When contact rates fall, do you narrow the list or widen it?

Question

I hold land and long-term rentals and I've been prospecting owners directly for six years, so I've watched my own connect rate slide from something like 11 percent down to under 4 on comparable list types. The question I keep circling is what the correct response to a falling contact rate actually is, because there are two coherent answers and they point opposite directions.

Narrow: if fewer people answer, the answer rate per record is now the scarce input, so you should spend more per record to buy better data. Better skip tracing, multiple numbers per owner, tighter filters on the distress signal so that the people who do answer are more likely to be sellers. Cost per record goes up, records worked goes down, and you're betting that conversion per contact carries the economics.

Widen: contact rate is a physical constraint you can't negotiate with, so the only lever is more attempts. Cheaper records, more of them, more dial attempts per record across different times of day, accept that the conversation is rarer and make it up in volume. Cost per record goes down and you're betting on throughput.

The complication is that everyone else is prospecting the same distressed list, so narrowing drops you into the most crowded water. Widening sends you where nobody is fishing, and that may be cheap for a reason. I've run both and I genuinely don't know which one held up better because I changed too many variables at once.

kevin_lombard · Answer

I've read this thread three times and I think I'm missing something basic, so I'll ask it plainly. When you say contact rate slid from 11 to 4, is that the same list source measured the same way across six years, or is it different lists that happen to be comparable in your judgment? I ask because if the list sources changed, the falling number might be telling you about data quality rather than about consumers screening calls, and those two problems have different fixes.

Also, does an attempt count as an attempt if nobody answers, or do you count a full sequence of tries to one number as one attempt? The denominator seems like it decides the whole argument.

carlos_nunez · Answer

Juniper is asking the right thing about the denominator and I'll answer for my own numbers because they're smaller and messier. I count a record as attempted after six tries spread over four days at different hours. On that definition my connect rate on a general absentee list is about 7 percent and on a tighter pre-foreclosure pull it's about 9.

So the tight list connects better for me, which argues for narrowing. But the conversion from connect to appointment is worse on the tight list, and I think that's the crowding orchard mentioned. Those owners have taken nine calls this month and I'm the tenth. On the wide list I'm sometimes the first person who called, and that changes the whole tone of the conversation.

My actual answer is more attempts on the same list, because attempts are the cheapest input I have and I was under-attempting badly. Going from three tries to six moved my connect rate more than any list change I've made.

samantha_ruiz · Answer

Quarry's attempt finding matches mine and it's the part people skip because it's unglamorous work. I went from four attempts to nine on the same records and my connect rate roughly doubled. No new data spend at all.

But there's a ceiling and I hit it. Past about eight or nine tries the marginal connect is somebody irritated to hear from me again, and irritated contacts convert at nearly zero while raising your complaint risk. So attempts are a lever with a hard stop, and once you're at the stop you're back to orchard's original fork.

Where I've landed is widen, with one qualification. The wide list only works if you can afford the labor to work it, and labor is what I ran out of at about 12,000 records. That's the real constraint behind the poll. Narrowing is what you do when your bottleneck is caller hours. Widening is what you do when your bottleneck is deal flow. Orchard, if you ran both and can't tell which won, I'd bet your bottleneck moved between the two tests.

When contact rates fall, do you narrow the list or widen it?

3 replies