Stop Marketing to Everyone: How to Attract the Right Deals Through Product-Market Fit

Scott Todd (: 00:00

Last week, I was reviewing marketing materials for an operator. Here's what his postcard said. It's the famous, we buy houses, any condition, fast close cash offer. You know, the thing that all real estate investors seem to say, it's like what we do. And I asked him, who is this for? And his response was, well, anybody that needs to sell their home.

And I said, that's the problem. It literally sounds like everyone else's message. Think about that for a minute. How often or how much of your message is the same as everybody else's? When you market to everyone, there's the old adage that you're marketing to no one.

And I would go a step further and say that you are attracting no one, or worse, you're attracting everyone except for the people who actually wanna work with you. And this is a pattern that I see constantly. It's something that reoccurs in the IPP assessments as people take it.

operators struggling to attract the right buyers or sellers, honestly, it's because in real estate investing, it's marketing to both sides. We're getting leads, but they're the wrong leads.

You could call them tire kickers. they're the people that want retail prices and they aren't motivated. And it's confusing because you feel like you're doing marketing. You're putting effort out there. You're spending money. You're spending resources. You're going through the motions. And then you wonder, why isn't this working?

And it doesn't work because marketing isn't about volume. It's about precision. It's about finding people who need what you have to offer. It's about finding product market fit. And most operators have never actually defined what it means for their businesses.

In the deal flow level of the investor priority pyramid, the third and fourth core needs are deal attraction and prospect attraction. It's one of the top bottlenecks that I see through these assessments. Right after available capital. Available capital is by far the one thing that screams out the most. And it changes. These assessments, as people take them and they take them over and over again and fix different problems.

available capital it's still leading. And then right behind that are these two core needs.

Now, you can have all of the capital in the world, but if you're attracting the wrong prospects, meaning you're attracting the wrong deals, or you can't sell them, then basically you're wasting everyone's time. Let me show you what this means. Early in my investing career, I did the same thing. I would send out these generic offers.

something like, hey, I'll buy your property, fast closing, fair prices, I was casting a wide net.

And I'm not going to deny it did work. And honestly, I thought that the more people that I sent these letters to and the more people that I made offers to and the more people that I tried to attract, the more deals that would come in. Right. Like that's logical. Well, it wasn't always the case. That's a wrong assumption. I got lots of calls, lots and lots of calls. But at least 50 percent of these people who were calling me, they weren't ready to sell.

They wanted full retail price or they had a probate problem or they were just testing the

worse yet, they thought fair pricing meant market value, which it does not mean in real estate investing. We all know that.

I was spending hours on the phone with people who were never going to sell to me at a price that would work.

Plus it destroyed my mailing cost. I mean, mailing to everybody is expensive. One day...

I mailed this one guy 39 letters. It was ridiculous. He had 39 properties that were on my list that day. I saw them. They were all there. Instead of mailing one letter after the other. So he got 39 of these things in the mail. You know what I did is I put them all into one big envelope, 39 pieces of paper, put them into this envelope and I took it to the post office. It weighed so much. I felt like I was getting a workout just

from

carrying this thing into the post office to price it out. I mailed this thing. I was proud of it. I'm thinking this guy's going to call me and we're going to do a big deal. Never heard from him. In fact, most of the people that had multiple properties never heard from. So I had to streamline that. went from mailing one letter per property to getting rid of the duplicates, mailing one offer per person, not per property. got refined in my marketing message.

I say marketing, what I mean is deal flow level. I'm really talking about your deal flow issues, trying to find leads to buy property. Through all of that, what I had was a lead generation problem disguised as a conversion problem.

See, I wasn't attracting the wrong people because basically I had bad follow up. No, I was attracting wrong people because my messaging was off. I wasn't attracting the right people because I wasn't speaking their language.

So I changed my approach.

Now, my background is in land investing, That's where I spent a lot of my time and a lot of my growth came from land investing. But the principles that I'm talking about apply to any type of investing that you're marketing to people to try to buy their properties.

I stopped saying, I buy land any side fast closing. I stopped that. And what I started saying is, I buy land in this specific area that meets these specific requirements. I put that into my offer letter.

I made sure that my team took great care as we were building the list of people to mail to. I made sure they took great care to isolate the areas in which we were marketing to or trying to buy in. And also that these met my criteria that evolved over time.

Now, I don't discuss this often because what I don't want you to do is I don't want you to start here. I want you to grow to this point. You see, you have to start off by mailing broadly. You have to start off by mailing to lots of people. And then when you find the people that you're attracting, then and only then can you niche down and specialize.

And again, this is the same message that I would say about the marketing side. When you go to sell, we can't get specialization with who we sell to from day one. We have to see where the market carries us based on our messaging and who we're attracting. And what happens on the mailing side is that you have to grow into more focused mailings.

When people try to start with a specific property type or specific niche within that niche, they risk never getting started. It's kind of like a starter's dilemma, if you will. You have to start broad and then you niche down over time. But pay attention to who responds. Ask yourself, what do they have in common?

When I did that, suddenly my mailings got more focused. My response rate increased and people who called actually had a problem I could solve. My conversion rate tripled because I was only attracting people who matched what I was offering. They had the problems that I could solve.

The same principle applies to homes, multifamily, everything. instead of we buy homes in any condition, operators who get this right say we buy from tired landlords, we take the property as is, including the problem tenant, and we close in seven days. In fact, a friend of mine only mails to property owners when the landlord files an eviction notice with the courts.

My buddy's point is that landlords going through eviction might be tired enough to sell or lease option their property right then. See, that's hyper specific. Eviction filings being public records, he targets one trigger event. He's specific, he's direct, and he speaks to that one person's exact problem. That's product market fit.

Now, product market fit is often talked about in the world of startups. It really is, especially tech startups. But product market fit applies to every business. In real estate investing, your product is your offer. It's what you're buying. That's the property types. It's how you buy, whether you buy for cash, terms, creative financing.

what problems you solve. could be speed, taking it as is, no hassle. It's those three big things. And your market is who needs that specific offer. Is it tired landlords, distressed sellers, estate situations, over-leveraged investors?

When your message speaks directly to your market's specific problem, you get product market fit. When your message tries to appeal to everyone, well, then you're just generating noise.

So here's how we're going to diagnose this. I want you to look at your last 10 leads. how many of them were actually qualified for what you offer? If it's less than 50%, You have a product market fit problem. Your message is attracting the wrong people.

And here's the pattern that I see. Operators think I need more deals or leads. So they spend more on marketing. And again, marketing could be on the buy side. It could be on the sell side. It depends on your niche. But they're amplifying the wrong message.

the wrong people does not help. You need precision, not volume.

Here's what to do this week. Step one, look at your last three deals that actually closed and ask yourself these questions. One, what problem did the seller have? Two, why did they choose you? And three, what was their situation? Hearing these questions, you might think, I don't know any of the answers to that thing.

But until you do, you're gonna keep walking around blindly. You have to know the answers to these questions in order to build the foundation in which to scale. Now, once you have the answers there, your next step is to look for the pattern. What did they have in common?

Were they all tired landlords, out of state owners, estate situations? Were they behind on their payments? Did they just have unfulfilled dreams that they never realized? What was the pattern? Okay, and that pattern is your market. And then what I want you to do in step three is to really sit down and think about these two data points that you just collected.

And think about that so that you can rewrite your message to speak directly to the market. Instead of, we buy homes in any condition, maybe try, we buy from tired landlords who want out fast. We take the property as is, tenants and all, and close in seven days. See, remember, specific, direct, and speaks directly to their problem. And here's the point. You have to find your voice.

So many times when we start off, we basically copy someone else's message. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with building on someone else's message, except when we stay there forever and ever and ever. See, you can use those generic marketing templates to start. Heck, done beats perfect, right? But as the market speaks to you and you learn who you're attracting,

and who you like to work with, you now know that there's a better way.

The other thing that we have to master is speaking the way in which we actually talk. You see, we can't, we cannot try to speak in a language that's not us. And sometimes that generic material doesn't even sound like us. You want it to sound like you.

So when you can speak your language, the way that you sound, and you can speak to them and the problems that they have, that's what's going to be authentic. That's what's going to be specific. and that's what's going to push you toward your product market fit. When your message is specific, the lead you get will be 10X the quality.

That's what you're looking for. You're looking for more qualified leads without having to work harder. And your conversion rate will skyrocket. because you're attracting the people who need what you have to offer.

Now, the IPP assessment, which you can take for free and the link is in the show notes, it takes five minutes or less. And it tells you exactly where you are stuck. So if deal attraction or prospect attraction show up as your vital need, you know this, this is what you need to fix next.

And in 30 days, your lead quality will transform. I'm Scott Todd.

and I'll see you in our next episode.

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