Joe: Hey. What's going on, guys? Joe here with the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. Hope you're doing awesome. I am. Hope you had a great Christmas. New Year's coming up as I'm recording this here. I just wanted to say thank you guys for being loyal listeners and viewers of this podcast for so many years. I've been doing it for over almost 12 years now. In fact, I think in a month or two it will be 12 years. I am going to be doubling down and focusing on delivering more great content and interviews in 2023 going forward. So if you haven't already, please subscribe to this podcast or subscribe to our YouTube channel. I'm going to be doing a lot more interviews like what we're doing today. I'm also going to be doing a lot more teaching and content and maybe even some like live make offers, comp properties, talk to sellers, talk to realtors. I really want to make this a great channel, whether you're listening to this on audio or video on YouTube. I just want to say I appreciate you guys. 2020 has been an amazing year for me and I'm looking forward to 2023 because it's going to be even better. I promise you that. All right. So welcome to the show. Today, we're going to be talking about new lead generation strategies for vacant land specifically. And I'm going to share in a minute here the guest I have, Nicholas Nick, from a company called Lead Mining Pros. And there was another early investor that I interviewed recently about land investing who recommended Nick to me. And so I thought, oh, this is cool. And I tried it and I'm gonna show you some of the results that we had in one of our counties. It did really, really well here. And it's amazing. In fact, it was a very difficult, competitive county. I'll share it with you here in a second. I'll share my freedom soft screen and I got three deals under contract is very expensive I mean competitive county and the marketing by direct mail is very expensive because the response rates were way less than what I normally get. And I was doing this as a live demonstration in front of a huge audience in this in this virtual challenge thing that I was doing. And I was really bummed that my direct mail response rates, I'm normally getting two and a half, 3%. I only was getting 0.8% in this. And so I contacted Nicholas Nick and I said, Hey, can you help me? He said, Yeah, let's do some things. And so then we did a bunch of marketing for me. We're going to be talking about what he's doing here. And I got about doubled my leads at the time. And of the three properties I got under contract, two of them came from Nick or Nicholas. I'm apt asking me when I bring him on what he prefers to be called. So yeah, bam. There you go. In a very competitive market that I'll share with you here in just a minute. So I'm glad you guys are here. If you're watching on YouTube right now or on the Facebooks, even maybe LinkedIn, if you're watching on LinkedIn, say hi and appreciate you'll tell us where you're from. Just say hi in the comments down below. Give us a thumbs up. And even, you know, even if you're listening to the podcast, I do appreciate you guys the most because you're the ones who've been around the longest. Right. And I know you can't tell me where you're from, but I do appreciate you. I'm not ignoring you. But if you're watching this on Facebook or the YouTubes, just say hi. Tell us where you're from. And if you have any questions, please type them in the chat as we go along here, because I can bring those questions up. I can pop them up here on the screen and share them with Nicholas. And I really do appreciate that. Like, we've got one here from Tom. What's up, Tom? Merry Christmas. All And this is a good question from Natalie. Nicholas, we'll do this one here. What questions do you ask land sellers when you're cold calling that? We'll talk about that. And how did you know we're going to talk about it's one of the things that we'll be talking about. But Natalie is from Orlando, Florida. What's up? And Nick is from Nashville, Tennessee. So I know there's a lot of you guys here on Facebook and YouTube watching this. So welcome. Okay, one more thing. This podcast is brought to you by my book, Simple Land Flips dot com, and you can get this book for free by watching my webinar. I did a free class and it's called Simple Land Class dot com. If you go there after you watch my webinar, I'm going to give you a copy of this book for free PDF book and in your I just lay out my I call it my ten K and 10 hours strategy how to make ten grand a month working 10 hours a week flipping vacant land. And I know that sounds crazy. I'm not promising or guaranteeing anything, but I can promise you this if you don't put in the work. We don't do marketing. If you don't make offers, you're not going. You're going to make zero. And this is what we're doing. Yeah. Ten grand a month working 10 hours a week. It's very doable. This is why I love vacant land flips is because you can make great part time income without losing your nights and weekends. So I'm all about this is my kind of might seem more cash flow less overwhelm and I want to teach you guys in this when my podcast and on my YouTubes and all that how to make more money simpler, easier without the hassle, the headaches and the overwhelm that come with that. Normally, typically. Okay, so go watch the webinar simple land class dot com and get this book for free. I walk through all of the steps A to Z on how to do it all. Cool. And then, hey, Nas Moore is from Bangladesh. Welcome to the show, man. Glad you're here watching. This is so cool. All right, let's bring Nicholas Nick on. I'm going to remove my banner here and bring him there. Hey, Nicholas. How are you?

Nick: I'm good, man. I'm good. How's it going?

Joe: Good, awesome. Welcome to the show.

Nick: Thank you so much for having me.

Joe: Do you prefer Nicholas Nick or Nick?

Nick: Well, you know what the more like Nicholas Nick. And that is my real birth name. You know, I really can't be too picky, so I always lean on the side of less syllables, right? I mean, that's. We all want our time back.

Joe: So I'll call you Nick. All right, man. So let me guys tell you little bit more like I was interviewing, I think was Travis King and about talking about land. And he's a guy that does a lot of land deals and he lends a lot of money on deals. Great guy like him a lot. And he had mentioned to me think during the podcast, yeah, I used this guy. No, he didn't. I don't know. But I was like, maybe it was offline, man. And so then I did the county. I'll show you guys my numbers right now. Let me just do this. Make sure I can boom. There you go. Okay. This is Park County, Colorado. This is an image that you're looking at right here of my freedom soft account. And we did I'll show you my numbers here. We were targeting 1 to 20 acres in Park County, Colorado. I don't recommend this to everybody because I was spending a lot of money on marketing for this campaign. Right. And I was this is a very competitive it's like. Right. It's the county south of all of the ski resorts in or what's that county called Summit County, I believe. Right. There's Breckenridge and in Copper Mountain and all of that. Vail is close by. This is the county right south of that. And there's a lot of land for sale or a lot of activity and a lot of investors. And I thought, well, let's just do it anyway, because if I can make it work in any competitive county than anybody else can. Right. So we did you look at my stats here, I did 5850 letters, which cost me about 40 $800, 40 $900. I generated 80 leads and this is leads from texting and direct mail. We're going to talk about what Nicholas did, Nick did for me with the texting. So I had a 1.4% response rates total. But if you looked at just direct mail, I was about a 0.8%, which is frankly really, really bad for land, for vacant land. That's not good at all. That's what you get with houses. Usually I'm getting 3 to 4 times that with vacant land. But here's the really cool thing here. Of all of these 80 leads, three of them turned into deals and of those three, two came from the marketing that Nicholas did for me. And I said, Wow, this is so cool. And if you look at these, I went into all of my leads here and I filtered out just the ones that came from text. And there's 32 of the 80 leads came from texting, right? And so I thought, this is amazing. This is super cool. So what I did was I mailed my letters. I sent a neutral letter that just says, Hey, if you want to sell Mr. Jim Smith, you want to sell your 2.6 acre lot in Park County, Colorado. Please text or call this 24 hour recorded voicemail and that phone number goes into is a freedom option. And this is all done inside of my I call it the Joe McCall signature edition of Freedom Stop. Okay. And it all comes in is custom built for my for me, for my students, for vacant land. And it comes in there, leave a voicemail and we send an offer. And so, again, scourge, like, oh my gosh, and I'm doing this in front of a bunch of people. Nick Like this is a big challenge case study thing that I'm doing. So I contacted you and I said, Hey, can you help me? And let's just text these people that we sent the letters to. And then pretty quickly I got double the leads that we got from the direct mail. And so it was really cool and thank you for that and really it.

Nick: That's great. That's actually news to me too. I just I'll never forget when your name popped up in my CRM and I don't know if you remember, but I actually sent you a personal message.

Joe: I was like, I was amazed because I started getting personal texts from Nick and then texts from the VA is like, Oh yeah, this is how they handle all of our customers. It's be awesome. But here's the crazy thing. I've been referring you guys now to my students of the land course and I'm getting compliments left and right from you guys. You're doing a great job. Appreciate it. And you do. Okay, so let's talk about what it is that you do. Okay. And why do you do it? We talk about your history. What were you doing before you started this business?

Nick: So, you know, like you, I was actually in real estate education back then and I worked for a very large company at the time, and I started off as their event coordinator, you'd probably call it, and I was just throwing the events for them all over the nation. After some time went by and my leadership skills shined naturally, I ended up catching a couple of promotions and I became an executive over the entire fulfillment on the education company. And back then the main thing that they taught was direct mail. And this was nine years ago for the record, when direct mail was the main thing, if that makes sense. And, and what happened was we realized a lot of the students, it was a pain point for that, you know, direct mail was expensive and the results are lower and this was single family. So as you mentioned earlier, I tell all my clients that they're struggling and single family, you should check out some vacant land because it's a real easy win for us. But. Back then, they were spending a lot of money. Well, I wasn't an entrepreneur. I was just an executive trying to solve my clients problems. And I was like, what's free? You know, what's free? You know, when they need to pursue free stuff. And I realized that this was free. Everything that we do with this, other than the $70 a month we pay, Verizon is free. So I started teaching all phone strategies. Manual text, manual call. Do it all yourself, way better than spending 3000, especially if you don't have the 3000 to spend. Right. I came up with all these strategies and I came from a good place in my heart. And what I realized was, you know, with education, there needs to be lead generation as well. And the education is often just theory until we like put pen to paper and now we're like, Oh, I worked at LEED, I know how that works. And so I realized getting them to leads was getting them in the game. And I didn't realize it then because I was so new to it. But me coming up with this solution for my clients back then, three years later, was going to set the foundation for me to create this amazing million dollar lead generation company. And I had no idea, you know, that it wasn't that clear then, but it came clear now. And, you know, that piece that together for, you know, a couple of people, too, would be my dad. What we really do is we do all the hard work for you.

Joe: Yeah.

Nick: You know, people say, what do we need to get started? And now I say, is the zip codes and the money, you know, and you don't figure anything out. You don't have that. Oh, which, which text messaging platform works best and which listen, skip tracing and should I figure out and get that stopped. Ensnare you for weeks and what I'd figured out is you come to me. I've already got it all figured out through my now nine years experience in real estate. I've already know what works, and so we deploy all that for you. And it actually reminds me of what I used to do for my dad. You know, I'm actually a really old millennial. You know, I'm 37, so I think I'm one of the oldest millennials that exist. Computers came out when I was like ten, you know? So it wasn't like super new to me, but I was the techie nerd in the house. And whenever my dad, you might be able to relate, bought a stereo. I know if you have kids now, Joe, but whenever he bought a stereo, he'd give it to me. Go, Nick, hook it up for me.

Joe: I do that with my son. Yeah.

Nick: Yeah exactly, and little. You don't know this. Your son doesn't knows we're training him to be an entrepreneur right now, because what I've learned is now investors, instead of my dad bringing me stereos, investors bring me their lead generation problems. And I also fix those for them. And they don't have to think about it. Look, you go cook dinner, you go work out. When you come back, you're going to have leads in your email. And I was the same way for my dad when he wanted to watch his television, listening to his stereo. So we handle all of the hard parts and you know, we want to fix that for you. On top of that, because I came from education, I've got a really big heart of a servant. You know, we don't have contracts, we don't have commitments, we don't have set up fees, you know. So those things that you might find and very often another lead generation companies, I don't have any of that. And that's because I want people to powerfully choose me. I don't want them to have signed a contract six months ago and be or be around me because I got them stuck. So with us, every customer who's with us is purely optional. And that actually gives me a lot of pride as well.

Joe: Okay. All right, cool. So talk about what is some of the marketing that you do for clients.

Nick: So our main strategies are our main services are cold calling and text messaging and we do do a lot. After being in business for six years, I keep trying to come up with solutions that make investors happy, like add ons, but our bread and butter is the cold calling and the text messaging. We can also pull lists and skip trace. I do know that your audience, I believe in most cases, use priced now, which for the record I highly recommend price that you're going to use my service their lists work very well and all of Joe's clients he brings your goods. So I'm not I'm also not here when clients come to me to sell them everything I offer, I want to I want them to bring to me whatever works best. And yeah, so I'm a huge I'm I'm a huge fan of the price recommendation that you offer. But what we do after that list is generated as we skip trace it, we cold call it and we text message. Now as a consumer like Joe just got skip tracing and text messaging you know you're also in full control. It does. You can piece it together or you can do it all as a combination whenever you use those.

Joe: All right. Now in land specifically and you could do this for land or houses, just to be clear. Yeah, that would land. Well, a lot of people send direct. Male. They're sending most people send a blind offer, right? They just want to send offers and they only want to talk to people who get the offer and raise their hands. Sure, I prefer the neutral letter. I want as many leads to come in as possible. And I don't like sending just the same kind of similar. Excuse me, I don't like spending all the time upfront to break down all of the different vacant lots into areas and come up with a price for each of those little areas. It's just maddening. Why not just send it to everybody? And then as the leads come in, you make the offer for them. All right. So when you're doing cold calling and texting, is it different weather when somebody wants to do make a blind offer or just, hey, do you want to sell your land or do you want to sell your house? What do you guys do there?

Nick: So, you know, my recommendation for blind shoppers, you know, I don't want to use the phrase stay away from them. But I think as a part of the direct mail piece, it makes sense. You're setting their expectation and they're moving forward. But I agree with you, Joe. We want to leave this wide open, you know, and it's our job here to work leads. And I get it. You know, one of my biggest topics is leads are not served on a silver platter, you know, and I know that's what we want. I can tell customers, hire me, and sometimes they think real estate is a slot machine. Yeah. Hiring ironic and gosh guys, that's not that's not how it works. If I was to use the slot machine method, the real estate ads, we use the slot machine, the slot machine breaks, and then we have to fix it. And then maybe we get a couple of coins because every lead is going to take a lot of work and a lot of effort. All right. And so what we see for lead generation and what works best is exactly what you said, leaving it wide open. Do you own this three acre piece of property in Galveston County? Yes, I do. Wonderful. Have you ever considered selling that property before? Yes, I have. And then we ask 12 questions. And for land. Because there's less. Because land a simpler. One of the biggest perks of land. Way less emotional. Way less circumstantial. You know, definitely. Sure. A sure fire win. So we asking eight questions for land about to answer I think Natalie's question from earlier about is there legal access to the land is there is there any utilities on the land? Is it cleared? So the good news about land is there's not too much to probe on, but we ask all those and then we deliver it all to the client. Now they get all this info and they can discern, like you were saying, what's going to happen. Best maps.

Joe: That's interesting. So I did it differently. I didn't want you to ask him a million questions. I just wanted them to know. I wanted to know number one day, Jim, do you own this 4.6 acre lot in Park County, Colorado? Cool. You want to sell it? You want an offer? We thought there's different ways you phrase each of these things right now.

Nick: And you're and you're talking. And so to be clear, too, I was just describing our text, our cold calling strategy.

Joe: All your cold going.

Nick: Yeah. So all the text messaging, we follow your exact script for all of our clients.

Joe: Oh, good, yes.

Nick: Yeah.

Joe: That works so well.

Nick: In the budget I don't recreate the wheel anywhere but on the phone call because there's more energy. We don't just want. Yes, okay. Click. You know, we kind of want to romance them. So on the text, you're right. And we do follow your lead on the call since we're kind of it's our it's kind of a customer service play the cold call. Right. And so we're kind of just showing up as a little more service oriented by asking those questions since.

Joe: We got them. All right. So texting, though. One of the things I liked about it was it's just. How do you own this lot? Yeah, cool. We thought about selling it. Yeah. Great. What's your email address? We'll send you an offer, but that's simple. Very simple. That's it. Now, you. At the time, he just emailed me a lead, and then my VA put that into free. And you can also just put that into whatever CRM he has, right?

Nick: So the best part about texting is it's very easy to work with forms. So anyone who wants to hire text just send us over the web form and do your CRM and we'll plug it right in there for you. Cold calling is a little different because there's a lot of automations that are fire off so cold calling. There's a couple more hoops to jump through, but we do still put those in your CRM.

Joe: So then that's the script for texting. Now does anybody ever ask you to make blind cold offers on texting?

Nick: You know, some people will say, hey, you know, so if you send me a sheet. And in that spreadsheet is a column of the offer you want to make. We can do it, you know, because it's all automated, for lack of a better term, with us. But if I was to give them my best advice, it would be to do it your way and then go into what I would call hand-to-hand combat with. Each lead, which is. Hey, I got your letter. I'm going to get you an offer over. Tell me, how long have you on the land for? Has it been in your family a long time. My real advice for all the generators is to find the process at which that lead can fall in love with you the fastest. Okay. Now, I know that land is the easier target, but I think if you really get them to like you, you're really going to get that deal for the best price possible. And if you can come up with a strategy that says, hey, I want to sell to Hey, I'm going to be your best friend for the next 10 minutes. And then on my next call, I'm probably going to make you an offer or I'm going to email you that offer. And because I am a firm believer that when you shop with them and you show them you're a real person, that it's going to allow you to save how they double digit percentages on your offer whenever they get to see that you're a real person.

Joe: Yeah. I want to show you guys one of the conversations here. I'm just taking one of these properties at random and I'm trying to do it where I can hide their identity. That sounds weird. Hide their identity? Well, here it is. See if I can pull it up. Okay, so I'm going to screenshot this and then then gray out some of the some of the things. So the I'll share this with you guys in a minute. The conversation, how it came in to me. But then when what? So when you do cold calling, how does that conversation go? Can you walk through that again?

Nick: Yeah. So those conversations are, you know, like you said, we really try to lead with customer service. Cold calling is the start of a relationship. What we've learned about people receiving cold calls as they take them very seriously. Right. I think when someone gets a text message and we can all probably at chest because we all know they got a text from someone or something we didn't want to today. And when we get the first thing we think is this isn't a real person, this is a robot. You know, I'm probably getting scammed. It's just it's natural. And it's because there's no rapport, there's no relationship. So on our cold call, we know all of those things begin to exist. We're starting a relationship, so we go in. Hey. Yes? I was wondering if you owned a piece of land inside of Galveston, Texas, about two acres. Oh, yeah, I sure do. Oh, great. I thought that was you. I just I'm. I was wondering, have you ever considered selling before? And we like to word that person you know perfectly or for a reason, you know? And that's because it is. Have you ever considered selling before? It's not just are you ready to sell right now? Because that answer is probably going to be no every time. And what you what we want to do is we want to, like, stick a wedge in the door, if you will, and start wedging like, well, in regard to that sale. So we ask that question and you'd be almost I mean, a lot of people, 32 people said yes on your campaign, for example, a lot of people say yes to that. And then we just hit them with a little bit more qualifying. Can we access it? I actually have it pulled up here in the background, so. So I'll make I'll make sure I don't butcher it, give me just one sec.

Joe: So while you're doing that, I'll show you the script that we use. This is the real goal. One of the deals we got under contract, it was their name. Jim-Bob. Do you own a 2.5 acre vacant lot near Hartzell? That's the city in Park County, Colorado. They responded, Yes. Would you like an offer? Sure. If you're serious and if you are serious, have had lots of interest in it. Okay, great. What's your email address? I'll send you an offer today. That's it. That's it. And you send that to us. We will take that and put it into the FreedomSoft record so they can see that. But yeah.

Nick: I love that. And that is really how easy how easy it is. And then on the on the cold calling, we do we try to confirm as much to you as possible. We confirm it is there a different phone number for them to be contacted on and lead gen. We see all kinds of different things, right? We confirm what their name is. We ask them how many acres it is in total and we ask them is the land or lot mostly cleared? Are there any underground utilities? How is the access to the property? Is there legal or road access? Any structures on the property? We also ask them if it's okay to text them at this number. You know, everything we do, we do with the customer service mind, right? We're not trying to be the pushy guy, forcing them to like hey, they like everything is very customer service oriented, which helps you build a lot of rapport. And then we say, What is the best time for us to call back? Would it be okay to get an email to send our offer? And then it says, if we were to make an all cash offer in 48 hours, do you have a price point that would work for you? And then we have this question inspired by Ron Legrand. Would you be open to receiving that full amount in monthly payment? Okay. Yeah, we've run the grand gave us that question about a month ago and I've added that to what a great question.

Joe: So yeah, that's what does that mean? I guess you guys are wondering it's means buying a property on terms with owner finance. So repeat that question one more time.

Nick: Well, you know, it's a great question. And it's there's no better way to sum up a term's deal in one sentence than this question. This question is, after you ask them, you have to poise it in timing after you ask them how much they want for the property. Okay. So that way we know the number we're talking about and then they say, well, a hundred thousand. And then you would say, would you be open to receiving that full amount in monthly payments? Really good question.

Joe: That's really good.

Nick: And just like everything else, I always say a creative finance deal is also built to a relationship, you know, as a lead generator, I believe everything's built over a relationship. The reason I'm here is because of our relationship if you will. And so, you know, I joke and I say I wouldn't create a financial $100 bicycle if I didn't like you. Right. And I think that when we think about that, we start realizing that, you know, that silver platter statement I made earlier, even if it is creative financing and they say yes to that, your relationship with them is what's going to really take that to the next level.

Joe: Okay. What do you think produces better lead quality, cold calling or texting?

Nick: So quality I feel like cold calling. And that's because of how serious the seller takes it, right? The seller hangs up the phone and goes, hey, honey, someone called about buying our lane that like it's real for them. But when it's a text, they might not even tell anyone because they don't know if that's a real person yet or not. So here's what I and here's why I actually recommend. But like, just so everyone knows, your first campaign with me, I really recommend Bo. And that is so you see how they both work and if they both work, if they both work for you, you just got two new lead generation strategies. If one of them works, that's still a huge win. Let's drop the calling, drop the texting, do one or the other. And also, I've seen certain markets respond really well to calls and others respond really well to text. So what I learned as you probably did Joe is a great call, which is the more saturated the market, the better text response we have. And the reason why and not better but better than cold calling would be on the reason why is because when they're being pelted on the phones, they're way less likely to answer that phone for the 50th time for the 50th cold caller. But they will go, well, someone wants to buy our property and selling so and so we've learned a more saturated markets that texting is probably a better strategy to start. You know, and the last thing I'll share is with land. We've also found that there's really not so much this such thing as the saturated market. You know, land really is a great resource right now. And, you know, with single family houses, I can name five markets that you don't even want to go into if you're cold calling, you know, and we've actually had people hire us for land in those markets. And at first I'm like, you know, but just so you know, this adds to they still get great results and they're able to move in these saturated single family markets, like there's no saturation for them.

Joe: Yeah, that's just incredible to me. So I was going to ask you that. How does cold calling and texting for land compare to houses overall?

Nick: Oh man, here's what I tell people. I have averages on my website. So if anyone goes to the site or sees that I have a lead averages on the site and for land, I tell everyone, expect 25 to 50% greater lead flow than if you were on single family.

Joe: That's. That's crazy. This is one of the biggest reasons why I love land so much. And I'm not even afraid to talk about it, because some people are like, Oh, Joe, stop talking about it because so many people are going to learn about it as a matter. There is so much land out, it's ridiculous. There's over 3000 counties. And I did a post on it on my Facebook wall about how many vacant lots there are now. There are more houses and then the number of vacant land lots. But the that when you compare the number of investors that are going after land compared to the number of investors going after houses, it's just it's just a huge difference.

Nick: And one good one other thing that happens to that, I'm sure that there's some philosophical name for this, and I'll just call it shiny object syndrome. But when there's a really shiny object like single family houses, people will step right over land because the shiny object is so bright. And I think land is a is an even greater niche because it really. It really helps us pierce that issue with our clients. You know, if they're struggling on like Sugar Land and there's no struggles, there's no issues. And very often, even if they're used to single family, I'm like, it only gets easier because there's way less to talk about whenever you are pursuing land.

Joe: Yeah, and a big difference too is the seller is not attached to their property. So their vacant lives, vacant land, they haven't been there. Not like to pull this through. They haven't bought it over ten years ago and it's like they haven't been there in forever.

Nick: You know, creating that emotional attachment house is what I've learned about houses is even if someone's house is rundown or dilapidated and they want to sell, they feel out of an integrity to even sell it because they feel like they've destroyed something. So like you're saying, you don't have all that emotional attachment with land. And one of the biggest perks I give my clients or biggest piece of advice is focus on rural markets. If you're going for single family house. Well, the beauty of land is it attacks two high target areas. One is rural, two is land. And the other reason why land will never be too saturated is because I don't think real investors will do their homework to really find those rural markets. They're too busy thinking. Atlanta, Houston, Phenix, Los Angeles. They're not thinking those little towns in the middle of nowhere that are right outside of Orlando, Phenix or Houston. Right. And that's I think is the other beauty. It's your market will take longer to be discovered overall.

Joe: Good. Let's talk about pricing and I have some more questions for you, too. And if people are interested in getting to work with you, if they go to my site, they'll get a lot of 10% off.

Nick: Yeah. So there's a couple of things. So if they if they use that site, they're they'll gain access to us.

Joe: Which by the way is Joe McCall dot com slash lead mining Joe McCall dot com slash lead L E A D mining M I N I N G. Okay, go ahead.

Nick: And then I also have a bonus for everybody. There is a coupon code that you can use at checkout. It's JoeMcCall. It's his full name with no spaces in it. And what that coupon code will do as it will save you $1 on your purchase and we will deliver 10% more. So for example, if you do the package that Joe did, for example, 5000 text messages for $450, you will actually receive 5500 text messages instead of the same. $450 is basically how that coupon code will work.

Joe: I forgot how much, how little that costs. So if I go to my calculator corner and $50 divided by 5500 texts, that's 8.2 cents over taxes. Right. I also. You guys also skip traced for me. Yeah. How much did that cost? Do you remember?

Nick: So we charged, now, if you have 5000 records or more, which you did, we only charge $0.06 per 5000 records or more below 5000 at $0.07. So.

Joe: So those 14.2 cents. 14.2 cents to skip trace and text. That's crazy. And for a letter to put that into perspective for direct mail, you're doing a really good if you can get a letter sent out the door with the list and the letter first class for under $0.85. Yeah, $0.85. Now, I'm not saying here's a thing you guys got to understand. I'm not saying that you should stop doing direct mail and only do texting and cold calling. You need to do them both. There's direct mail really works because there's a huge difference between the quality of a lead that comes from a letter when they're calling you. It's, you know, the compared to the other way. So you have to do both. I'm really big and adamant on that now.

Nick: You know, I almost if I were to even give some advice, my recommendation, if you want to do it in a sequence as a lead generator, I like to call and text at the same time. But if you wanted to do it in a sequence, I would direct mail through your lowest hanging fruit leads, cause they're that easy, as close as hand down, which I think we're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then text them and then call, you know, you had a student do that with us, gear them all and I'm pretty sure he got he got 70, he got email, got 72 leads on 7500 text messages. And it was crazy. I'm not sure it was cold calling. Sounds for you to calling after that as well. And I think that's a great sequence because now you're pursuing leads by cost or ease, the cold calling or the direct mails easiest, the text messaging next easiest. And the cold calling will probably require the most work, however, because that relationships there, I would assume you'd get the most profit as well from the cold call.

Joe: Amazing. So at about 5000, it works out to be about $0.14 per skip, trace and text. Okay. But what are the costs for cold calling.

Nick: For cold calling, I have two different teams, so one of the really cool things that I offer is I have Americans or Filipinos and I and these are real Americans. I know we've all heard it before. Ex-Patriots, they used to live in America that live in Mexico. Now, cold call. And I don't do that. All of my Americans live on American soil. I pay them also 12 to $20 an hour, depending on how long they've been with me. But we have two different teams and basically and the way it works is I do have several different packages, but it goes to break it down numerically like you just did, cold calling at its most expensive form or the smallest package, which is the most expensive per dial Americans is about $0.40 per dial and Filipinos is about $0.20 per dial. And then if you buy, that's the smallest packages. If you go up to the bigger packages, the Americans drop down to about $0.33. And then the foreign callers are exactly half, I believe that 16 and a half cents per dial. So those kind of are our cadences.

Joe: Okay. What do you feel like is better American or Filipino?

Nick: Definitely American, especially for land. You know, land is and again, land adds a couple of great marks. I work for Americans. You know, normally if you're in like a metropolitan area like New Jersey, New York City or Atlanta, I say, hey, send in the foreign callers. Right. There's those places are melting pot. They're probably saturated. So it doesn't matter if you have an American or a Filipino. But land is different because it's more rural. You're going to find people with different cultures and they might not be as open to other cultures as well. Might be the best way to word it. So you might be losing a lead on a foreign caller to a land investor because he probably is waving an American flag. You know, he's probably out hunting dog. He's probably out, you know, growing animals to feed his family. And those guys, they generally have a unique feeling about America. So that's why I recommend doing the Americans for land specifically, but using the foreign team for those ultra saturated markets.

Joe: Talk about the one of the biggest frustrations I've always had with cold calling is when the seller answers, there's that delay and it feels like an eternity. It's really actually only one or 2 seconds. But the first thing it triggers in my mind is that here's another cold caller because there's this really long silence, awkward silence, delay at the beginning of that call. You know, normally when you say hello, there's an immediate, hey, how are you doing? But when it's cold calling it, it's about a one or two seconds. How do you how do you avoid that?

Nick: So what we do what our we use call tools just so everyone knows, you know it's not no trade secret. We do use version one. Thank God they didn't discontinue version one for me because I like that a lot more, but it beeps whenever they pick up. But what I tell my team say I think here's the average mistake of the average cold caller who may not have as great a training as we do. It connects, it beeps. But that cold caller still waits for you to say hello again. What I train my team on is when they when that thing beeps, you imagine that's them saying hello and you just pick it up. Don't wait to hear their voice in confirmation. Beep. Hey, what's up? This is Sherrie with so-and-so. We roll right into it. What I learned is when we say hello. Right. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, yeah. So sorry about that. It's that pause, I think, is what gets us. Our solution is as soon as it beeps, we start talking because we already know we lost that second. And we're assuming that that is the hello that we missed.

Joe: Okay, interesting. And that that should fix it.

Nick: Yeah, yeah. We don't, we don't have any. Our only complaint really is that is the abandoned her problem with cold calling and that's when you call multiple people at a time so a triple line dialer calls three people right to answer but one gets hung up on you know and so that's really our only complaint. And we're actually in the process of turning down our dealers way down because, you know, we used to be so many people used to pick up the phone that we were like, hey, let's call them all at three lines at a time. Okay? Now what we do is we actually just turned everything down to half as happenstance. So we're actually calling your leads at one and a half times rather than a three line dialer. Interaction means that we're hanging up on less and we're allowing more conversations that.

Joe: Okay, interesting. Let's just get a large. More questions for you. If you guys are interested in talking to Nick, go to Joe McCall dot com slash lead mining, Joe McCall dot com slash lead mining and there's a coupon code. Just use JoeMcCall, no spaces. J O E M C C A L L. You can also just if you go to lead mining pros dot com make sure you use that coupon code JoeMcCall to save 10% and you've got a lot of different packages here. People can scroll through it, sign up if you have questions or the cool thing about Nick's service is very simple to reach. I mean, I was surprised how easy it was to call or text and get somebody to answer and get somebody to respond to your text. And it was very, very good.

Nick: Thank you. Yeah, I do. I the phone number on the website is my cell phone. So, you know, anyone who calls or text that that does go directly to me. I do provide all the customer service myself. I am looking at eventually, probably in a year or two hiring out for that. But for the last five years, you know, I love dealing with all the customers, myself and adults. It's generally much easier for me to handle them than an employee to at that's what chemical. But you know, we'll probably change that the next year or so. But you know, in the meantime, you guys, you have me directly, even if you just want to call and ask questions. I love meeting clients as well. And if you tell me or what, Joe, I'll remind you of the coupon code. I saw you on the podcast. I'll make sure that you don't miss out on any help or to cool.

Joe: Nice. All right, let's talk about compliance. Tricky subject. How does it work? I don't know the answer to this. Can you ask five different people, get five different opinions on it. What what's your take on it?

Nick: Okay. So I know this is being recorded, but I'll say my take anyway is so like the reality of being sued is if they cannot find you, they cannot hurt you. And so I think that that is the most important piece here. Now, we do a bunch of things that also keep you safe. The phone number we text from as length to my in. It's paid for and sponsored and everyone knows what I'm doing with it. So that does apply some level of compliance for you. But what what's most important that we do is we don't throw you under the bus. You know, you never want to send a text message that says, hey, this is Nick with lead mining pros dot com in a way because I did do that and I did get sued for that. And the way I did this is a true story. I got cocky, I got a list and I was like, let's start say my name, my name and my company's website address and we're going to get all kinds of sales from those. Nope, not true. I got a letter in the mail like three weeks later with a screenshot of the text message I just sent out saying that I'm being sued and my real only problem, the phone number that texted them, that's not linked to me, but what's linked to me is that website. And so my advice to all investors, regardless of compliance or cold calls or text message, is don't put your name out there. Don't put your business name out there. Don't put your last name out there. You make sure that this is a lead before you go. Given all that information, you know, I don't know if anyone I just watched one the other day. It was like one of those true crime TV shows where this guy's name is Slim and he murdered someone. Well, in the hood or on the streets, there's a reason why everyone goes by nicknames. Okay? And that's because when something does go down the like, Oh, and nobody knows well who's Lammers, right? And you know, not the words I can knowledge from that over here, but it's a very important distinction to understand that you're in control of how much liability you put out there. If you want to blast text messages with you, I won't even let you do. Ira is the beauty of us is I help ensure that you're protected.

Joe: Yeah.

Nick: As one of our big benefits but the real solution here is. Yeah. So, you know, the biggest way for you to be compliant is just for you to be protected right now. You know, don't be foolish. There are some cases where people are this doesn't happen to any of my clients, but people are pretending to be a lead until you show up with the contract. Okay. Yeah, I had heard of that twice in 2022. Okay. And, and my real rebuttal there is that just be careful with the name you put out. You know, we don't have to operate 100% as our company name. We don't have to give everybody our full name. You know, we I'm not saying be unethical, but I am saying don't leave yourself susceptible. Yeah. As well, you know. And so that's kind of my spiel when it comes to compliance. And the other thing I'll say is if somebody is threatening to sue you and they're being incredibly aggressive with you and. My honest opinion, it means they don't have anything. Okay, so when, you know, if someone was to come in and actually do something wrong to me and I had them dead to rights, I don't have to scare them. I don't have to. Employees. Oh, man. I'm going to take your company. I'm going to file this with the city manager, but I ain't going to be able to do like these litigators will say whatever they can to make you as scared as possible. But I can promise you, the more they're threatening you, the less they have money. All right. It's not as easy to bring these cases to fruition as you would think. I mean, I'm under the impression that this case has to go in front of a judge and a judge has to go, okay. Always taxpayer dollars on a text message. Okay. So all these things have to line up. So I will share a lot of these scare tactics. I wouldn't just bend over and fold just because you have someone threatening you either, as is my other piece of advice.

Joe: I guess we should leave this would be, you know, getting legal advice from a legal expert. We're not attorneys. If you do have a concern with this, some people would say it's a gray area. Some say it's not, you know, hey, don't do it. Some people would say it's not a big deal. It's worth the risk. We're just telling you, go get legal advice. You should talk to an attorney. And if you if they say don't do it, then don't do it. Wow. So, yeah, it's it's one of those things I'm on the fence. I, you know, I just don't know. I've talked to people that are fine with it as long as you comply and you do it the right way. You know, you the if if the person says to ask you to stop or if they opt out, you have to opt out which Nick does.

Nick: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think that's an important distinction, right? Not antagonizing. Yeah. You know, I have clients that are like, well, you sent two text messages. Now I will not send if they do not reply positively. I'm not texting them again, you know. And so I like what you're getting at because we do things that we don't even realize that help keeping you. Like we don't let you spam. We don't, you know, because that's when someone's going to have a cross to bear. That's when someone's like, I'm going to make your life miserable now. But what we've learned, even on the cold calling, sometimes we cold call and they say they're on the do not call list. We say exactly that. Oh, my goodness. I'm so sorry. I will put you on our do not call list. We will never, ever call you again. We say that exact script every time and then we actually put them on their do not call and we actually never call them again. And that's never been an issue for our client. So I think whenever you do run into these people as well, don't fight fire with fire, fold right up, apologize, never happen again. I'll remove you from my systems. Have a great day.

Joe: Good. All right. Well, I don't know what happened to my camera. I think. I do know. I've plugged it into another little hub, and I need to put it back to where it used to go into directly into my computer. So Cameron is out, apologized for you guys. Watch you. Maybe the podcast has gotten better. The video's better now because I'm not on it. But again, guys, if you're interested in talking to Nick, go to Joe McCall dot com slash lead mining Joe McCall dot com slash lead mining. Nick, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Yeah. Any final words you want to say?

Nick: No, I'm glad to be here, Joe. I'm really honored. You know, you're I've known your name forever and I'm really thankful that you found me and that you were happy with our service and that you were well. And you wanted to share this with your audience and your students. I just want to let you know that really means the world to me to trust us with that. So thank you so much.

Joe: Thank you, man. All right, guys will see you all later. I am waving at the camera right now. I know you can't see. We'll see you guys later. Thanks again, everybody. Take care. Bye bye.