fairly large house for Wisconsin. It was a 3,500 square foot house and it was a cop looking for a good spot for his family to be a little bit further out in the suburbs.

Do you remember the numbers on that deal?

I remember what I made because it was my first check.

What did you make?

CRM And Automated Follow-Up: People either don’t have a CRM or get down into the rabbit hole of trying to figure things out themselves.

$4,500.

How long did it take?

That one was almost three weeks. It’s not too bad.

Was that a lot of money to you at the time?

Absolutely. I was working as a government contractor at the time for Northrop Grumman. I was negotiating contracts for the F/A-18 program. At the time, I made good money, $70,000 a year, but that $4,500 on my own was huge.

I tell people it’s not about the amount you make on your first deal, it is just that you make anything. You go out there, do it on your own and go do it because that’s the proof of the pudding that this is doable and you can do it again. It’s like the four-minute mile. No one could break it until Bannister broke it and then everybody started breaking it because all of a sudden, it was doable. It’s that same kind of thought process.

It was a big enough deal to me that up on the top of my desk up here, I have a fresh $1 bill that I framed from that check when I cashed it. My dad had done it when he did his business. I did it for mine for the first dollar that was made.

Through CRM, you can hand off some of the things that were mundane but have to get done. Share on X

I think it’s beautiful. It’s like a gate opener. Once you get in the gate, you’re going to stay on that path because you’re not going back. Finding deals has gotten competitive with A&E and flip this everything. Everyone is a house flipper. It’s almost incredible. A lot of people are under the illusion because of these shows. A&E followed me around for about three weeks and they didn’t pick me because I didn’t have any problems. They said, “You’re too smooth. Everybody likes you. There are no arguments.” I said, “It’s all made up anyway, but we’ll make it up.” I’m glad that it didn’t happen because I had a big year that took me in a direction that I’m glad I went. It’s so competitive that just sending out postcards and answering them to get a house, that’s even purportedly not working as well as it used to. People have dropped that to start calling directly.

We use an offshoot of that we have outbound calling to get to talk to those people and if they have a property that we’re interested in, then we put them on the mailing list after we’ve contacted them and we’ve decided because mailings can be expensive. The other thing about the mailings is every now and then we’ll do a 10,000 mailer in San Antonio, Texas where there are two million people. We don’t do it to get a call from the postcards. If we do, great. We got a bonus. We’re doing it for the return postcards and out of 10,000, we’ll get 300 to 450 return postcards, then we go to work. If our postcard didn’t get to this person, neither did anybody else.

These 400 people were sitting out here unknown to the world where they’re at. We get excited about that. We have over 8,000 people in our CRM. Talk to us about CRM. First of all, CRM stands for Customer Relations Management. The one thing I know for sure is you can hear things and people can tell you things. When you start doing it and then you start seeing it happen, pretty much like what they’re telling you, it becomes earned by you. You earned that knowledge and you know that data. We’re buying houses in the 6th, 7th, 8th touches. That requires a follow-up system.

You can automate a follow-up system. That’s what Donald has gotten good at and he wants to share it with you because you do not have to go out and reinvent the wheel. There are people out there that have already done this. You need to tap into one that suits your needs. I’m going to figure Donald that they can modify it as they need it if they need to, either through you or they can hire a Podio expert and you tell them what to do. My biggest shout-out here is don’t go learn how to do it yourself unless it’s just you and that’s what you’re drawn to do. For the most part, if you got in the house business, don’t get in the programming business, sub it out to Donald or somebody. Why don’t we start with this CRM?

The CRM, it’s one of those things where it is an important thing to have and a lot of people either A, don’t have one or B, they get down into the rabbit hole, in the black hole of trying to figure it out themselves. Before they know it, they look up and six months went by. The marketing didn’t go out and they haven’t gotten the deals done. For us, we’ve put together what we needed for our own business. We wholesale out in Wisconsin, flip things here and there, but try to do mostly the wholesale hotel and then some retail with the brokerage. We built out the Podio platform that we call Beast Mode for that in what we were doing. A lot of what we do is a direct mail texting, ringless and a little bit of cold calling.

From that, we needed to be able to bring in those prospects. For the ones that raised their hand and said, “Let’s set up an appointment now. I’m interested, what do you get?” or for those that said, “I’m not ready just yet. Call me in the spring, call me three months from now,” or whatever the case may be. You’ve got to have a very easy way to put something into a system where it’s going to raise its hand when it’s time to call them back. If you forget to call them back when you say that you’re going to, you’ve probably lost that rapport and that trust that you built. If you tell them you’re going to do something, you need to do it on that date or around that time that you said you were going to do it.

That means a lot when you show up on time and do what you said you’re going to do because your trust factor went up with them. Let’s back up because you went over that pretty fast. I want to make it simple for the people. In the old days, we used to have call up files and it was like, “Twelve files for this year, twelve files for next year and twelve files for the year after that.” It was 36 files. If someone said, “Call me in May,” we take the property sheet and we’d put it in May of 2020 and every month we go up to that file. Now it’s automated, but it’s way more than that because the part that you breezed over was there’s email, there’s physical mail, there are physical calls, there’s voice drop and there are texts.

What you can do is you can program for your acquisition person or you to say, “It’s time to call Mr. Smith on 123 Main Street. Here’s the data that you’ve collected so far to refresh your memory.” He’s already been sent this text saying this, he’s already been sent a letter saying this. There are two different theories on this. This is my theory and tell me what you think. You don’t want to beat these guys up with this stuff. You just want to touch them once every 3 or 4 weeks to let them know that you’re serious and that they don’t forget you. One of my favorite things to do is when we talk to someone, we send them a hard, physical contract.

CRM And Automated Follow-Up: People want to be belly to belly with you. Anytime they feel that you’re the small hometown guy and not some big corporation, they’ll give you the time of day.

It gives us a lot to talk about because we need excuses to contact them. With text, “Did you get my contract?” With email, “If you didn’t get it, here’s a digital copy.” There are a lot of reasons to touch people, but I like to send the physical piece out after we talk to them making an offer, whether they like my offer or not, whether they’ve already chewed me out. Some people get mad at me and I still send them the contract. We ended up buying those houses sometimes 6, 8, 9, 12 months later. I think the longest someone’s ever held one of our contracts and called us back was five years. I’ve been in the business for several years, so I’ve had the chance for that to happen to me. You ask, “Why me?”

When the notes say, “This is the guy that ran you out of the porch and told you to get off his property. It was cussing at you because he didn’t like your offers, so be aware.” I’m reading that and this guy is saying, “I want to take you up on your offer.” I’m going like, “Why did you pick me?” He said, “You’re the only guy that took the time to send a real contract.” Those are the guys that were yelling at me before. How often do you recommend we touch people and does it get further and further spans as you go or do you stay consistent?

The way that it’s set up out of the box with text and the ringless voicemail is we’ve got scripting already built into it prior to an appointment if you’ve never gone out. It’s something that if you’ve gone to an appointment, you can pick. Once you pick that drip, it will automatically select the dates and it will start pushing out text and/or ringless voicemails. Typically, it’s every 3 to 5 weeks and it does dribble in between, but that’s similar to what you were saying. Three to five weeks is when we push it out. For us, our direct mail cycle was every six weeks, we will send out mail. In between the direct mail and that, it seems to keep in front of them to where they’re not forgetting who you are. When that decision happens, they do come and come back to you because they remember you, you didn’t give up. You kept in front of them, but it wasn’t to a point where you’re being annoying and in their face every other day. That’s a fine line, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time, it’s worked well for us. As you brought up, we’ve had people where straight up, they were marked as removed from lists. They were screaming at us and then 4 or 5 months later, they’re calling us back and they want to go ahead and proceed. You’ve got to shoot your shot and see what happens and put it out there.

On the ones that were screaming at us sometimes that we knew were in trouble, something had to give. It was going to happen one way or the other. They just hadn’t come to the conclusion that their ship was sinking, but I can tell. We knew it. Once we remove them from our list, we’d have a backup CRM and they started getting solicited by someone else. That’s still us, but it doesn’t look like us.

For us, we did a lot of direct mail. If they were calling in, we knew exactly what mail piece they were calling off of simply because we have platforms like CallRail or others that are out there where for homeowners that are high equity or homeowners that are tax default, this is the phone number that we put on the mail piece. We know exactly why they’re calling. In our area, there’s a sale date that’s the same pretty much every year. We know when it comes up to that time frame, they’ve got to make a decision. It is what it is. We’re not trying to just go out there and take it away. We want to help them, but they’ve got to make a decision and let us help them.

Many people put their heads in the sand and they will not admit that they’re going to need help until 3, 4 or 5 days before. You got us everybody in a corner scrambling around. I find that a lot of people don’t know what ringless voice drop is, so let’s talk about that. That’s a phone call that actually two calls go out at the same time, split seconds apart. One gets the phone to ring, the other one is right behind it, hits the busy signal, drops into the voicemail, then the ring ends before the phone even rings. This happens in milliseconds. It’s a way to get into voicemail without a ring of your prospect’s phone. It’s an automated message that’s dropped. It can be done hundreds of times a day or thousands of times a day, depending on the phone police if they can handle it.

We use a service that drops. It puts it through at the same time pretty much to where it drops that voicemail. For us, it’s not a big company. The voicemail is road noise in the back. “We’re small town home buyers. We’re reaching out and don’t know if you have anything or not. If you do, give us a call.” The other thing that we’ll do is that color ID that shows up on their voicemail is typically a virtual number like CallRail, but the other thing that we’ve done is we’ve left a different phone number in the voicemail than what we are showing as our caller ID. It was a verbal phone number that we gave. We call it the mobile phone. If they listen to that and call it back, we know that they actually listened to the voicemail because it’s not the number that showed up on their caller ID.

That’s another little tip, trick and hack that you can put out there and try. The other thing, when they call back in, there’s some difference of opinion. Some like to live to answer them, some don’t because it is typically a lot of callbacks of, “Why are you calling me? How did you get my number?” For us, we’ve always used a phone tree of, “Press one to talk to somebody, press nine to be removed from the list.” If they press nine, it’s a voicemail. They leave their name and then their address and we can remove them. If they press one, it’s live answer. Some of our clients actually live answers. For us, it’s always going to a voicemail and we’re calling them back.

There's plenty of fires that are there, but a lot of it is white noise and you've got to be able to focus on one thing and move that ball. Share on X

I like to shield my people from the negativity as much as possible because even though they might be thick skinned, it does wear on you. Some of these people are quite nasty and they’re quite upset.

People are in tough situations. Rationale sometimes is out the window. You’d try to get your people away from that. Even a hard head like me out of the Marine Corps, it wears on you. I answered the phones personally for almost a year and a half and you get your fair share.

It doesn’t make you a very good salesman when you start getting jaded. You need to have only called that matter and people that are wanting to deal with you. We try to shield everything else so that they’re having a pleasant experience and they’re very good. I used to answer my own phones too. I used to get 50 to 60 phone calls a day. By the end of the week, they say, “How much is that house for rent?” I’m going, “Where did it say on that sign?” I’m the worst salesman ever in the world because I had it up to here with people that can’t read English. In mass text messaging, you can do mail merge as we do on emails. You can say in a text, “John, I’m still interested in the house at 123 Main Street.” You can put in the variables. It’s very personable. One of the things that don’t happen in ringless voice drop is it’s very hard. You can’t make that personal because there’s no way to mimic your voice that wouldn’t be noticeable. I think no one even tries because there’s stuff worth trying.

What happens is you’ve got to use your voice drop to refer to the personal email. Here’s an example. Take it however you want to. You could send up 8,000 text messages to people and say, “John, I’m still interested in this property address.” They all get this personal letter, “John, I’m so interested in your house at 567 Main Street. Is it still available?” You send out a ringless voice drop saying, “This is Mitch. Did you get my text?” He thinks that that voice drop is real because it’s referred to something that was very personal or, “Did you get the contract I sent you in the mail?” You’ve got to take the voice drop and tie it to something that was personal because you can’t make a personal voice drop.

The wording of how our scripting is set up, it is set up and timed so that if a text message drops after a voicemail, it will bring reference to a voicemail that was left. They start to think, “This guy is persistent and he’s a little bit different than the others.” From that, we’ve got plenty of people, including ourselves, where they’ve said, “I just got a contract. The guy called a year after I went to the appointment.” Things change and you don’t seem to go away and you’re different from the others.

This is all happening in the background automated while you’re having your lunch meeting with your banker, sleeping, working out or whatever it is you’ve got to do that day. These things are going out. The most important thing is that it’s become scientific. It has become an art form. Donald and his partner have set out to make it seem highly personal. They cannot tell that you did not send the text yourself and that you did not drop the voicemail yourself. That’s the key because no one likes being part of an automated system. A minute I answer the phone and I can hear a phone room in the background, I’m hanging up. I don’t even want to know who it is. I pick up the phone and go, “Is this Mr. Steven?” You can hear everyone in the background, 500 people asking 500 other people, “Are you so-and-so?” It’s like, “I’m in a phone room. I’m out of here.”

For us, especially because we’re Midwestern market Wisconsin, it’s farm country. People want to be belly to belly with you. They want to be personal with you. Anytime they feel that you’re the small hometown guy, you’re a regular Joe, you’re not some big corporation, they’ll give you the time of day. For us, that happens to be true. Some of these other guys that are doing remote stuff and they are the bigger company, it’s something where you’ve got to play the lower of the two. You’ve got to show that you are that small hometown buyer for the Midwestern markets. We’ve tried the branding approach versus the unbranded and small hometown buyer. For us, it was always a small hometown buyer that went out.

The more personalized direct mail pieces that were not just the run of the mill in your face corporate styled logo worked better for us. There was a time where we had 75 phone numbers and we tracked every single mail piece to see what worked, what colors worked. All that stuff was tracked for us for over a year and a half. We’re not the only ones. We’ve got friends that did the same thing and we found that the personalized letters and the ones that showed a family photo and things like that did well for us.

There are a lot of things in our business that if you do, then the doors start opening and you’re actually able to do it full-time rather than a part-time deal as trying to make it work.

I went a different route. We started several months ago trying to set up our own CRM. We still got a few months to go. I spent $12,000, but it’s completely customized to my office. If it ever gets finished, it’s going to be great. It’s been the most frustrating thing in the world. We hired a Podio expert. If I had to do it over again, I would tap into someone else’s system and have gotten on with it. One of the things that we’re trying to do is code these people’s personalities, blue, green, red and there are four different types of messages. We try to talk to them in their language and it makes a difference.

I tried to buy a house from a guy one time for a year. I’ll make the story short but his daughter had eight babies from eight fathers. They don’t know who. They’re keeping track. They haven’t kicked her out. They didn’t shun her. They’re trying to keep up with all these babies in their house and taking care of them all every time they come. The house got too small and someone from the church gave them a big house and they moved out and the house that they had was almost paid for and there’s no one in it. I want to buy it and I cannot connect with this guy for a year. I’ve been trying to buy his house. I did an interview with a guy named Hartman and he was talking about color-coding people. When I finished the interview, my phone went off and said, “It’s time to call that guy again that owns that house whose daughter has eight kids that the church gave them a house.”

I thought, “This guy is blue. He’s charitable, he is giving, he’s got patients beyond no end. He has compassion, he is all this stuff.” As luck would have it, I knew someone who needed to live in that neighborhood. I called him up in this time instead of quoting him numbers like a red or talking to them in a business guy, I said, “Do you still have that house over there?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “I’ve got this family that needs help. They need to live in that part of town. They can afford to live in that part of town, but they can’t afford to live away from his job. Grandma lives over there and takes care of the kids.” I gave him all these compassionate reasons to say yes and I bought the house in an hour.

It’s funny you say that. For us in the appointment area, within our CRM, we have what that is, red, blue, yellow and the different colors for the DISC profiles.

You’ve got the four personalities, so you know how to send out how do you talk. This requires more work because you have to create four very well thought out different messages. Reds, engineers want lots of numbers. They need facts, they need data, they want lots of pieces of paper. They want to hold files. You have to think about these four different messages. If you want to up your game, send out messages that are designed for the kind of personality that you’re talking to. This is where I say this has become a science. To sit down and originate this stuff yourself is probably not something you want to do unless you’re an enthusiast in that direction. You guys have a CRM and it’s $197 a month.

If you want to learn more about this CRM and everything I do, I’m sure you have videos that show or you have webinars, go to 1000houses.com/Beast. Also, if you’re not ready for a full-on CRM right now, they have a free simple CRM. You can get your hands on that and delve into what it might be like if you actually had some automation in your life. If you’re a one-man show, there are two things you need, an automated CRM and a VA. I don’t care who you are. If you’re a one-man show, you’re bragging about your do it all yourself. That’s like bragging about, “I don’t know how to read or write.” Get CRM. That little bit of automation will help you and get a VA. VA’s can do a hundred things for you that you don’t need to be doing.

For me, that’s when things changed drastically. For us, we were able to hand off some of the things that were mundane but have to get done. There are a lot of things in our business that you do them consistently and part of that is the follow-up and some of that other are the marketing. If you do these things consistently, then the doors start opening and you’re actually able to do it full-time rather than a part-time deal as trying to make it work. That’s a big difference. It’s just being able to multiply yourself and not necessarily having to pay for a full-time employee to make that happen. It’s the system that’s doing it. If you were to try to pay somebody $197 to do your follow-up like the system does, good luck. Even in the Philippines, it costs you more than that to do the follow-up. Let the system do a large amount of the work for you and then get yourself an assistant, a VA to help with the rest.

It’s like anything else. It’s a little front-end heavy. You’ve got to get in and get it organized, spend some time with it. Get it set up. You’ve got to get that train on the track. You’ve got to get it full of coal. You’ve got to get it fired up. You’ve got to get moving, but you can jump off that train. It’s still going to go down the track. Everything is like that. Take a week or a couple of weeks and say, “This is the month I solve the CRM.” That month goes by, the CRM thing is solved. You move onto the next part of your office or system that you want to do. They’re like little Lego blocks. You get this one done, it’s running. I can leave it. You’ve got to check in on it every now and then, but it’s done and then you get another.

There are a few things that you can set up easy. One is if you’re doing your own books, stop. If you’re a small business, it’s going to be a small bill. It’s relative. If you get a whole bunch of businesses, you get a big bill. My bookkeeping bill is $18,000 for the year, but it’s nothing. My businesses can handle it. It’s proportionately the same as when I had one house and my bill was $100. The other thing is closings. Normally we close the title companies, but you get closer. If you don’t, you can get an attorney to do your closing. You pay a fee, but you’re not wasting that time. The next two things are CRMs and a VA. Those are things that you can get right off the bat. If you don’t delegate as much as you can before you can get real employees, you’re working below your pay grade in most circumstances doing a lot of this stuff.

Without taking the first step, there is no moving forward. Share on X

Entrepreneurs are running around like they got a fire hat trying to put fires out everywhere. At the end of the day, the important part is to come up with one thing that for the month is the theme. That’s been a huge difference. Even in the last year, I focused on, “This month is this and the next month is this.” There’s a book called Traction that a bunch of guys rants and rave about. I love it, but they say 90-day rocks. Personally, I like 30 days. It is something that makes it to where this month, this is all I focus on and if I get this done, we did well and I know we’re moving forward. That’s been huge for me. Beast Mode alone, just that one business, we’ve literally had a 250% increase and we’re at 850 plus members just from focusing on the right things and growing from there. It works across real estate and any business. You’ve got to focus on one thing, move the ball and then go on to the next. Sure, there are plenty of fires that are there, but a lot of it is white noise and you’ve got to be able to focus on one thing and move that ball.

What’s in store for 2020?

For us, we’re going to proceed forward with Beast Mode. We’ve got a board being built out. The guys that are visual, we’ve got Klipfolio which is the screen monitors that you see a lot of places have to be able to visually see how your leads are doing. Those that are texting, we’ve got the integrations with the texting platforms out there. Some of them to name a few are Sherpa and Launch Control, but those are the ones we have an integration with. You’ve got to be able to prospect and bring that gold in and then figure out what to do with it within the platform.

We’re growing on what we already do well and we’re trying to keep it simple. For us, the big thing has always been we’ve got one app. Work out of that one app, the property lead app. From there we’re just going to refine what we do. We’re never trying to make it the Swiss Army knife that does everything. It’s got to be very simple, be able to continuously use it and it doesn’t need ten different buttons pushed to make X, Y and Z happen. That’s the biggest thing. We’ve been down that path. That is not a good path to go down because it winds up being you the operator that can only press all the buttons in the right order to make it happen.

You’ve got to keep it simple stupid. For the record, I own LiveComm. We’re a mass texting, fixing to be voice drop. If you ever want to take a look or things aren’t working out with where you’re at, we’d love to talk to you about possibilities. It’s the same thought process. I was trying to get the same thing done. We have recordings by phone numbers and forwarding. We have all different kinds of instant call connect. If you’ve got a house that’s not moving, you just turn on the instant call connect. When people are listening to the recording, my salesman gets a text saying, “Someone from this phone number is listening to the recording on 123 Main Street.”

We put a lot of thought into it too. It’s not a completely new idea. None of them are completely new, but we’ve honed it down to specific things that we’re trying to accomplish in this industry. It might be interesting to you. I want to thank you for taking the time. You guys go to 1000houses.com/Beast. Go ahead and at least get your simple CRM down there and check out what it does. Talk to these people about getting more robust CRM, Beast Mode. It’s $197 a month. It’s affordable. It takes one billing and you bought this thing for 40 years. Don’t trip over the pennies on the way to the dollars here. You need a CRM. It takes one deal or half a deal a year. For this not to be an issue, it’s actually stupid to even contemplate not having a CRM. There’s so much competition out there, they start selling to the people that are recurring and keep showing up. The people that knock on the door one time and leave, they’re just looking to get lucky.

We tracked the numbers. 30% to 40% of our annual was from the follow-up.

That’s a huge number. Is there anything you want to say to the new and ambitious young entrepreneurs out there?

Get out there and get your feet wet. It is definitely scary, but as far as taking a step, move one step forward, take another and you put the pieces together. Between Mitch and others that are out there, they’ll help you come along the way and figure it out, but you’ve got to take that step. Without taking that first step, there is no moving forward.

I like to thank Donald Ross for being with us. I’d like to thank all of you for reading. Do me a favor, go out there and give us a five-star rating and help us promote our show. We get about 17,000 downloads a month, which is pretty good, but we can always stand to be introduced to some new people. If you have a friend, share it with somebody. I appreciate all the help you want to get me. We’re out here trying to help people get educated and be light on the sales and a lot on the content. That’s why people stay with us. There’s always something to buy or something to add to plug into your business. We’re trying to deliver as much content as we possibly can. Some of you will go out and do a lot of stuff on your own and if you’re like in that 2% that doesn’t need anybody, more power to you. You can get your whole education out there on the internet, but you will pay a certain amount. You’re going to pay the street one way or the other. If you don’t get some help, you will pay the street and the street sometimes can be ruthless. Be careful about that.