This is episode number 2136. In this episode, Jill and I are talking about how the Land Academy CRM can streamline your deals. It’s land research week. Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy member Discord forum and take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular requests.

The Importance Of Structuring Your Phone System For Land Deals

Wes wrote, “Hoping a Land Academy veteran might help advise on the optimal phone setup to ensure calls get through. I have a regular iPhone 15 Pro that my current business pays for. My phone number is my personal. My daily number is my personal. I have a second business line set up in Grasshopper VoIP that forwards calls to my personal number. I mentioned previously that Grasshopper isn’t working for lots of reasons. To ensure I don’t miss calls like I currently do, I added a second line in a different area code for identification purposes. Next, I’m thinking of getting an eSIM assigned to this line. This allows me to carry only one phone around.

My question is once you’re scaling to where you send mail to multiple states across area codes, are you purchasing a virtual number in each state and then forward it back to your main business line or do you send these calls to PATLive? I’m getting this all set up, and because I still work a 9:00 to 5:00, I’m stuck in meetings most of the day.

I’m wondering. If an answering service from the start isn’t ideal, I can barely answer when my wife calls me due to my schedule. I need to solve this and find success in this business. If I can’t get the call, I at least need a voicemail to get it, which is with Grasshopper, and that’s not currently happening. I would love to learn how a $1 million-plus land business is doing this.” There’s a lot of hidden stuff in there. Do you want to go first?

I know how I would set it up, but it always changes. Honestly, Jill and I don’t talk about this too much. She makes the changes on that side of the business so we don’t talk about it.

Here’s the real answer, Wes. I don’t have my phone with me, so I can’t look up the name of the phone system we’re using. It’s not Vumber there. It’s OpenPhone. I want to say that. The first thing I want you to do, Wes, is to go into our Discord forum and search for the latest phone thing.

Let me give you the big picture. We have a $1 million-plus land business. I carry one phone. I have Sim, OpenPhone, Vumber, Stream slash Pentera all feeding into my one device that is older than yours. I have the 14 Pro version. With success, I can manage them all. The first thing you need to do though is think about your land business. Let’s start with that.

Using Regional Phone Numbers To Improve Mailer Response Rates

Search within Discord. It’s OpenPhone. That’s what I want you to think about. That’s been our latest, greatest as a group and my team. It is the best way to get multiple phone numbers for your land business. It sounds like we’re eating our words, and maybe we are, but getting more regional phone numbers because it’s going to make a difference when these folks get your mailers.

I had one. It was the sweetest phone call. I was doing one-on-one coaching. We were going over this guy’s mailer. I looked at him and said, “I got to tell you this. You got to get rid of that 305 area code phone number.” He’s like, “Really?” I said, “Yeah. You cannot be Miami mailing the sweet little town. You might as well be LA, Brooklyn, or New York.”

That’s great advice.

I said, “I’m sorry. I have to tell you. You’re not going to get the same bang for your buck.”

That’s good. He didn’t waste money on the mailer. That’s what this is all about.

I had to message my team and say, “What are we using right now?” I’m pretty sure it’s OpenPhone. Check me in Discord to make sure. That’s number one. I said, “Do you know what you got to do? You have to get your address tied to it too. You don’t have to go run around and get physical addresses. There are all kinds of virtual ways”. It’s something like OnSIP or something like that. It’s in the Land Academy Discord forum that you have access to as a member. We have all these quiet discussions going on within our group. I want you to get that too.

Get a regional one, Wes. Let’s say you’re mailing somewhere in the middle of the country. Pick something great like Oklahoma, a rural part of Texas, or Arkansas. Pick somewhere in the middle that has a good vibe, not Miami and New York, that would be receptive to going, “Interesting. This person from Arkansas is sending me a letter to buy my Arkansas land, Oklahoma land, or rural Texas land. This all makes sense. I’m going to call this person. They’re Midwest like me.” That’s what you want to do.

It’s easy when you get this phone number to point it wherever you want. I’m not going to get into the details of that, but you can easily have it go to PATLive during the day and your phone at night. This is all possible. The group will help you in Land Academy. It is like an accountability group in Land Academy. We help each other with this stuff. That’s what I want you to do.

As far as the SIM phone number, I’m a fan of that. You don’t need a separate thing. You don’t need a phone number to go to Grasshopper to go to that. When you have this phone number, it’s going to come into your phone or it’s going to go to PATLive. That’s all you need. I’m going to stop right there. When you port the phone number to PATLive, they’re answering it from 9:00 to 5:00.

You could probably have this automated too. Every day, it automatically goes to PATLive at that time, and then after 5:00, it goes to you. When it goes to PATLive, you can be rest assured knowing that someone’s going to answer the phone. They’re going to have your script. They’re going to get these calls and all of the data is going to get to you. After 5:00, it’s coming to you. How great is this?

Make sure your voicemail is a professional voicemail. It doesn’t matter if it’s your best friend, your wife calling, or someone to buy your land that’s calling. It needs to be that one voicemail. It’s easy to manage. To unpack the wife calling, maybe that’s what you have a sim number for. If you want to be alerted that it’s your wife, you don’t even need to do that. You see what’s coming in and you know what the calls are. That’s it.

I’m going to leave that alone.

It doesn’t need to be more detailed than that. It doesn’t need to go from here to here and six different voicemails that you have to extract.

Here’s the deal. Please, whoever you are, wherever you are in your real estate business, take a look at your operation with a fine tooth comb and ask yourself every tiny little touch. When you send a mailer out wherever you touch that person that you want to see if they want to sell their property, and I don’t care what kind of property it is, is it a positive, easy experience for them to make it easy to sell their land to you? They’re your customer.

Take a look at your operation with a fine-tooth comb and ask yourself—are you making it easy for sellers to say yes? Share on X

If you’re doing an Oklahoma mailer and you’ve got an Oklahoma mailbox and an Oklahoma address, you’re meeting them from where they’re coming when you answer the phone, speaking at the speed at which they speak unlike New York speed, and talking about things that go on in Oklahoma as best you can, you’re going to have a lot of success, especially if you answer the phone on the first call and say, “I’m the owner. I’m not a real estate agent. We do deals here.”

It’s perfect. That ties into what I said. If you follow the steps I laid out, Wes, you’re always going to have a live person answering the phone. It’s you on the evenings and weekends and it’s PATLive during the day. Anytime you want to take a weekend off, turn on PATLive.

Jill and I own property all over the country. We get liars all the time. For fun, she calls some of them back. 95% or 98% never return her call.

Of who?

The people.

I see what you’re saying.

We get a letter because we own a piece of property. Jill calls and says, “Give me a call. I’d like to talk about it,” and it goes straight to voicemail.

I get other investors sending me mail. I call them back and I don’t get a live body. That’s very true.

The last one that called and she returned the call, we sold it to them. It was probably 1 out of 500. I’ll leave it at that. Our topic is how the Land Academy CRM can stream live your deals. Take it away.

How The Land Academy CRM Streamlines Deal Management

In Land Academy, based on popular requests, we have fine-tuned and shared our personal CRM template, and it’s great. I have to tell you. Everybody loves it. It does help you stay organized. Back in the day, and we used to talk about this too, you could get started by making an Excel file and building it out however it makes sense to you. That gets clunky, busy, and scary because whenever you share things within an Excel file, you always run the risk when you have other people in there. You’re like, “Are they going to delete things I need? Are they going to mess me up? I color-coded all this stuff and they moved it all around.” That’s part of it too. It’s hard to stay organized.

I put the pertinent ones at the top. The middle were the ones I’m thinking about. Below this line was where I said, “Bye. We’re not buying them,” kind of thing. I found myself every day opening up the same Excel file, going through every single thing, and going, “What do I need to do today?” It ate up so much of my time. Having an organized CRM, especially when ready to go and designed for you and tested and used for twenty-plus years by us personally, is huge.

If you’re a Land Academy member and you’re like, “What are you talking about?” Pull over the car. Where is this? Go to your Land Academy dashboard, go under tools, and scroll down. You’ll see the CRM thing there. There’s a video showing you where to go, how to set it up, how to download it, and how to get started and fill in properties. It’s got everything you need.

First of all, it’s all spelled out so you don’t forget what you need to put in there, like the property information, the seller information, and your due diligence information. There’s a column for every one of the eight As to make sure you don’t miss one. You’re like, “I forgot to check on the Alive. I need to make sure I have everything I need and everybody is Alive or I know what to do here.” All the As are in there.

Also, it takes it a step further when you’re selling it. There are things in there for escrow agents. You have all your information pushing them through escrow and selling the property. There are categories too. That’s what my biggest thing and time saver is. When the property comes in, you’re going to put it into a bucket. It’s beautiful because you can turn on notifications for you, people on your team, and maybe even virtual VAs.

When you put something in and assign it a category like, “This is a pre-acquisition. It needs some due diligence filled in by a VA,” you can have it already set up so it automatically does this for you. It alerts them that they need to fill in the taxes, put in whatever photographs you want ahead of time, and maybe put in the vesting deed for you. They research and pop that in there. There are things that VAs can do for you. It could be all automated.

When I talk about the security part of it, which is so great, you can create different views and permissions that only certain people can see and access certain things and never break or screw up your whole CRM. This is your book of business. In the old school days, it was your accounting ledger. Imagine you handed some of your accounting ledger and you don’t have a copy. You get it back and it’s a mess or they lose it. You don’t have to worry about that.

Your CRM is your book of business—keep it organized, automated, and secure so you can focus on closing deals, not chasing information. Share on X

That’s a little bit about it. It’s something new that we came out with in 2024 to help you. It’s a version of what we use in a version of what my team uses. The reason we share this too is because I’m setting you up if you’re going to be in Career Path. We’re going to talk about it and how we organize things. If you’re going to use LA Pro, then my team can jump right in and start working on your deals right away.

I designed the roots of our CRM, the one Jill is talking about, a lot of years ago out of frustration with the amount of redundant communication that was happening. I designed it based on a contractor’s project management tool where a plumber would go in and say, “We’re done with this. Here’s the status. We need this. I need two more days to do this.” The electrician says, “I can’t get my stuff done. Thanks for letting me know.” No one talks to each other. It’s all in that project manager. Talk about scalability. Whether you do 5 deals a year or 5,000 deals a year, the CRM is set up to manage that. 

I love it. 

Join us in the next episode where Jill and I discuss what makes a great county for land mailers and what does not. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.