Episode 4: How to Build a Million Dollar Sales Team

Justin Piche (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Ground Gave Podcast. This is your host, Justin Piche.

Clay Hepler (00:05)
This is Clay Hepler and we are here to talk about how to win

Justin Piche (00:22)
we have a great topic. It's specifically how to build a million dollar sales team. We're going to be talking about the lead intake and sales process. How do we close deals? How do we qualify leads? What does that look like? Especially when you're doing it with a big team and at scale. You

know, this is like a

intake acquisitions. This is the engine. I think that drives your business.

And a lot of people's problems can be solved by just increasing their ability to handle leads. But how do you do that? Like, what's the right way to go about that? So I think a lot of that is going to be what we're going to discuss here today. So Clay, you want to kick us off with some thoughts? And then maybe we'll dive into, hey, how are our teams structured? And what are our philosophies behind lead qualification?

Clay Hepler (01:07)
Yeah, man, actually just got off a call, as you know, coaching one of my sales guys on how to close a deal. We have a complex deal that, you know, we're buying 20 acres plus another six acres that we have to survey while we're in the due diligence period. We're going to be selling it to a builder, but we have to structure it in such a way that it's a five-year payoff

structuring these creative deals is important. And so we take that same philosophy and apply it

Not everyone is going to be approaching our company with the same set of temperament, the same analytical background, the emotional background. And so we do have to apply a level of individuality to the process. But as you'll see today, in order to build a scalable sales team, you have to build a scalable process. The process is the framework and the

think about it as like the architecture of the sales team. And so you can't build a successful sales team without a clearly defined, consistent process that produces outcomes. And so Justin and I are gonna talk about our individual processes today, and they might be a little bit different, but try to focus on the principles

Justin Piche (02:24)
100%.

Clay Hepler (02:36)
behind what we're talking about versus actually what we're talking about. And that'll allow you to apply to your circumstance because if you don't have a team with five salespeople and you're a one man show or one woman show, the things that we're gonna talk about today will still apply to you because you're gonna have to go through the same sales process that we're talking about. Taking someone that has never heard about your company to someone who is under contract to sold.

is the same exact process executed well, whether you're one person or you have a large sales team. So Justin, mean, let's, dude, kick it off, man. Tell me, tell me a little bit about the structure of your sales team and let's break down your

Justin Piche (03:17)
we're saying sales and what we're really talking about today is acquisitions, but it is a sales team, right? You're selling yourself and your service of buying this person's property. so the way my team is structured, let's see, we have 13 people on the sales team, something like that. I, we just hired a couple more this week. So if my numbers are a little hazy, it's cause I haven't updated my, my org chart. but basically the way it's broken down is we have lead qualification.

essentially cold outreach. That's the first step, right? Call one. And then we have lead management and acquisitions management, which is essentially steps two through follow up. So that's the, it's, that's kind of the way I look at the biggest picture kind of buckets of the acquisitions team is we have people that are qualifying the leads. They're looking at thousands and thousands of leads a week and

trying to figure out who are the right people, what are the right properties, what are the right people that want to sell, and what is the right price to move them on to our second tier, the acquisitions manager, lead manager, to start that comping and negotiating and closing process.

Clay Hepler (04:30)
Okay, so when I'm hearing you for the first step and our team is structured in the exact same way, you know, if you're doing, for example, inbound marketing, you're what Justin's talking about for his first process, right, which is the pre-qual, like let's say pre-qualification. A lot of times the salesperson that's actually doing that is the PPC ad, the radio ad, the mail.

Justin Piche (04:57)
The Mailer.

Clay Hepler (04:57)
Like the male is acting as a sale person to bring those people in. So you can think about that part of the process is this like marketing sales type of role. And so then you...

Justin Piche (05:07)
Right. Right. And for us, cold calling, right? So cold calling is the primary lead gen source for us.

Clay Hepler (05:15)
Okay, so you get a lead that says, hey, I'm kind of What's the process from there?

Justin Piche (05:23)
Yeah, so for us, I try to put a lot of energy into that initial lead qualification because I don't want my acquisitions manager to deal with a bunch of leads that have no motivation. I don't want them to get a lead that comes in because somebody said, yeah, I'm interested in selling, but the property is garbage. There's floodplain covering it or wetlands covering it or whatever other thing it might be covering it.

I don't want those leads to come in and bottleneck my higher value, higher dollar. I say value, but I don't mean necessarily value. mean, skill, my higher skill, higher dollar per hour employees. I don't want them getting bogged down with a bunch of bad leads, if you will. So we put a lot of energy and effort into our initial qualification process that I think honestly, listeners will probably get something out of.

Clay Hepler (06:15)
we're in the same boat. We're actually changing our sales process after we speak right now into the intake, which is the lead manager. So the first step of the process, because we're talking about basically a three step process here for sales. The first step of the process for us is the intake, if you will, and that's a lead manager position. And so you can imagine, depending on what industry you come from, it's like a setter and closer.

way of doing it. So the setter for us is gonna do basic qualification. And we used to do heavy qualification on the front end. what I mean heavy, like I'm talking about like going through big roadblocks and motivation and things like that. What we're really trying to do at the beginning is like to assess the clear motivation and just to see if like price is within

And so that role, that lead manager is going to do just basic, have a basic conversation and then review the price to say like, okay, is this an actually valuable lead that I can pass to my acquisition person? Because my acquisition person, the role of them, like if they're playing sort of a lead manager, acquisition manager role, in my opinion, again, this could be you as a one person show, and that's okay, right? You don't have to.

necessarily abide by this, the two call close, I think is a.

But we want to qualify those people to such a degree that we know that we're within striking distance with price and we're within, there's a motivation there and there's no like crazy, weird characteristics of the land that we wouldn't be able to build on or develop or anything like that. At that point, that's when we're passing them through to our closer.

Justin Piche (08:09)
That is exactly what we do. All right. So we I push that down to I guess we may have different, you know, different names for some of these roles on our team, but let's just use the role for me of a cold caller, for example. All right. We we reach out to these leads. We call them. And obviously you got to get past the 'no' there's a wholesale's aspect to just getting past the 'no' and actually engaging these people in conversation. But that's not necessarily what this podcast is about. Once we're past the 'no'.

We needed to know three things to consider the lead qualified. The first is do they want to sell? Okay. And that's motivation, right? Do they want to sell? The second is do we want to buy? That's the bad characteristics of the property, whatever. And then the third is, is the price reasonable enough for us to negotiate?

The way we do each of those is pretty straightforward. Okay, for one, do they want to sell? We just ask them if they want to sell their property, right? I don't phrase it, are you interested in an offer anymore? Because a lot of people want an offer. They want to know what you will give them for their property, but they don't want to sell. Those are fundamentally different questions. And so we really got to be careful about saying, do you want an offer? Because yeah, we're going to be pushing a lot more people that want offers than people that are actually interested in selling. And the second thing we do is,

I'm trying to make sure that I'm not forwarding garbage properties to the acquisition manager. And since we're not pre-scrubbing visually all of our lists before they go into initial cold outreach, because that would be incredibly time consuming, we just scrub out on the call. So the way my team works is, a cold caller gets a call, a connected call, they get past the no. The first thing they do is they're like, hey, Clay, one sec, I'm just pulling up your property on a map right now so I can talk directly about it.

And boom, they type it into land ID, they pull up the land ID and now they have all their filters turned down and they can immediately see the floodplain, the wetlands, where the utility poles are, what type of access there is, the slope of the property, all these different things. And that does two things. One, it gives us a pretty good idea of if it's a good property for us to buy, but it also allows us to specifically ask them questions that aren't like the generic lead qualification questions that a lot of people might ask.

Right. Instead of saying something like, how slope is your property? We can say, Hey, I see it's relatively flat off the road for a little while, but slopes down to the back into a ravine. Is that more of like a cliff or is it kind of more of a gentle slope? Or instead of saying, what's the utility situation? We can say something like, Hey, I noticed there's overhead power lines right across the street. Do you have a meter box already hooked up on the property? Like, did you have a mobile home on the property in the past or something like that? Instead of saying,

how's the access, we can say, hey, I noticed that there's a dirt road that runs in front of the property. Is that dirt road a public or is that a private road? It does two things. It gives us better answers and more quality, better answers to our questions up front, because we don't have to ask the obvious stuff that we can easily tell by looking at the map. And it also lets the seller know, hey, they are actually looking at my property and they're asking legitimate questions about my property. They're not just somebody who's

just trying to see if I want to sell and forward me on to somebody else.

And then obviously, anyway, let's talk about those things first.

Clay Hepler (11:27)
Yeah, so we're talking about the second stage in the sales process and we're equally there. mean, you know, I think the phraseology is important, right? Because if someone says, hey, Clay, do want to sell your house? I would say, or you're interested in an offer on your personal home. I don't want to say this too loud because my wife could be upstairs right now, but I would sell it. Man, if I make

two, three X on my money, are you kidding me? Right, like so, know, if I double or triple, like I bought this house last year, like if I double or triple it, like right now I'm like, I'm selling it. Like I don't even, I wouldn't even consider, I'd be like, yeah, absolutely. Double the sale, the purchase price. And so that's the important nuance that Justin's making there about that. And then having a more personalized approach. One of the things that people run into,

Justin Piche (12:14)
100%.

Clay Hepler (12:27)
depending on the type of lead that you have, is you need to take a different type of approach with a cold outreach lead versus an inbound lead. What I say that I mean, the handoff between the cold callers to the lead manager is vitally important. And setting the expectations on the cold call versus the lead manager is the ball game, right? Because you might say, hey, we're gonna get you an offer on the cold call.

and then they get submitted to a lead manager and the person gets pissed off because you set the wrong expectations on the front end. Justin, how do you manage that with your team?

Justin Piche (13:07)
Yeah, no, for sure. for one, have a very clear callback within less than an hour policy. like if a new lead gets like we have a cold outreach lead, we so our inbound leads would be, for an example, mail. That's our primary like inbound lead marketing. so those actually come directly to the acquisitions manager. We don't have we have two of them. They don't they don't they're not handled by the cold outreach team. They come right into the acquisitions manager because it shows a level of motivation above just

somebody you're randomly talking to already, They're a higher level lead, if you will. But for the cold outreach, the conversation generally goes something like, that's great, thank you so much. We've decided they could sell or they wanna sell. We've established that we wanna buy it. We've ideally gotten a price out of them. We can talk about how you get price out of people too. I think that'd be a valuable discussion to have. And then we have to say, okay, well, hey, we have another department that handles our pricing and our offers.

they're going to take a look and they're going to get back to you within the next hour. That's how we end the call. And we let them know like where somebody is going to be calling you in the next hour about this property.

And then it's the job of the acquisitions manager and lead manager to prioritize those calls. And ideally, they get back to them in 30 minutes, right? You say an hour, you get back to somebody in 30 minutes. Hey, man, you've exceeded their expectations. But in no case will a lead ever go more than an hour, hour and a half without getting a call back. And we may not be able to reach them. Sometimes people get busy. Sometimes people put their phone on silent. They go back to work, whatever. But we're calling them back, just like we said we would. We're leaving a voicemail, and we're scheduling a follow up.

to reach back out to him. And I'm probably calling him multiple times that day.

Clay Hepler (14:51)
Okay, so there's a couple of things that I want to talk about here that I think the listeners are probably thinking about. Okay, so depending on your land investing strategy, you're going to be in different markets. And sometimes it's pretty difficult to, when you go into those markets, to get a feel for the actual price of properties. Depending on what specific type of land you're targeting, rural recreational can be increased.

Justin Piche (15:20)
Yeah.

Clay Hepler (15:21)
near impossible without actually bringing a realtor into the conversation or doing extensive underwriting. So I'm gonna talk about that in a second, but I wanna talk about price conversation, right? This is the important thing to pull out of the seller and it's not relevant to the conversation because it shouldn't define how you're offering, but it should provide a framework to start from, right? So for example,

If someone is saying, hey, you know, I have a property that's, I'm looking for $100,000 on the property, okay? And you look and you're like, dude, this property's not selling more than $30,000. You know, that person is probably not gonna be someone that you should prioritize.

Justin Piche (16:08)
100%.

Clay Hepler (16:11)
And so you should also know that if someone says, I want 30 for it, or I want 25 for it, like 30 and we're like, I think this thing will sell for 30. That doesn't mean that lead can't be converted. What that does mean is like, you should have a internal prioritization matrix. That's a fancy way of me saying like, what's a hot lead? What's a cold lead? What's a warm lead? And so that should def-

Justin Piche (16:36)
Triage, the right, yeah, the term, I would say the term for that is like triage, right? You've gotta have, yeah.

Clay Hepler (16:41)
Triage, triage, yeah. just, I use more fancy words than Justin. It's just trying to compensate for his intelligence. No, so yeah, triage is very important. so you need to spend the time in the business to get to know what is a motivated lead. And teaching your team how to do that is work that needs to be done.

So you need to do that, so as you do that, then you'll kind of get into the level of being a sales manager. But in order to actually produce a high ticket, crushing sales team, you gotta be in the day to day, man. Or you gotta hire someone to be in the day to day. And so that's what we were talking about on a previous podcast, is like, who do you hire next? So constraining your business is a lot of times is leads, and then it's the conversion component.

So when you're overwhelmed with leads, then you get into the conversion. And these little nuances guys are the things that actually make or break the bank. So let's talk about the underwriting component here. Cause this is going to be a big thing that people are probably like, man, yeah, but like those that know those are doing three to five deals, they're going to be like, yeah, I get it. Like how do I underwrite this quickly? Justin, tell us a little bit about how you handle that.

Justin Piche (17:58)
100%. Yeah. Let me just touch real quick back on the getting the price out of folks, right? and maybe just like how we handle leads next. I, again, to Clay's point, like it's, it's pretty irrelevant what exactly the person wants for the property in terms of your offer. It makes no difference to me what they want versus what I'm going to offer. but again, the triage aspect is super important, right? Because you have, you have generally cool. Your cold outreach team is a lower dollar per hour employee.

And your acquisition managers are, a more skilled position. It's a higher value employee. And so if you're gonna, you don't want to send a bunch of essentially unqualified leads that want way too much money onto your acquisitions manager. Otherwise they're gonna get, their time is gonna be spent just doing the initial comping just to realize that person wants way too much money. It's kind of the other important thing about why, or the other thing about why it's so important to try to work to get a price out of the seller on that first call.

so that you can do triage appropriately. Otherwise, again, you're gonna be handling a lot of leads that come in that aren't actually motivated because they want too much money. And it's just a quick aside. This is why I personally have a very high conviction for growing a sales team internally and not necessarily outsourcing my lead process, not outsourcing my lead qualification and lead generation to another agency where I don't have nearly as much control over how those leads are qualified.

Yeah, just a quick aside. But let's talk quick about underwriting. You don't have to have it perfect on the first call. We do a three-call close, where the first call is the initial outreach or the initial intake, whatever you want to call it. The second call is from the person who's going to make the offer. It's from the person who's going to make the offer. They've already gone through a quick underwriting. And we can talk more into what that actually looks like. But they've gone through a quick underwriting, maybe 10 minutes.

They pulled up some recent comps. They've looked at some data like pricing analytics software to kind of figure out what the averages might be in that geographic area. They've looked at the features and compared it and they've come up with at least an idea of, I think the market value is around here. But the whole purpose of that second call is to set up the third call and get all the questions that we don't yet have answered from our initial call answered. It's to build rapport. It's to build more credibility.

And it's to sort of frame our offer. Because in most cases, our offer is lower than what they want. That's just how this business is, right? You're trying to make money on either flipping or on developing. And there's a price you can pay and make money. And there's a price you can pay. And you won't make money. And you obviously can't go to that price. And so you've got to come in lower in a lot of cases. And so that second call is a framing call. We're talking to the seller and saying things like, hey, Clay, does your property have any

like have like a gravel driveway on it. I'm having trouble seeing where the access is because you know a lot of properties we have are just overgrown at the road and they'll be like no I don't I don't have any of that or does your property already have a septic tank and water well on it? no I don't have that and you're trying to get them to see some things that you might have to do to the property to make it worth whatever they want for the property that they haven't yet done and there can be a myriad of things right it's kind of on the fly of like

looking at the parcel and figuring those things out. But yeah, what do you got,

Clay Hepler (21:21)
Yeah, I would like to go to pricing before we move on to what I'm about to say. And I could talk a little bit about how we're coming up with pricing, right? So, you know, the oldest trick in the book is, you know, who gives the pricing first loses. You know what I mean? And we're dealing with an older audience that was like, this was like, dude, this is their freaking narrative.

Justin Piche (21:32)
Yeah, let's take a step back. Let's talk pricing.

Right, yeah.

Clay Hepler (21:49)
Right, this is what they know and this is how they roll. And so, when sellers give us resistance on price, we hit them with this. Hey listen, I totally understand that you're not really interested in sharing the price, but I'm a little bit concerned if I go back to my team, go back to my underwriting department without something to come to them on, it's gonna end up not allowing me to really advocate for you.

I'm not gonna be able to get you a little bit more if I don't have some place to start with them, right? And that's the first thing that we always talk. We always talk about trying to advocate for the seller when the seller is giving us a price. And then if they give us more resistance, then we hit them with this. We hit them with, hey listen, I get it, I still completely understand the old adage, like he who gives the price first loses. But if you're buying a car,

Like we're buying the land. I wouldn't show up to the dealership and say, hey, you I'm gonna take that, you know what? Let me think. That price is a blue truck. It's 2024. You know, the wheels look nice. I mean, let me just offer $10,000 for that. No, there would be a sticker on the truck and it would say, hey, MSRP is $33,000, right?

And so that starts the conversation, so you kind of know where you're going. And the person that dictates that is the person that owns the truck. And so in this case, you own the land, and so you're the person that dictates originally what the price is, so I can go back to my team and get you the most money possible. Does that make sense? And so in that point, they're gonna probably give you the price, right? So Justin, I just gave two kind of keys of how we do it.

Justin Piche (23:43)
That's gold. I love that. Yeah, we, we, I love the advocate for you piece of that. Right. I love that because it's, it's, it's, it's like, Hey, we're on the same team. Right. It's, it's a bit of a, it's just a framing and a psychology thing that helps get people to trust you more and give, give away some information. Yeah. We have a couple of things that we do. The first thing is always the old, Hey, I've seen other

investors, other land buyers, other whatever, never, never saying this is your offer. I've seen other people pay between X and Y for this type of property in the area. Is that in line with what you're looking for? That, that is like the first tier of like, Hey, I've seen some other land trade at this price. Is that in line? And at a minimum out of that, you're not getting hung up on, right? You're not, you're not saying this is my offer or my range. You never want to say this is my offer. This is my range. Never.

You always want to say something else like this is what other people are paying. Are they they way off or is that what you're looking for? At a minimum, you'll get either a very negative response and that'll tell you, OK, they obviously want more than that range. And that will help you in the next the next one, which is if they still won't give you the price. Another way to do it is if you're working in an area with really good tax assessed values like North Carolina, for example, North Carolina, I think is pretty good at having the tax assessed value of most properties in most counties be relatively close to market value.

then you can use that as another one. Hey, like, hey, Clay, I noticed that the county tax assessor has your property assessed at $130,000. Are they just way off or are they spot on with the price? And then they can just talk about how bad the tax assessor is and you can jump on and be like, yeah, they don't know what they're talking about, kind of build another a little bit more rapport, it might at least gives you some information, helps you lead you to it. And then the third way that we do it is more similar to yours, but I don't think quite as good, which is.

applying to or appealing to their logic, which is, Clay, I totally get it. Like, you know, you don't want to give your price, but look, we're going to go back and we're going to put a good bit of work into getting you the most money we possibly can for the property. And if we're going to put all this work in to do this, you know, I don't want to waste your time. I really don't. I want to come back to you with some offer you would never accept. And I don't want to waste my team's time either preparing an offer that you'd never accept.

And I know it's tough giving out a number, but just any kind of ballpark, anything that's stuck in your mind that would help us moving forward. So I know we're just not way off and wasting each other's time. That's the way that we typically approach it on the third. And that does a lot to get people's number out of them.

Clay Hepler (26:24)
Yeah,

Justin Piche (26:25)
Hey guys, this is Justin. I'm just interrupting your podcast to ask you for a favor. If you got any value so far, you're about halfway through, could you go ahead and click that subscribe button, leave us some comments on YouTube, let us know what you've liked or haven't liked so far, and we want to know other topics that interest you. So leave those in the comments too. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Clay Hepler (26:48)
man. Yeah, so we talked a little bit about pricing now. And so, for me, I actually used to do the initial lead intake call to the process call, like a qualification call, to the offer call. And so we're actually moving to initial call to offer, right? And our lead managers are gonna do a little bit more heavy lifting on the front end so that our closer is just closing.

So if you don't have a discerning enough lead manager on the front end, what ends up happening, and what I've found, is you end up getting so many leads through your pipeline, and then you're passing them over, and then you're closer, who should be only closing, right? And following up offers ends up starting to do a little bit of everything, right? And so we're getting away from that, and we're actually working with one of the top sales consultants in

the nation for wholesaling, house flipping. And so he has this two call close and so we're just following him. And so that's the framework that we're putting in. But I used to do what you're doing. I don't think there's any problem with that, but I just really am trying to focus on this one, this new one. So I think what's important too, when we're talking about a sales process is the closing call is important, but also like metrics, right?

And so I actually texted you in preparation for this call. You didn't know that I was doing some pre-work. But about how many leads can a lead manager handle per day and how many leads can a acquisition manager handle in a week? How many offers can your acquisition people do? And how many leads?

Justin Piche (28:34)
Yeah. this is going to differ based on what the responsibilities are of your acquisitions manager and how you do comping and underwriting. A lot of people do, they have their acquisitions manager doing both, which is what I do. I have my acquisitions manager both comping, underwriting, and then offering on the property. And I think it leads to better conversations with the seller because the person who's actually having to overcome the objections and give the offer

has the background of all the properties they've looked at and all the features they might have that, you know, to actually expand on that. But it does slow things down, right? So if you had just a closer that was only closing somebody else did the underwriting and they were just using that information to offer on, you know, they could probably handle more. But generally my team can handle about 10 new leads per day along with all of their follow up responsibilities. So 10 new leads come in 10 comps.

10 quick comps, 10 attempts to follow up with them, but then obviously the whole follow-up sequence, double dialing them multiple times a day for multiple days, then go into once a day for two weeks sequence. we have a lot of that's kind of automated and built in to our CRM. So yeah, that's about 10 new leads per day per acquisition manager.

Clay Hepler (29:56)
So, but your lead manager, how many leads per day are they handling?

Justin Piche (29:59)
When you say lead manager, do you mean like that cold outreach person? Yeah, here's like a cold caller, like a cold caller.

Clay Hepler (30:02)
Yeah, so what, so this is important. This is, yeah, this is important because my lead manager is the intake person, number two, and it sounds like you are doing number two and number three is your acquisition manager. Your acquisition manager is taking that initial call and then they're taking a follow-up call and then they're taking another call. Am I incorrect in understanding?

Justin Piche (30:24)
No, it's not quite right. What we've done is we've basically split the lead manager position into some of those responsibilities are on the intake person, the cold outreach person. So some of the responsibilities that a lead manager might take, some of the follow-up questions, some of the maybe more detailed due diligence questions that you might ask on a call to help prioritize and qualify lead, those are happening on the very first cold call.

So we've pushed some of those responsibilities down to the initial cold call. And so the only leads that are getting pushed onto my acquisition managers are people that the price is within striking distance, they want to sell it, and we want to buy it. They're already qualified. I don't know if that makes sense. So one of those cold callers, like one of those cold outreach team members, we use a software called Ready Mode, which is a

Clay Hepler (31:06)
Okay. It makes perfect sense. No, I'm trying to dive in for the listeners here.

Justin Piche (31:18)
I mean, it's a great software. There's a lot of different kind of cold calling softwares out there. Some of the more popular ones are Mojo dialer. ReadyMode is just another one, multi-line dialer. it allows you to do a whole bunch of things and track a whole bunch of KPIs. And so the one that we care most about, the two that we really care most about for our agents is number of connected calls and talk time. Talk time is super important too, right?

The more time you spend on the phone with somebody, the more likely you are to be able to close a sale. You know, it may not be exactly true of every single industry, but at least in our industry, when you're trying to uncover motivations, you're trying to build rapport, you're really trying because you're faceless. I mean, you're faceless. You're on the call with somebody and you have a voice, but you're faceless. You're not shaking their hand. In order to build up enough trust to get them to sell you something they own, they've got to be able to

have a conversation with you where you're genuinely interested in what they're saying and asking good qualifying questions about their property before they're going to be like, okay, maybe this person does know what they're talking about and actually give you that that sale. And so talk time and and connection. So each member of my cold calling team on average connects with about 220 leads, 250 somewhere in that range per day. And a connection is we get their voicemail. So we leave a voicemail or it's an answered call.

They either answer and hang up, they answer and they talk to us for a bit and then hang up, or they answer and we have a long conversation. It's one of those things. And I can't really get any more granular than that on my general KPIs.

Clay Hepler (32:59)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So mine's different. I'm going to go through mine here in a second. But 220 leads per day. How many leads per day per cold caller are you seeing for push leads?

Justin Piche (33:11)
Pushed like qualified? Yeah, somewhere between one and two on average qualified beats per day that meet all three of those criteria.

Clay Hepler (33:23)
So what we're seeing guys here, just so you can really get it, is Justin is doing a lot of his qualification on the front end, and I do it when the leads actually hit the CRM. so the philosophy, and I'll talk about why I like my leads to be in my CRM versus Justin, is because...

Justin Piche (33:46)
And there may be some, real quick though, there may be some analogous stuff, because we are, all those leads are in our CRM. They're just categorized differently. And maybe I can explain how we do that after you talk through what your process is.

Clay Hepler (33:58)
Yeah. ... when we submit a lead from a external source, depending on what source it comes from, A good lead manager can handle eight to 12 leads a day. The lead manager is the second call for us, right? So a good lead manager can do eight to 12. Dude, if you have more than eight to 12, you got to get another lead manager, right? That's just the reality. And

If you're not converting deals, it's not because the lead manager's not good enough, it's because they can't handle more than that. And their follow-up tasks, and there's automations that can increase leverage and connectivity and the ability for them to touch people. But I know industry best, and this is from people that I really trust that have very successful businesses, it's eight to 12 a day. That's the most, right? For outbound, right? For less qualified.

So for after that, you know, for your acquisition manager, if you're doing two call close, which is what we do, you need to eight to 12. get any more than eight to 12, you got to hire another lead manager. That's just, that's what you need to do. Right? And so after that, if you're doing a two call close or like Justin, a three call close for us, for the acquisition, it's like the guy that sits in that seat, they're going to underwrite the deal. I also like that, Justin, like you do, because it does frame the conversation. Depending on

the difficulty of the actual comping, we're gonna try to close it, call this person back as soon as possible. I like how Justin said an hour, that's elite, right, that's elite. But in order to hit that, there are a couple things that you really need to focus on. One of the things is what I'm talking about, the eight to 12 leads per day. So you might see,

your process actually breaking down if you're not doing some things that you don't really recognize. And the things that we know that when we see things breaking down, like, it starts at the top of the funnel and then it goes down. But some people want to say, my acquisition manager's not closing enough deals. Well, it might not be their fault. It might be looking further up in the funnel. That's the way that I look at it. Like if there's a problem, it starts at the top.

and then you can sort of filter down and look at each step of the funnel progressively. So our acquisitions person, a good acquisitions person, depending on the level of comping ability, depending on the type of deals that they're comping, if you're going after just entitlement deals, they might make three offers a week. They might make two offers a week, right? If they're comping, right? If you're going after

bread and butter flips, like infill lots, they can make 20 offers a week, right? They can make 15 offer a week if you're just looking at subdivision, bread and butter flips, right? But usually, if you're thinking about this logically, let's say that you're getting 10 leads per day, you have two lead managers, okay? So of those 10 leads per day, right, we're gonna say usually about 50, it's about one in every 50 outbound lead.

depending on your channel, is gonna be a deal that you're gonna close within the first 30 days, right? So if we're looking at this, 10 leads per day for two lead managers, that is 100 leads per week.

Yes. Had to triple check there. So your acquisition guy is probably going to be closing two to three deals per week with that amount of offering. And depending on the skill set of your acquisition person, depending on the type of lead, right, a good acquisition person is going to be able to close 20 to 30 % of the deals that they offer on. And that's just like very good.

person and you know, I'm giving generality so you can start to build you start with the end of mind one of the things we're going to talk about in the future is we're actually to talk about hey, you know if Justin I were to you know be dropped in a desert and start a land investing business from scratch I just added a desert because I thought it was you know, was relevant It started landing investing business from scratch like what would we do? And one of the things that we'd actually do would be like these types of things we're looking at the actual process and so

Justin Piche (38:11)
I know that's funny.

Clay Hepler (38:26)
If I'm talking 20 to 30 % of the, you know, I'm getting that amount, I'm gonna go always conservative, right? I'm always gonna go conservative. So that means my acquisition person needs to make 10 to 12 offers per week, right? And so what can we do to set that person up to be successful? Right, and so as you can see, as you scale a sales team, right, it does not scale linearly, right?

So this is the last thing, and then Justin, we're gonna go to you, because I've been kinda going on this a little bit longer, but when you scale a sales team, gets exponentially more complex. It's not going to be like, say you have 40 leads a day, and so you have four lead managers, right? You're probably gonna need actually three acquisition managers for something like that.

And here's the reason why. Because...

As you have more leads in your system, the complexity of the system increases. And so the amount of force and energy that you need to input in a sales system at that level is much higher. Even though you think it's gonna scale in the same way, it's not gonna scale in the same way. At that point, because there's so many leads happening, right, some of your acquisition guys are gonna have to, and gals are gonna have to pick up different slack, and so you're probably gonna need those three people.

and your offers per week might only be able to be 10 offers per week, right? And so I can go into the nuances there. This is gonna be sales 201, which we might talk about in the future, but this is sort of the framework of as you're starting to bring a sales team on, this is exactly what you need to start doing.

Justin Piche (40:17)
Some gold. Yeah, man. I was just looking through our numbers because we do a daily report where the acquisition manager puts out a daily report of how many net leads, how many offers made, how many contracts sent, how many contracts signed. And then we have a daily report of our outbound and inbound lead metrics. then mainly a lot of times it's also for acquisitions and lead managers. talking about number of calls made, time on the phone.

And then for cold callers, obviously number of outbound and connected calls and talk time. And going through for offers made, we're averaging somewhere between six and eight. And I didn't actually run an average, but sometimes it's 10, sometimes it's 12, sometimes it's five, sometimes it's, but about seven, maybe called seven offers per day is what we're, we're averaging.

And that leads, what that's turning into is about, like two weeks ago we had four contracts, last week we had two, this week we're on pace for three. It's just, it's on average three contracts a week.

Clay Hepler (41:22)
Seven offers per day, mean, those are different numbers, right? So Justin, he's at 35 offers per week. He's doing three, so he has a 10 % close rate. So that either...

Justin Piche (41:34)
Yeah, but I think the difference there's a there's a bit of a difference too in what we're talking about because you have a lead manager that is doing that initial like additional outreach and and then you have a really talented closer on the close side for us. The lead the leads aren't as qualified on price on average when they get that offer like we're making those offers to everybody. Like everybody who's a good lead that gets pushed to see around that gets through the initial call.

is we're trying to get that as an offer. So for us, it's usually one in every 20 leads that we push to our CRM, we're getting a contract on. It's about 5 % of the qualified leads we're getting under contract.

But I think it's just, honestly, think it's just for us, these differences between us, I think are really just a difference in our processes and what we're actually looking at. I don't think it's like a fundamental difference on numbers, more of just what we're tracking. There's a million ways to skin this cat, man.

Clay Hepler (42:19)
And that's from just, that's from.

I, know, for me, I mean, for me, for me, I'm just, you know, it's just, we just close more deals, you know, a higher percentage of deals. It's just, that's what I'm here, and I think Justin's trying to justify it. For those listeners, hey, in the comments here below, just let us know if Justin's trying to justify a lower close percentage. That would be helpful. Are you more on Clay's process or you're on Justin's process? Like if you are more on Clay's and

Justin Piche (42:55)
my God.

heart. you're no, I don't know what the I don't even know what they can do on this. Can you like can you heart?

Clay Hepler (43:04)
Like also if you're more hard. Yeah, right. Right. Right. We're not actually, actually, you know, to be fair, one in out of every 20 leads to come into a CRM is very good. That's actually very, very good for, you know, it all depends on your process. Like we're giving you guys general numbers that you can take back and then, you know, what would be helpful is, you know, when you guys are thinking this through, maybe you're applying this to your business, like seriously,

comment below because we're going be really active and say, okay, so here's my plan for this. And so you can leave a comment in YouTube or reach out to us on social media or tag us on social media. And we'll be happy to jump in and I'll be happy to give you guys a better perspective on how to close a higher percentage of deals. But Justin can tell you about the volume game too. But in the first episode...

Justin Piche (43:57)
One thing I wanted to touch on too was how the leads flow through the CRM. Because there's one thing to say, these leads enter, and then these leads enter your CRM, and then you work the leads in your CRM. But how are you following up? That's huge. And so one thing we do is we have a source of truth. And I think you do the same thing, Clay. I use Follow Up Boss. Follow Up Boss is my source of truth.

All of my, maybe a system of record is like the right way to say that in the tech world. But we have all of our data and then we do our data scrubbing, cleaning, like skip tracing, whatever we're doing to it. And then that data gets organized into campaigns. And I think we could totally do a whole other episode on like how multi-touch campaigns or how we do campaigns to actually cold outreach. But they get broken down into campaigns and then that campaign gets uploaded.

into follow up boss with like a tag essentially. So all the data is there and every campaign has its own campaign tag. And when we're doing cold outreach to these people, right, there's a series of types of outreach that we do. But when we're doing this cold outreach, we want to be able to take advantage of all of those interactions that we've had with these sellers. So if.

It's one of the big reasons why you pull up land ID on every outreach to every lead is so that we can scrub out bad properties immediately, right? I never want to talk to that lead again if their property is covered in wetlands and flood zone and is not buildable and they have no other properties that are worth selling. I don't want that that lead to that contact rather to stay in my CRM. I want to mark that as never reach out to again. So in the future when I'm remarketing to this area, I'm not going to include that data, right? I'm never going to send that person a mailer. Like I want that out.

But the same thing is true for people who are not interested or people who are price motivated. Price motivated is probably one of our biggest places where we put leads. We're going through the work of establishing that these leads want to sell and we are establishing that we want to buy and we're spending time on the phone with them, building rapport, asking them good questions about their property. And now we've come to the price and their price is too high.

And in some cases, it's way too high, you know, whatever, they're not, have no motivation, but in some cases, it's not way too high. It's not unreasonable. It's just not going to work for us, right? It's not a lead. It's in the triage. We were talking about triage earlier. It's not a lead that needs to be pushed in action to buy a lead manager and acquisitions manager, but it is a potentially good lead for the future. And so those people get pulled out and put into a price motivated stage where we do a series of follow-up over time with those leads, because you never know.

what circumstances may change in the future. You've already qualified them as good properties and people that want to sell, the price just isn't right. And so we spend a lot of time figuring out how are we going to market to and follow up with those leads to get more contracts and deals out of the people we've already established a relationship with.

Clay Hepler (46:57)
So the process that we talked about today is the initial call, right, which is the initial outreach could be direct mail. It could be cold call, could be some other cold outreach. we have a lead manager that's having a quality conversation with the seller and the level of lead manager for Justin and I are different, but we're having that qualification, the lead manager, the second call, if you will.

We don't have to call a lead manager's second call, which is a qualification call with the seller. Okay. So after that call, okay. Then we're going to push that, push that to a acquisition manager, a closer call. Now that could be a two call close in that point, but that third, let's say, column, that third call is going to be the two call close. So Justin and I do it differently, but that's the

to focus on getting leads through our pipeline and converting those leads. Justin, do you have anything to add here, man, before we wrap this

Justin Piche (47:54)
Yes, I do. have one thing that I think is super, super important. We didn't touch on it, and there's probably a whole other part. We have a lot of topics where we probably have more to talk about on. But I think this is really important for people to understand.

You have to call people a whole bunch of times to close them, right? Clay and I have been talking about the two call or the three call close, but the truth is people are not gonna answer. You people are gonna ghost you. And so one thing I maybe wanted to encourage people on is like, dude, I've closed leads after calling them like 50 times over four months and then finally gotten them back on the phone to close them.

It happens. We do not give up on leads unless we die, which we haven't. They die, which we don't really know, but we're going to keep trying. Or they tell us to never, ever contact them again.

And I think the follow up aspect of this, like if you've already qualified a lead and you've gotten them through your lead manager and like they're ready for an offer and you think you're pretty much there, like there's a ton of value in that and you need to really go after them. It's a critical task of any acquisitions manager is getting the follow up right to make those offers on those calls. I think I see a lot of people giving up on leads too early and they're like, why am I not closing in these leads? Did you call them 10 times? They're like, no.

Did you call them five times? I tried, but they just didn't answer. It's like, OK, you're just not doing enough to reach back out to that person. I don't know. The reality of it is it sometimes takes a lot.

Clay Hepler (49:27)
We do a couple of things here. We do what we call the six by seven. And the six by seven is six touches per day for seven days. Touches a call, a text, or an email. Six touches per day. So a touch is not like, all right, I called him, that's like I'm done for, no, no. Like six touches per day for seven days. And so we have a,

Justin Piche (49:41)
Love that.

now.

Clay Hepler (49:56)
status a bucket in our CRM that is first seven days and we are just hammering that list. And like Justin said, we're qualifying these people. And so if they come into our CRM, they have opted in and said, hey, I'm actually interested in selling. And so our speed delete, I posted this thing. There's a Harvard study that demonstrated the ability to qualify a buyer of a product.

is directly related to the speed with which you have a conversation with this person. So I'm not gonna quote the study right now, but just go on my Twitter and I talk about it all the time. But that's why we do that extensive study, or that extensive qualification and the amount of calls that we're having with these sellers and reach outs that we're having with these sellers. After that, the bucket that we're doing is the 30 day qualify bucket, right?

So we're that list, man, all the time. We are equally calling that list. And, you know, there should not be any leads on that list, right? Your goal is to make it so that that there is no such thing as a 30 day qualify, right? That the leads when they come from the conveyor belt from the first seven days, in our case, to the 30 days, right? So that goes from the week to the one week to four weeks.

We want those people to say, reach out to me in the future. We got an offer they didn't accept or never call me again. It's a failure on our lead manager if we don't have that qualification call with that seller. So right now, if your list looks like I have 150 people on that list, if I have 50, I'm like having a heart attack, right? Cause I'm like, we're not, we're not having, like,

If we close one out of every 40 leads, let's just say, right? know, 40 leads that come into our CRM, and then the leads that we offer on obviously is the 20%, 20 to 25 % close rate. That means that there are two deals in there. Or potentially three. And if we're talking about like 80, say we have 80 leads in there. And so,

there should not be people on that qualify list. so getting to a hell yes or a hell no is like my team knows that I always talk about this. Like in life, first of all, in life, you should make decisions saying hell yes or hell no. But like in sales, getting a seller to a hell yes or a hell no is your spiritual responsibility. And that's

Justin Piche (52:42)
Man, I love that. Well, hey, I learned something in this podcast.

Clay Hepler (52:49)
So did I, man, so did I. It's always good to jam with you here. like we just summarized there, a lot of this comes down to focusing on the most important things, which is the connection rate of the seller. Like you can see, Justin and have a little bit of a different process, but the outcome is oriented around the same thing. We want to have conversations with sellers. And so everything that we do is built around that.

And so the quality of the conversations is less important than the quantity. Because at the beginning in your journey, and if you have a successful business, a seven figure business, having that amount of reps, the amount of reps, more reps in the next person than your competition is gonna set you up to succeed. And so we focused on orienting around the quantity of conversations during this.

podcast, we talked a little bit about the triaging process, right? And so how do we actually discern what a good lead is, what a bad lead is? We talked about the amount of lead flow that team members, your lead managers should be able to expect to manage. And then when it's appropriate to hire new ones and the quantity of offers that you can take on on a weekly basis based on my model and then based on Justin's.

Justin, is there anything that I left out here to discuss before we close today?

Justin Piche (54:20)
No, not at all. I, you know, just to kind of piggyback on that, the acquisition side is the engine that drives this business. And I always like to think of my business in phases, right? There's a quantity and then a quality phase. the quantity is scaling up the album marketing to handle more and more leads. And you do that and you put touched on this during the podcast, right? You do that until the point where you just like are at your pain threshold. And when you're starting the business, it's you.

You get pushed to the point where you're such a bottleneck, your lead follow up is pushing to the next day. And then you're like, my gosh, I can't do this. And you bring someone in to help you. And then your goal is to ramp up the number of leads that are coming in to break that person's ability to handle it so that you can keep pushing and growing. It's like a muscle. You break it down and then you scale. But the quantity is one side, and then the quality is the second side. You don't have to have the perfect sales process.

And neither of us would say ours are perfect, but we've done a lot of thought and effort into iterating it over the last several years of business. You don't have to have the perfect process, but at some point you've got to stop and improve it. So I think for people, maybe just like an actionable step for some of the listeners, especially if you're early on in your land investing journey or just starting out, is to get enough lead flow so that you are comping and negotiating and calling and trying to make offers to the point where you can't do it anymore.

That's kind of like the first step you need to get to. If you're not even to that level of uncomfortableness, then you're probably not generating enough leads.

Clay Hepler (55:51)
That's such a good point, That's such a good point. So, I mean, guys, the gentleman's agreement of the podcast, as we always talk about, is listen, we just gave you a playbook to build a seven-figure business, period, right? And so we're happy to do that, right? But if you got benefit from this, if you have questions, if you really appreciate our podcast, number one, share this with a friend, another land investor in the land investing space. But number two, rate us, review, and subscribe.

As you know, this is the stuff that helps boost these types of quality podcasts, separates the wheat from the chaff. we would, Justin and I would really appreciate you guys rating, reviewing, subscribing, and sharing this with a friend. Justin, that's all for me today. You got anything to add before we sign off here?

Justin Piche (56:39)
That's all I got, man. As always, great conversation and look forward to talking to you next week.