# Marcus Elkin, Director of Sales Ops at Skyline Realty Group (43 agents, Phoenix metro) — read of RealEstateOutreach, June 5 2026

> Eight years running the ops side of a mid-size residential brokerage. I'm the one who buys the tools, trains the agents, and then hears about it for six months when something doesn't work.

## How I got here

Typed "expired listing drip campaign automation real estate" into Google around 9 PM on a Tuesday. The kids were in bed. I had a tab open for Follow Up Boss already because one of my top producers was complaining again that we don't have good automated sequences for sphere of influence. This page came up on page two. I clicked it.

## What I clicked first

The hero copy pulled me in briefly: "Stop manual outreach." That's real. My agents are absolutely not doing follow-up manually and I am absolutely not going to make them. The sub-headline mentions Follow Up Boss by name later in the page under integrations, which made me stay. I've been burned by tools that say "CRM integration" and then mean a Zapier webhook you have to build yourself.

## Where I paused

The honest disclosure block at the bottom. Read it twice.

"Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet."

Fine. I actually respect that. But here's the problem: three paragraphs above that, the page says "Pre-built sequences tested across 2000+ agents" and "40% Higher Response Rates." Those two things cannot both be true. Either you have live customers or you don't. If you tested sequences across 2000 agents, those are live customers. If you don't have live customers, those numbers are made up. I sat with that for a while.

## What I distrusted

The stats are the killer. "Save 12 Hours Weekly." "3x More Warm Leads." "40% Higher Response Rates." No source, no methodology, no "based on a cohort of X agents in Y markets over Z months." Just numbers hanging in space.

Then you scroll to the Wishdeal scoring section and it shows "landing page quality: 6/10" for its own product. That's... a choice. It also shows "financial upside: 2/10" and "Year-1 take-home: -$21,000." I don't know what to do with a product page that tells me the product has a 1 in 7 shot at meaningful success. Is that honest? Sure. Is it a good sales page? No.

"Join 400+ real estate teams" also felt thin. For a product this broad, 400 teams is not a proof point. That's a small sales team's quarterly quota.

## What would convince me

Show me one Follow Up Boss power user who switched. I don't need a polished case study. I need a name, a market, a before and after on one specific metric they actually track. Like: "Dana Ortiz, team lead in Charlotte, was running 3 sequences manually in FUB. After 60 days with us, her team's expired listing reply rate went from 4% to 9%." That's specific enough that I can smell whether it's real.

Also: show me what the sequence actually looks like. Email 1, email 2, day 3 SMS. Show me the actual copy. "Industry-tested outreach templates" means nothing until I can read one.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page says sequences were "tested across 2000+ agents" but the disclosure says no live customers yet. Which is accurate, and where did those response rate numbers come from?

2. How does the Follow Up Boss integration actually work? Is it native API or Zapier, and does it write back to FUB or just read from it?

3. What does "AI-powered scoring" actually do to rank warm signals? What signals does it look at, and can I see what a scored prospect record looks like in the dashboard?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The contradiction between the social proof claims and the honest disclosure is hard to get past, but the honest disclosure itself is the first thing I've read on a product page like this in months that didn't feel like a lie. I'd reply once, with those three questions, and see how fast and how specifically the founder answers.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-05. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*