Working Your Own Database

1. The Five Fields That Matter

Export the whole database, then ignore most of it. Five fields carry the method:

1. Name and mobile. A landline is not a warm contact, it is a switchboard.
2. Address. Everything in section 3 hangs off resolving this to a property.
3. Purchase or settlement date. The single highest-value field and the one most likely to be missing.
4. Last contact outcome. Not the date, the outcome. “Asked me to call back in spring” is worth more than every other field combined.
5. Investor or owner-occupier. Only if you actually know. Guessing produces the worst call in section 2.

If purchase date is sparse, do not stop and do not estimate it. Flag the gap, run the other plays, and capture the date in conversation when you do get someone on the phone. A database fills itself in if the calls write back to it.

2. Four Plays, Not One Campaign

A single “are you thinking of selling” campaign across the whole list is the version that fails, because it has no reason to be calling any particular person today. Four plays, each with a trigger:

Build the tenure play first even though lapsed appraisals convert better. Appraisals are a finite pile you will work through in a fortnight. Tenure is a queue that refills every morning on its own.

3. Which Contact Rings First

This is the part people skip and it is the part that decides whether any of it works. You cannot call fifty thousand people. You can call some number per day, so the only question that matters is which ones. Six rules, in order of weight:

Keep the weights in one place, as plain numbers you can read. The point of an explainable score is not elegance, it is that in six months you will want to know why a particular person was called on a particular Tuesday, and a model that cannot answer that is a model you will stop trusting.

4. The Opener Is the Whole Call

People decide to sell when their own circumstances line up: the kids move out, retirement arrives, equity appears that they did not know about. Nothing you say creates that. The call’s job is to make someone curious enough to start thinking about their own situation out loud.

Write two openers per play, not one, and alternate them by contact so the split is stable. You will be wrong about which one works, and one opener gives you no way to find out. Keep the difference real: a tenure-led open and a sale-led open are worth comparing, two rewordings of the same sentence are not.

5. Cadence, and When to Stop

A warm database is an asset that a bad cadence converts into a cold one. Three rules hold it together:

• One slow value touch a month for contacts who are mid-journey and quiet. Something worth reading, not a check-in.
• A no buys months, not a removal. Demote, wait, come back with a different play. The tenure call and the equity call are different conversations, and a no to one is not a no to the other.
• Write every outcome back. A call that does not update the record is a call you will make again, and the second time it is not warm, it is annoying.

6. The Gate, Which Is the Step to Not Hand-Roll

Everything above is a weekend’s work and you should do it. This part is not, and the reason is not difficulty. Each of these is a rule that has to hold on every single call, including the one made at 8:04pm by a script nobody has looked at since March.

• Warm only. A contact with no prior relationship is a cold call wearing a warm list’s clothes.
• Do not contact, honoured across every play. An opt-out is a decision about you, not about one campaign.
• Calling hours in the contact’s timezone, not yours, and not the server’s.
• The Do Not Call Register, and knowing which of your contacts are exempt and why.
• Disclosure and recording consent where required, on the call, every time.
• A record that survives: what was said, when, and by what authority you rang.

The gate has to sit underneath the ranking, not beside it. If a high score can promote a contact past a check, then the check is advice rather than a rule, and the first time it matters will be the time somebody is looking.

You can build this. What you cannot easily build is the part where it is still true in eight months, after the model changed, the script was edited by someone else, and the person who wrote the gate moved on.

7. Try It Now: The Prompt

Everything above is the method. This is the method as something you can paste into Claude, ChatGPT or whatever you already use, along with a CSV export from your CRM. It is deliberately the list half only: it ranks and it drafts openers, and it stops before deciding that anybody may be rung, because that decision needs a register, a timezone and a consent record, none of which are in your spreadsheet.

You are helping an Australian real estate agent work their own
database. I will paste a CSV export from my CRM.

Your job is to turn it into a call list for tomorrow, in priority order, with a
reason attached to every row.

STEP 1. Tell me which of these five fields you can find, and what you are
missing: name, mobile, address, purchase or settlement date, last contact
outcome. Do not guess at a missing field and do not estimate a purchase date.
Say the coverage as a count, for example "purchase date present for 312 of
1,040 rows".

STEP 2. Split the contacts into these four plays. A contact can only be in one.
  - Tenure: 5 to 9 years since purchase. The move-probability band.
  - Equity: bought through this agent, any tenure, where a nearby sale is
    likely to have moved their number.
  - Investor: only where the data actually says investor. Never inferred.
  - Lapsed: an appraisal that never converted, or no contact in over a year.
Report how many landed in each, and how many you could not place and why.

STEP 3. Rank within each play, applying these rules in this order of weight.
  1. Engagement state dominates everything. A contact who asked to be called
     back outranks a cold one regardless of every other signal.
  2. Boost a contact with a fresh nearby sale. It is the strongest opener hook
     because it gives the call something currently true to say.
  3. Boost the tenure sweet spot, roughly 7 to 12 years.
  4. Demote anyone who said no recently. Bottom of the list, not off it.
  5. Recency breaks ties only. It must never move a contact above a warmer one.
  6. Ranking decides order and nothing else. It never decides whether someone
     may be contacted.

STEP 4. Output a table: name, mobile, play, rank, and one short sentence saying
why this contact is at this position. The reason has to be readable by the agent
in six months, so write it in plain words, not as a score.

STEP 5. For the top 10, draft two openers each, in different styles, one leading
on tenure or the sale and one leading on the relationship. Openers must ask
nothing and must be true. Do not write "are you thinking of selling", it asks
for a decision they have not made and once someone says no they defend it.

WHAT NOT TO DO. Do not produce a dialler script, a sending schedule, or any
logic that decides a contact is safe to ring. Whether a call may legally be made
depends on the Do Not Call Register, the contact's own timezone, consent, and
recording rules, and none of that is in the CSV I am giving you. Rank the list
and stop there.

Two things to expect. The coverage answer in step one will be worse than you hope, usually on purchase date, and that is the honest starting point rather than a reason to stop. And the reasons it writes in step four are the part worth reading closely: if they do not make sense to you, the ranking is wrong, and a ranking you do not believe is one you will quietly stop using.

8. Parts That Are Harder Than They Look

Not warnings. These are the four places a working build usually stalls, so you can recognise them as normal rather than as a sign you got it wrong.

• Purchase dates are missing. Most CRMs have them for a third of contacts. The tenure play is the best one and it depends on the sparsest field, which is why section 1 says capture it in conversation instead of waiting.
• Address to property is not a lookup. Unit numbers, renamed streets and duplicate records mean a meaningful slice will not resolve. Decide up front what a call with no property data says, because you will make a lot of them.
• “Warm” is a judgement, not a column. Someone who enquired once in 2019 and never replied is in the database and is not warm. You will have to define this and you will get it wrong twice.
• Capacity is the binding constraint, not the list. This is why section 3 exists. Every hour spent on the automation before the ranking is an hour spent making it easier to call the wrong people faster.

9. What Breaks After It Works

This section is the honest one, and it is the reason a build standard is worth publishing at all. A self-built version of everything above genuinely works. Here is what happens to it over time.

• It leaves with whoever built it.The rules live in one person’s head and one spreadsheet under their login. The replacement starts from nothing, and this is a role that turns over.
• Nobody knows whether it ran. A silent week looks identical to a working week. There is no alarm for a queue that quietly stopped refilling.
• It degrades without failing. A CRM export changes a column name, the tenure play matches nothing, and the system keeps reporting zero opportunities. A false negative is worse than an error, because an error gets looked at.
• Attribution arrives too late to steer by. The listing comes eight months after the call. By the time you can prove it worked you have already decided whether to keep doing it.

None of that is an argument against building it. It is an argument for knowing which parts you want to still be true after you stop paying attention to them.