Joe:  Hey what's up guys, Joe McCall here, REI in your car, I got a special little episode for you.

Joe:  These are the most important skills that every wholesaler must know if they want to do a lot of deals in this market. Now, you may not even be a wholesaler. That's fine. You may be a buy and hold investor. You may be a land investor, house investor. You might be doing the multifamilies, but these are important skills everybody must know because we're deal finders, not deal creators. And so if you are doing real estate, real estate investing, you need to learn how to be a deal finder. You need to learning wholesaling. It's the most important skill in this business. So I'm gonna be talking in this podcast here about the five most important skills that every real estate investor must know, specifically, especially wholesalers. So I've been in the business a long time. I've made a lot of mistakes, I've done a lot of deals, and I've also coached and helped a lot people do deals. And there's some very simple things that if you can just master these skills, money will never be a problem for you again. You will always be doing deals, making money. Does that make sense?

All right. Number one. It's marketing. You got to understand that we're not in the real estate investing business We're in the marketing business. It's the most important skill in any business, especially real estate. Marketing is most important. It's creating leads. It's keeping that lead pipeline full. So how do you do that? Well, it starts with a real simple marketing plan. You need to have a marketing plan so that you know what has to be done every day. And that marketing plan, I'm not talking about like, okay, I want to make 10 grand a month, so I need to do one deal a month. I need one, two deals a month or one deal week. It's breaking it down into things you can control. So, for example, if you want to make 10 grand a month and your average profit is 5 grand, which should be way better than that, but let's just keep it simple here. So you need to do two deals a month, right? Well, you can't control that. You can't that your average profit is 10 grand a deal or whatever. So all right, work backwards from that. How many offers do you need make to do 2 deals? So if you need to make, let's say, 15 offers to do 1 deal, you want do 2 deals a month. You need to make 30 offers a month. We're breaking this down again now into things we can control. So then let's say, well, how do you make offers? Well, you get leads. How do you get leads? You do marketing. Now there's different kinds of marketing. There's outbound and inbound marketing. You go out and get leads or leads come to you. Whatever marketing you do, it's important you get it done for you in spite of you. Write that down. That's so important. I talk about that over and over again. It's something that my coaches when I was getting started, harped on over and, over and again. Get the marketing done.

So it's just done, you can set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to remember to do it. It just gets done for you in spite of you consistently, every single day, every single week. It just get done. You need to set it, and forget. It's really important. Leads are the lifeblood of your business. So it like when I was getting started, I would try to schedule the marketing. I'd time block it out on my calendar. And I would say, all right, every Tuesday morning, I'm gonna send my postcards. You know, every day I'm going to make calls between two and four o'clock, whatever. And it just never got done because I'm not disciplined enough to get it done. So I'd encourage you to find somebody to do it for you. It might be a direct mail company, it might be virtual assistant, it might a cold calling company. It might be, you know, somebody that does PPC for you or whatever it is, but like you need to get somebody to do it for you in spite of you.

Now, let me rewind a little bit too, because back to that marketing plan, breaking it down into things you can control, you actually have to get that done first before you hire somebody to do it, for you. So like, for example, if you got to make 30 offers a month, you know, 15, that's about seven or eight offers a week. How many is that a day? So how many leads do you need to get to make that number of offers? And so you might determine, working the numbers backwards, all right, well, I need to send 100 letters a week, 20 letters a day. I need two hours of phone calls, cold calls every day. I need a call five realtors a day, whatever it is, like, you need to know those numbers and it needs to be on a scorecard. And now you can take that scorecard and give it to somebody else to do, if your goal, and start small, it doesn't have to be big, but maybe your goal is to send 500 postcards a week. I mean, that's a good place to start. Maybe you can't afford all of that yet, but you can do 20 handwritten letters a day. I mean, you can call five realtors every evening or older vacant land listings or something like that. But now you've got a scorecard and if you can, do it or you aren't going to do it, then find somebody else to do it for you. And then that's their number one job. I often say, too, if you hire one of your first hires in your real estate business should be a virtual assistant. And your virtual assistants should really only be doing three things. One, they should be doing all your marketing for you or teeing it up for you So that you can do it or sending the marketing lead, you know, the lists or whatever to whoever's doing it for you and then managing it and tracking your KPIs and all that. So your VA's responsibility, number one, is the marketing, right? You develop real simple systems around that so your VA can do the marketing. That's on their scorecard now. Does that make sense?

The second thing is updating your CRM and the third thing is doing all your follow up for you. So, get your marketing plan in writing, so you know every day, every week, the marketing needs to go out, and you can track all of your key performance indicators, your KPIs, your main metrics, because you should know, all right, so if I want to do one deal, I need to send 1,000 postcards. If you need to, I've got a client, Grant, I interviewed Grant a few months ago, he just quit his job flipping vacant land using my system, and he knows his numbers. He did, it's so funny, because I was sitting down with him, like, man, this is so cool. Like, it's actually working for you. And he says, Yeah, I said, Well, what are you doing? He says, I'm just doing what you said to do, Joe. Why are you acting so surprised? I was like, Oh, so be more specific. Like what are You doing? He says Joe, I am sending the letter you say to send to the list that you say to Send. And I'm doing I'm talking to them. So anyway, in fact, it is the next three or four things that I'm saying that you should do. This is what Grant's doing. But anyway, he knows his numbers and he's doing one deal out of every 600 letters that he's sending and he is getting one offer accepted out of every 13 offers that he is sending, all right? You know your numbers, so you should know if I want to do a deal this month, put it into your, look at your KPIs. All right, so I need to send 750 letters, I need to send 20 offers, I need call 20 realtors, whatever it is, like you should your numbers and then working it backwards, makes sense? You should know your average profit, your average response rates, the average number of calls per lead, the an average number of dollars spent on PPC per lead, per offer.

So every different lead source has different conversions. Cold calling doesn't work as well. It's cheap, but you might have to do more cold calling. You have to get more leads, make more offers from cold calling than you would with direct mail or PPC because the quality of the leads are different. So you need to know those numbers. Don't ask me to tell you what the numbers are. You need to find them for yourself. All right, so number one, most important skill that every wholesaler must master is marketing. You are in the marketing business, not in the real estate investing business, not in a wholesaling business, not in land business, not in house business, you get my point.

The second most important skill that every deal maker needs to master is talking to people. Brent Daniels popularized the TTP method of doing deals, so brilliant. Talk to people, you need to learn to talk to sellers. It's very simple. A lot of us have a fear of talking to people. We look at the phone like a 600-pound cactus, but it's actually not that hard. You need to learn the skill of asking questions. And people think that man, if I have to talk to people, I've got to be a really good expert negotiator. I need to be able to think on my feet. I needed to be an extrovert, and I'm not. I'm an introvert. No, no, it's really actually a lot simpler than that. It's just asking questions. It's being polite. It's saying, hey, listen, can you tell me about the property? So what I like to do in my mind, I like think of it's like, when I'm getting on the phone, because I don't enjoy doing it, but I put in my mine like, okay, listen. I don't have to make them an offer on the foam. I don't have to like sell anything. I'm just the reluctant buyer. You need to think of yourself as the reluctant buyer. You're not selling them anything. You're trying to convince them to do anything. You're not trying to trick them or use NLP mind tricks to get them to do what you want them to know. You're just asking questions and you need to get them to convince you of why you should want to buy their property. Does that make sense?

So you're trying to sell a program. Once you try to sell, you've already lost. You are not selling yourself and you're just getting them to tell you why you want their property and not one of the other hundreds others that are out there right now. So you are just asking questions. And whoever asks the most questions wins. It's like, it's not a competition, but it's like you got to stay in control. And so many times when a seller asks me questions, I answer the question with a question. So you start off the conversation with, hey, listen, I'm returning your call, which by the way is why I like direct mail so much better is because the positioning I'm now returning that seller's call, not interrupting them or whatever, but hey, I am returning your call. I see that you called about a certain property. Do you mind if I give a few minutes? Can I ask you some questions? Can I catch you at a bad time? Can I ask you some questions to see if this would actually be a property? I would be interested in it. Right? Makes sense. So I'm getting them to sell me on the property, why I should want to buy their house. And so I ask a lot of questions. I ask questions like, and write these three questions down. I've talked about this a lot, and I learned these actually from my buddy, Matt Terrio from the Epic Real Estate Investing Podcast. Shout out to Matt. Good dude. Smart investor. I like Matt a lot. But number one, what's your situation? What's going on? Tell me about the property. What's the area like? Number two, what would you like to see happen? So tell me. This is a nice property. Why do you even want to sell it? You know, you should probably, I'm probably not your buyer, reluctant buyer. You should probably list it with a realtor. Why haven't you listed it with an agent yet? What would you like to see happen? How quickly would you want to see that happen? Those are the three questions. Number one, what's your situation? I care more about their situation, their story than the property. Number two, what would you like to happen? Maybe they don't want to sell it. Maybe they want full price for it. Maybe they're willing to wait 12 years before they sell it, I don't know, right? But I want to know what do they want to happen. What's more important to you, Mr. Seller? Do you want sell it for the highest price or as fast as possible? Do you just need to sell or do you want to sell it? Is this a now thing or a later thing for you? Like, why do they need to sell it and then how soon would they like to see that help? All that happens. Does that make sense? I'm kind of getting my questions mixed up there, but you understand the gist, those three things.

So as you're talking to them, you just get better and better at it. Like I had this client one time, his name was Chuck. This was a long time ago. And he hated talking to the phone on the phone with sellers because it would be 30 minutes sometimes and his whole day would be wasted. He only talked to two or three sellers. It just took way too long. He started telling himself. All right, I'm gonna be like psychologically, he's tricking himself to think I am I've just got to my destination. I'm in the phone. I'm on the car in the car on the phone I just got my destination and I'm walking getting ready to walk into a meeting and I'm gonna be late. And if I don't I only got a couple minutes. So he started telling the sellers on the bone Hey, listen, I've only got two minutes here. I walking into a meeting. I am returning your call. Do you mind if I just ask you a few questions about your property? Cool and then he just bam bambam asks the questions with a sense of urgency because he's walking into this meeting and that really helped him a lot because now he was able to talk to more sellers. He was able control the conversation by asking questions and just got some information and he told them, all right, so I'm going to ask you some questions. I'm gonna look at some numbers and I'll send you an offer and you know, we can go from there. Is that okay? Cool. Do you see the positioning there? How much more powerful thatis when you can kind of do that? Leads me to the next thing in regards to talking to sellers is, talk to five sellers a day. This is another thing I learned from one of my mentors, Claude Diamond. If you could just talk to 5 sellers a days, or realtors, or private investors, or buyers, if you could talk to people 5 people a day, money will never be an issue for you again. If you just learn how to talk, and there is a guy I knew who didn't do any marketing, but he had a huge Rolodex, for those of you that are under 30 years old, just Google it. A Rolodex is like a list of contacts, people in the business, buyers, realtors, property managers, investors, wholesalers, landlords, you know, he had a big list of everybody that he knew in St. Louis that was in the businesses.

And he would go through that list every couple months when he wanted to do a deal or he wanted some money, and he would call everybody on that list and ask them two questions. Number one, hey, do you have any deals? Or number two, are you looking to buy any deals. In other words, do have any deal you're looking to sell, you don't want anymore, you just want to get rid of, or do you have any deals you're lookin' to buy? And every time he did that, by the time he got to that list, many times before he even finished, he would find somebody with a deal to sell and somebody else who wanted a deal that they were looking to buy and he put them together and he'd make the money in the middle. Make sense? So talk to five people a day. Rule number three, number one is marketing, number two is talk to people.

Oh, one more thing too here. This is important. If you're not on the phone, you're making money. It's as simple as that. Like this, this phone here is a million-dollar tool. If people just don't wanna talk to the people and the problem is you're gonna have a very, very difficult time making money in this business. All right, rule number three, make offers. This is the most important metric of all of them. If you're not making offers, you're not making money as well. So let's write this down. Your speed to income is directly proportional to the number of offers that you make. Your speed income is directly proportional to the number of offers that you may. Very simple formula. The number one rule in real estate it's not location, location, location, whoever said that was stupid. It's kind of true, maybe. But the most important rule in estate is make offers, make offers make offers. That's it.

So if you're talking to five sellers a day, or five realtors a day, whatever, the most important thing is to send every person you talk to an offer, send every seller you talk to an offering, every realtor you talk, to send them an offer. You should also let's say you're, talking to wholesalers who have deals, you should be sending them offers, even though it's less than what they're asking for, send offers and your offer should be in writing. Every seller you talk to, you should send an offer in writing in physical mail and in an email and by text. I'm telling you because emails get lost, they go to spam, but that's something that nobody else does. It may be a letter of intent. It may just be, hey, listen, it was great talking to you. I know this may not work for you, but if I were to buy your property, it would need to be at around this range to this range, right? Send the offers in writing, give the seller's options. Maybe it's like, Hey, listen, there's maybe two things I could do. I can, if I paid you cash, I could pay you about this, but if I could, I could offer you more, if you would consider taking payments over time, something like that.

So you can give the sellers options. In my program, I have a, what's called an automated offer pro calculator. It's a software that helps you come up with a cash offer and an owner financing offer for land and for houses, a cash lease option and owner financing, just put in some numbers and it spits out three different numbers. So basically you can offer them more if they would take terms over time, all right? The fourth thing that you have to learn if you wanna do a lot of deals is follow up. I'm telling you 90% of your deals are going to come from the follow up, my coaching business partner Gavin and I were doing a lot deals one time in the Birmingham, Alabama area. And this was houses before we started doing land about five years ago. And we looked at in the previous 12 months, we did 58 deals and we looked at how much follow up did we do to get those 58 deals? And of those 58, only four came from that first conversation with the seller. Only four. And if we would have not done any follow-up in that 12-month window, we would've only done four deals that year. But the 54 deals came from follow-ups, and on average, it was seven to eight touches over two to three months. Some deals came just a week or two weeks of follow- up, some over a year. But on average two to months, seven to 8 touches. A phone call, a text, an email. So this is really really important.

Okay, get your marketing done for you in spite of you every single day every single week Get that marketing done. Let it go out. Number two,talk to every seller that calls responds to your marketing talk to five people a day five sellers a day. Number three send an offer to every single seller that you talk to every realtor you talk to send them an offer in the physical mail in writing. Nobody else is doing that. Your competition is not doing that it makes you stand out above all the rest and then finally,well, I got one more after this. But to follow up every 30 days, every single 30 days with every single offer that you send, it doesn't matter if they said no. It doesn’t matter if they want a million dollars and your offer was $10,000. Send that same offer every 30 day. Follow up with every single seller. I mean, I can't tell you how many times people have told me, oh my gosh, Joe, I did what you said to do and it worked. I just got a deal accepted. I just flicked a deal. I had a student the other day, made $19,000 on a deal on the third offer that he the seller. He sent the offer, the same offer, three times to the seller, that's the power of follow-up.

The final thing I'll say is the fifth skill that you need to learn is being brilliant at the basics. Learn to get really, really good at the simple, basic things, okay? This business is not complicated. It's not complicated, so stop trying to complicate it. Stop trying to do five million different things. Just focus on doing one thing really, really simply. So stop asking what if. Start asking just what next. Have you talked to five sellers today yet, right? Have you made five offers today yet? Have you followed up with any of the offers that you sent from 30 days ago? The best wholesalers are really good at those basic things and they focus those simple basic things because I've said this before focus will make you rich. Shiny objects will make you go blind. So stop complicating this business. Keep it simple. Focus on these simple basic things. Marketing, talking to sellers, making offers, follow up, and you will do very, very well. All right. Appreciate you guys. I got to go. See ya.