Hi Reader,

I asked for a number last week, and so many of you sent one back.

Tonya sent fifty-eight.

Fifty-eight newsletters, not one reply. On the fifty-ninth, a check for five thousand dollars.

Here's the part I didn't see coming. Tonya isn't selling houses. She's raising money.

I had already picked her industry as this week's steal, and then it turned up in my inbox on its own.

University development offices have a word for the long stretch between meeting someone and ever receiving anything from them. They call it cultivation. They staff it, budget it, and put it on a calendar that runs for years.

Nobody in that office is panicking in year two. Year two is part of the plan.

Then there are your numbers.

Chris said seven years. Monthly market updates the whole time, and when the call finally came, it was from the prospect’s relative. Jill said 1,825 days, and I love that she counted. Chantal said three years. Jon said two. Kathleen said twelve months. Soosh said four hundred days, and that one turned into a listing appointment.

The middle of that pile sits right around three years.

Now go look at what your CRM does to somebody at ninety days.

The Only Three Exits

A contact has actually left your database if, and only if:

1. They told you to stop. An unsubscribe is a real answer. Take it.
2. The email stopped arriving. A hard bounce. Not a quiet inbox. Those are different problems.
3. They already bought or sold with somebody else. This one you can look up. So look it up.

That's the list. There is no fourth door.

If none of the three is true, they haven't gone anywhere. They're quiet. And quiet isn’t bad; it’s just a long game.

Open your database and find the one contact you were most ready to delete.

Run the three on them.

My guess is they survive all three, and you were ninety days from deleting someone who is quietly appreciating the market updates on their home and communities.

And if a whole chunk of your database is sitting on one of the three, delete those today. Unsubscribes and people who already bought with someone else are costing you money on every platform that bills you by contact. Bounces cost you something worse. Every send to a dead address tells Gmail a little more that you don’t know who your people are, so your future emails could go right into the spam folder.

One word this week, since last week's number worked.

What does your CRM call the people it has given up on? Mine says "Cold," and I've started to think the word itself is doing damage.

Reply with yours. Just the word.

Alice

The Heist · Marketing playbooks for real estate agents, stolen from every industry except this one.

​
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​