Mastering Leads: How Three Asheville Business Owners Build Repeatable Pipelines

Mastering Lead$ was AVLmeetup's September 9, 2025 event at The Mule at Devil's Foot Beverage, where 53 people heard real estate investor Dillon Ramsey of Highland Home Buyers, Realtor Marie Reed of the Marie Reed Team at Keller Williams, and EOS implementer Patrick O'Cain discuss how their businesses generate and convert leads. Haley Gant and Elena Kovrigin moderated.

Key Takeaways

• Dillon Ramsey offers a standing $1,000 cash bonus to anyone who connects him with a motivated seller whose property he closes on, and he says roughly half of his lead flow comes from organic networking and driving for dollars.
• Marie Reed said her team's database is 95% built from her local church network, and she personally answers every one of the 60 to 100 text messages she gets a day within the same 24 hours.
• Patrick O'Cain teaches a proactive-call method through his Outgrow system: call, leave a voicemail, then follow with a text, a sequence he said moves the connection rate from roughly 30 to 40% up to about 80%.
• Reed's team runs a "33 touch" system adapted from Keller Williams and the Buffini coaching program to stay in front of past clients, on top of a separate client-retention CRM called Market Leader for gifts and events.
• Ramsey partners with an Arizona-based acquisitions manager, found through a mastermind group, who handles cold calling, direct mail, and networking with wholesalers so Ramsey can focus on closing deals in person.

Hunter vs Farmer: Two Ways to Build a Pipeline

Elena and Alexi opened the night with a framework they called Hunter vs Farmer. A farmer builds a pipeline through content, community events, and long-term relationships, a source that keeps producing even during a slow season. A hunter generates business through direct outreach: cold calls, door knocking, and working a room like the one at The Mule that night. Neither approach was framed as better: farming takes months to pay off but is more durable, while hunting can produce a client within days but demands constant activity. Their advice was to pick a lane while learning the business, then blend both once there is a foundation.

How the Panelists Actually Generate Leads

Each panelist's lead sources track their business closely. Ramsey's ideal seller is a distressed owner in their 50s or 60s who inherited a rundown property and does not want a parade of realtors through the house; his model centers on meeting people "belly to belly" at their kitchen table. Reed's leads are almost entirely referral now, though she started buying courthouse-steps properties in West Asheville with her general-contractor husband before she was licensed. O'Cain works business-to-business, targeting leadership teams at companies with 10 to 250 employees who are open to change, largely by reactivating the network he built running two Asheville restaurants before becoming an EOS implementer.

One attendee, sharing what came up at their table, offered a different framing: doing more deals with the same handful of clients, rather than chasing new ones, made more money for less selling effort once their business partners showed them how repeat clients compound.

Turning a Lead Into a Client

All three converge on the same principle even though their tools differ: differentiate yourself by being a real person who calls back. O'Cain's method is proactive calls first, always followed by a voicemail and then a text if there is no answer. Reed's team uses two CRMs, Follow Up Boss for active lead tasks and call recording, and Market Leader for the "33 touch" cadence with past clients, including a gift mailing at Christmas and Easter to more than a thousand people in her database. Ramsey runs his side off his phone, Google Sheets, and paper notes, tracking metrics through a simplified system he called REIOS: annual goals, quarterly goals, and weekly habits, plus a weekly accountability coach.

Referrals Are the Real Engine

Underneath the different systems, all three said referrals do the heaviest lifting. Ramsey's $1,000 bonus goes to anyone, electricians and landscapers included, who sends him a motivated seller, and he asks every new contact how they heard about him so he knows whether to reward a referral. O'Cain's advice was blunt: always follow up with whoever gave you a referral, since failing to do so is a common way businesses lose future leads. Reed credited consistent branding, her face on signs across town over a 17-year real estate career, alongside a community give-back event her team hosts a couple of times a year with face painting, free pumpkins, and a bluegrass band for around 300 to 400 attendees.

Questions

• Is your acquisitions manager local, and would you recommend hiring one out of state? Ramsey said his acquisitions manager, found through a mastermind group, is based in Arizona and runs a team investing nationwide; Ramsey essentially operates as one of their market centers and pays for the service. The closer needs to stay local, he said, but everything upstream, cold calling, direct mail, finding the lead, can be outsourced from anywhere.

• Do you spend an hour or two every morning on lead generation? Ramsey said he is "always hunting" rather than blocking dedicated time, since his acquisitions manager handles the farming side. Reed said her team calls it lead generation but it is really lead nurturing: agents come into the office three days a week for a couple of hours, though in practice the team is often just keeping up with existing leads.

• Do you treat familiar leads, like past clients or referrals, differently than cold leads? Reed said her follow-up process is about the same either way. O'Cain added that consistency matters most in closing the loop with whoever made the referral, something he said gets skipped constantly and is a fast way to lose a good referral source.

• Is anyone using targeted social media groups, like niche regional Facebook groups, to generate leads? Reed said she built her early business on Facebook, friending her pastor's network and posting constantly, but does not pay for targeted social ads today. Ramsey said the return has not been there compared to networking or direct mail, and described many niche real estate Facebook groups as full of noise. O'Cain pointed to LinkedIn as the better B2B version, as long as what you post is genuinely useful.

Mastering Lead$ carried one more note: AVLmeetup's next event, on October 7, 2025, was The Final Panel, closing out five years of monthly meetups with hosts Zac Ruiz and Rodrigo Afanador.