107: Direct Mail Is Dead?

Melissa Johnson

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Show Notes

Melissa Johnson has been on the Flipping Junkie Podcast multiple times (she and Danny run the business together and are married, so it goes without saying she’s an important member of the REI community). She runs the house flipping side of their business and does a great job doing it!

After years of running their real estate investing business, Melissa made the decision to cut out direct mail marketing at the start of 2018. Their yearly goal was to stop direct mail marketing all together. But why?? Hasn’t direct mail been working for so many investors?

The truth is…direct mail is dead. Real estate investing direct mail marketing has been declining for years, so much so that Melissa said it’s time to stop. In it’s place, Danny and Melissa are going to be focusing on online lead generation.

Melissa didn’t make the decision to cut out direct mail overnight, though. At the beginning of 2017 she had noticed that their direct mail wasn’t consistent and wasn’t performing well. Instead of cutting it off then, she decided to go all in and get that marketing strategy back up and running.

“We started a bunch of mailing campaigns and the year went on, and we were getting some deals, but it wasn’t performing the way I hoped it would when I looked at what we were spending on it,” Melissa tells. “I started looking at the numbers half way through the year and was pretty disappointed.”

Melissa’s direct mail plan started by mailing to high equity for most of the year, then they started adding in unknown equity. The unknown equity didn’t produce any leads at all, so they quickly stopped that campaign.

“We had about 30k addresses in our mailing list, based on our criteria,” Melissa explains, “We were had them separated by zip codes so that it wouldn’t be so much at one time. Every mailing was between $2400 – $2500 per week.”

The criteria for the high equity lists was anything under $250k with more than 50% equity, at people over age 40. The criteria for the unknown equity lists was just not stated how much equity the homeowners had. The equity could be unknown, unstated, they could have some, they could have none; it just means that the equity field wasn’t filled in. This list did not produce leads, so Melissa stopped that campaign.

“About half way through the year I took a look at the numbers,” Melissa says, “In September I said ‘look we’ve been spending a lot of money on this and it’s not getting us leads. We need to stop what we’re doing and reevaluate all of it’.”

The mailing lists were the same addresses, but it was all sent in a cycle. Each address would get a piece of mail from them every 4 – 6 weeks. With 30,000 addresses, that adds up.

Once Melissa looked deeper into the process and the direct mail findings, she learned that direct mail just isn’t enough to keep a business at this scale going. There’s a huge difference between a high quality lead and just another throw-away lead.

Melissa sat down and took about 8 hours just looking over every single lead from 2017 to see which ones were high quality and which ones weren’t. She read all of the notes on every property to see where that lead went, how far it got, and if it turned into a deal or not. And if it did turn into a deal, how profitable was the deal?

Overall, Melissa found that the cost of direct mail wasn’t worth the kinds of leads that they were getting. Their higher quality leads were coming from online marketing strategies and their website. The leads that came in through direct mail either weren’t quality leads or weren’t leads that converted to deals.

So when the question is asked: is direct mail dead? Melissa’s answer is, “For us, direct mail died about a year ago. We dropped it and moved to online lead generation.”

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Episode Transcription

Danny Johnson: This is the Flipping Junkie podcast episode 107. [music] Welcome to the Flipping Junkie podcast, the podcast for flip pilots everywhere. Flip pilots are the house flippers that work more “on” our business instead of “in” our business by keeping a 30,000-foot view. You’re now part of a small group of house flippers that considers themselves flip pilots that strive to build the life of financial freedom and time freedom so that we can spend more time doing what we love with who we love. In this podcast, I give you a glimpse of the daily life of a flip pilot, so let’s gets started.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Flipping Junkie podcast. I’m super excited because I’ve got a very special episode today for you guys. I’ve got my trophy wife and she’s also very smart, Melissa on the show today to share with you what we’ve been talking about a lot lately. So she was spending lots of time at home and at the office, going through hundreds and hundreds of leads. I think nearly was it something like 800 or 700-something leads to drill down into the data to see which marketing channels were producing the best, not just cost per lead or cost per deal, but far beyond that and it blew me away. I could not believe the level of detail and the different things, the different metrics that she looked at with this marketing to determine that our direct mail was just not performing as well as we thought. And it was costing us a ton of money, a ton of time, and a ton of hassle. So I thought this would be very beneficial for you guys to hear as to why we stop sending direct mail after spending nearly $100,000 in 2017 on direct mail. And we’re going to talk about that in great detail today.

Also decided because it’s kind of hard to show numbers and a lot of detail through a podcast, I’m going to be a live training, a webinar over a lot of this information to show you the numbers and stuff like that, so please pause right now, go ahead and register your spot and if you’re listening to this weeks after it’s been recorded, check the website anyway because I’ll be doing this training over several times, so see if that’s available. Go to SellerLeadHacks.com/webinar. So SellerLeadHacks.com/webinar to get on that training. It’s going to be very, very special. I can’t wait to share with you guys all of this stuff. It’s been amazing. And looking forward to jumping in right now to hearing about all of these details about how Melissa looked at the numbers in such a way that I’ve never heard any other investor before look at them. It’s crazy. Tons of value. Probably one of the best episodes I think that we’ve done in a very long time, if ever. So, grab a pen and paper and be ready to take some notes. This is a great episode. And here we go.

All right. Well, welcome back to the podcast, my beautiful wife.

Melissa Johnson: Thanks.

Danny Johnson: So we were talking and Melissa has been doing a lot of research. Turns out, she’s very analytical and really loves the numbers which is good because I thought I did but I really don’t. I guess it depends on what it is. But we were talking and she’s been running the flipping business for a while now, for over a year with me focusing a lot more on the software. So you told me we’re going to stop doing direct mail at the beginning of this year which kind of was a surprise to me because that was a big plan for last year. So, let’s talk today about why it is that you saw the importance of just quitting the direct mail when that was the – I guess we could start with the plan for last year in doing a lot of direct mail and go from there.

Melissa Johnson: Okay. So I think we had just kind of come off of the last Mastermind, like, right before towards the end of 2016. Everybody was talking about direct mail, direct mail, and so at the beginning of 2017, we were kind of still doing what we’ve always done but I thought, no, let’s just really hit the direct mail super hard and see what happens because although we’ve been doing it, we weren’t doing it super consistently on a very large scale. And so we thought, let’s really just go all out with the direct mail and see what happens. So we did that, so we started a bunch of mailing campaigns and the year went on and we were getting some deals but it wasn’t performing, I felt like, the way I hoped it would when I started looking at what we were spending on it. And so I started analyzing the numbers kind of towards the middle of the year just to see where we were at and I was pretty disappointed.

Danny Johnson: Just to give an idea of how much mail we were sending, so what was the plan? Roughly, what amount of mail were we sending and what list and all that kind of stuff.

Melissa Johnson: We were mailing to high equity for most of the year and then we did start adding in some unknown equity which produced nothing at all, so we quickly put a stop to that one. I think we had about 30,000 addresses on the mailing list based on our criteria and we were hitting them, we had them separate by zip codes so that it wouldn’t be just so much at one time because every mailing was probably between $2300 or $2500 we were spending per week on mailing.

Danny Johnson: So what was the criteria for those lists, for the high equity? Do you remember exactly what that was?

Melissa Johnson: I think it was anything under 200,000 with more than 50% equity or $200,000 value. More than 50% equity and I think we had over age 40 or something like that because I think it was older people would have more equity in their houses.

Danny Johnson: Right. And what is the unknown equity?

Melissa Johnson: The unknown equity is just where it’s just not stated how much equity they have so they could have some, they could have none. It’s just I guess that field wasn’t completed in the searches.

Danny Johnson: Right. So Listsource has unknown equity as one of the selections I think in the dropdown when you’re selecting ranges and then there’s like a big group of them that we used to always just kind of mess with because why would you want unknown? We want known and known to have the X amount. But we did try that, right, and then you said that really didn’t produce anything at all.

Melissa Johnson: Yeah. I could count on my hand actually how many phone calls we did get from that. It wasn’t very many. So that was quickly just put to the side. But I started looking at everything, like I said, about halfway through the year and about September, I said, “you know what, we are spending a lot of money.” We have spent a lot of money on this and we need to stop what we’re doing with this right now and reevaluate all of it.

Danny Johnson: And at that point, were we getting new lists or were we mailing to the same people on a regular basis? What kind of spacing was between those mailings?

Melissa Johnson: Yeah, it was the same list but it was a cycle so we were hitting each list. The goal was to hit each address on each list six times. And I think we were mailing, so the cycle was coming through like every 4 to 6 weeks, they should get a piece of mail from us. So with 30,000, it’s a lot.

Danny Johnson: Right. Okay. So you looked at the numbers and does that mean like we’ve done for a long time where we looked at the cost per lead and the cost per deal for each source. I know you had gone in and done a much deeper analysis of those numbers and it kind of blew me away and I was excited. That’s why we’re on the show right now, is why did you feel like you needed to look deeper into the numbers and then how did you do that, what was the process and what findings did you have.

Melissa Johnson: The story gets really fun. Actually turned out to be a really big project but I really enjoyed the process of it and everything that I learned from it. So yeah, like you said, we always did the really vague, you know, how many leads did we get and then how many deals did that turn into. But we weren’t really thinking about if they were qualified or good leads because you did get a lot of leads. We get leads that come in from different places all over the country and those are just kind of throw away, not throw away but we try to capitalize on those if we can. But they’re not qualified leads for our market for us and so what I did was I sat down and it took about – I checked my time and it was about 8 hours. You probably remember. Eight hours I spent and I went through every single lead from 2017 that we got. And then I actually went into each property and started looking and reading the notes and everything and trying to figure out did that lead turn into a deal, like how far did that lead go in the process from coming in as a suspect to becoming an actual deal or having an appointment. So what we did was we separated suspects, prospects and then marketing qualified leads.

So the suspect is just anything that comes in. It doesn’t matter where it came from or where it is or anything. It was just a lead. Then from there it goes into a prospect which is basically where they reach out to us, we had some contact with them. Maybe we talked to them on the phone and then decided if it was something we could pursue or not pursue. Then from those prospects, then how many of those prospects became an actual qualified lead, something that we would actually make an appointment for. Even if the appointment got canceled for some reason, it was definitely a good enough lead that we would spend the time to go on an appointment for it.

And so looking at it that way, it really takes that number down from when it came in as a suspect to actually becoming a good lead. So what I really wanted to do is see how many of these marketing channels because we do a lot of marketing, which one of these are producing the best qualified leads, because that’s really where it counts. Right? That’s where you’re going to get your deals from.

Danny Johnson: Right. Well, first question, we’ll come back to this, but the qualified leads, you said we make a decision, they’re qualified because we made an appointment to go to see the property, so we’ll need to find out what was the criteria if we’re going to see a property. But before that, you had mentioned going through all of this for all these properties and through the CRM system and finding out whether, you know. So you’re having to go through these systems and look at these notes for all these leads in 8 hours and it’s like, well, if you think about 8 hours, that’s maybe one work day, but really, that was tedious, very time-consuming work because how many leads were there roughly that you had to go through.

Melissa Johnson: 720 exactly.

Danny Johnson: That gives everybody an idea of like how painstaking that kind of was, but it was worth it to do that research. Now, let’s go back to the criteria used to determine whether we’re going to see a property or not because that makes it a qualified or non-qualified lead.

Melissa Johnson: Right. So basically, the numbers just have to fit. It’s kind of a couple of things. I mean, it starts with the numbers, if the numbers make sense for what we want. For a rehab or if it’s something we might want to owner finance, or if it’s something we know we have buyers for on our buyer’s list so it’s really knowing kind of like what our end buyers are looking for, if we’re assigning something. So it’s kind of a combination of all of those things. There’s no super like hard and fast kind of thing. It’s just the numbers look good, the area looks good. We know somebody that will probably buy this property and the motivation also, you know, how motivated are they. They were super motivated and they’ve got a lot of equity, and that’s something we definitely want to set an appointment and go to.

Danny Johnson: Okay. So you’re really looking at from each of these marketing channels and campaigns, which ones are producing the actual good leads and not the ones where people are calling and saying, “Oh, my house is beautiful. I just fixed it up. Did all this and that and everything, and want to know how much you’re willing to give me. I’ll sell if you’re willing to give me this…” crazy amount that’s over market value and all that kind of stuff. Kind of weeding through those because they’re not really qualified for what we want as an investment property or the likelihood of us getting the deal is not very high.

Melissa Johnson: Right. And that’s the thing that going through all this that I started to realize I was looking for patterns and just really breaking down by source what all these things looked like. What I found was that the direct mail, they might not be super motivated. They’re not coming to us initially like they are with the online stuff. We’re just kind of throwing it out there and then they call us. If they’re interested, they’re interested enough to say, “Well, maybe I do want to sell.” But just because they have a lot of equity in the house doesn’t necessarily mean that they want to sell the house. So it’s throwing a lot of stuff out there to people that they might not be motivated. The motivation is not as high as with other sources.

So looking at all that, when I looked at the numbers, looking at qualified leads to what actually became a deal was not super high. When I started looking through like what is bringing in more qualified leads, what’s converting better, it was actually the organic stuff that was people coming to our website. I think a big part of that was just because they are motivated. They are out there looking for us. We’re not directly approaching them through a mail piece or something. They want to sell and they’re actively looking. And so those seem to be much better qualified than the other.

Danny Johnson: Did you take into consideration? I think you had mentioned also just looking at factors, which I kind of had an idea and a rough thinking about this kind of thinking, but you had really thought way more about how much work is involved in these different sources as well. Because it’s not only those numbers that don’t look so good for direct mail. And do you have the numbers for the qualified leads to actual deals?

Melissa Johnson: Yeah.

Danny Johnson: Just the direct mail one.

Melissa Johnson: Mm-hmm. On the direct mail, so what ended up being qualified leads, we got 91 and only 13 of those turned into deals. And yeah, the cost was pretty high per deal.

Danny Johnson: What was the cost per deal?

Melissa Johnson: It was actually the highest cost out of all our marketing channels and it was $5555,41.

Danny Johnson: Okay, and that was per deal?

Melissa Johnson: Per deal.

Danny Johnson: Per deal, yeah. Okay. And so what other things? Because you were looking at what other costs other than financial costs. You were looking at the things like just the fact of the manpower and the time and having to field all those calls from unmotivated sellers and things like that and then dealing with the angry calls. Right? Because I don’t know of any other marketing channel that produces those pissed off calls like direct mail did. So what else did you look at? Did you look at those things and just kind of considered anything else that wasn’t mentioned that we don’t maybe necessarily or most investors might not necessarily consider in analyzing these different deal sources?

Melissa Johnson: So, here’s a little thing that occurred to me while I was doing all this, is I got really way into this spreadsheet for some reason. But everybody talks about like cost per lead and cost per deal and stuff. But I was really interested in conversions. And looking at all this, I became really interested in the attrition rates too just to see. You’re going to have a fallout. So I wanted to know are any of these channels, do they have a higher fallout rate? What do those look like? And when I started looking at that, the direct mail also had the highest fallout rate or attrition rate. So it was considerably higher than all the other channels that we were doing. So that was a big factor for me and I think it goes back to that motivation thing too. They’re not quite as committed, what goes.

Something else that I looked at too, that I’ve started digging into, is I was curious about the average profit per source. I wanted to see. So basically, I took all the deals that we did and I keep a profit sheet listing all the properties and like what was our final net profit on that deal. And then I grouped those by marketing channel and averaged them out. It was okay but we had other channels that actually produced more profitable deals also.

Danny Johnson: Right. And that’s huge. I really hope everybody out there is listening to that. Because if you’re not looking at that, what else really matters, right? If you find, if you’ve done enough of a certain marketing channel that the deals produced were just not good of deals, you could be looking at “well, I’m getting a lot of leads from this source and the cost per lead is not very high”, and you’re thinking that this is a good lead source or deal source, and then you take it a step further and look at the cost per deal and saying “well, we’re getting a lot of leads or not getting a lot of leads, but the cost per deal is really low so it’s good.” But if you’ve got those numbers and then you take it a step further like Melissa did and kept track of the profit per channel and finding that even though you might have a lot of leads for a channel and then a low cost per deal per channel but then your profit is not very good, you got to look at the return on investment for that channel to determine. And that’s what she did to say “hey, this isn’t so good” and it’s got all these other strikes against it. And when you said the fallout rate and retention rate, that’s when we’re getting the property under contract and then not able to wholesale or something, or the seller backs out, or we just don’t end up closing on it. Right?

Melissa Johnson: Right. And really, we do everything we can to keep deals from falling out. So when deals fall out, it’s just a deal that couldn’t be done. It’s not because we couldn’t close; it’s because the seller refused to close or we couldn’t close because of a title issue. Not anything on our part.

Danny Johnson: Right. So all these things stacked up and there’s the temptation where you are thinking we need to have these mail pieces dropped X amount of times for this list to really know how this is going to work out. Right? And so we said 2017, we’re going to do this and we’re going to look at the numbers afterwards because if we do it too soon, we might stop before we’ve actually hit them at enough time or we had a good enough response rate. You notice how we’re not even talking about the response rates because to me, that doesn’t really matter. It’s these other things that matter: how many deals are we getting, what’s the profit on those. And I don’t care because if I’m only looking at things like response rates, you’re thinking you’re gauging something on the wrong metric. Right?

Melissa Johnson: Exactly. I think that’s a big problem and that’s why this was so helpful for me because although it may have a decent response rate, it doesn’t mean that it produced a qualified lead. It wasn’t a good spend of the money. It doesn’t matter if somebody calls you or not. It matters if that call becomes a deal or not.

Danny Johnson: Right. You had mentioned that the direct mail in 2017 for the attrition rate, the fallout rate was higher. But how much higher was it? Was it like double?

Melissa Johnson: It was double.

Danny Johnson: It was double. Wow. So that’s a big deal. You’ve got problems with the properties actually even closing. And so if you’re just looking at how many got under contract, you’re not seeing the whole picture either, right? Wow. So, what else did you find digging through all this? Have we covered?

Melissa Johnson: I was digging through all this stuff and, I don’t know, this has just been so helpful for me because it’s really helping me make better informed decisions about where to spend our marketing money, where to spend our time. Thinking about the time factor with the stuff that was coming in organically and online, I don’t have to put any work into that so it’s kind of nice because it’s set up and it just runs and there’s not a whole lot of – I mean, they’re still the taking the calls and the stuff that’s coming in from online dealing with those leads, but we have a lead manager that handles that. But it’s much less work than trying to develop and monitor our mail pieces and negotiating with the mail house and putting all this mail out and stuff.

The only thing we’re mailing is probates right now and what we did with that was we just initially they get a handwritten – they get a letter that’s like in a handwritten envelope that we have somebody to pay, I don’t know, I think like 25 cents a letter or something for it and she prints them and mails them out and everything. Then once that goes through a cycle, then it goes to the mail house and they get just a mail piece also, but that’s the only thing that we’re doing mail-wise anymore. We haven’t mailed since September of last year.

Danny Johnson: Oh wow. I thought we had stopped later than that. So stopped in September, huh? And so things have been cruising right along because we’ve put more behind the better channels which I’m going to discuss on the training, the webinar that we’re doing.

Melissa Johnson: Would it be okay if I shared how much we spent on direct mail last year?

Danny Johnson: Sure. Why not? Go ahead.

Melissa Johnson: We spent $72,000 on direct mail/

Danny Johnson: On direct mail last year?

Melissa Johnson: Yes.

Danny Johnson: 2017. And that’s stopping in September, so that probably would have been well over $100,000 spent on direct mail.

Melissa Johnson: So I’m thinking, where can I spend $72,000 in 2018? That’s a big chunk of change that you have to play with.

Danny Johnson: Right, and we’re going to talk a lot of that on the training in the webinar. And if you’re listening, head over right now to SellerLeadHacks.com. I’ll be doing a training and we’re going to talk about the numbers, mode detail about these numbers that we’re talking about from the qualified lead percentages per marketing channel to the cost per lead and deal for each of those channels. I think we’ll probably go ahead and share some of those 2018 numbers as well and talk about where we’re putting more of that money in for 2018. And we’re also going to talk of the title of the webinar is Direct Mail is Dead, and that also stems from just this general shift that we’ve seen in the mastermind group and a lot of top investors around the country, kind of talking about that’s kind of what we’ve seen where people are talking about the response rates dropping and it just not being as effective as before. Right?

Melissa Johnson: Right. And I have talked to other people in other markets, big investors just to see is it just our market or is it happening all over the place and I keep hearing that same thing over and over again which is another reason why I wanted to dig into all these numbers and everything because it’s like, well, maybe am I doing something wrong with my mail piece? But it turns out, a lot of people are having this problem. So it’s been eye opening.

Danny Johnson: It’s interesting that you point that out because I think that is the temptation, right? It’s like with direct mail, there’s so many moving parts. Well, maybe not so many moving parts but there’s so many factors that play into the different numbers and so it’s always easy to question do we use the wrong mail piece, should we have used the larger postcards and smaller postcards? Should we have used a more business, professional oriented letter than a personal letter or a yellow letter? Then you start questioning all those things and you wonder if maybe that was the problem. But we’ve been doing direct mail for, what, 15 years or 14 years and we’ve dialed in those messages so when we see this stuff happing on these pieces that have always worked and even changing those and knowing from past experience what should work and finding it’s not working as well. That’s why I wanted to do that webinar as well, so everybody listening out there to find out more of why I think that is happening. I came up with three reasons I feel are the cause of that for the direct mail and I’m going to share that along with these numbers and what we’re doing now in 2018 to put the money and behind things that produce much better numbers and deals, and based on data. Data from our own flipping business, not just from what we think or hear from other people might be working. It’s what’s working for us and our friends that are flipping a lot of houses around the country.

What else did you want to share? I mean, we’ve focused on certain different marketing channels in the past, usually pretty heavily on one or two. I wanted to touch really quickly on the other issue with marketing that I think people tend to fall into traps of trying to have more lines in the water, like I want to try all these things or I want the magic bullet that’s going to get me all these extra deals. We kind of had run into that problem before, right? Do you worry about ever running into that again where we’re trying to maybe find different sources and just end up blowing money because we’re not spending enough time becoming experts in each of those marketing channels?

Melissa Johnson: Yeah. I think that… you’ll have to edit this part out because I got to think for a second.

Danny Johnson: I don’t edit.

Melissa Johnson: Yeah, I think that before, you know, we have done a lot of different types of marketing but I think one thing to remember is you do something and you have to give it enough time to produce a result. I was talking to somebody about this just the other day. You can just do something in like 30 days it’s not working and you just stop. That was part of this whole direct mail thing. When I saw how much we were spending and it’s kind of like thinking to myself, there comes a point where you just got to stop because it’s like I’m throwing a lot of money away now. Now, we’re getting to a point where I’m just spending money and I’m not getting the return that I need on this money and so it needs to end and I wanted to make sure, though, that I let it have enough time to produce something measurable. So it’s like business choices, test and measure. And that’s good advice. You got to test something and give it enough time to test it and then measure it and see if it’s performing the way that it needs to and if not, then you cut it off and you try something else. But I wouldn’t recommend trying 15 different ways of marketing all at once because it’s going to be really hard to figure out what’s working and what’s not working. We don’t have like a ton of things that we’re doing but I feel like everything that we do, we do really well. We have it very systemized, we have processes for all that stuff. So we really are able to measure well and do well what we’re doing. Does that make sense?

Danny Johnson: It does and it’s a very good point because that explains maybe why that doesn’t work when people try to do all these different marketing things, is because they’re not committing enough to become an expert in each of those. But on top of that, your good point is a very, very good point of they’re not measuring or taking enough time or doing enough of it to be able to measure to see really what’s happening or whether it’s working or not. Especially if you’re only looking at the surface level metrics like the response rates which doesn’t tell you the whole picture. And if you don’t have enough data to go on where you’ve had enough actual leads or even deals from the thing, it’s kind of hard to figure out whether it’s going to work or not. It’s like the trap that we see a lot of new investors falling into and we fell into a lot when we first got started of not doing enough in each channel to actually see if it worked and especially with direct mail because you can send out like 300 postcards or 300 letters or something twice and you barely get anything back and you give up because you only look at it based on how much you’ve spent and the fact that you don’t have a deal to show for it. And then you’re like, I’m throwing money in this black hole and I’m never going to see it again and it scares the hell out of you and you end up just stopping and trying something else and going online and finding, checking out BiggerPockets and other things, like what are people doing to find these deals. When really, isn’t kind of fascinating that what people are doing, the larger investors around the country are doing a lot of deals. The fact that they don’t do a bunch of like crazy tactics that you’ve never heard of before. They’re using tactics that everybody knows about, but they just became experts in them.

Melissa Johnson: Right. And I think that’s really the key. It’s like you know what you’re doing and you do it as efficiently as possible. I am all about being efficient because it saves you time, it saves you money. And if you’re doing four different types of marketing and you’re doing them well and you’re producing results, then I’d say you’re pretty successful with your marketing.

Danny Johnson: Right. And you are very organized and I’m super grateful for it because I don’t think we have had the success that we’ve had without that. And since you took over the flipping business, and I’m not just saying this to blow smoke or anything – but yeah, since you took over the flipping business, it’s been so much more organized and you’re looking at these things that I was too busy to look into and really focus on, and I was more of the throw-mud-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks kind of person. So thank you for that anyway. I just wanted to say that. And how important that is and how big of a deal that is to continue to do that and how it’s taken the same amount of resources that we were using before, but getting so much better results from that same amount of resources. You know, basically dialing everything in, right?

Melissa Johnson: Right.

Danny Johnson: And that’s what you’ve done so well and that’s what helps us to be a lot more confident in 2018 with where we’re putting all that money that we were spending on the direct mail that we’ve stopped and becoming an expert and exactly those things that we’re putting all that money into what we’re doing so well with. But we’ll share the details of all those and on the training and on SellerLeadHacks.com you can get your spot reserved. And if you’re listening to this weeks after this episode has been published and recorded, I’m sure I’ll be doing that training several times, so go ahead and check it out anyway, see if the page is there so that you can register for that. SellerLeadHacks.com/webinar or just SellerLeadHacks.com and you’ll be able to reserve your spot for that training. It’s going to be awesome. Do you have anything else to share about the topic that we’ve covered or anything else?

Melissa Johnson: The only thing that I would say, I did spend a lot of time doing this and maybe if you haven’t done this before, initially it can take you some time to get through it all but trust me when I say it has totally been worth it. Now, I’ve actually even systematized this process now to where I’m able to do it a lot quicker. I’ve changed some things with how we create statuses and stuff in the CRM so that I can more quickly see the things that I need to see. It kind of helped a lot of different things in the business, even just how we make notes and leads and stuff like that has been helpful because I need to be able to get the information that I need quickly and so once you’ve kind of tightened up that process, then doing this, tracking the marketing and stuff and all that becomes a lot quicker and easier. So we’ve actually wrapped up just about 2018 so I will have good numbers for you to share and it didn’t take me 8 hours, so that was awesome. Just being able to take it into bite-sized pieces and stuff, having to do a whole year at a time.

Danny Johnson: Right. And that’s been super helpful too because as we’ve been doing a lot of the planning for the Flip Pilot software which is the new CRM system that we’ve been working on, all the input from all that research to make sure that that system makes it to where you can see that stuff at a glance like right away. It’s going to be super awesome.

Melissa Johnson: Yeah. I’ve been telling everybody I’ve been pushing for that. It’s going to be awesome to have those reporting features for all this. So it will be nice to be able to just print a report with all this instead of going through every single deal.

Danny Johnson: Right. So super awesome. Thanks so much for taking the time to come up to the office with me even if you’re down the hall again. Weston’s in there so if you’ve heard some noises like a little creature in the background, if you’re listening to this podcast, Weston, our son is over on the little sofa in Melissa’s office.

Melissa Johnson: You want to come say hi?

Danny Johnson: You’re going to have him come and say hi?

Melissa Johnson: Come here. Come say hi. He’s going to come say hi.

Danny Johnson: Hey, buddy!

Weston Johnson: Hey, dad.

Danny Johnson: Say hello to all the flipping junkies out there listening on the podcast.

Weston Johnson: Hi.

Danny Johnson: Are you a flipping junkie? Yeah.

Melissa Johnson: Are you a flipping junkie? Wrong answer.

Danny Johnson: He’s a soccer player. All right. You want to say goodbye to everybody? Tell everybody “have a good week”?

Weston Johnson: Goodbye, everyone. Have a good week. [music]