The Multi-Touch System That Converts Cold Leads to Closed Deals

Robin Seib00:00Good. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. 1PM, Thursday. I'm excited. We have a repeating guest today on the show. A good friend of mine, I admire him with a really close, like, business partnership. He's the backbone of a lot of our autopilot clients. So we have Barry here, Paul here, Ashley here. You probably know that guy pretty well. And, you know, like, he... He's like... I always wanna talk to to to Brandon.

Robin Seib00:31It's always like, here's the next idea. How can we automate a process? And this is what I really very much love. So I'm, like, super happy to have him on the show. Brandon Parker, how are you today, my friend?

Brandon Parker00:43Good. Thanks for having me back, Robin. And just enjoying AI and Claude Cowork and all the fun things going on land right now. I mean, we'll dive into land automations. Right? But I know you're you're you're you're like me. You're living, breathing, and taking this whole AI thing really to the heart and implementing that a lot for yourself and your customers into your business. What the heck is going on the last three months? Like, what... Like, when I look back on the last three months, we do things today that were, like, six months ago, not even thinking all about.

Brandon Parker01:19Like, what what... What's your take on, like, how's the whole AI space, like, in generally evolving right now? What's... What does that... What's... What does it mean for for us? More automations. Everything can be automated faster. I would say that the shift in AI that we had in the last three months was as big as the shift of going from no chat GPT and to chat be GPT spawning. I mean, I think there was a sea change in how useful AI is.

Brandon Parker01:52It's so impactful that we took our entire team, our entire middle management, number management, about 20 people, and we had a couple training days. I even went out to visit the team, and we put everyone onto co work, and it just became a mandatory part of their job. Just... You you have to use this in your work every day, and we're checking in and making sure they are, and just it's making everyone more effective, be able to work faster. Yeah.

Brandon Parker02:24I think I think that's that's manager. Actually, we're we're implementing that here right now company wide too. I think, you know, what it what it... When you when you look at certain parts of that, I feel like, you know, like, we we lost... Like, what what we were used to do the past couple of years was, like, here's the software we're using. Here's another software we're using. We build an automation to connect a to z. What we're capable of doing right now is I have a case. Maybe I have some data.

Brandon Parker02:55Let me just build the software on the back end that looks like exactly that what I want to have in there. You know? Like... And I think the speed how AI is evolving right now is, like, freaking incredible. Yeah. I think it almost is gonna eliminate SaaS. In the future, I feel like SaaS is gonna be very personalized. So you're not gonna have a... An app for... You know, you're not gonna have a a weather app on your phone. You're just gonna have a thing that you ask, and it presents the weather exactly how you want it to be presented.

Brandon Parker03:30Like, there's no reason to have an app when you could just build them as fast as they can be built now, and you can just make it exactly for yourself. It doesn't have to be an app that everyone uses. It's just the app that you use. And, we're be... We're able to leverage that and do some exciting things. Like, right now, we're building, a lot of things with data, and so we're trying to look at all the different counties that we call over time and see where and and track from the moment we pull the data, every point through calling it for our clients, our clients calling it, getting in touch with it, and then which counties are performing, where we're sending contracts, where were we getting the best contact rates, what the close rate is, how many contracts we're getting.

Brandon Parker04:18And so we're trying to start collecting big data on county performance. And that's something that was... It's still a really heavy techno... Technology lift. It takes a lot to do it, but now it's possible. Like, now we have some... I mean, it was possible before. It just was juice wasn't worth a squeeze. Now we have someone working on that and building, like, a display dashboard that we can start giving real feedback, on what's happening in different parts of the country.

Brandon Parker04:49So that'll be... There's just things like that that used to be too technically difficult to attempt, and now they are possible. That's why we're able to think a little bit bigger about land and the whole business.

Robin Seib05:01Love it. Yeah. And I think, you know, when you're really... The the amounts of data we can process today are just insane. Right? Like, I'm just like... We we built in the past couple of weeks a complete project management system for... Actually, we built the software in, a day, and now it's just, like, adding features to it. But it's a project management system. What happens when we have the deal? Like, the whole underwriting engine that starts. Right? And, you know, like, we had a couple of years back, I bought a database of every single realtor in The US.

Robin Seib05:32It... People that are interested, it's 2,300,000 realtors that were at this point. It's it's 2,100,000 realtors left at this point. Right? So we lost 200,000 realtors in the last, like, two and a half or three years. And what we built at that point was a system that was getting into this database of every realtor in the country. And when we had a property, we had our realtor set, it was started advertising to all the other realtors. And that build out was a $50,000 build out.

Robin Seib06:03It took us, like, three months to get rolling. I just hacked that thing right now in our cloud code. I think it will be done next week. Right? Like, it it... It's like the the the the the downtime that... Or the the time of getting big data done is just, like, so so so so low now that you... And you need to think about that what that means because we are in the data business. Right? Like, this is... We're in the data marketing and sales business. This is what it is.

Robin Seib06:34We move people from a to z, and so we need to look at the data. What is the data telling us? Right? And... But... Sorry. I just... I got distracted. Let's get... Let's let's switch gears a little bit. What does it mean for us as line investors, Brandon? I mean, you are on the acquisition end. Right? Like, you were, like, for me, like, one of the one of the few people that really drive technology in our space. And so thank you for coming coming to our show today again. Right? What are your fees, especially in the acquisitions game, that people are getting wrong right now?

Robin Seib07:09And and where is it heading to? Like, what what do you think are best practice and will be best practices in the future?

Brandon Parker07:17So I think that the the layer that is hardest for people to deal with right now and where people are... Have the most things that slip through the crack is the qualification and the follow-up layer. It's everything that happens after people capture a lead where technology has a huge amount of leverage, where most people don't have that dialed in, and where some people do, and they're performing better. And so what that looks like is, you know, you capture a lead, and then how quick does that first call happen?

Brandon Parker07:47That's kind of the easy part. But then everything after that call, when does the next follow-up happen? How does a contract go out? If they're if they're interested in a follow-up, like, how efficiently is that hit? If they're not interested in a follow-up, are they getting a short term nurture or long term nurture? And all of that, there's... I think that there's... That's where the hole in most people's system is is right after that first call and then everything from that until the lifespan of that lead.

Brandon Parker08:18And people do everything from just call the hot ones and kinda deal with them as they come and forget about everything else. Or a lot of times, they'll have a a few different follow ups, something fairly rudimentary. But I think that's where the biggest low hanging fruit is in the... To make teams more efficient with leads because there's a lot of hidden value in leads that are interested in selling land, which you get on the phone with them the first time, and it's just not right now. But a lot of times, those people turn into three months, six months from now if you have a solid professional follow-up nurture system, a way to get pinged and notified when they're ready and and that type of, that type of thing.

Robin Seib09:03And I think there there is so much, like, value in what you what you just said. Let me just make sure, that because it a 100% matches, like, what I'm thinking about that. Right? Everyone is dealing with hot leads, and it's really important to do that. Right? Don't get me wrong. Like, we need to do that. But the the second part of that is once we did this initial intake or didn't do it, because some people just don't answer the phone maybe on our first call even when we do that for five to ten ten days, it's...

Robin Seib09:34What we need is really to have a process in place that stays with them in touch for forever. Does that make sense? Like, you know, I was saying till they say say f you, or they say, like, you know, oh, they die. Right? This is, the thing. And then you probably wanna get to the hairs, but, these are the two two things where that should stop because, you know, everyone and every person has, like, every six months a life event happening where they maybe need something. And when we see how as land investors, how do we make money is, we solve one of these three issues for our clients.

Robin Seib10:10One is price, like, one is money, one is time, One is certainty. Right? And when... What we need to do is we need to be there with the client when he has one of these problems we could face. He needs to remember us. Right? And I think, Sue, that would... When when I look at... You know, like, when we built the first iteration of the land autopilot, we worked really close together. We had, like, one version where we work with you in Land AI, but we had also one version where I had the idea, we pluck into people's CRM systems and just do it there.

Robin Seib10:48And guess what happened? I looked in all the CRM systems, nobody had a nurture sequence. Nobody had, like everyone, like what it was, it was like a fancy spreadsheet to organize context... Context. Right? So... And I think where where where we need to spend... And everyone is talking about return on ad spend and how many leads do I produce, but nobody is tracking. How long is a is a lead in my system? When an average does a lead reach out? When do they come back?

Robin Seib11:19Right? And when when I looked back into my career, because every lead that inquires you paid for that already. So why would you drop that? Does that make sense? Because it's so much harder to convert a cold person into, like, a contract than maybe somebody that has heard of you that has seen seen you over a period of time to convert those people in a contract than the other way around. Right? How how do you think about that?

Brandon Parker11:47Yeah. I think that... I mean, I could give some tactical insight exactly what what we do and what we're working on. So just what our process looks like is on the front end, when we first capture a cold lead, I think that rapport is built with a a few different promises that are fulfilled just right in a row. It can be multiple touches that makes it... And separate touches that make it feel...

Brandon Parker12:17That... That's a way to build rapport. It's not just all getting on the phone and making friends with someone. It's fulfilling promises. And so we do that by... We have the cold call, and then we do a warm transfer, and it say, hey. This is Maya. You just talked to Alex. And so there's name to name warm transfer, so that's a second touch. After that call with Maya, which is basically a lead manager, there's a warm handoff at the end of that. Hey. Robin's gonna give you a call from the land pilot.

Brandon Parker12:47Does today or tomorrow work for you? Okay. Hey. You're in great hands with Robin. He's an expert in this area. So that's a warm handoff with a little bit of hype. So that takes us to the third touch. And then right after that call ends, we send a text message that says, hey. This is Robin. This is the number I'll be calling from, just so you know, if they have text. And then we send an email, and the email has a video from... Would have a video from you, Robin, or the owner. And it's like, hey. How's it going? This is Robin. Just wanna let you know I'm the person you'll be talking to.

Brandon Parker13:19So they get a video, then a property report, information about their land in their email, and all of those touches, build rapport. So it's not just, like, one long strong conversation. It's just a a bunch of steps of things happening from multiple angles that make it feel like, okay. This person's legit, and they have a nice program. It's the same thing when you... I mean, even this... Your thing you set up today. Like, there's some sort of level of professionalism that you can tell when a livestream's happening, and then you've gotten...

Brandon Parker13:55You saw it pop up the week before, and that was a touch. And then, like, you know, the day before, hey. You got a reminder, and you kinda scanned it in your email, and then you... Something hits your phone, and it's just like, okay. Whatever whatever this is, there's something... It's... They're they're doing it correctly because I'm getting reminders, and it's subtle, but those points of contact build on each other. I think that's really important at land too, and it increases the chance that someone's gonna get on the phone with with you for that second call or for that acquisitions call.

Brandon Parker14:27And so that all... All those things are just small things that can happen before you even get on the acquisitions call. And then the same thing. After the call's over, a quick follow-up. Hey. Nice to talk to you. We'll talk again this day. And then if they're... And then actually hitting that meeting, having it set in your in your CRM calendar or your... Whatever so that you call them exactly that time, maybe send them a reminder. Hey. I'm gonna call you in ten minutes. Another tactic around that is if if they're a cell phone, yet you've had a first call with them, then an hour before or the day before your next call with them, sending them a quick selfie video.

Brandon Parker15:04Hey. This is Robin. Excited about our call today. I just was thinking this about your property. You know? I I looked into that slope, and I'm I'm look... I'm looking forward to talking about it tomorrow. Just like something that shows that that will... That increases the chance of them getting on the call again. But as many of those little professional micro touches in between is a big, help with closing sales. And then on the back end, if they're not ready now, they hit a nurture sequence where they get contacted, text, email after a month.

Brandon Parker15:38What we do is after one month, and then we space it out, and it's after two months. And then we space it out. It's after three months. And then every four months after that is just a email and a text, just a reengagement, see if they reengage. So that's what our system looks like from front to end.

Robin Seib15:56And I love that. And I think you said, like, so many good things in there. Right? Because in the end, you know, it's... There's two ways how you can do things in our business to get in touch with people and to stay in touch with them. The one is is... I call that brute force. Right? You just pound the phone, like, as much as you can and double dial, triple dial, quadruple dial, whatever that means. And, you know, you will get through to people. That's the one thing, but not all of us are built for that. I'm not built for that.

Robin Seib16:26I will never do a triple dial. I will get so pissed off at that person on the other hand... On the other side. I would just block them and gone. But the second thing is I think how you can build this trust. And, you know, one distinction I have when we were talking is always have in mind what you're competing with. We're talking of 28 to 30,000,000 land properties in The US that are roughly owned by 18 to 19,000,000 individuals.

Robin Seib16:58So not take the 40% of properties or 50 of properties out of there that have too much slope, that are just like in the middle of nowhere, that are landlocked, that are swamps, that are whatever. So that means maybe we're dealing as land investors with 15 to 18,000,000 or 20,000,000 land parcels that are owned by twelve, thirteen million people. So how many land investors are out there? I don't know. Could be a couple of 10,000 probably that are somehow doing this or not doing this.

Robin Seib17:31But now there's like... Let's say it's 50,000 people are competing to get attention from this 12,000,000 owners. So that means when you when you when you break that down... And probably from this 12,000,000, there's like 40% where everyone is and the 60% are roughly there. So that means you have a lot of competition. And now you can do two things. You can go brute force or you can go with quality. Right?

Robin Seib18:01And with, really a process, like process is the right word, to make them feel special. And that... And that what they need to feel is that you are special to grab their attention in the first place. And these are all the little things. This is what I like love working with you. Like, the little... The one text message. Like, in the autopilot program, like, one of the things... Like, we have a guarantee. We guarantee, like, our autopilot clients, like, certain amounts of money they make Because I know fifth... When they call them fifteen minutes after Maya called them and say something like, I'm here the principal in the company, and that property looks so special.

Robin Seib18:39I wanted to give you a call personally. Right? If you were the acquisition manager. Then suddenly, this individual has heard from your company in the last half hour, like, seven, eight times, and they didn't have experienced that before. Does that make sense? And this is like why I love working with Brendan because he thinks about these little things all the time that you have all these touch points. And will they all be seen? No. Will some of them be seen? Yes.

Robin Seib19:09But it's the overall story you tell about your company on a really subtle way. This is how we are reliable because we care for you. Does that make sense? And that sets you really up. Sorry, I talked a lot. I just... I'm really like Maya and Align dot ai CRM fan and like Align dot ai fan, right, so you probably hear that out. But this is what really makes the difference is that you... Because now we have the initial contact, but then what happens after that?

Robin Seib19:39Staying in touch with them. You know, all of that is nailed out and nobody has that. Like, how do we nurture a contract for twelve months? How are we there when something changes in their life? And that's just like they need to remember you. You know what? I had Brandon, and he sent me a text message the other day, or he sent me an email last month. Let me reach out to him first because I have probably something how he can solve my problem.

Brandon Parker20:05Yeah. And the interesting part that I glossed over there is the the lead the lead magnet or the property report that we send to them because that whole idea of how are we there four months from now, six months from now, eight months from now. One is we've done these multiple touches, but the lead... The property report that we send into their email sits there forever. And what the property report has is it has the video from you. It also has, a report about their property.

Brandon Parker20:37It's a PDF, and it says... It's pictures of their property. It's like, here's your road frontage. Here's your exact acreage, your flood zone, your APN number, your slope report, and then a little paragraph kind of describing interesting things about their property. So that report sits in their inbox, and it's something in the future when they think of selling their property, it's likely that'll ping in their head. They'll go search that and look for that report because it has all the information they need on it.

Brandon Parker21:09And then there's your video right there in your website in that same email. And so I don't have data on how that... What the return rates look on that, like, yet. That's something I hope to measure at some point, but I think that that is a... That's similar to someone having a letter on their desk. You know? You've sent a blind offer, and they've kept it in their desk drawer for two years. And they're finally like, you know what? I'm gonna sell my property. Where was that offer? They go look, and they call. You know?

Brandon Parker21:39It's that that type of thing. So

Robin Seib21:42Yeah. And I think there's a lot of truth in that because when you... I mean, like, we we talked about earlier. We're in the business... In in the data business. Right? So it's like, we started this cold list, and now we narrow it down to one list from people that wanted to work with us in the first place. Right? And I think what what you're describing is like, how do we keep in their mind over a long time? Like digital? I I probably... Know, like, you probably think I'm crazy, but, like, I made roughly six and a half, 7,000 offers in my life.

Robin Seib22:14We send once a year mailer to everyone. To everyone on that list. Was exactly the same offer we made three, four, five years ago. It's exactly the same letter. Like, I don't put a lot of work into that. It's just like we go in the system, click print, send it to the mailing house, send it, and send then after that a ringless voicemail like thirty days later. That's that's it. That's everything we do like, compared with the... Combined with, of course, the text message follow-up and email follow-up and all that.

Robin Seib22:47But that one letter is like... We we normally get, like, between five and forty contracts each year from that list. Wow. Right? So when you think about that, like, 7,000 letters cost you what? $4,500 probably. So that's the first contract we get then, and we probably already made some profit on that. And then there... Then then there is, like, every other contract is just pure profit, and they're sitting right in front of you.

Robin Seib23:21Right? So and I think what you need to to think about in your business, and I love that we that we... And you have that really nailed on the digital side of things, right? Is that you really need to think like, how can you stay in somebody's mind? And I love how you explained that was a property report in the website and the video because that's one of these things. Like, hey, I have all these emails in my inbox when I think, fuck, I'm to sell my product. There was this guy who sent me this report. Like, let me pull property report, land property or whatever. So you go in your Gmail and find it there.

Robin Seib23:53There's so much sense behind that. Let's talk a little bit about numbers, because I know your numbers are insane. Right? Like, had a conversation the other day, right, with somebody that had a conversation with you. And and when he comes back to you, maybe you can invite me for dinner the next time because I... We we were talking about Land AI. And, like, when he was telling me, I couldn't make the cost per lead work. And I'm like, what does it even mean for you? Cost per lead? Yeah, normally I get a 100 leads and...

Robin Seib24:24And here it's like I get 20 leads. Okay, for the same price. And I said, okay, many contracts do you close from a 100 leads? Right? And he said, oh, yeah. One to three normally. Like, but what is even a lead for you? Oh, that's somebody that's... Call me. Right? Okay. Great. So how much do you close? One to three. Okay. And then I ask him, okay. So what makes more sense to you? Because I know your your internal numbers. Would you rather talk to a 100 people or to 20 people and close, like, fifteen, twenty percent of them maybe?

Robin Seib25:01And I guess this is the the strong suit of Maya, of Maya and Land AI. Walk us a little bit how do close rates, prequalification, how does that whole process look like that people get a feeling how valuable that is? Because the second thing is when you have 100 leads, you need to talk to 100 people. How many hours each week is that? You need to go 100 times through the same conversations, and probably 80% of these people are tie kickers anyway, Right? Like, walk us a little bit through that idea that that, how Land AI supports people there.

Robin Seib25:33And some actual numbers. I wanna hear them.

Brandon Parker25:36Yeah. And I have some... Our first quarter data of those rates also, so I'll give that at the end, but I'll tell the... What the process looks like and the philosophy behind it first. So if we... What we do is we cold call outbound with cold callers. When someone says, yeah. I might be interested in selling my... Their... My land, then we live transfer to our conversational AI, which is Maya. And then Maya has a professional sales conversation with them. She's not trying to get them to sell their properties.

Brandon Parker26:07Her goal is to draw information out of them about their property. So she draws out their motivation, a price they might want, and the timeline they wanna sell on. After that call, we look at the transcript, and we prequalify the leads. So if they have some sort of motivation, some sort of reasonable price, or a timeline, then they're prequalified. And we send just those prequalified leads to our teams so their acquisitions managers can call them. So if we call...

Brandon Parker26:38Capture a 100 raw leads, we call them someone who said they wanna sell, about 20 of those turn into prequalified leads. That means someone that's worth talking to. Those 20 leads go directly to acquisitions managers. The other 80 leads go directly into our client's CRM where we just nurture them over time. The overall conversion rates, generally, out of those 20 leads, it's people close one deal. 20 to 30 leads, people close one deal, prequalified leads.

Brandon Parker27:11So that's what those numbers look like. Basically, one lead... If we capture a 100 raw leads, then usually one one contract comes out of it. Now looking at cold calling in general, I ran a call center, and we did over 10,000,000 calls just straight call center for clients. And our overall conversion rate at the call center just sending raw leads was 1%. So it was about...

Brandon Parker27:41It was one lead in a 100 would convert. So what's interesting is when we... I look at what we're doing now, which is that whole system and what we're doing with just the call center, the conversion rate's the same. It's still about 1%. The difference is our clients only need to talk to 20 to 30 leads, and so they're saving 80% of the work. And so when I talk to people about it, the the hard part for people to get over is they like to be able to work all 100 leads to some extent.

Brandon Parker28:17They don't they don't really want to, but they like the idea of seeing all 100 leads, and they like the idea of sorting through those. And, but I don't think that they realize how much time it actually draws. They either need to do that themself, or they usually end up hiring an acquisitions... A lead manager who goes through and sorts those leads and passes them on. And the lead manager feels kind of effective, but then training a lead manager properly and then managing them properly, that becomes a time drain.

Brandon Parker28:50That's a job in itself. And so there's a lot of hidden operational costs that go into sorting through garbage leads. That's just... That's the nature of the beast with land, and that's the hidden cost that so many people overlook. It's like another one that I see often is, and and it works. All this stuff works. So, like, text messaging, like, people have great success in text. What they overlook is the entire operation is filtering through garbage leads. You know?

Brandon Parker29:20That's the whole that's the whole business. Like, you can go. It's easy to go capture a 100 raw leads, but turning those 100 raw leads and filtering them down to the ones that you actually wanna get on the phone with, that's the business. That's the art form. That's where, like, all the time that's goes and... On the acquisition side, and that's the the part that matters the most. And so I see people overlook that filtering process just like it's almost like it's not even part of the business.

Brandon Parker29:52They just jump from one to the other. They're like, oh, I got a 100 leads. Oh, I got this many deals. But don't... It's hard to conceptualize unless you really dig into it how much time it actually takes in between a 100 leads filtering down and getting a contract, and that's the that's the hidden cost that people overlook. And that's the reason I ended up attacking that problem specifically is because when I ran the call center and we were just sending raw leads to people, it hit our bottom line. People... We had a high churn rate because people would come back after two or three months, and they would say, hey.

Brandon Parker30:26You gave me a 100 leads a month. It's great. But now I have 300 leads, and I have to pause and figure out how to sort through these. And so I was like, oh, okay. This is this isn't a lead getting problem. This is a lead sorting problem.

Robin Seib30:41And I guess that's what it is. Right? You know, like, I'm in this for a long, long time. And when you when you think about that, I don't know how many millions of records we processed in this time. In the very end, what we do is we have a funnel. Right? And that looks like this. So you know what I mean. Right? So you have a bunch of data there. And now we we we just, like, check this data. We do call calls or texting.

Robin Seib31:12And or... And and by the way, this is what you handle too. Right? When people are sending direct mail campaigns or when they're sending text message campaigns, Maya can handle the inbound from there too. Right? So it's like you... We do this massive outreach top of the funnel. Then we have the people dropping in. And then first of all, like, I think one of the... That's one of the the greatest weaknesses I... When I will look at the industry is because when you really wanna handle a 100 leads, which is easily accessible through text messages, call calling, like, get easily a 100 leads, like...

Robin Seib31:46But filtering through them, this is what really is the work. Right? I had an interesting discussion, like, two or three days ago with somebody, And we're talking about blind offers and acquisition strategies and all that. And he asked me, what do you think is that what works? I said, like, I think everything works. Because everything is working. Like you asked, like, 50 people in a room, how do you do acquisitions? One will tell you text message, next one will say cold calling, the next one says blind offers, the next one says like I sent Easter bunnies or whatever.

Robin Seib32:19Right? Like no matter what you do, it works as long as you do it enough. I think it's a question where do you wanna make the work. Right? Because when you send a when you send a text message, like, always think about the other side. You have really highest response rates normally. Right? Like, I I I have seen a campaign the other day. There was 28% response rate on the text message campaign. So... But now what does it mean? How many text messages does each of you guys answer today?

Robin Seib32:52Like, I don't know. Like, I had already like a couple of dozens. Right? I forgot about like 90% of them because it's just out of my mind. So the commitment level on text message is really low, but the the conversion rate to, hey. Yeah. Make me an offer is really, really high. And now you need to filter and sort through all of them. And like when you when you have like sent to a list of like a thousand people, and let's say average on text message orders is 15%, then you now need to sort through 150 people. What is that when you run a one person operation?

Robin Seib33:24How do you want to sort through a 150 people? Right? How how should I even go on on, call calling the same thing? The response... They're like, their response rates are, like, really great. Right? Like, I don't know where where is this, but what I see is anywhere between 15% often. Right? And so, like, now you need to sort through them. Right? You will have less on direct mail, But the thing is, you will have less people to talk to to get to a contract in the end, because the commitment to open a ladder, have it sitting on the kitchen thing or put it on the fridge and say, I'm gonna call him, am I gonna...

Robin Seib34:04But when they do that, they actively called you from something you send, like the level of commitment on that is higher, right? But you will talk to less people. And the first thing is when you send a blind offer, you send somebody a physical piece of mail with a price on it. When that person reaches out, that's the highest level of commitment. But when you do blind offers, you spend a lot of time on data. It's like you do all this filtering work up front because you need to figure out, like, what are these properties worse.

Robin Seib34:38Right? But what you skip is the process of discovery. And I also think, you, Paul, he's on the call. Right? He's exceptional exceptional at converting anyone into a contract. You know, he's like a Eskimo refrigerator kind of guy. Right? Like, you lose that opportunity on blind offers when you don't play. Right? But, like, what I what I want to say is, like, where do we want to do the work? When I would run a one person operation, I would do blind offers because it works in my speed and I don't need to talk to a lot of people, right?

Robin Seib35:10But I need to be patient because when I send out 3,000, 5,000 letters, I probably will not get anything back in the next four to eight weeks. And then I say it doesn't work. Does that make sense? Like, heaven to one of my blind offer campaigns, we didn't hear anything for like six weeks. And I was like, dude, that was like $5,000 in the dump. And then we got like 12 contracts, like four of them, they didn't even call. They just sent us like the signed offer. I think we did three of those deals. One was just shitty, but like, you know.

Robin Seib35:41But when you do call calling, you need to figure that. And like the great thing about call calling and texting is you are in a two way conversation from day one. It's not a one way conversation, Right? Like, you you you can steer and trigger that. And what I think is the beauty of of having, some... A system available like Maya that takes the initial take in of this two way conversations to filter for you, probably more reliable than any human could do it, to filter the good ones from the bad ones, right?

Robin Seib36:20That just like speeds up your process. It saves you what? I don't know. When you get a 100 leads and you filter out 80, let's call it like ten minute... Let's say fifteen minutes per conversation. That's a thousand two hundred minutes. Right? Like, that's twenty hours of your time just to having that available. Does that make sense? I'm sorry. I talked a lot again, but, like, I'm really excited about this because, like, I feel this is where technology really supports you. So let's let's talk a little bit, about this one thing.

Robin Seib36:58When that is so great, why is not everybody building Maya right now? Why why does not everybody build, like, an an... A con con... A conversational agent right now?

Brandon Parker37:12The technical handoff is is hard. Actually, I think that the current moat to building what we built is running a call center with the human operation. So being professional with being able to reach out to people and get them on the phone and then make that live transfer to a conversational AI. And then what we do with Maya is we have live connection to the property records so Maya can see the address and all the information about the property, knows the person's name, and has all that pulling live from a cloud database so she can have the conversation.

Brandon Parker37:54So it's just a... You know, someone could technically do it. It's just a bit of a a lift. It's it's running a different business that's not running the land business. It's running a technology operations business, and that is for the right people. They could do it. But it... You know, a good analogy would be a CRM. It's... This is something I see all the time. It's like, oh, I've... Like, a CRM is like a Maserati or something. Like, it's got all this power. It can do a million things, but you need to know how to drive it or else it's just the same as any other car.

Brandon Parker38:27And maybe an airplane is a better example. Like, you could do a lot of stuff, but you need to... There's a lot of time and learning that goes into making it actually work. So you see a lot of people with really fancy CRMs, but then they just have, you know, a few stages and two automations or something set up. So, same thing with this. It just takes a massive amount of time to get all the the technology technology set up.

Robin Seib38:54Yeah. And it takes a lot of time, money, and trial and error. Right? Like, this this is what what what it is too. I agree on that.

Brandon Parker39:04And something else that... To add in there, Robin, is that I'm really excited about is we've captured thousands of land conversations, and all of that is big data. And so we're working on recursive learning where we can learn lessons from how these conversations go and improve over time. And so that's something that a big difference between, you know, just having an AI that's plugged in as an answering service.

Brandon Parker39:34And what we have with Maya is that our recursive learning based on thousands of land conversations, like, it is a land acquisitions manager AI. It's not just an AI that's doing... You know, winging it. And so that... All that context starts to really set it apart over time. So

Robin Seib39:57I love that. That's really, really cool. Ben, I I always ask that everyone that comes to this call that's out of the land space, where do you see the land industry heading in the next, like, two, three years?

Brandon Parker40:12Right now, land is... The margins are... Have compressed. So it got more people in the business doing deals, more text messages, mail, cold calls going out across the board. So three, five years ago, you'd send out a blast, and you'd get responses and close deals. That low level or that low hanging fruit, I think, is largely being competed away or has been competed away at this point.

Brandon Parker40:47So now I think that the people who are starting to separate themselves are... Have really solid operations. I... They fall in between a... So when I look at it from the land seller's point of view, I think the people they wanna sell to are in the middle. So it's not BlackRock. It's not some giant corporation that's calling them like, hey. We're... We wanna buy all the land in your state. Like, we... You know, people feel that that that that big feel, and they're looking out for that.

Brandon Parker41:20And the other thing is they've already had contact from a lot of small land operators, and so they want someone who's professional. So someone who makes all these follow-up touches, who calls back when they say, who sounds clear on the phone. They want confidence that if they sell their land for a $100,000, that the money is absolutely gonna land in their bank account, and that's not something they're questioning. And so... Because we've burned a lot of rapport because we have so much... So many people out there reaching out, and not all of it's the highest quality.

Brandon Parker41:51And so the people who land in between there, like, hey. I'm a local land business owner, but I'm also very professional, is where people are winning. And I... That comes to all those... Every touch that you do that builds rapport and then having a website and maybe getting them a lead magnet, getting them a text, getting them a video view, anything you can do to make it feel professional. So that means that, the people who are just kind of winging it, it's getting harder to do deals.

Brandon Parker42:21I see them likely slowly, getting competed out of the market, and the people who are more professional probably taking more of the market share over time. And then I would... Over two to three years, I would guess that that same trend continues, that their... The market continues to consolidate. That seems natural to me because of how much leverage we're gaining with technology. And so I think that it's gonna continue to compress and get more competitive and that eventually that just be just be less people.

Brandon Parker42:56It'll be harder to break into the market.

Robin Seib43:00I think so too. Because what it is, a couple of years back as an unprofessional operator, you could just, like, blast a couple of 100 text messages and make a deal, make 10,000. And then you had really great operators that are processing the system in place that was relying on a lot of people, if that makes sense. Right? Like, you know, we were over 40 people at the top of this, in this company. And I think that the great operators out there, they can just do more through technology.

Robin Seib43:37So they take their improved processes that are top notch and just do more of it because technology supports now to do it for them. And that will make it harder to enter the space.

Brandon Parker43:52All that being said, like, a little bit harder to enter the space, but I don't think, like, some sort of barrier to entry. I think that with any business, if someone comes in and they run it good, better than 80% of other people, there's plenty of room. So I don't... It's not like a a doom like, hey. You know? Get in now or, you know, like, it's just... You just have to do... You just... There's gonna be a higher standard, but there's always room for people who are performing better than 80% of other people. And I think that will continue on.

Brandon Parker44:22So what I what I think. Yeah. Sorry. Maybe that came over in my German English a little bit bad here. But, like, what it is is

Robin Seib44:29the business has matured, and you need to run a mature operation. And the more matured businesses will just make more more... Will do more business that really run it like a business. Right? Like, this is this is what I see. Was there ever anything we didn't cover in that we didn't cover in this?

Brandon Parker44:51Yeah. Let me pull a couple. I did my state of land investing. This is... I've only talked to some of my clients about this, but I'll go ahead and talk about it on here. But we pulled all of our data from the first quarter. Me Let just pull a couple interesting numbers out of here. This is one that may not be applicable, but it's just interesting for people to understand some of the things that go if... Because people do hire their own cold callers. Our... The cold calling, needs human infrastructure, and our cold caller, our ninety day retention rate is 53%.

Brandon Parker45:26The people who last past ninety days, we've had people who've been calling with us over two years now. So we have, like, some... Like, a lot of really long term. When they get into the team, they get integrated. They're there. But hiring, training, a cold caller, half the time, they end up leaving. And we're good at onboarding. We've pressed on letting them know it's gonna be... How the job is gonna be at setting expectations, and we have, you know, driven that retention rate up. But for people hiring cold callers, there's a huge hidden cost.

Brandon Parker45:58If you're gonna go hire people off Upwork or wherever, there's a huge hidden cost in training them, and they're gonna leave. You know, half of them are gonna leave within ninety days. So bake that into your ops, hire two or three, run them all at the same time, let one leave, and then let the other two compete, and then, you know, keep the one that's gonna work and fire the... Like, take that into account when you... If you're hiring your own cold callers. The other thing that we have is our prequalified lead conversion rates.

Brandon Parker46:33So what that means is we have the raw total leads. If we bring in a 100 total leads, how many of those turn into prequalified? It was average 21.5%. So about that 20% that I talked about, we overperformed that a little bit, but 21 were actually prequalified. What's interesting to me about that number is it lines up with Pareto's principle, so it just feels right to me. I use and look for eighty twenty, like, all over the place in business and in decision making and things like that.

Brandon Parker47:08And so this big data landing at nearly Pareto's principle, it feels like that's a nice checkpoint to hit. That's a number that people can use as a ballpark for themselves if they're doing cold calling, is that, you know, about 20% are gonna be. Doesn't mean they're gonna be a full on sales conversation. It just means about 20% are gonna be worth talking to, at least worth getting eyes on. But 80% are gonna be tire kickers. The...

Brandon Parker47:39Our clients, our overall close rate... So out of raw leads, if we capture a 100 raw leads, our overall close rate was point 9%. So right at that 1% that is our is our benchmark that we usually see with cold calling, we're right at that, which checks out. Our top 10% of clients, their close rate was 1.7%. So the factors that go into basically someone doubling the amount of contracts they get, from what I've seen is the counties, where their target marketing...

Brandon Parker48:21Where their targeting markets, and then how they are on the phone. Those are the two main levers, to pull... To go from a one percent close rate to a 1.7% close rate. Now why that's important is our system, what I I look at is is is controlled data and conversations over time up until the point it hits our client. Like, everything we do is the same exact system, and so it's very measurable across clients. Like, we are going to pull data the same way.

Brandon Parker48:52We're gonna make the same cold call. Maya's gonna have the same conversation thousands of times. We're getting the same data. We're prequalifying the same type of leads. We're sending the same summaries. They're landing at our clients. And some of our clients have a point 9%, and some have a 1.7%. So it's on the very front end of the process, like, which counties are they choosing becomes very important. And then when they get on the phone, how good are they on the phone? And I think that sales skills and getting on the phone gets...

Brandon Parker49:25Is very easy to overlook. The reason it's easy to overlook sales skills is because a land isn't a... It's not a hard sell. You know? It's not like selling a car. You're not gonna talk someone into selling their land. So people look at it like, okay. Well, this isn't a sale, so I'm just gonna talk to this person and see if they wanna sell. And they just completely wing it because they've let themselves think that it's not a sales call. I take the approach that it's still a sales call.

Brandon Parker49:57It's just a... You're just adding value, but you can still do that in a way that you're walking someone down the road. And I picked... The the mental model that I use for this is that a lot of people do actually want to sell their land. They've had it for twenty years. They always thought they were gonna do something with it. They never did. And what's really happening there is they have locked up capital, and they have decision paralysis. You know? Know because I've seen it in my family. We've had... My family's had a piece of property for thirty years.

Brandon Parker50:28The whole family's been like, oh, we should build this. We should build this, but we never did and never will, to be honest. They... They're... They have it, and it's in their best interest to actually sell it, and they actually do wanna sell it. They just need someone to take them through the steps of act... To... Of making that decision and feeling good about it. And so being able to do that is a sales process. It's not just a get on the phone and see what happens. It is a, I know that it would be better for you if you sell it, and let me walk you through the steps so you feel good about actually doing this transact...

Brandon Parker51:04This transaction, and that does take, skill. It's just not sales y. It's a it's a consulting sale. So, those are... That would be the data that we have from quarter one and what I've pulled out of it. So

Robin Seib51:22I love it. There was so much gist in that. And I think, you know, like, is like not... Like, it depends. Like, there's, like, people that are natural salespeople, and then there's not. Like... But I think everyone can learn sales when you have a good process in place. Everyone can do it. Right? And you just need to have a system in place, and this is why anyone in my personal, world can can do that, if that makes sense.

Robin Seib51:53So... No. Beautifully. Brandon, thank you so much for chiming in. People can find you where?

Brandon Parker52:01Landai.ai. And then I'm on YouTube at Brandon Parker, on Twitter at Brandon Parker underscore o. Website that I've landed. O. Yeah. Underscore o. I did it when ChatGPT first came out. Remember ChatGPT o? Like, it was it was a... Their first launch was a basically beta zero. And so, anyway, I was looking for a Twitter name, and I was like, oh, I'll be like ChatGPT.

Robin Seib52:34Yeah. That's cool. You you are like ChatGPT. Right? Guys, we're almost, like, on top of the hour. Let's open it up for the last five minutes for q and a. So while Brandon is here, just get him out of there. There was, like, a couple of questions in the chat, I think. Hey, guys. Yes. So, Ashley, thanks. Thank you for letting us know that you are sending out emails in the long term metro. It just came to my attention that when Maya gets the email address, do we then need to add it to their profile as the primary email so they are able to get the emails every time if it wasn't on file to begin with?

Brandon Parker53:15Yeah. So we do that. So what we do is we... If we get the email address, then it goes into the data file, and Maya can see it. Maya, at the end of the call, will ask, hey. What's your email address? So we can send the property report, and then, she'll get it, and she'll put it onto the record, then we'll send the property report to that record. So that's all just gets done on the back end with automation.

Robin Seib53:40And by the way, that's a smart question, right, when people don't wanna give you the email address. Right? So that's a really, really great thing, if that makes sense.

Brandon Parker53:49The amount of things that we have tweaked and improved with how Maya says things and how she approaches things is a lot of things, a lot of little details like that. But if you caught that, when you say what's your email address, if you give a reason for something, anything, people are much more likely to comply. It doesn't even matter what the reason is. You just say, hey. Can I cut in front of you? Because I'm in a hurry. It's like, okay. They'll probably let you cut in front of them because you just said... It's not even a reason.

Brandon Parker54:20Yeah. We're all in a hurry. You know? But, like... So, anyway, that's that's the theory behind that and helps. Yeah. I always say that, like, you know you know, like, one of the most ridiculous things I see happening is

Robin Seib54:32people tell me they get a verbal yes. Somebody said yes, I gotta sign a contract. And then you asked, did you set the contract?

Brandon Parker54:42Yeah. No.

Robin Seib54:44Yeah. So, you know, like, you're closing a deal, you don't wanna let them go without signing a contract. Right? And, you know, like, just framing the question, like, you prepare it on the phone, send it out and say, hey. I just sent you the contract. Can you open your email and, just... I wanna make sure that I wrote your name... That I spelled your name right. Right? So... And then suddenly, you're in a contract situation. I saw the little tweaks, and and I love that. So good question. So I could go through it with you. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So question here from Ash...

Robin Seib55:16From Crystal was, can you use this system in in other CRM systems?

Brandon Parker55:23Yeah. So we we have a CRM expert, and we zap... We just zap leads to different places. Generally, we encourage people to use our CRM because we've put... We do so much of it for you. We send so many automations. We do so many follow ups, and we measure KPIs for you and all kinds of things. So some people have really sophisticated operations, and in that case, we zap it to their sophisticated CRM. Most people end up using ours.

Brandon Parker55:55So... And then looks like Crystal says, Robin, with autopilot, are you using Brandon's system?

Robin Seib56:07Wait. Let me see that here. What was the question? Oh, we see auto... Yeah. We we we are working with Brandon there because, you know, I test a lot. I see a lot. And, like, it's just, like, fully done for you. Here's a couple of things too. Like, I want... I wanted to highlight here. They... Average setup system right now, we track that in eight business days. That means they build your CRM system with a two p verification, like, an average on eight days. Sometimes it's three.

Robin Seib56:38I've seen three days too. Right? The second thing is you have, like, a Slack channel where you can talk to their team anytime, if that makes sense. Right? So it's like you have technical issues. You need anything. You can just, like, work with them, if that makes sense. Right? Like, there... There's somebody there. Like, Brandon has an enormous... He he showed me once how he sets up SOPs, and I'm like, yeah.

Robin Seib57:08I can learn from that. Right, so it's like a really, really trainable team. So the organization is functioning. And third of all, like there is not that because they have like so much clients done so much calls in the end, every AI model lives on the amount of data it was trained on. And I think there is not I haven't met anyone that has had as much training on that model as they have as of today.

Robin Seib57:40And that were all the reasons working with Diamond. For us, it's like really, really great working with Brandon and his team because we speak the same same love language about leads, right, that we wanna nurture them. And so it's a backbone of the autopilot system for for a reason. Yeah. Great great question, Crystal. We need to have you on board there. It's like, yeah, what we need to work on. Great. Cool. Guys, it's 2PM almost. Do we have any more questions for Brandon?

Brandon Parker58:13Well, good to see the faces in here. Paul, good to see you. Barry, good to see you again. Crystal, Vlad. Moussav, thanks for getting stuff set up today.

Robin Seib58:25I love it. Guys, see everyone next week. I don't know who's coming next week, but whoever wants to join autopilot after this discussion, set up a call with us. Right? Set up a call with Jessica. Let's let's get it rolling because, you know, like, we take the power of LAND AI. We help you setting up not only call calling, we combine with text messaging, with direct mail, we give you the whole disposition process, the deal funding, we run all the comps for you.

Robin Seib58:56If you wanna know how a fully managed line business looks like, then you wanna get into that. So yeah, schedule a call with us. And with that said, guys, thank you so much, Brandon, for coming over, for spending some time with us. And, yeah, everyone else, see you next week. And, whoever wants to come to the comms call, 3PM, CST today. It was Holly. You wanna be there. She has, some amazing deals to look on. And if you have a deal that you wanna get calmed, just bring it there. Get some live feedback. And, yeah, I wish everyone a great day.

Robin Seib59:29And, guys, talk to you soon.

Brandon Parker59:32Bye, everyone.