What are you going to do to guarantee your success?

This was the question I was being asked over the phone by a mentor of mine sometime in the late summer of 2016. I didn’t have an answer. I wasn’t even sure I understood the question. We were towards the tail-end of a 50,000-piece mailing campaign that had so far yielded nothing and I was wondering why direct mail marketing was failing to hold up its end of the bargain. We were doing everything we were supposed to be doing…consistently mailing to a big equity list, processing phone calls, following up on our leads, yet direct mail marketing wasn’t bringing us deals. I went into that phone call wanting some explanations but now the script was being flipped.

That question reinforced to me that my success or my failure depends on me alone. Direct mail marketing doesn’t guarantee anything. In fact, direct mail marketing provides one thing only – opportunity. And opportunity is what every budding real estate investor desperately needs. Success can’t be bought, but opportunity can, and direct mail marketing does an excellent job at delivering it.

The practical truth is that the more opportunity we buy, the more success we’ll likely have but there are absolutely no guarantees. The other practical truth is that some mail campaigns don’t produce as much opportunity as others. That’s when we have to employ the old-fashioned pivot move and that’s really what I was being asked about that day by my mentor.

So, what did we do to guarantee success? We hired a full-time virtual assistant out of Jamaica who commenced Monday morning to light up the phones of every lead we had ever received, and for good measure – every Realtor in town. Within 3 months we had 5 deals, but more importantly, we had learned the valuable lesson of the necessity to force success.