Text Message Marketing: State of the Union

Mike Hambright (00:00.725)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show today. I’m here with Mark Michael Bartolome and we’re gonna be talking about he’s from launch control That’s a leader in the tech space Obviously text marketing has gone through a lot of evolution has really the whole industry over the past few years, We’re gonna really talk about kind of a state of the union on what’s going on with SMS marketing and other ways to use text Marketing your business that aren’t necessarily all lead gen, right? There’s a lot of ways to communicate with leads you already have and build relationships that that you need to strengthen So Michael, welcome to the show

Michael Bartolomei (00:31.116)
Thanks Mike, appreciate you having me.

Mike Hambright (00:32.755)
Yeah, good to see you. So I’m excited to talk about this. you know, text has has been beat up a little bit over the last few years. You guys have an amazing platform. I remember when it was just getting off the ground and and it’s come it’s kind of come a long way. Right. And there’s I think a lot of people use text in a lot of different ways, not necessarily just lead lead, Jen. But let’s maybe start off by just having you tell us a little bit about your background and a little bit about your, guess, kind of

launch control and your role there.

Michael Bartolomei (01:05.142)
Yeah, of course. I, you know, I had, let’s just say many years of sales and marketing experience. and I came into launch control actually not from a real estate, not from the real estate side, but really from the building up sales and marketing teams side of things. And so the founder of the company brought me on to basically do two things to really scale up the sales and marketing team. And this is like six months after the app was launched. So

I think I was the second non-engineering or development hire for the company. And then the other thing was to really connect with the investors and really kind of learn what their needs were so that we could bake that into engagement strategies. So one of the first things that I did was I called a bunch of investors, some that were just getting started and some that were running big seven, even eight figure shops.

and just picking their brains about their business and what they needed and what some of the responses were from the seller so that we could figure out ways to properly engage with them. it was a fun learning experience to really kind of dive deep into wholesaling right from the beginning.

Mike Hambright (02:17.919)
Yeah, I guess a lot of us were outsiders at one point. You’ve obviously been in the industry now for a number of years. But I remember even when I first started, it’s kind of like…

Michael Bartolomei (02:23.843)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (02:29.289)
It was like the, you know, it’s less of the Wild West now than it was when I started in 2008. But I just remember thinking like, cause I came from a startup, basically a kind of a high flying startup. And I remember thinking like we went from like all tech to like no tech. mean, there weren’t even CRMs when I first started. And it’s really interesting to kind of insert yourself and bring your, bring your knowledge from outside into this world. And, and a lot of times you can make an immediate impact just by applying the things that you brought with

Michael Bartolomei (02:41.378)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Bartolomei (02:45.656)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (02:59.283)
you from the outside world into this industry and kind of apply them.

Michael Bartolomei (03:03.222)
Yeah. And you see it all the time at how, important it becomes. because you, you know, you’ve seen people that let’s say in the first 18 months of their investing business, they get a really solid amount of cashflow. Let’s say they get $400,000, $500,000. They’ve done well in that first, like 12 to 18 months. And then with all of that cashflow coming in, they go, well, now I really need to turn this into an organized business, like a really structured business. I’ve never built a structured business.

And so, you know, a lot of the education questions that people end up having is, how do I build this into a business so I’m not wearing all the hats and doing all of the things, you know?

Mike Hambright (03:45.257)
Yep, for sure. Well, let’s talk about a little bit of the State of the Union of what’s going on in SMS. And before we kind of get into all the ways to use SMS, maybe just talk a little bit about what it’s looked like from your perspective over the past couple of years.

Michael Bartolomei (03:46.222)
Let’s go.

Michael Bartolomei (03:59.21)
Yeah, you know, I anytime I I do podcast anytime we we have one of these conversations, you know, the preface is always that well text has really gone through a lot of changes and There’s there’s actually a lot about that narrative that just isn’t true, right? So and and most of that comes down to people Understandably blurring the lines between what is a regulation?

as in like federal or state level regulations that are coded into law and have fines associated with them and things that are just best practices that the carriers want people to use in their businesses so that they can have more of a smooth ride for their recipients. So I’ll give you an example. 10 DLC, which is often thought of as a regulation, is not a regulation. It’s a carrier best practice. Your EIN number being registered,

That’s purely in the carrier’s bucket. That does not get shared with the state. That does not get shared with anybody in a federal level. It’s best practices. Words that you can use in text messages and the filtering of those. Carrier best practices. So many of the top things that people associate with being regulatory changes are in fact not regulatory changes. They’re simply carrier best practices.

And the important, really, really important underlying thing that goes with that is that when it comes to regulatory monitoring of text engagement, there isn’t any. There’s no big brother. There’s no monitoring system where every message that you send through is going through a compliance filter metric. There’s no communication between the carriers and any state or federal level

bodies the only way that that any kind of of federal or state level compliance or Or regulatory issues come into play is if somebody takes the the step to become litigious, where they they want to they they want they’re looking for money and and they’re The recipients know absolutely nothing about state or federal level regulations. They knew nothing. They just know it doesn’t feel right Right. So the only time

Michael Bartolomei (06:20.47)
if we’re talking about risk reduction or risk analysis, the only time that any of those things ever come into play is if someone chooses to be litigious. And they’re only litigious if they’ve been put into a predatory situation or if it’s a lawyer that’s just kind of being sharky and looking for stuff, right? Those are only things. and that applies that this doesn’t feel right and sharky lawyers kind of thing applies to all outbound.

That applies to email, applies to text, that applies to cold calls, that applies to anything where you don’t have the express written consent of the person to engage with them. You run, you have to do a little bit of risk analysis and see if that risk analysis is beneficial for your business, right? And we send, Control sends millions of messages every year. The risk profile is extremely low, but it is, if you are doing outbound,

Mike Hambright (06:58.911)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (07:13.151)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Bartolomei (07:16.556)
You need to have a pretty clear understanding of what makes the carriers happy and what is actually something that is regulatory, which again, like for the examples I gave, very little of what is thought to be regulatory is in fact regular.

Mike Hambright (07:33.365)
Yeah, so maybe you could share just kind of high level, a few kind of best practices in terms of messaging and stuff like that that work and a few best practices on how to stay out of the penalty box, if you will.

Michael Bartolomei (07:49.462)
Yeah, I mean, much of what launch control is geared to do is to create a risk reduced environment for people to be able to do that kind of cold outbound that’s really necessary to scale up a real estate investment business. you know, when you put in five messages into launch control, it creates 150 variations so that every person that’s receiving a message is receiving a unique message.

There’s going to be nothing that’s going to get red flagged as, you 5,000 people in this market received the exact same message from the exact same sender, which is, which is going to look like outbound marketing, not one on one engagement, right? The idea of launch control really what it comes down to is imagine you just had a list that you pulled from whatever your favorite data provider is. And you wanted to reach out to me as a, as a homeowner, just to gauge interest in, in.

purchasing my home off market. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You’re not selling a product or service. You’re just reaching out to an individual and saying, something for your consideration. It’s not solicitation. So what Launch Control does is takes that conversation and allows you to do that at scale. So if you think about it that way,

Right. And the conversations that you’re having are really meant to be one-on-one conversations. Then that will inform everything in your strategy because you’ll, it will, it will inform what you say. And those initial messages that get, that get turned into like a high level variety. And when someone has an inbound response, which is the thing that matters, right? Like every single deal that’s ever been closed through launch control started with an inbound response. Right. You don’t, you don’t get deals from non-responders. get.

deals from people who ended up in the inbox. So because of that, you know, this gets into, know, and you, I think you guys are really great about educating people on this, but how do you put your touch points together? What do you say? What are, what is the sales conversion funnel that is going to be proactive enough to get the, get the requisite number of touch points to close a deal, but recipient respectful enough.

Michael Bartolomei (10:08.622)
that you’re not burning opportunities because it might just be a question of timing. They might want to sell in six months or eight months, and you don’t want to burn that to the ground if you still have that opportunity. Right. So as soon as it hits the inbox, it now becomes a question of sales conversion, best practices, and text is only, you know, a couple of the touch points that go into that vital touch points, but touch points to go into that. So it’s, it’s kind of, you know, I know this is where we’re going to steer the conversation, right. But like what’s best in text.

is really a question of what are the best lead conversion techniques currently for leading investors and how do you do that in a way that allows you to do quick close for those that are ready in 30 to 60 and then nurture those that are going to be a few months out so that they choose you when they do inevitably make that choice.

Mike Hambright (10:59.957)
Right, right, yeah that’s great.

So let’s talk a little bit about like what all SMS is used for. Like it’s obviously, everybody knows, I mean, it’s a channel of communication, right? So it could be, there’s no relationship yet. And it could be with sellers or buyers. is a little bit of a relationship there and I’m trying to nurture maybe like more of a B2B. Like I’m trying to network with wholesalers and build my buyers list or with agents that might bring me deals or other people that might bring you a deal.

I was about to say attorneys, but attorneys are the most litigious, so maybe avoid those. I don’t know. And then also…

Michael Bartolomei (11:37.112)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (11:42.261)
Just like long-term nurture like it’s just I mean the reality is is the everybody says the money is in the follow-up everybody’s kind of heard that right and there’s no doubt about it if you’re not doing a great job of following up with people proactively and Systematically then you’re costing your money business So but by the way before we jump into that I just said something that made me think of something else Is there any of these any of these rules or laws or best practices in place? Are they different if they’re?

Michael Bartolomei (11:50.764)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Bartolomei (11:54.829)
in the house.

Michael Bartolomei (12:05.582)
Sure.

Mike Hambright (12:12.215)
B to B versus B to C. Like if you’re talking to other businesses, are the rules different than if you’re soliciting, if you will, potential home sellers?

Michael Bartolomei (12:22.158)
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. it, technically the rules aren’t much different, but the risk profile goes down even further. It goes down to almost zero. And there are a couple reasons for that. One, you’re just, you’re doing B2B outreach, like say, you know, an investor to a buyer, for instance, or, you know, somebody that owns gym equipment and wants to sell gym equipment to gyms around the country, whatever. It’s…

For the person that is the recipient of that message, usually there’s an opportunity for them to make more money, right? You’re not asking them for something, there’s an opportunity for them to make more money, it’s a business conversation. So that tends to go smoother, the volume’s lower, they’re not getting, business owners don’t get into distress situations where suddenly every supplier in the world is sending them a message, right? So they’re not getting into that feeling like they’re in a predatory situation.

And then almost all businesses have very publicly published contact information. Right. So, so they’ve, they’ve put that out there and said, yes, please contact me. So you can’t then go, but well, yeah, I wanted them to call. I didn’t want them to text, right. You’ve, you’ve, you can’t, you can’t do that. Right. So because, because it is publicly available information and, and advertised information, because it is B2B and because it is lower volume.

It’s very, very safe.

Mike Hambright (13:52.605)
Yeah, yeah, awesome. So let’s get into kind of the primary uses. So let’s talk about Legion first. Text as a Legion mechanism, kind of maybe share your thoughts, best practices, things like that.

Michael Bartolomei (14:03.598)
Yeah, sure. mean, look, the point that every investor wants to get involved is when a seller is ready to have a conversation, right? Like every investor wants to be involved in discovery and not so much involved in a ton of outbound or cold calling or whatever. So the reason I brought up the inbox is that if you look at text as basically converting active marketing or outbound marketing into inbound marketing, you’ll understand its purpose really well. So if you send out 10,000 mailers, right, you know,

that or 5,000 mailers, you know that you’re probably gonna get 30 to 50 legitimate phone conversations from those mailers. And those are the ones you really care about, right? Those are the ones that are, they self filtered and became inbound. And so now again, it becomes sales conversion, right? So when you send out 5,000 text messages, it’s the same thing. Who’s gonna raise their hand? Who’s gonna self filter?

and say, okay, text is a way that I’m willing to communicate. And then there’s one more filter where you have to kind of get rid of the people that are just reactive and not serious to get down to that core number of conversations. Then in all likelihood, you’re going to take off of text and move to a phone call, right? Because you want to start your lead conversion process. You want to get them to discovery. So if you think of it as a way of getting a larger group of people to self filter and identify themselves,

as what is the equivalent of an inbound lead, then that gives you just one more resource where you’re able to reach out to larger groups of people, right? So it’s filtering down to discovery called ready leads is the idea. And then, well, I’ll pause there for a second, see if you have any questions about that.

Mike Hambright (15:52.222)
Yeah.

So it’s meant more as a conversation starter, like can we have a conversation about this? And I know there, know, several years back when texting was really hot and everybody and their brother was doing it, there was always the conversation of, do you just keep the conversation inside of text if that’s working? There were some people that are like, hey, as soon as they text me, I’m calling them. And so it sounds like at this point, your belief is it’s just kind of top of funnel to start a conversation that probably leads to a phone call.

And most likely, well, mean, it’s hard to do the whole process over text, I mean, honestly. But is that true? Like, you think the current belief is it’s meant to be kind of top of funnel, middle of the funnel is more of like, let’s have a conversation on the phone or in person about it?

Michael Bartolomei (16:40.972)
Well, I think that what I think is that anytime you have an open communication channel, you want to keep that channel open. All right. So I’ll give you an example. There’s a big land acquisitions company that we work with that they do, I think a little north of $150,000 a month in land deals. So it’s a, it’s a big operation. And what they do is they’ll, they’ll send out their text messages to get people into the inbox. Right.

And then they’re going to have their team calling them to engage with the sellers. But they’re also, if they miss that call, right, they’re sending from that same text channel, hey, just try to call you from, and some identifier about the number, right? So they’re connecting those channels so that people understand that those weren’t two separate calls that were coming in, but rather a single company trying to get a deal done. Now they may send them a purchase agreement.

for that land in this case, or could be property, they may send them that purchase agreement. And it looks like the person’s going to sign it, and they drag their feet a little bit. They’ll go back to the launch control conversation and say, hey, my team’s been trying to get a hold of you regarding the purchase agreement that we sent over to you four or five days ago. What do we need to do to get this signed? Maybe not that aggressive in their phrasing. But the point is that they’re not shutting

that pipeline down because it’s a channel that has been proven that that person is going to reply to. So you have to think about it as a thread, right? Like any text thread that you have on your phone, it’s an easy to recapture the conversation because it’s already in a thread. So if you can use it as a way to just supplement what you’re doing on your CRM, through your CRM, to make sure that you’re just getting that extra touch point connection.

then you’re using it to the best of its ability. If you just use it to get conversation started and then go, well, we pivoted to a call for get launch control, you’re missing a huge opportunity. You’re shutting down an open conversation for no reason, right? And often without transition to your team. Your team’s just calling from another unknown number. So you have to connect the dots for them and keep channels open.

Mike Hambright (18:42.783)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (18:49.0)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (18:53.204)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (18:59.509)
Yeah, I know when I get calls from random numbers, it’ll pull up my most recent text like on my home screen so I can see like was there a pre-existing condition there, pre-existing, was there a previous conversation there, right? Or if somebody texts me, I always, if they act like they know me, I’m like, have we met before? And I’m kind of looking back at previous messages and sometimes I got to scroll the ways back to I see a name or something like that. But yeah, yeah, that’s great. Awesome, so.

Michael Bartolomei (19:10.956)
Yeah.

Michael Bartolomei (19:23.394)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (19:27.925)
Any kind of best practices? I know you guys obviously have tools that take your message and modify the message and kind of, I don’t know if it’s like just adjective spinning, so it’s way more advanced than spinning words so that there’s a lot of variations of it. But I still get a lot of texts that are like, I mean just super old school. Are you still looking to sell your house at this address? And I’m like.

No, I never was looking to sell, by the way, sometimes it’s like I never even owned that one. I don’t even know what this is, you know? But yours are trying to elicit a more, probably generally more of an icebreaker versus hitting them over the head with do you wanna sell this house, right?

Michael Bartolomei (20:07.65)
Yeah, I mean, the first thing that I would say is we’ve got the best customer success team in the business and they’re aimed at helping you hit your goal structure. They’re not just there to help you turn the knobs and press the button. So we assign a dedicated rep for your account. So you should use that, utilize that, get them to really walk you through all the best practices.

just to give you an idea of kind of how deep we go on this. Like we’ll start with data and we’ll talk to you about what your data strategy is. And as a part of that, really push that you segment your data down to the point that you know exactly who you’re speaking to, right? If you’re looking for, let’s say for instance, you get your data all the way down to a housing development or a couple of housing developments where you know that there’s been some wholesaling deals over the last six months, you want to take advantage of that.

You know not the nicest neighborhood in town. And so there’s there’s some some opportunity there, you know, it’s not a brand new development. And so then you’re speaking to people of saying, you know, I’m I’m I’m Actively looking to find something in the Oak Ridge in Oak Ridge Estates, know, I’m not having any luck on MLS Just kind of going outside the box here, right? Like and you’re you’re speaking directly to that that person But you also know and this is where it gets really important

is by the more you filter down your data and the more you use like the custom tagging opportunities in launch control to know exactly who you’re talking to, now you can as a lead conversion tool, you can filter this. So now you know that you’re talking to just based off of the data that you have, you’re talking to someone who lives in Oak Ridge Estates, who has some level of money worries, you know, they’re in pre-foreclosure or they’ve got tax liens, they’re over the age of 50.

And now you know on a pretty detailed level who you’re talking to and what your approach is going to be. You could have another one where it’s in that same area, but you know that the person lives out of state. You did a little more work and you know that they own three to five properties nationally. Now you know that you’re talking to somebody who’s going to probably understand what wholesaling is and is probably going to understand what an off-market deal should look like.

Michael Bartolomei (22:30.966)
and you can treat it more like you would a seller conversation, right? You don’t have to educate and build trust as much. So knowing who you’re speaking to is going to up your conversion ratio, not just from text to discovery call, but from discovery call to deal.

Mike Hambright (22:49.353)
Yeah, that’s great. Okay, well let’s talk about building relationships that are there with your buyers list. It could be with realtors you want to bring your deals. It could be with, I call them continuous business referrals, but basically kind of B2B type folks that you’re trying to build relationships with. What are some kind of, what’s working now? What are some best practices there?

Michael Bartolomei (23:10.626)
Yeah, I’m glad you asked that question because I think it’s one of the things that gets underutilized in the app. This text is, know, like if I sent you a text right now, right? You, would, anybody watching this on YouTube would watch you kind of look down and try not to look at your phone or try not to answer. There’s a very Pavlovian kind of thing to sending a text message. So because of that, like it works at all levels of your business, right?

And some of that, obviously some of it you can do through a CRM, but there are other parts of your business where you want to filter down to core conversation. So a couple of simple examples, right? Rather than getting a deal and then sending an email or a text message even to 300 buyers and saying who’s interested, curate that list, use text to reach out to those 300 buyers and say, look, I actively buy in the area, a few properties a month. If you tell me what you’re looking for,

in the next 60 to 90 days, I can go out and source it for you. Right. And now you’ve got, you’ve got buyers that want to work with you because you’re going to make their job way easier. Like they’re going to be able to, you know, hammer the final, you know, maybe not the final nail. Maybe that’s not the best way. They’ll be able to put a bow on one project and turn around and start another because you’ve teed it up for them. Right. And it makes your job easier because you know, when you go out to send that first text message,

Mike Hambright (24:30.005)
Alright.

Michael Bartolomei (24:37.218)
You know what your ideal property is that you’re looking for. You’re not just looking for a yes, you’re looking for something, something that you know you’re going to be able to turn over very quickly to an eager buyer. And, you know, the same kind of logic works for real estate agents. If you’re in a couple of prime markets, there’s most likely, there are a lot of real estate agents in that area. And I mean, you know the stats on this. Like the vast majority of the deals are done by a handful of the agents.

Most are hungry. They need deals, right? And, and connecting with wholesalers could be phenomenal for them because one, if a wholesaler has an edge case deal that’s there, they’re just not going to be able to make their margins on, but they can get a finder’s fee from, the agent. When the agent gets their commission, you know, you stack up a few of those, you you stack up a couple of those a month, every month. And it’s a nice little additional profit stream for your business.

Mike Hambright (25:07.815)
sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Bartolomei (25:35.638)
And if you’re a real estate agent and you’ve got something that’s looking like it’s creeping towards an expired listing and you can get someone to swoop in with a solid cash offer that the homeowner might be willing to take, or even like a subject to solution or, you know, there’s other ways that you could potentially take it, but nurturing that relationship and just having the, know, using the drip function in launch control to just keep up consistent communication.

Nope. Hey, Mike, just, you know, checking in, let me know if you’ve got anything that’s, that’s looking like a potential inspired listing for you. I’d love to chat about it. Also, as always, we’ll let you know if I’ve got anything, you know, that kind of just simple little automated check-in. It’d be enough that, that, that people are bringing deals to you and not, just you to them. And so you can, you can use it to, to find profitability or to, to fine tune profitability at various stages of your business.

Mike Hambright (26:18.037)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (26:34.579)
Yeah, the automation just helps you build relationships. mean, it’s, you know, if you’re casting a wide net and you want to build a lot of relationships, you need tools to help you. Not necessarily, you know, I mean, there are, we, you know, some of our businesses, use bots now that are programmed and carrying on conversations with people. mean, we’re not really talking about that. We’re talking about just.

you know, trying to restart or trying to re-break the ice, restart a conversation, trying to just keep that going forever, right? Because how many people do we all know, we’re all guilty of this, we see somebody and you’re like, man, I haven’t seen you in years, right? And it’s like, well, it doesn’t have to be that way. You could constantly be essentially tapping somebody on the shoulder saying, hey, just wanted to check in, how’s everything going? You know, any opportunities for us to discuss or things like that,

Michael Bartolomei (27:12.29)
Yeah.

Michael Bartolomei (27:19.35)
And yeah, and it’s the automated side of it that’s really, really important, right? Because it’s a hard lesson that every investor has to learn that you can’t wear all the hats, right? You can’t do everything. Otherwise you’re going to have an 80 hour week job. I was talking to, we’re going to get you on Launch Control’s podcast, Deal Nation as well, but I talking to a guest a couple of weeks ago and they’re doing 15 plus deals a month in real estate business. And this investor is

also a coach, also an influencer, run, does a handful of other things. And my question was, well, how, right? And how the answer to that is efficiency. this person has their automation system and it’s a small team, I think two, maybe three people, but they all know their roles and they all do their job. And they spend four to six hours a week on that wholesaling business.

that’s producing like 15 deals a month, right? They’re spending four to six hours a week because peak efficiency, right? They have the right systems in place. They have the right people in place. And so they’re able to just work on strategy and, you know, if they need to get called in for a big close, they get called in for a big close. So if you think of text as like, as your ability to just, like I said, increase your profit margin, but doing it in a way,

that you’re not sending off those text messages. You’re not like, what do I say now? What’s my check-in gonna be? It’s work that you do upfront one time, and then you just let it run, you know? And if letting it run produces an extra three to $500,000 for your business over the course of the year, which is found business, that’s huge.

Mike Hambright (29:05.491)
Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Sounds awesome. So let’s talk about the last one is just kind of follow up and long-term nurture, right? I mean, very similar to we’re kind of putting the two together. The lead’s already been generated. The person, I like to say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. So a lot of folks that contact us about possibly selling their house, not that we wish this on anybody, but a lot of these folks have been distressed for years, if not decades. And they’re generally

Michael Bartolomei (29:07.758)
Thank you.

Mike Hambright (29:35.437)
speaking also professional procrastinators, right? So just because they contacted you today doesn’t mean they’re ready to sell today. Maybe they will be, but most likely it’s going to be in months or even years ahead. And the only way that you’re going to make those work, which by the way, I’ve said this many times, if people were, if people up their follow-up game and could just get better at follow-up, they don’t even have to spend any more money. Like they’ve already generated the lead. All that stuff has already happened, right? You just have to use some tools that allow you to automate that. Most small businesses could easily

Michael Bartolomei (29:39.191)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (30:05.301)
double their business if not more if they just up their follow-up game. But most are terrible at it. They’ll follow up a few times and then it falls off. Like we’re all probably have had people that we’re ready to give a bunch of money to for something and you call them and maybe they don’t most likely they don’t even answer and maybe they call you back but you just never or you have a conversation once with somebody and then you just never hear from them again and it’s just like crazy to me. But let’s talk about using SMS in follow-up.

Michael Bartolomei (30:31.702)
Thank

Michael Bartolomei (30:35.958)
Yeah, so there are, there’s the upfront part of it and then there’s the nurture part of it, right? Cause I, it’s, one of my pet peeves when, when, investing or investment companies are thinking, well, how did text perform against direct mail? How did direct mail perform against PPC? All of these different marketing channels that you’re using are all funneling up to people that are either already in a distressed situation with their home or

evaluating because they’re circling around to that. And so it’s really just a question of how you can actively engage with that limited number of people that are within your markets. And so to do that, you’re sending, let’s say I’ll use text and direct mail as an example. Let’s say if you’re sending direct mail out to people, why not follow up with or even prompt ahead of time with text

to let them know that that’s another channel that you can contact them on, right? Not as separate entities. Again, like earlier in our conversations, you need to connect the dots for them so that they know that that text message and that direct mail piece came from the same company that is a solution provider that can potentially offer them a good exit strategy for their property, for their home or their land or whatever you’re focused on, right? And so figuring out ways, or if you get leads from

from paid marketing, PPL kind of leads, you’re, or excuse me, PPC kind of leads. And you have a team that’s calling them right away, right? Okay, well, of a hundred of those leads that come in, you’re probably gonna have really solid conversations, maybe convert three to five of those, which means you’ve got 97, 95 to 97 that didn’t convert. So that gets into what you’re saying, it might be months, might be years, but they’ve already raised their hand, right? So you’re not gonna nurture them.

by consistently calling them. Nobody wants to be called every week to see if they’ve changed their mind, or even every month to see if they’ve changed their mind. What you want to do is keep your brand in front of them and keep your solution in front of them. So if you can just create, dissect your discovery call into like eight different value-based touch points and drip those over the course of a year, so you have something relevant to say to them over the course of the year.

Michael Bartolomei (33:00.802)
then I’m getting your company name, like we said, on a thread, right? Where you’re able to be like, well, who is this? right, right, right. This is the person that works for this company that could potentially pay me cash for my home. I wasn’t ready for that before. Let me have a conversation. Let me see what kind of numbers they actually throw out at me. I’m gonna call them, right? And then they call in. it’s using it both on a long-term nurture and a combined marketing channel.

Mike Hambright (33:21.257)
All Yeah.

Michael Bartolomei (33:30.254)
just to make sure that you’re getting the requisite number of touch points needed to close a deal.

Mike Hambright (33:37.461)
Yep, yep, that’s awesome. So let’s talk, one other thing that I know you guys do, which is really intriguing is…

There’s in business. There’s a do-it-yourself solution, which most people do everything themselves. There’s a done-for-you solution, or there’s kind of a done-with-you solution sometimes, right? I think, but there’s always this done-for-you solution. Like most real estate investors and most entrepreneurs ultimately just want to make money and not have to do the work. And the reality is, is if you’re not good at something, even though there’s a cost associated with kind of a done-for-you model, which we do that at Investor Machine as well, obviously.

we do lead gen for folks and it costs money but you know we believe that the fees and stuff are dramatically offset just by having it done consistently like clockwork, eliminating a whole bunch of waste that the do-it-yourselfers typically have involved but there is a done-for-you solution for SMS marketing that makes this easier for people that you guys help with right so it kind of tell us you know what that looks like.

Michael Bartolomei (34:40.172)
Yeah, so we’ve got a done for you service called Launch Leads. And we’ve purposely constructed it so that it can work for people at all of our different subscription levels. So it’s not just a, you you don’t need to be an elite investor to use this. You can be on our light package and use it. So if you’re on our light package and you just want to max out the messages that are available to you on that light package and not have to touch the outbound,

so that you can really use text truly as an inbound lead source. all you’re doing is our team is saying, this person’s ready to have a conversation about their home. Can you call them in the next 5, 10 minutes? And you go, yeah, on it. And you call that lead. You can even look at the mobile app for launch control, get some details about the lead, call them. Our team will text you the basic details. But if you want to get more, look at the whole conversation, you can just do that from mobile app. You call them within 5, 10 minutes.

It shrinks it down to all of your text engagement, down to all you do is you give us data and a little bit of advice on how you want to use that data. And then you sit back and you wait for us to say, these people are ready to have a conversation about their home. And then you’re just having discovery calls. And on the light package, that’s only $997. So you can have the entire light package plus the cost of the light package plus $997 a month. And we will do absolutely everything for you.

And then you can scale that up. There’s a version for the core package. There’s a version for pro and enterprise, depending on how much volume that you need to do. And so we will do all of that so that your focus is just on discovery calls. And then within our network, and this is where I think it becomes additionally powerful or even more powerful, is we’ve got, I’ll give you a for instance, we’ve got a partnership with New Western.

And they’re in 40 plus markets around the country with boots on the ground teams. So you could, if you’re in one of those markets, you can use launch leads on the front end, have your discovery calls and then take those discovery calls and send them to your rep at New Western to disbow the deal and get you paid out on that super fast. Right? So imagine the volume you’d be able to do if your only focus

Michael Bartolomei (37:02.604)
was on converting discovery calls into purchase agreements. That’s it. All of your focus is on that. Everything else is handled. So the volume that you could do in your business, if you’re somebody which many, many people are in this position where they’ve got a W2 and they’re trying to do this as a side hustle and they need a solid amount of proof of concept. So if you’re going to do all that on your own, wearing all the hats, doing all on your own.

Mike Hambright (37:06.453)
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Michael Bartolomei (37:30.456)
you’re looking at, I don’t know, 18 months to two years to really probably have enough in the coffers to be like, I’m quitting my W2. I’m going all in on this, maybe less depending on how successful you are at it. But imagine how much, how fast that gets sped up. If you’re able to, if you don’t have to touch the outbound marketing, you, don’t really have to touch much on the Dispo side. You’re just solely focused on converting, inbound leads. You could do, you do a lot of business.

Mike Hambright (37:42.559)
Yeah.

Michael Bartolomei (37:59.63)
pretty quickly that way.

Mike Hambright (38:00.799)
Yeah, that’s incredible. So Michael, folks want to learn more about launch control and things you guys have going on, where can they go?

Michael Bartolomei (38:08.071)
Yeah, so a couple of places. If you’re ready to get started and you want to implement text for your business, go to launchcontrol.us, book a time with our sales team. They’re not going to hard push you. The first thing they’re going to do is just kind of evaluate your business, your goals, make sure that it’s a good fit for you at this time. And they’re really knowledgeable, so it’s worth just hitting them with some questions.

And then that will, you you get signed up, you’ll work with our CS team. They’ll give you the best, the best practices and you’re kind of off and running or, know, you can implement launch leads right from the start. Right. And then if you’re just looking to connect with the community and you want to, and you want to, you know, you’re not ready, ready to get your business off the ground yet. We’ve got a Facebook group called investors hub REI. And if you go to that, can, you know,

You’ll get snippets from our podcast. We’ll probably put snippets from this podcast when it’s available, Mike, we’ll put those on there. And then we are, you we have guests that come on and offer advice and it’s just a good place to connect with.

Mike Hambright (39:12.693)
Fantastic. Well, Michael, thanks so much for spending some time with us today.

Michael Bartolomei (39:16.416)
Yeah, my pleasure. Anytime.

Mike Hambright (39:18.397)
Yeah, awesome. And hopefully you guys got some good insights here from, there’s a lot of rumors and a lot of information out there about SMS that’s not necessarily correct, but there’s also a lot of ways to use SMS that we talked about today. And especially with a pre-existing relationship that’s already there. If you’re not using text, you’re missing out. So, appreciate you guys a bunch. We’re gonna see you on the next show. Take care.

Michael Bartolomei (39:32.174)
Thank you.