How a wholesaling operation cut speed to lead from four hours to seven minutes, and where the build nearly broke

The 14 to 7 stage cut is the whole post. Property management has the same disease, where owners describe eleven steps for a maintenance ticket and the techs use three. What happened to the records that were sitting in the seven stages you deleted? A stage cleanup can strand 200 leads with no warning in a status that no longer triggers anything, and nobody notices for a quarter because the reports only count the live stages.

How did you get a reliable baseline of 4h 10m and 31% contact rate out of a shop that had two CRMs and a spreadsheet? That is the number the whole improvement claim rests on. If the old contact rate was really 31% of logged leads and half the leads never got logged, then the true before number was worse and your improvement is understated, which is fine. But if the spreadsheet only held leads someone had already touched, your before number was flattering itself and the 58% is a smaller jump than it reads.

Doing the client's arithmetic. $7,400 plus $850 for six months is $12,500 in year one. They went from 4 contracts a month to about 6. At any normal assignment fee that pays for the build inside the first month, so the build is not the risk to them. The question worth answering before renewing is what happens to those numbers if fees compress or their mail response drops. Their cost per lead is fixed by the marketing spend, and you improved the conversion side. If the market gets thinner and they cut mail, does your system still earn $850 a month on 200 leads instead of 400?

What's the carrier registration thing? Starting from zero here and I don't know why sending a text needs anyone's approval.

@bmoreno23 it's the business-and-campaign registration you go through before automated texting from a business number gets delivered reliably, and mobile carriers run the approval. I only know because I asked the same thing here two months ago.

@mikeoconnell7 the dispatcher part is what I want more of. She refused for two weeks. Did she tell you why or did you have to go find it? I'd assume most operators in that seat just half-use it and let you believe it's working.

How many hours total, build plus the migration plus the eight weeks you didn't bill? Trying to work out what your effective hourly was on a $7,400 build, because I suspect it's lower than a beginner reading this would guess.

Genuine question, no snark intended. How much of that lift is the system and how much is simply that someone is now calling leads within seven minutes? A single dedicated person sitting on the new lead queue with a phone and a legal pad would take a four hour response down to perhaps fifteen minutes for considerably less than $12,500 a year. Worth asking because speed to lead gets described as the whole ballgame, and if that holds, the software is the cheapest way to buy speed rather than the thing that creates the result.

Take a land operator for contrast. Follow up on land owners runs 18 to 30 months, four touches a year, and half of them are mail. Everything in this build assumes the value shows up in the first ten minutes. Does the same architecture hold at that pace, or is a long cycle pipeline a different thing entirely? Very few CRMs have default reporting that can say anything useful about a lead first touched in 2023.

11,000 duplicate merges and you reviewed the ambiguous ones by hand. What did you do with the pairs you couldn't resolve, delete or leave both? I'd be scared of merging two different sellers who shared a phone number.

The documents interest me more than the pipeline. Who holds the sub-account and the billing relationship, and what does the agreement say happens on termination? Specifically whether the client can export contacts, call recordings, and message history, in what format, and whether that is an obligation on you or a favor. Also the 20% holdback. Is that written with a defined test for what "live and working" means, or is it a handshake? A holdback with no acceptance criteria just moves the argument to day 31.

Worth laying out how the lead scoring in this build is composed, since it shows up beside every one of these stacks and the inputs behind the number are rarely spelled out.

Two full months at 6 and 7 contracts and one at 5, against a prior average of 4. Was the mail spend flat across all six of those months? If a bigger drop landed in the good months, some of your lift is the mail. Not saying it is, but the post would be stronger with the marketing spend printed next to the contract count.

Take a two person shop doing maybe 40 leads a month in a rural county. At that volume it is hard to see how any of this pencils. Is there a floor below which the build is just an expensive contact list?

@aaron_fitz10 your one-person-with-a-phone version breaks the day that person takes a vacation or quits, and then nobody knows what was said to whom. What the build bought them is that the process survives the staff. I'd argue that's most of the $12,500.

I'll also say I'm skeptical of automated texting doing the persuading. The machine's job is to get a human on the line fast and remember the follow-up. Anything past that and sellers can smell it.

What's a stage, in plain terms? I've read this thread twice.

@kevin_lombard a stage is one column in the pipeline, a named point a lead has reached. New, contacted, appointment set, offer made, under contract. The lead moves left to right and each move can fire off a task or a message. @mikeoconnell7's point is that with 14 of them, people stop moving cards and the whole board lies to you. @mikeoconnell7 what did the handoff document look like? On builds, the drawings are often fine while the as-built information is garbage, and six months later nobody can say why a thing was wired the way it was. Same failure mode with automations, most likely.

@luis_carrera asked the question I'd have asked. I'd add the attribution one: with cold calling, PPC, and mail all landing in the same pot, how confident are you that a contract gets credited to the right source now? If the source field is set by whichever integration fires first, then a mail lead who later clicks an ad gets logged as PPC and the client will overspend on ads for a year on the strength of your reporting.

That's the part of these builds I'd want audited, because it's the number the owner will use to make his largest spending decision and it's the number least likely to have been checked.

If you could only keep one of the changes, which one produced the most of the result?