More On Toll-Free Numbers

There is a common misconception that toll-free numbers are expensive. My response is they are an investment that pay back ten times what you put in, and more.

Don’t Be Cheap Here!

One more point that is very important - we strongly recommend also setting up a toll-free # for motivated sellers to call after they’ve received your free report. These prospects are “hot” if they’re calling you off the reports and should be able to call you directly.

You Don’t Want YOUR “Hot” Leads To Go
Anywhere Else But To You!

If you don’t have an office yet, you can may or may not be there when a motivated seller calls. If you do have an office, you don’t want your seller being disconnected while being forwarded to your voice mail while you are “in a meeting” or on the other line. Either way, if the seller gets disconnected or shuffled off to Buffalo when they are calling you back, hot to trot, this is very bad.

Now, you can do all you want to try and prevent incompetent help from sitting at the front desk, but it won’t make any difference. Things like this are going to happen when you depend on others to take care of very important things. (I consider your speaking to every motivated seller who calls you as being very important!).

Anyway, there is a simple solution that you should consider for the Voice Mail Line that you have on your business cards, letterheads, offers, etc…

Get Your Own Private Toll-Free #
Recorded Message Line

This should specify that it is separate from the lead generation lines. DO NOT CONFUSE THE TWO.

If someone calls your office, or home-office, and you’re out, why not skip the office line altogether? (Or, at least offer the 24 hr toll-free# voice mail as an option to the office number on the business card or whatever).

Get people to call your own private toll-free # message line. They will be calling you directly, and there is no chance that anyone except you can mess up the message.

This is very important. If a seller has been thinking your offer over and then decides to do it while thinking about if at 2 am, they can call your toll-free line and leave you a message for you to call them in the morning. Anytime anyone wants to call you, they can and will, because you have made it easy for them to call.

In fact, you can check the line frequently for messages, or get a box with a beeper function that beeps you anytime you have a message!

I get a lot of resistance when I mention this: members say they don’t want another expense. Believe me, I understand the feeling, but that thinking is plain wrong.

Spending a fixed cost of around $15-20 a month to have a dedicated, private toll-free# recorded message function is a no-option matter for me. There just isn’t any excuse to not have this powerful marketing tool in your bag of clubs!

Don’t be cheap on the wrong things. Keep in mind that you are going to have a whole new budget available from having stopped wasteful marketing expenses that don’t work and from generating a whole lot of business! You paid us to teach you how to make money. And a toll-free number is a key to success that most Real Estate Entrepreneurs and Investors pass on, with disastrous results.

Toll-Free Numbers and Real Estate Investing Success.

An interesting fact is that most of the Investors we talk to who are doing a large volume of business - the people who have R/E business that make a lot of money - most of them do have a toll-free number coming into their office, into their own private voice mail, and they use toll-free #s for their marketing.

Now - which came first - the chicken or the egg? Did they get their businesses to the point of generation a lot of revenue, and then decide they could afford toll-free #s? Or did they use toll-free #s to help grow their business to the high revenue propositions that they are today?

Of course, I can’t answer that question - all I can tell you is, I’ve used toll-free #s for years, and the cost, which I consider to be quite small, is far exceeded by the number of leads that convert into deals that produce big up-front cash profits I get because they can call on my toll-free line.

One way you can test this for yourself, is any time you are doing any king of marketing, try going one way (with a toll-free #, for example) and then compare it to the exact same marketing but without the 800#. Which one works better over time? Which one generates more calls and results in more leads that convert to deals?

If you find there is a slight increase - for example, if you got even one extra deal over a three month period on the toll-free line - it would pay for the costs 10-50 times over. So even a small increase in response because of the toll-free # can generate large dollar volume increases in your business that far exceed the cost of the line.

Like everything else we are teaching you here, this is based on human nature and the fact that people like things that are free.

Toll-free #s are free. People will use them more often. And the more often they use them, the more they will be calling you. And the more they call you, the more houses you will buy from motivated sellers.

Think about this hard and try not to be cheap here, because this particular area of your marketing is very low cost and has the potential for producing dramatically increased results.

Real Estate Investing and Toll-Free Numbers

One of the negatives that people first think of though, when they think of toll-free numbers, is the cost of having them. Everyone worries that the cost won’t be worth the benefits received. So let’s discuss this in a little more detail.

Firstly, with any carrier toll-free # will run you about as far as fixed cost, and somewhere between 20-30c a minute, depending on what use you require, what kind of carrier, and so forth.

Is A Motivated Out-Of-State Seller, Who Still Has A House In Your Market, More Likely To Call Your Local Number That Is Long Distance To Them , Or A Toll-Free Number That Is Free Of Change To Them?

Now, let’s just say that by using toll-free numbers your usage totaled a bill of $100 from people calling you, and that $100 of usage helped generate $10,000 in cash profits (i.e.two $5,000 option deposits) - would you think it was worth it? Would you think it was worth it to bring in that kind of revenue that might not have come in if you had just a regular number?

See, one of the myths that we regularly hear is that somebody who is local won’t hesitate to call you on a local number, because basically people think local call is free.

In other words, having a toll-free# is “overkill”, and you don’t need to have a toll-free number because all the prospects and sellers you want to work with are local. Why waste the money?

Let Me Shatter That Myth!

It has been proven and time again, in study after study, test after test, that for whatever reason, people will call toll-free #s more often and more readily that they will a local number

Now, you may not think that this is the case. Or you think that this shouldn’t be the case because you call local #s as much as toll-free numbers yourself. It doesn’t make any difference to you.

But remember, it doesn’t matter what you think or what you do. All that matters is what your target seller prospects do and think.

Think about it. Is a person who has had to suddenly move to Maine, who still has a house in Arizona they are trying to sell, more likely to call your local number that is long distance to them, or a toll-free number that is free of charge to them?

All I can tell you is, empirical evidence (the only kind I care about) shows that toll-free #s will almost always out pull local area code numbers! And that’s true whether it’s a call to your marketing devices or to your personal voice mail.

In fact, this is so true that you will very seldom see anyone engaged in the business of direct marketing use anything except toll-free numbers.