Lead Generation Tips With Scott Carson of We Close Notes!

Posted on July 1, 2020 by

Lead Generation Tips With Scott Carson of We Close Notes!

Are you having a problem generating your leads? We got you! Today we have “The Note Guy”, Scott Carson giving us tips on how to generate leads. We will also tackle how to market locally. Nothing will be done by not doing anything, start now! Hear it from the best!

P.S If you like this interview, check out my “F.I.R.E.D Up” playlist with more interviews! Just visit —> http://bit.ly/3bmkm0o!

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Lead Generation Tips With Scott Carson of We Close Notes!

Krista Mashore:

Hey everyone, are you just as ready to be as fired up as I am? You're here Krista Mashore on the Fired Up show, and I'm so excited. I've got Scott Carson here, he is known across the country as the Note Guy, and believe it or not, he actually has more energy than me. How are you doing Scott? Thanks for being on.

Scott Carson:

I am doing wonderful. So honored to be on here. Love what you're doing, love your energy. You just got a great show, Krista.

Krista Mashore:

Aw, thank you, I appreciate it. Well, so do you. You're just all over the place. He was just giving me some tips on how to get on other peoples' podcasts and his goal this year was to be on 100, and you were on 110 you said?

Scott Carson:

110 in 2019, and we've got a goal for 120 in 2020.

Krista Mashore:

This is his first one. So Scott, tell us a little bit about you. How can you help our wonderful listeners?

Scott Carson:

I've been an entrepreneur since 2002, but an active real estate investor since 2004. Over the last decade plus I've made my money from marketing and doing stuff for myself, not having a W2 and being reliant on me to go out and close deals and make money. The last 10 years, obviously it was a bit of an upheaval back in 2008, 2009, 2010 and I got out of the mortgage industry where I owned a mortgage company here in Austin, Texas. It was doing loans for 30 States across the country to real estate investors, and left that side of the business and jumped in on the side of buying distressed debt.

I know that's a little bit different, who wants to invest in a non-paying mortgage, but over the last 10 years we bought over a half a billion dollars in distressed debt, saved a lot of homeowners, able to keep them in their house is what we prefer to do, had to foreclose on some of them as well, but we always try to rehab the [inaudible 00:01:45] aspect of that. The marketing for that kind of business is completely different than what most people are used to, especially in the real estate side of things with most people used to going out and putting out flyers or door knocking or bandit signs and things like that.

It's a different kind of model since we deal directly with the bank on finding these deals, reaching out directly to asset managers, things like that. It's a whole different level of marketing and using digital marketing. I'm a big fan of using LinkedIn, not only to grow my network, but also to find deals and also get guest hosts on other podcasts as well too.

Krista Mashore:

That's great. That kind of seems like it might be a little bit of a scary business, but you don't seem like it seems scary at all.

Scott Carson:

It's not scary. It's not. We do a lot of good out there, we help a lot of people out there. We're buying in a lot of different States at different times so we leverage local investors, local realtors, local experts in our vendor list to help us go out, take a look at the property, if we need to we can get them on the phone with a borrower. We've also got a servicing company that deals with a lot of the… When we've got “troubled children” we just put it off to our attorneys or servicers who deal with them.

Krista Mashore:

Yeah. Well, good for you. That's that's an awesome little business. Let's talk a little bit about marketing. Marketing is my thing, I'm called the Digital Marketing Queen, tell me some of what you're doing so that we can help. We have a lot of real estate agents, lenders, local professionals that are listening, and all of them are entrepreneurs, right? Give us some strategies that you use that you find helpful that might help our guests listening.

Scott Carson:

This is one of the best strategies that I love. Now, LinkedIn, I think LinkedIn is one of the best places, it's the hottest social media platform out there for entrepreneurs. I don't care what niche you're in, I think you got to spend time on LinkedIn. Just the fact it's growing, a lot of people are using it properly, there's some new tools that have come into play that allow you to prospect on there, a little bit of [inaudible 00:03:37]. Services like Octopus that allows for you to pull lists and then direct message a bunch of people automatically or Lead Fuse, which is a great service to pull different lists of professionals.

What I like to do is, I think you've got to have a complete LinkedIn profile. That's the first thing. Have a good photo, have a good back image behind you, banner image, but the profile page, that 2000 characters you've got to fill in your profile I think is one of the biggest things that's under utilized out there. Everybody's like, “Oh, I'm a realtor. I'm a mortgage broker. I'm an investor.” Yeah, that's great, but that's not who you really are. Use that space to fill in a little bit about what makes you interesting. What's your passion, your mission statements. I think having that, and you can obviously fill it full of keywords that people can help search and find you, is a great place to use to attract clients for you.

I'm a big proponent of using the LinkedIn search aspect of things, not only locally, but also across the country. We talked about wanting to get booked on more podcasts. I think podcasts are a great way if you want to expand your speaking, whether you're speaking to somebody who has 10 downloads or 1000s of downloads, it's like you're publicly speaking every time you get on a podcast. It's a lot cheaper versus jumping on a plane and flying out, and taking days to go to one spot to speak for an hour, now you can do a lot of these on a weekly basis. I try to hit two to three podcasts a week as a guest to help me expand my audience.

What I do, I'll jump on LinkedIn type in podcast hosts, that'll pull up like 370,000 people that have podcast host in their profile, and then I just niche it down from there. Realtor, mortgage broker, real estate Austin or real estate San Francisco, as a way to help me niche it down. If I type in real estate that niches it down from 370,000 to 17,000, and if I niche it down to a second degree connection that drops it down more, and now I've got really great list of people to reach out to.

I know sending a message you're limited, so what I did, I took it one step further. Instead of just having the 300 characters you've got in there, whatever you can to type a message, I actually recorded a short two minute video of me just talking about myself and why I would be a great guest so that I can just say, “Hey, I think I'd be a great guest for your show. I'd love to talk with you. Maybe do an episode swap or something. Check out this short little video about what I'm an expert, and I speak on.” My energy comes across in the video, they see me versus a link, and it's done well for me. I know I booked at least 76 spots last year alone from just using that strategy.

Krista Mashore:

Do you say their name personally, or is it just the same video to everybody?

Scott Carson:

It's the same video for the most part to everybody, but I always make that email customized to their first name. “Hey, I see you're host of this show.” I'll take a look if I can, if I've got time, to go over and take a look at their most recent couple episodes to pick out a nugget or two, but it's hard to customize that video if you wanted to get it out. I know some people are doing them and that's great, I just like to fill it up for two minutes and then give it to a VA to run with for me if I need to.

Krista Mashore:

I'm just going to take some notes right now because we're not using LinkedIn as much as we should be. We are doing tons of YouTube, tons of Instagram, tens of Facebook, but it's on our list now to start doing LinkedIn. Can you go into a little bit more about those tools that you were talking about; Octopus, and search, and the Lead Fuse? I don't think on LinkedIn, you can't just mail blast everyone, right?

Scott Carson:

They won't let you do that. They'll let you do about connect with about 100. I have 17,000 connections right now, the most it will let me do roughly is about 100 a day of invites a day. At the most you're capped out at 2,500 pending invites at any given moment. For anybody that doesn't know that, 2,500 is the cap, but what I use is Octopus.io. It is a great service, it's relatively cheap too, inexpensive, less than $100 a month if I remember, I think it's even lesser than that, but it allows for you to go in and search.

You pull up your search profile on LinkedIn, it's a Google Chrome plugin, and I can go and search and pull up 6,000 podcasters in California, and then I link my CRM through Octopus CRM, and it'll actually pull all those profiles and allows me to customize it with their first name, last name, business, or whatever, so I can customize the invite that it gets sent to them.

Then I just put the link in there and I can say, “Okay, do 100 invites today,” and it will do 100 in the background while I'm working on something else. Later in the afternoon I'll jump on and maybe try to do 50 more, but usually the system shuts me down after about 100, 150 a day, so I'll just wait and just do it automatically. What's great about what it does is it varies the time in reaching the reach out, so it looks like it's a person doing it versus a bot.

Krista Mashore:

Nice, that's great. Okay, so octopus.io. And then, what's Lead Fuse? Explain what Lead Fuse is, and maybe give some examples on how our listeners could use it.

Scott Carson:

Lead Fuse is another LinkedIn specific tool that scrubs LinkedIn for profiles. It will allow for you to search for specific profiles. I use this when I'm searching for specific niches on LinkedIn. With me buying notes, we target special asset managers or secondary marketing professionals in banks. We'll go in and type in special assets and location the United States, and I can ask it to find profiles where the people are showing their email.

Now, LinkedIn made a big change two Thanksgivings ago where it hid everybody's email address. If you exported your database it would give first name, last name, email address beforehand, but now they've hidden it unless you actually manually go in there and do that now. It's harder to export your database and put it into a newsletter if you want, or spam a little bit that way. With Lead Fuse, it'll allow for you to pull still their information, their LinkedIn URL, like LinkedIn.com/1ScottCarson is mine, and you can export that list now, and then I can upload that list of special asset managers into Octopus, and it'll automatically just go out and start connecting with them automatically for me without having to do a lot of work on my end.

Krista Mashore:

When you're connecting, what kind of things should people be saying and doing?

Scott Carson:

What I do is a very similar thing with when I'm reaching out to asset managers, I say, “Hey Krista, just wanted to make sure you're the right person at ABC Bank that handles your special assets, your note sales. I'd love to talk with, see if you've got anything in your portfolio you want to get rid of,” and then I can include a link. A link to either my website, a link to my booking, my calendar booking thing, so I have them book 15 to 30 minute phone calls with me. It fills up my schedule with bank phone calls, or I could put another link to another short two minute video that talks about my business and what we do as a note investor. I keep those videos private so I know how many people are actually clicking on them from my email campaigns or my LinkedIn campaigns, so I know how many views they're getting and how many connections I'm getting.

Krista Mashore:

Have you heard of Sales Navigator with LinkedIn?

Scott Carson:

I have, I have. I've not messed around with it that much. I think you can do some of these similar things on there, I just came across Lead Fuse and Octopus faster, and I seem to like them a little bit better.

Krista Mashore:

Really? Okay, great. Lead Fuse and Octopus, I'm going to have my team look into that. I'm trying to think, I had some questions and they just lost me.

Scott Carson:

Here's the thing when you're thinking about it. Lead Fuse is $99 a month, it'll give you 500 leads. I think for $100 more a month, you can get another 1500 leads. If you don't use them all in a month, they bank them all, which is really nice because over December I didn't use it much because most people are holidays, so I let that go. Now I've got extra leads this month that I can tap into, and go from there. What's nice is if somebody-

Krista Mashore:

It's automated. Because the Octopus, it's automated, you just upload the list and Octopus will send it out automatically.

Scott Carson:

Exactly, exactly. I pull the leads from Lead Fuse if I want to be really narrow, and then I upload that list to Octopus, and Octopus does all the work for me. It's doing it right now actually for me.

Krista Mashore:

All right. Yeah, it's kind of working while you sleep. The message is basically just reaching out to people to try to get them to want to connect with you on LinkedIn?

Scott Carson:

Yeah. You do it for, “Hey, I want to be on your podcast,” or “Hey, I want to see people for buying notes,” or “Hey, I'm a mortgage broker in your State, love to talk with you if you know anybody who's looking at refinances here,” or “Hey, you're in Austin, I'm a realtor that's done 3.5 million in sales this last year. I'd love to talk with you if you're looking to buy or sell.” Simple things that you're here to target. That's the beautiful thing I love about LinkedIn is you can target your specific niches if you know what to look for, and you don't have to have an expensive account. A lot of this stuff will work if you've got a free account with LinkedIn, as long as it's complete.

Krista Mashore:

Wow, that's good to know. Is there anything you can do on LinkedIn… Because I think you can buy credits where you're allowed to personally email people, but you seem like you're doing it anyways just through Octopus?

Scott Carson:

Yeah. If you're a more than a secondary connection away, yes, it wants you to have an InMail or some people will require you to have an advanced account. They won't talk to you [inaudible 00:13:11] with a free account. That's fine, it won't target those people. If I want to buy credits I can, and then I'll do those individually to people that are on my list that I can't connect with.

Krista Mashore:

Great, okay. Okay, awesome. More tips? I'm learning a lot from you, which is great because like I said, I don't use LinkedIn that much and which is kind of surprising because we utilize pretty much everything else. I'm learning a lot, which is wonderful. I really appreciate this.

Scott Carson:

Hey, no problem. It's the first thing I do basically when I come into the office, it's the first thing I do in the day so that our marketing goes out. What leads are we pulling today? What are we focused on in the next couple of weeks? Don't get me wrong, not everybody is on LinkedIn every day. I had two people opt in today off of something I sent last month in December, that's okay. They opt in, we'll talk to them. I just try to make it marketing in the first hour of every day that I'm in the office, whether it's doing this stuff or being on a podcast episode where I'm speaking to somebody else's thing or having somebody on my show.

I think that's the biggest thing, no matter what niche we're in, we're all in the media business these days. You talked about Facebook and YouTube, we do a lot of videos, a lot of YouTube videos, but that's the biggest thing I think people need to keep in mind in 2020 is we're all in the media space, and everybody's looking for eyeballs and earballs, as I like to say. The more you can be out there, the more you can leverage different platforms, the better off you're going to be.

Krista Mashore:

Yeah. It's so funny, we've already had 40,000 downloads on our podcast and we just launched in August. It's not too bad, right?

Scott Carson:

Congratulations, that's phenomenal. That's really, really good. You're averaging almost 10,000 downloads a month, that's a great starting point for you. I think that's where a lot of people struggle too is they try to figure out how to compare themselves when you're launching a podcast, but that's phenomenal. You're doing something really good there. I think the fact that you're leveraging multiple platforms is part of it. I see a lot of people starting a podcast and they just put it on iTunes and like, “Oh, if I record it they will come.” That's not the case. You've got to leverage it.

Krista Mashore:

You have to market it. You have to absolutely market it. That's the thing, I don't know what's good or bad on it.

Scott Carson:

Well, that's the thing. If you look at how many episodes, if you can get over 1000 average downloads per episode, you're in good company. I think that you're in the top 30%. I think if you've got more than 1000 downloads per episode, I think that's even in the top 30% of podcasts out there. Now, if you hit 300 episodes, then you're in the 1/10th or 1% of podcasters who stuck around for a while.

Krista Mashore:

Really? Man, that's crazy that people quit. Everything's about time, and if you're listening to this, well, you are listening to this, just understand it's about time. Everything just takes time. What so many people do is they stop, and momentum continues to happen over time. I can't tell you, even so many of my students will say, “I've been working, but I don't see the results yet.” And then all of a sudden, two months later they're saying, “Oh my God, I had to hire an assistant. I had to hire a buyer's agent. I had to hire help because I'm so slammed,” because they actually stuck around and gave it the time it takes.

Things take time. In fact, things take more time now than ever because there are so many people in the digital space now. People have picked up on the fact about Facebook, and marketing, and being online, and that's how come there's so many podcasts. You were just saying real estate podcasts, how many are there? It was some crazy amount.

Scott Carson:

It was like 17,000 real estate podcasts that were on LinkedIn, and if you think looking at the numbers, we just exceeded 800,000 podcasts total out there, but 85% of them haven't recorded an episode in six months. I had a good friend of mine who was an amazing broker here in town teach me marketing years ago, talk about 80% of sales are made after the fifth contact. And that's what you have to realize is people who are hearing for the first time, they're not going to reach out. They want to see you in other places if you can come across them, not everybody's a podcast listener. In my audience, my avatar is a little bit of an older crowd, 45 to 65 is my ideal student or investor, and they're not always listening to podcasts. I have to go out and put it on YouTube or put it on Facebook or even God forbid send an email out to them with the link so they'll listen to it.

Krista Mashore:

What else do you do? You actually teach people how to do what you do with the notes?

Scott Carson:

Yes. I've been teaching note investing since 2010. I was Educator of the Year in our niche back in 2014, and a runner up two years ago. We do a lot of stuff online these days. A lot of people like going to hotels and conferences, that's great. I used to travel non-stop across the country, not only looking at assets, but also talking with bankers and then teaching, and just got so tired. I was like, look, we do a lot of webinars. We use Zoom all the time for this, let's just start putting our classes online and offering them via Zoom. We do three to four online workshops a year.

We'll bring in our vendors and students we'll have a couple of hundred people on, and spend three to four days teaching them the ins and outs of the note investing place. We call it How to Find, Fund and Flip Notes, and it's a great [inaudible 00:18:31]. We record it, give it to them so they can watch the replays, and it allows for us to get people from all across not only just domestically, but the world joining in because they don't have to jump on a plane. People that maybe couldn't leave their house or leave the area for a weekend can join us and learn because they're staying at home, and they're saving that flight cost or that hotel cost on buying their first deal.

Krista Mashore:

What do you typically charge for them to do that? It's called Fund, Flip and Find. I like it.

Scott Carson:

Yeah. A three day workshop where it's me teaching the thing, we'll do from 599. We have training programs up to $1000 with different videos, and other specific niche trainings and bonuses as well too.

Krista Mashore:

That's awesome. You have a several hundred people that sign up for it, you do a couple of times a year?

Scott Carson:

We do it four times a year, we'll get 100 to 200. Our peak class was 550 that we've had on. We do one to two notes basic conventions virtually for three and a half, four days, but we'll have 40 speakers on and we've had 15 to 1600 people on those before too, and leveraging using two Zoom rooms for two different speaking sessions going at the same time.

Krista Mashore:

That's awesome. Man, good for you. I like it. I like it, Scott.

Scott Carson:

Thanks.

Krista Mashore:

Okay. Locally, so having people really locally start to market and dominate, what are some tips and tricks you can give us on that?

Scott Carson:

Here's a big thing I would do locally; every city or every major metroplex has an SBA, a Small Business Administration, go out there and connect with them. They all know a lot of people in the area. That's a great place to go, especially if you're in some sort of business entrepreneurship aspect of things, they'll direct you to people, they give awards out for entrepreneurship every year. There's nothing like saying, “Hey, I was the Businessman of the Year award,” for just connecting with other people. I love using little old fashioned BNI, Business Networkers International. What's great is I'm not a member of a group because I travel so much, but I leverage different BNI groups across Austin and in other cities that I go to when I'm flying in, but I'll go and network and meet 30, 40, 70 people in a couple hours. Most of the BNI clubs will give you the roster right there, so it's a great way to add people in my database that I can reach out to and just follow up for even marketing or investing opportunities or different things we have going on.

Krista Mashore:

That's great. It's a great idea too, to make your own BNI. If there's one that's full, you can start your own. People are looking to get them in, and they only allow one or two people typically in each space. For example, if you're a real estate agent or a lender or an insurance agent, they only have one of each or two of each at the most. So, you can always start your own too and that'd be a great way for you to help people in your area.

Scott Carson:

The thing is you can go to bni.com and see how many groups, and attend to any of the groups any time. You don't have to be a member to join. I've attended 28 out of 40 groups in the later part of November and added 765 people in my database, and it's been great. Some were investing with us, some were looking to learn more about it, other people were just, “Hey, it's great to know you.” I ran into a guy the other day at the grocery store and I'd met him at a BNI group. We got to visiting and talking, and now we're like, “Hey, let's go meet for coffee and just chill out.” So, why not?

Krista Mashore:

Yeah. Well, you seem like you have such a good personality, you're so easy to talk to anybody. I love your energy.

Scott Carson:

I've been known to talk to a wall every once in a while.

Krista Mashore:

Scott's great. You got to see him, he's great. Okay. Scott Carson, he says if you want to learn about notes, you can text “notes” to the number 72000. He'll give you some information about notes and about his program. The name of his podcast is The Note Closers Show. The Note Closers Show if want to hear more from Scott. His energy is just awesome, just even getting a piece of his energy every morning is going to help you have a better day. More, more, Scott. Give me more.

Scott Carson:

Our podcast is focused on the note industry, but we also do a lot with mindset, entrepreneurship, business. We had a great guy on yesterday morning, Patrick Precourt, who's been in the real estate industry for years, first cut his teeth in short sales, and then he was also the individual that helped with Fortune Builders build their big training stuff up. He's just a great guy there, but I'm a big fan of working with entrepreneurs.

I think there's so many things that we as entrepreneurs don't know, and just need somebody to reach out to, and talk to, and bounce ideas off of, and so that's kind of the idea of the Note Closers Show. We're such a little niche kind of thing in the real estate field of all the different types of podcasts or real estate focused out there, we created this show three plus years ago to provide people with an avenue for learning and specific niche things that happen in our industry, but it's just also a great way to work with the entrepreneurship mindset too.

Krista Mashore:

Absolutely, absolutely. I'm all about constantly learning and just trying to better ourselves, and especially as entrepreneurs keeping your mindset right is important. I always tell my students that, “Hey, I can give you the blueprint for success, but if your mind isn't right, it's not going to matter. You've got to work on that first and work on it always. It's a never ending thing.” Especially with the kind of world that we live in, we see a lot of negativity out there, it's so fast paced, there's more depression and anxiety than we've ever had in history, even for young people, the statistics on young people.

If you've got kids out there really, really try to help with them and get them learning early on and infusing their brain with positivity. My daughter, she actually drives every day for an hour and a half to and from beauty college, and I have her listening to audibles and I'm like, “Promise me, you'll do it at least half the time each day.” At the end of the year she'll have listened to so many books just by doing that each day, so don't let your kids waste their time. Talk to them about infusing their brain when they have free time.

Scott Carson:

Yeah. This four to six inches between our ears is the biggest tool we have, but it also can be the biggest hurdle we have if we don't have that set up. I know so many people have many goals that they want to reach in 2020 in the new year. If you want to make a hundred grand, you've got to get your mind into that a hundred grand mindset. If you've got a $20,000 mindset, you're not going to reach a hundred grand.

If you want to make a million bucks and you've only got a $100,000 mindset, you've got to grow into that million dollar mindset. Charlie “Tremendous” Jones is a motivator from years ago, he's passed on, used to say, “We'll be the same person five years from now except for the books that we read, and the people that we meet.” So hopefully you're meeting some new people or reading some new stuff to program your brain right.

Krista Mashore:

Yeah. I love listening to stuff when I'm at the gym. I always have a book in my ear or a podcast in my ear or something, and they even say that when you work out and you're listening to things, it sticks more. Everyone that's listening right now, they're those kind of people. They like to learn, they like to educate themselves, they want to better themselves because they're on this podcast right now. Okay, I always end every podcast with the same question and no one ever knows what it is. And that question is if you had one-

Scott Carson:

Hang on second, drum roll.

Krista Mashore:

Yeah, you ready?

Scott Carson:

Yes.

Krista Mashore:

I love it. If you could give one tip, just one tip, to help local entrepreneurs and professionals, lenders, and real estate agents, what would that be to increase their business?

Scott Carson:

Oh my goodness, thanks. Start now. Get off your butt, get out and talk to people. That's the biggest thing. It's all about building relationships. Don't be afraid. Maybe you're not comfortable with social media, so get out and network, go to meet up groups, go to real estate investing clubs. January and February are the best times of the year where these clubs and networking events have the biggest growth rate and attendance ratio, because people want to do something. Get out, get out from behind your home, put the phone down and go talk to somebody. If you're going to a networking, don't be sitting there staring. Get up. We've all got huevos, love your huevos, and get up and go talk to somebody. That's what you got to do. Don't be a wallflower everywhere.

Krista Mashore:

We don't all have huevos. Women don't.

Scott Carson:

Actually, you do. Ladies' are just a little higher up, that's all.

Krista Mashore:

Okay. Oh gosh. Oh gosh, I love you. Okay. Well Scott, thank you so much. I so appreciate your time. You have just been wonderful to have on. The Note Closers Show, go watch Scott Carson on that. He's just doing things, doing great things. And remember everyone, it's great to learn, but if you don't implement, nothing's going to happen. We want to see you-

For more of my interviews just visit https://kristamashore.com/category/interviews/

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