This is what actually happened inside our own wholesaling operation, in the order it happened, including the parts that make us look bad.
A five minute read, or scroll to 04 if you only want the numbers.
We buy inbound seller leads. Meta ads, pay per lead, you name it. However they reach us, we paid for every one of them. A seller finds us, fills in the form, and the lead lands in the CRM.
Then one of our VAs calls and runs the qualification call.
That is the whole job. It is not complicated, and all of them were good at it.
Multiple people, multiple phones, US business hours. We thought that was fine.
Then we turned the ad spend up.
Here is everything that started breaking.
Every VA is on a call. A new lead lands. Nothing happens.
It waits five minutes. Then ten. Some afternoons, more than an hour.
By the time we call, he does not pick up. Or he picks up and tells us he has already spoken to somebody else.
Speed to lead is not a nice extra in this business. It is the whole business. Whoever calls first usually gets the deal, and we were hardly ever first.
More ad spend means more leads. That is supposed to be good news.
But more leads with the same phones just means a longer line. On our biggest days, the leads at the back got the worst treatment.
We were paying more for leads and looking after them less.
Sellers fill in forms after work. Evenings, late nights, Sunday mornings.
To cover that with people you need three shifts a day, seven days a week. At our size, that was never going to happen.
So those leads waited until the morning. And a seller who fills in our form at 9pm fills in two other forms at 9pm. By the time we called, somebody else already had.
This is the big one.
About 60% of our leads do not pick up the first time. They need several attempts before anybody says hello.
So most of a VA's day was not a conversation. It was dial tones. Voicemail greetings. Dead numbers. Wrong numbers. Somebody saying now is not a good time.
We were paying people by the month to listen to phones ring.
Lunch. A break. Notes to write up. The CRM to update. A sick day. A holiday.
Every one of those is fair. Leads keep arriving through all of them.
Our VAs were good at the job. Like most VAs, they were not from the US, and a seller can hear that in the first three seconds.
Some sellers simply do not want to talk to somebody with an accent about their house. They are polite, they get off the phone, and you never find out what that deal was worth.
The fix is hiring US-based callers instead, at around $3,000 a month each. At the volume we needed, that math did not work.
Hiring one more caller is not a week's work. It is a month of training, scripts, shadowing and correcting before they are any good with a live seller.
Then some of them leave, and you start again.
Our lead volume was capped by how fast we could hire, not by how fast we could market.
Six of those we could feel. Number four we could actually count.
So we counted it.
We pulled a month of call logs and worked out one thing. How much of a paid shift is an actual conversation with a seller.
It was about half.
The other half is phones ringing out. Voicemail. Dead numbers. Wrong numbers. Somebody saying now is not a good time before you finish the first sentence. Then notes, CRM, a break.
That is not slacking. That is what dialing is. Most dials never reach a human at all.
Which means you cannot hire your way out of it. Two more VAs is two more people spending half their day listening to a ringtone.
We were paying for a full day and buying half of one.
One shift, drawn to scale
4h 00m
Talking to a seller
1h 40m
Rings out, no answer
50m
Voicemail
35m
Dead numbers
55m
Notes, CRM and breaks
We are not paying for calls. We are paying for the gaps between them.
Quick interruption.
If you are reading this and recognising your own operation, there is a short form at the bottom of this page. Two minutes, and we will tell you straight if your lead volume means Sloan is not worth it. Now, back to the story.
We looked at buying something first. Everything we found was either software we would have to configure ourselves, or a per minute rate that charged us more for doing the thing we wanted to do more of.
So we built our own. One job. Take a brand new lead, call it immediately, ask our five questions, send the transcript and the answers to the team.
Then we pointed it at our own leads, and it went wrong twice in the first week.
Day three. It called a seller at 6:41am, because we had not set quiet hours. He told us exactly what he thought about that. He was right. Nothing rings before 8am now, and anything that lands overnight gets a text straight away instead.
Day six. A woman started telling us about her mother's house and why it had to be sold. Sloan asked her what she wanted for it. Technically the next question on the list. Completely the wrong moment. That call is the reason we now hand anything emotional to a person the moment we spot it.
We ran it on our own leads for 0 weeks and rewrote the questions 0 times before we let it near a lead we had paid for.
This is what it sounds like now
A real inbound seller call — press play
Same lead sources. Same ad spend. Same five questions. Same two VAs and the same acquisitions team behind them.
The only thing we changed was who made the first call.
The row that still gets me is the first one. Thirty six hours became seven seconds. Not because Sloan is clever. Because it is never busy.
Figures cover date range and 000 inbound seller leads. Time to first call is measured from the lead reaching our CRM to the first ring. These are our own numbers from our own operation, and your lead mix will not look exactly like ours.
Sloan calls at 4 a.m., calls the lead that came in during lunch, and makes 8.1 attempts before giving up. Your VAs make 2.4. That gap has a dollar value. Plug your numbers in.
Close rate fixed at 12% of conversations. Sloan uplift: 1.65× contact rate, based on 8.1 vs 2.4 attempts per lead and 24-hour vs 9-hour coverage. Your results will differ.
Both of them are still here.
They do not dial any more. Sloan makes the calls, screens the sellers, and hands over the ones worth a real conversation. Our VAs spend their day talking to people who already picked up and already answered the five questions.
That is the part I did not expect to matter as much as it does. Nobody enjoys four hours of ringtone. They both like the job more now, and we are not paying anybody to listen to a phone ring.
We did not replace our VAs. We deleted the half of the day they spent waiting for somebody to pick up.
Emotional calls need a person.
Probate, divorce, foreclosure. Sloan asks the next question. A good VA knows when to stop asking. See day six.
It cannot follow a hunch.
When a seller drops a hint that he is more motivated than he said, a sharp caller chases it. Sloan carries on down the list. This is the one we feel most.
Some sellers can tell.
Most cannot. A few can, and a few of those hang up. That is a real loss. It is smaller than the voicemail they used to get on a Saturday.
Odd answers break the call.
Answer sideways and the call can end half finished. It gets flagged, a person picks it up. Nobody is standing by to rescue it live.
Transcripts make mistakes.
Addresses and figures get checked by a human before they go anywhere near an offer.
When it breaks, it breaks everywhere.
One VA having a bad day costs you one seat. One wrong setting costs you every lead until somebody notices. We check the dashboard every morning.
Sloan does not negotiate, make offers, book appointments or close. That is still our people, and if your team is not ready to take the handoff, calling faster will not save you.
Would we go back? No.
Not because the technology is impressive. Because no lead we pay for waits any more. Not the Saturday night one. Not the fifth one in a spike. Not the one that needed a seventh attempt.
Answer a few questions about your lead volume and who calls them today. You get a straight yes or no from us, including a no if your volume means this will not pay for itself.
See if you qualify60 seconds, no card, one reply from a person
Answer a few quick questions about your lead volume and who calls them today. You will get a straight yes or no from us — including a no, if your volume means this will not pay for itself.