How Do I Hire And Train Someone To Talk To Sellers?

“How Do I Hire and Train Someone to Talk to My Sellers?”

Joe: Hey, it’s Joe Crump. Here’s another video in the automating your real estate investing business series that I’m doing for the blog. The question is, “I hate to call buyers and sellers, but I’m having difficulty finding anyone who can call sellers like I can and convert them into deals.” I agree with you, by the way. I hate calling sellers. I’d prefer just to work at my business instead of having to deal with buyers and sellers at all. “If I,” and by the way, the reason you’re asking this question in the first place is because you’re good at it to start with and you can do it. Don’t ask this question until you’re good at it yourself because you won’t be able to solve the problem. You won’t be able to teach somebody else until you do.

Joe: “If I could pull this off, I could completely extract myself from the work and the business and be able to focus on building my business. How can I make this happen?” All right, there’s a whole long process that we use to train people to talk to sellers for us. Remember, the first thing, outsource person, first of all, you’re going to automate, before you do anything, you’re going to automate to get a lot of the tasks done. You’re going to eliminate all the junk that you don’t need to do, then you’re going to outsource after that. So you’re not going to outsource until you’ve automated and eliminated then it’s outsource. And that’s when you bring in another person. Because whenever you hire somebody, it gets expensive if you’re not producing so you want it to be as efficient as possible. So you’re outsourcing first your admin, then you’re going to outsource somebody who’s talking to your buyers and then you’re going to outsource someone talking to your sellers. So this is the last thing that you’re going to outsource in your business because it’s the thing that demands the highest level of skill.

Joe: The person who’s putting the deals together, the seller, talking to the sellers, that person is the rainmaker in the deal, not the automation guy, not the guy who’s talking to the buyers. It’s the person who’s putting the deals together, because the deals are ultimately what make it easier to make money doing the other things. Make it possible to automate all those other things. So, the question is, how do you do that? And I do it in a two-step process. You know, when you get good on the phone and you can usually close a deal just by getting on the phone and getting a lease option memo signed in one conversation. But when you’re beginning at this, and for those of you who are just getting started, you might want to use the two-step process, where you ask a bunch of questions. Ask the question on the lead sheet that’s inside the Automarketer, like where are you moving? How soon do you have to leave? You know, what are you going to do if you don’t get this thing sold? How much do you owe on your mortgage? What’s your monthly payment? All these questions that we need in order to help us structure a zero-down deal of some sort or another using one of the zero-down structures in the hierarchy that I teach.

Joe: So, if you can get those questions answered and you can ask, and you can have, you know, in the first step, you can have somebody who’s got a low level of skill ask questions and say, you know, “I’m calling for my boss who’s an investor and he wants to make an offer on your property. But before he can make an offer he needs a little bit of information and I was wondering if I could get a little bit of information from you about the property? Would you mind answering some question?” And almost always they’ll say, yes, and then they start asking these questions. And you try to get somebody who’s really nice on the phone. Somebody friendly and so you go through these questions and one of the questions that they ask is, “Would you consider selling your home rent to buy rather than selling it outright?” Would you, you know, and if they say, yes, then, “All right then, well, then you need to talk to my boss. He’s going to make an offer on your property,” and what, if they tell us that they’re willing to do a rent to buy like this, then we know that this is a pretty good lead. And after we’ve gone through this whole process. And then the telemarketer tells them, “Oh, and Joe’s going to give you a call and just so you know, he’s a really nice guy, you know, he won’t put any pressure on you, you know, he’s going to give you two different offers. He’s going to give you a cash offer and he’s going to give you an offer, you know, on a lease option, or on terms. Is that okay? You know, is there a good time for him to call you tomorrow when he can get in touch with you?”

Joe: And you have them schedule a time where you’re going to call them, a specific time, you know, down to the minute. And then, and say, “And don’t worry, he’s very nice. If you don’t want to do it he’s not going to put any pressure on you, you know, he’s a good guy.” Have them give you that third-party validation so that when you get on the phone they’re already going to think that oh, at least an employee likes him. You know? So, at least you have something positive going in your direction before you get there, and, it gives you a little bit of weight because now you’re coming in as the guy saying, hey, I’m going to make you an offer. Do you want to listen to it?

Joe: Now, the offer that you’re going to make on cash is going to be a very low offer, so if you make this low offer, you have to apologize before you do it. Say, “Well, I’ve got two offers for you. First of all, would you be willing to do the lease option deal that they were talking, that Shelly was talking with you about yesterday?” And they may say, “Yeah, I’d be interested. But I also want to hear your cash offer.” Say, “Okay, I’ll give you the cash offer, but I want to tell you up front that you know, you might be offended. I don’t, I’m not giving you this offer because I want to offend you. I’m just doing it because there’s only two ways that we make money as real estate investors and one is that we buy a property on terms, like a lease option or other zero-down structures, or, two, that we buy them you know, dramatically under market value and so I’m going to make this offer to you but it’s going to be very low, so please, please don’t be offended – will you promise?” And have them promise you that they won’t be offended. And then you give you them an offer that’s 50% less than what they are asking for.

Joe: Most of the time they’ll say no to that offer. Every once in a while they say yes, and when they say yes, bingo – you’ve got you know, a really nice cash offer. You can do a wholesale deal on it if you don’t have any cash, or if you do have the cash, even better, because that means you’re going to make a chunk of money on a deal like that. So those are great deals to do if you get them truly at 50% under market value, current market value, in the current condition that they’re in.

Joe: But, so, so they get them to say yes, that’s when you go in and you make the closing call. You’re going to be the closer on those deals at the beginning when you’re outsourcing this person. So they’re going to go in there, they’re going to make the calls, they’re going to talk to twenty people and out of those twenty maybe one, two, three, of those people you need to talk to. And they find out who they are. Now, as you’re having them call, make sure they’re calling through the Automarketer system or through some other system that keeps track of how much time they’re on the call. The Automarketer is nice because it actually records their calls, so you can keep track of what they’re saying to people and then you can in and listen to it and you can train them and help them get better and say, “Don’t say this, say this – do it this way, don’t do it that way.” They also can’t tell you, “I put in you know, ten hours calling these ten people,” when in fact they only put in three hours talking to those ten people. What we do is, when they come in, we say we’ll pay you 150% of the time that you’re on the call. We’re going to provide all these leads for you. All you have to do is go to this page and start dialing and the system will keep track of how long you’re on the phone.

Joe: And then we’ll look at that number at the end of the week, and we’ll pay 150% of whatever time you were on the phone. And it’s okay if they’re on the phone longer because they can establish relationships with people. Don’t worry about paying a little extra to be on the phone longer with these people. It’s okay. You know, get them better at it, get them more competent at it, but don’t worry if they spend a little bit more time on there and pay them 150%. And you’re going to want to pay this person a little bit more perhaps than you would pay an admin person, or somebody working with your buyers. Maybe you want to pay this person between $15 and $20 an hour and maybe give them a bonus if you put a deal together, maybe a couple hundred dollar bonus.

Joe: Now, if it takes them ten hours to get a deal together, which they should be able to do that on a reasonable basis once they learn how to do this. If it takes them ten hours for them to get you a deal, and you pay them $20 an hour, that’s $300 that you’re going to have to pay them in order to get to that deal. The likelihood that they can call twenty people in ten hours is very high. The likelihood that they can close one out of every five people that they talk to after they get good at it, is also very high. But expect at the beginning for them not to be as good at it and to spend some time with them. We use a system called Free Conference Calling.com where I can get on the phone with the telemarketer and I can train them and spend time training that person, explaining how, what they’re supposed to say and how they do it, and you can record the call so that next time when you hire somebody else to take their place because they won’t stick around forever, when you hire somebody else to take their place, you’ll be able to have them listen to that call, have them get started and you know, get the ball rolling without having to go through this training every single time.

Joe: So, again, it’s a bigger process than this and it does take a lot of your time and a lot of effort to train somebody to do this and there’s going to be a lot of turnover. It’s going to be a much higher turnover if you pay them $7 an hour than if you paid $15 or $20 an hour because it’s a lot harder for somebody to go get a $15 or $20 an hour job than it is to get a $7 an hour job. I also suggest that you get somebody who has English as their first language, assuming that you’re speaking to an English audience. You know, if you’re doing this outside the country, obviously you want to get somebody who’s working in the same language that the people that they’re talking with.

Joe: Anyway, that’s kind of a brief nutshell overview of how to outsource finding sellers. All right. Hope that helps.