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At first glance, Scott Morse seems like a real estate expert with decades of experience.
Instead, he’s a sales guy – and he has used his sales background to build the wholesale industry’s only enterprise-level call center for generating seller leads, Lamassu Leads.
With just three years of direct REI experience, Scott has truly made a name for himself in the wholesaling vertical, and he credits his nearly two decades of experience in sales to that success.
We sat down with Scott to understand his business better and to pick his brain on where he thinks new investors go wrong (and where they can go right instead). We also dug more into his thoughts Motivated Leads and the caliber of clients we work with.
Starting in sales: Where Scott developed his business acumen
At 20 years old, Scott landed his first job in high-ticket sales at a timeshare resort and has been an aggressive sales professional for over two decades now, and has since pivoted into more sales coaching and training.
“I started at a timeshare resort, and that's the worst product in the world,” says Scott. “But timeshares – if you know anything about them – people still pay somewhere between $15,000 to $40,000 daily for something they don't want, really, or need, and they’ll still happily buy it. Understanding human psychology and people’s desire to buy led me into other industries of high-ticket sales.”
The shift to wholesaling & lead sourcing
As mentioned above, Scott’s only been in the real estate space for about three years, pivoting from another industry where he was wildly successful selling leads to attorneys. “Ultimately, after we grew that company to be a monster company, regulatory headwinds (as I like to put it) faced us when working as non-attorneys in an attorney space. I needed to exit out of that industry, and I heard about wholesaling. I thought ‘That sounds super simple and super easy.’ It felt really dominatable,” Scott says.
Immediately, he noticed that his competition in wholesaling lacked the sales acumen they needed to succeed.
“It felt like it was a lot of small guys with no real good cohesiveness, particularly at scale. So I ended up starting my own wholesaling office that's mushroomed very large and started a marketing company to generate cold-calling leads.”
Lamassu Leads was born in Southwest Florida and still has a stronghold there today. “But I wanted to outsource my outbound lead generation, and so I hired a team in the Philippines, and that was really terrible. I hired a lead manager in Egypt, and somehow that was even worse than the Philippines. And then I found a guy in Colombia, just randomly, on some Facebook group,” says Scott.
He goes on to say that it was a great partnership, but not scalable with his ability to only pass 3-5 deals a month.
“My appetite was stronger than his growth potential,” Scott says, “so I turned to my partner and said ‘Dude, I'll move to Colombia. I'll just go down there for six months, I'll set up a monster office. I'll get it all set up.’ Needless to say, a six-month project turned into more than three years. I bought a house here, and my two daughters are here, and what drove me was the need to provide a quality lead source outbound that I couldn't find through somebody else. So I said, ‘I'll just do it my damn self.’”
Now, three years later, he runs multiple successful businesses, including his lead generating business for wholesalers. Within just these 36 months, Scott has learned a lot and shares those experiences with newer wholesalers.
“I think what attracted me to this industry from the product side was also probably my biggest failure point, because I saw wholesaling as trading paper. Ever since I've been a kid, I wanted to be those cool guys at the Mercantile Exchange or be in Chicago at some trading floor, and I'm going to get a piece of paper for this amount, and I'm going to sell a piece of paper for that amount,” Scott recalls.
“Wholesaling was so intoxicating because I was flipping paper with little to no involvement other than my marketing cost and office costs. I was assigning contracts. And so I fell in love with that strategy, but that same love turned into a drug and an abuse, because what it did is it restricted me from the opportunities of other exit strategies,” he says.
Scott recalls that, in getting caught up in that, he wasn’t set up to build a portfolio and leverage the knowledge to get into self-storage facilities or other opportunities for building more wealth that he has now in year three.
Understanding human design: Scott’s philosophies for sales and investing
A sales coach and guru himself, he was perplexed to see “leaders” in the REI space touting
“seven-minute or less offers,” Scott says, “and their whole presentation was based off it being seven minutes or less. They did nothing to help this industry. If anything, they drove it in completely the wrong direction. So one of our sales philosophies is ‘it takes time to take honest.’ And so our metrics [at Lamassu Leads] are talk time and volume of dials. That talk time is the most important KPI because it shows that we're having a conversation.”
Treating people like the humans they are is Scott’s biggest philosophy, not only in his early sales career but today in his wholesale investing practice and as the founder of Lamassu Leads. When you understand what’s making people tick and when you give them the space to be real and address their issues, you can feel good about the work you’re doing.
“We’re asking somebody to sell their house for $0.60 to $0.70 on the dollar. There has to be a justification for it if you want to do this at scale for a long term because, if you feel like you're ripping somebody off or you’re speeding through deals, you're just not going to be around for long. Take the time to make sure that you're a good fit for them, but also that they're a good fit for you irrespective of their desire to sell,” he says.
So how can wholesalers and other real estate investors learn how to build better relationships for the folks they transact with?
Scott’s lessons for stronger, more meaningful relationships:
- Understand your prospect: What are their needs? Concerns? Interests? How can you meet them where they are and alleviate their pressure points?
- Understand your marketplace: How big are the shares? What’s the value you bring to your marketplace? How do you create a product that solves problems and builds relationships at the same time?
“I think one of the things that people in the REI space struggle with is they don't really have a lot of sales acumen. They're used to buying off of paper, i.e. investors. They buy from the MLS for multiple years or they're buying strictly through a realtor. There's no real relationship. It's transactional,” Scott says.
Understanding the art of the sale and improving communication acumen as much as the business acumen of real estate, Scott says, is what has helped set him apart in the wholesaling space.
Scott’s business with Motivated Leads
Though a budding partnership, Scott’s really excited about the opportunity to grow his inbound pipeline with Motivated Leads.
“I didn't actually build a relationship with you guys until the last Collective Genius. I had the opportunity to speak, then I met the Motivated Lead CEO in the hallway after my speech, and we formed a relationship. He asked me about my wholesaling office, and from that point forward, not have I only been a fan, but I've also been a client for one of my inbound marketing channels.”
What drew Scott to Motivated Leads was the caliber of clients we service. “The people I know that use [Motivated Leads] are a higher avatar: More established, serious sales organizations,” he says. “These aren't the newbies typically who are just trying to scratch a lottery ticket to get one lead and get a deal. These are guys who have a marketing budget and expect a certain ROI.”
Like Scott, we work with investors across the real estate portfolio; from single-family to multi-family, commercial to wholesaling to vacant land, we will bring you better, higher quality leads that are qualified and motivated. Click here to learn more about our business and marketing philosophy.
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