How Do I Train Someone To Find Potential Buyers?

How Do I Train Someone to Find Potential Buyers

Joe: Hey, it’s Joe. This next question is about outsourcing and the question is, “How do you train someone to find buyers for you?” What we call the buyer finder. This is not an agent’s position, by the way, this is somebody who’s working for us to sell our properties, properties that we have control over or we have a vested, or a legal interest in which makes it legal for us to sell those properties without a license. So how do we train someone to do that for us?

Joe: The main job for a buyer finder is to take the calls that come in and respond to any emails that come in. When a call comes in, they want to call that buyer back as soon as possible and they want to ask some questions. First of all they want to give information about the property, but one of the first questions they’re going to ask is, “How much do you have for a down payment?” And they want to find out what the financial resources are of these people to do a little bit of qualifying. You also want to find out you know, “Have you ever rented before? How much have rented for?” You know, if they’re looking for a house that’s $1,000 a month and they’re rented before for $500 a month, you know, how are they going to pay that $1,000? Did they get an increase in their pay? Did they get a better job? There’s a whole process of learning how to talk to buyers and how to put that together. And if you’ll learn that then it’ll be easy for your train your buyer finder to do that for you.

Joe: But they don’t have to meet the people at the property. What they’re going to do, is we’re going to put a lockbox, our boots on the ground guy, he’s going to put a lockbox on the front door, and that lockbox is going to have a key that lets them get into the house. But we’re not going to give them the combo to the lockbox until they show up on the front porch. So first we’re going to talk to the buyer, or buyer finder is going to talk to that buyer. Going to find out if they’ve got a down payment. Find out if they’ve got enough income to qualify. See if it’s an area that they like. Make sure they’ve gone by the property and like it and once they’re on the front porch we give them the phone number of buyer finder. So the buyer finder, they can call that person from the front porch and they buyer finder can say, okay, here’s the combo for that house. And we often have them take a picture of their driver’s license and send it over or just get their contact information, usually that’s enough.

Joe: And then we let them go into that house. And we say, “Before you leave, though, please give me a call so I can make sure that it got locked up.” And when you do that, it’s almost certain that you’re going to get a call back from those people. And when you get a call back from those people they tell you it’s locked up then you ask them, “What’d you think of the property?” And if they like it, then you close the deal. Or, you send it to your closer which may be you, at least at the beginning is going to be you because you want to make sure you maximize the deal. When they said, they told this person, they said, “Well, I have $5,000 for a down,” and the buyer finder told them, “Well, I know it’s $10,000 down, but sometimes I know that Joe might work with you on that deal, so let me have you talk to him. But let’s first find out if you like the property.”

Joe: So they get them into the property, once they like it then I can call them and I can put up, put together the deal based on what I think that they can afford and what makes sense for them and still works for that particular property. Maybe it’s $2,000. Maybe it’s $5,000 now and $5,000 later. You know, we have a lot of different ways we negotiate the down payment. All these things are taught in the Automarketer and the Pushbutton Method program, PushbuttonAutomarketer.com, also in the mentor program. And I also teach it in a couple of the books that I’ve got on Amazon.

Joe: So, anyway, that’s the basics on how to get a buyer finder to start working for you. Just make sure that they’re following up on your leads. And what I would make sure is that the way to figure that out is all your buyer leads when they come in get punched into your CRM so they’re put into your follow-up system as a buyer instead of as a seller. And they’re put in by your admin person if you have several people that are doing this. And it’s good to have several people working fewer hours rather than one person working multiple hours. If you have an admin person working ten hours a week and a buyer finder working ten hours a week, then that admin puts the leads in there and then all the buyer finder has to do is get on and start calling those people.

Joe: And typically we pay a buyer finder by the time that they’re on the phone. So in the Automarketer system there’s a phone system that allows them to talk and it records the phone calls and it times the phone calls so we know okay, he was on the call this week for six hours. We typically pay our buyer finders 150% of the time that they’re on the call because we figure there’s some extra time that’s lost by dialing and all that stuff, so 150%. If they’re on the call for ten hours, we pay them for fifteen hours. And we usually give them a bonus, $100, $200 when we close a deal just to help them have some incentive to help us get it closed. And that usually works pretty well.

Joe: The main thing, though, sometimes our buyer finders aren’t making our calls back. So if you’ve got your admin person who’s plugging this stuff in he can go in and check, or she can go in and check and make sure those leads were followed up in, on, in a timely manner. And if they’re not, then he can report back to you, the investor, to make, so you can go to the buyer finder and say, “Hey, why aren’t you doing your job?” and “You’re fired.” And I’ve got to go find somebody else, or whatever. Or you lower their hours and have them you know, work fewer leads. You don’t want them screwing this up because that’s where the money is going to come from ultimately is those buyers.

Joe: You can’t get a buyer until you have a seller, so you get the seller first. But once you a property for sale then those buyers, that’s your most important person to talk to and you need to make sure that they get followed up with properly and don’t let them fall through the cracks. And if you have an admin person who’s watching over that stuff it’ll make your job a lot easier.

Joe: All right. Hope that helps.