How Do I Train Someone To Call My Sellers? 

How Do I Train Somebody to Call My Sellers

Joe: Hey, it’s Joe. This question is about how do you train people to call your sellers? What I suggest at the beginning that you use a two-step process. And the two-step, there’s a one-step and the two-step process. The one-step process is typically what we do at the buying events. I teach people to get on the phone, ask the questions and then try to close the deal right there on the phone the first time you talk to them. And if you’re good at it, you can typically do that. But, to get somebody who’s not that good at it, or is new, or who’s a telemarketer, and you’re just paying them ten bucks an hour, whatever, twelve bucks an hour, you need to make it a little easier for them. And the way that we do that is we have them open up the lead sheet, so they’ll say, they do a text blast, a lead comes in, it goes into the CRM in the Automarketer. You click on that and inside the lead there’s a lead sheet and you click on the lead sheet and it opens up a questionnaire.

Joe: And the telemarketer’s going to ask the questions from the questionnaire. And they’re going to ask, you know, what’s the address, you know, how much do you want for the property, you know, how long has it been on the market, did you have any mortgages on it, would you be willing to do a lease option on it, would you take terms on it, would you sell it for under market value? Has all these questions in it and when they fill out that form it saves all that information into the lead sheet. And the ones that look decent, that look like, yes, we might do that, what they’ll say is, now, I want to have my boss give you a call. He’s a nice guy, you know, he’s not going to hammer you, he’s not, if you say no, it’s okay. He’s not going to be upset with you.

Joe: But he’s going to make you two offers. He’s going to make you an offer for cash for your property and he’s going to make an offer on terms. You know, you said you might be willing to do a lease option or you might be willing to do another type of terms. He’d like to make that offer as well. And then you can decide which one makes the most sense for you. Would that be okay? Okay, when’s a good time to do that? Could he do that tomorrow at 12:15? Would you be around at that time? Okay, I’m going to give him this message to give you a call tomorrow at 12:15 and he’s going to call and do that for you.

Joe: And you know, like I said, he’s a good buy. You can trust him, you know, don’t worry about it. Get that third party endorsement from the guy’s whose doing your two-part thing, he’s working for you, but there’s nothing like having your employees say that you’re nice to the people that you’re trying to sell. And you know, make sure that you give bonuses to this person who’s making these calls for you.

Joe: So they call that person, or you call that person, you close the deal with them. That’s the two-step process. Now the way that we pay the telemarketers is based on the time that they’re on the phone. So I pay them 150% of the time that they’re actually speaking to sellers. So, I’ll have an admin person feed them a bunch of leads and say, “Here’s your batch of leads,” and they can tag the leads by which telemarketer we’ve got in the Automarketer. Say I’ve got three telemarketers, I can give each one of them a batch of leads depending on how much, how well they’re producing. So if I want to give this guy ten, this guy five and this one three, I can do that. It sends it out, they make the calls to those leads and we keep track of who’s calling what leads. We also know what number they’re calling out from.

Joe: Maybe I want to give this guy Los Angeles, and I want to give this guy Dallas, and I want to give this guy Jacksonville and you know, those are the areas that they’re going to work. That way they get comfortable and start learning those areas. Because inside their lead sheet there’s also a button they can press to look at a Google map to see where that property is. They can click another button, pulls up Zillow, pulls that property up in Zillow, show you the value of that property. It makes them more intelligent when they’re speaking to these people, as they’re speaking to them without them doing a lot of due diligence before they make the call. It all happens while they’re on the call. And that way they can get paid for the time that they’re on the call with these people asking the questions, going deep, you know, at finding out what the situation for these people.

Joe: If you don’t understand the situation of your seller, you can’t possible diagnose their problem and give them a solution. You need to know the problem before you can give them a solution, or you’re out there giving solutions all the time without knowing the problem. And that doesn’t work. You know, you get lucky every once in a while, but you want to find out what the real problem is and you find that out by asking questions and being nice to these people and then when you get on the call to close the deal you can do that pretty quickly because they’ve already been sold on working with you and sold on giving you a little bit of education about what it means to do a lease option, what it means to sell a property a little bit under market value and when you call back and you have, you’ve promised, or your guys’ promised that you’re going to give them a cash offer, you’re going to give them a cash offer that’s probably half of what their asking price is. And that has a potential to piss them off.

Joe: So what you want to do before you make that offer, say, “Now, I’m going to make you an offer that is, you know, you’re, it’s a little embarrassing for me to make and it’s kind of low, and I want you to promise me if I make this offer that you won’t be mad at me, you know, because I’m not doing it to tell you it’s not worth that, I’m doing it because there’s only two ways that I make money in real estate. One is by buying properties you know, dramatically under market value and the other is by buying properties on terms at market value or below and so I’m not trying to hammer you. So, is that okay?”

Joe: And they’ll say, “Yeah, it’s okay.” And then you tell them 50% of the asking price and most of the time they’ll say no, but every once in a while they say yes, and when they say yes, I say are you sure you don’t want to do a lease option? Are you sure you don’t want to do this, or this, or this? They say, no, I want to just sell it. Take it for 50%, I’m happy. And then you go and you either do a wholesale deal by flipping it to another investor, or if you’ve got the capital to do it, you buy it yourself because it’s such a good deal.

Joe: Now when you get into properties that are $30,000 or $20,000 half is not enough. You have to go even farther below to make that make sense, but in most properties if you’re over $80,000 or $100,000 50% is a really good deal.

Joe: So, anyway, talking to these people, paying them for 150% of their time, the Automarketer keeps track of the amount of time that they’re on the phone so you can just add it up at the end of the week. Oh, this person worked ten hours. So I’m going to pay them for fifteen hours of their time. Because there is some time that they have to shuffle around the leads and all that stuff. But you’ve got an admin person who’s sending them the leads. And you’re going to give that telemarketer a little bit of a bonus, maybe a couple hundred dollars, so you may give a couple hundred dollars to the buyer finder and a couple hundred dollars to the seller finder and $100 or $50 to the boots on the ground guy. And maybe $20 or $10 to the admin person. So now you’ve got $500, $600 into the deal to pay your people to do the entire deal for you except one phone call that you had to make. And you made $5,000 on that deal. You know, if you had to pay a realtor to do that work for you, they’d expect to be paid at least one months’ rent. So you know, you’d be looking at you know, 20%, 30% of your income on the deal, maybe 40% of your income on the deal, or maybe you’re going to partner with him and have, and give them half. It just doesn’t make sense. Pay somebody hourly because an hourly person is ten times cheaper on average than a commissioned person. And they’re also more responsible and they’ll follow through because they’re getting paid for the hours they put in and you have a way of keeping track of their hours because you’re using the phone system.

Joe: So often in the past we didn’t have a way to keep track of how many hours they were actually working because we didn’t have a timer on their phone. And now, suing the system, you have to pay for the minutes, but you’re looking at 2.5¢ a minute. So it costs you an extra $1.20 an hour. If you’re paying them $12 you’re paying them $13 an hour now, because you have to pay a dollar for their time on the phone. So, it’s a beautiful thing.

Joe: Anyway. Hope that helps.