829 » Some Things You Do Not Outsource » REI In Your Car

Hey, what’s up everybody? Joe McCall here, REI In Your Car podcast. So, it’s been a little while, probably a couple of weeks since I recorded one of these In Your Car podcasts. So, I was going to say, I was going to apologize, but there was no need to apologize. I’ve been still giving you a lot more interviews, which I’m hoping that you are enjoying on the podcast.

I really love doing this podcast. Been doing it since 2011, so nine years now. And I love doing it. I love teaching you guys the stuff that is working now, things that we are doing in our business that we’re having success with, things that I’ve see my students having success with. So, I’m just I’m glad you’re listening. I’m glad you care. Isn’t that nice? Oh, anyway. Okay. So, thanks.

One more thing I wanted to tell you here is… A couple things really quick. I was having lunch with a really good friend from out of town who is here and they’ve been in the business a long, long time and she’s a very successful real estate investor. And I was having lunch with her and a mutual friend of ours, Sean, and it was really good. We had a great conversation. We were talking about the market. We were talking about what’s going on in business, you know, personal productivity hacks. What are you doing that’s working and, you know, talked a lot about my problem with my inbox, my email inbox is like way out of control and it stresses them out. So, that was kind of funny.

Anyway, so one of the things we talked about was somebody made a comment like, it wasn’t anybody in our lunch, but they were, we were talking about somebody else who has bought my course and they were starting to get into the business, right? They were starting to do some marketing and it’d been a couple months and they have not done any deals yet. And she’s, this person said to this other person that yeah, I’ve had Joe’s course now for two months and it’s not, I haven’t done any deals. I don’t have any leads yet. And she said, okay, well what are you doing? And she said, well, I have two full time VA’s and I don’t have any leads yet.

And then the question then becomes, well, well you have two full time VA’s and you don’t have any leads? So, I’m confused still if it’s like leads or deals. Right. I don’t know, but she said, no, not one. And I was just floored. I was like, what? You have two full-time VA’s and you don’t have any leads or deals yet… Like whatever it is, something’s wrong. Something is not right. What’s going on? And I can’t talk to the person who was complaining because I don’t know who they are. And this person who was telling me this doesn’t know who they are either.

But regardless, this is a common problem that I see with a lot of people and I wanted to talk to you guys about it. And the problem is this: trying to outsource the selling part of the business to virtual assistants. Okay? That’s one of the last things, one of the hardest things you need to outsource. It’s actually…

So, what I suspect, and I’ve seen this happen a lot, what I suspect is happening with this particular student is they hear me talk about how I do deals while traveling and they just think that they can hire a VA to do all of it for me, for them, right? Well you can’t. So, what happens usually is someone who gets in trouble with like this is they hire a VA to do the marketing and they also want the VA to prescreen the leads, make the initial calls, right? Talk to the seller, go ahead and make the offer and send the offer and hope with the idea or the hope of not having to talk to the seller until it’s, they’ve already said yes to a lease option or they’ve already signed a contract or the VA has already sent a proposal or something like that. And that’s the wrong way to do it.

I just want to clarify this for all of you guys, even if you don’t have my course. You can’t outsource talking to sellers. Well, I take that back. You can outsource like prescreening the leads, but that’s it. Like you don’t want VA’s to negotiate and try to sell sellers on selling their house to you doing a lease option or a cash offer. That’s something that you need to do.

Now, I say that tongue in cheek kind of because like I’ve done it before. I admit I have done it before. I have had VA’s in the Philippines negotiate lease options for me before, but that’s only because I was already doing a ton of deals and I just didn’t care. I had a VA who was really good and I said to him, listen, if you can make it happen, go for it. Right. And he did. He was like making it. But that was like the rare exception to the rule. It’s not the rule. And I, you know, I have VA’s that will make the initial cash offers to sellers as well. I’ve got like friends that have done that. But here’s, that’s the slow way to do a deal. Okay, trust me on this. That’s a slow way to do a deal.

If you want to do the fast way to do a deal, you need to set it up where all the VA does is send out your marketing, update your CRM, and send your follow-up for you. In other words, like make sure the VA is sending out the marketing, right? They’re sending out the marketing, whether it’s text or letters or emails or ringless voicemails or texts, or whatever it is you’re doing, let the VA do that, right?

But anybody, any seller that raises their hand or responds to the texts or calls in from a letter and says, yeah, I’m interested in selling. Or even like maybe, tell me more, yes, my price is negotiable. Like any kind of warm signal, don’t have your VA call that seller and prescreen them out. That’s your job. You need to get on the phone.

Call that seller, talk to them, find out about their situation, find out about the house… You need to be the one doing that. Okay? Trust me, if you, you try to outsource that to a VA, you’re shooting yourself in the foot and you’re wasting thousands and thousands of dollars in marketing, you’re wasting leads. Your VA’s can’t close deals for you. You need to do that. And if you don’t want to do it, then get another wholesaler, somebody that already has experienced already based in the U.S. to do that for. You don’t get a $5 an hour VA to do that. It does not work.

So, what this, what I would tell this student, whoever it was, I would say, listen, just have your VA do the marketing. The VA should never talk to anybody. Anybody who responds to the text or the letters or the voicemails or you know, whatever and says, yeah, I might want to sell or I might be open to that, interested in, I don’t know, maybe which house, then flag that lead. Have the VA flag the lead and you call that seller lead back immediately. Like the seller shouldn’t know that… They should think that all the marketing that’s going out to them is from you. And then you call them and talk to them because they responded to your marketing. Does that make sense?

And then after you talk to the seller, you can Voxer or WhatsApp, you know that app called WhatsApp. You can send a voice message through Voxer or WhatsApp to the VA with your notes of the conversation and then have your VA update the CRM. You may tell the VA, okay, so this lead I just talked to, on a scale of one to five, they’re a three. Go ahead and send them a letter. Send them a cash offer for 50 grand or send them the three-option letter of intent.

Just, you know, you tell the VA what to send, the VA puts all the information from your notes right into the CRM, sends the offer for you from you, and then sets a reminder task to follow up. And then in the future when that task pops up in a month, you know, it’s a text. Maybe it’s an email. Maybe it’s another letter where the VA sends your follow-up for you or the CRM that you’re using sends the follow-up for you.

Does that make sense? I just want to make sure you guys all understand that because I feel bad for this student because they’re just not, either they’re misunderstanding what I said to do or they thought they would be smarter than me and maybe they are, but like they thought they could be smarter than what I teach and just try to outsource all of it or they’re busy. I get it. Right, and you just think, well, all right, I’ll have the VA do the marketing, pre-screen the sellers, like talk to the sellers, be the one to ask like an initial set of questions and then go ahead and send an offer to the seller and only then when the seller sees the offer and says, yeah, I’m still interested, then I will talk to them.

That’s a huge mistake. Don’t fall into that trap and I know a lot of people do that and it’s wrong. Like you’re wasting your time. So, you could, if you’re doing like what I teach in automated wholesaling, you do the marketing, like whatever direct mail or whatever you have a VA do that. Any leads that come back in, if it’s a live call, you know, you can have a VA answer, but just basic prescreening questions. Like, do you mind if I ask you a few questions about your house and I’ll take your information, send it to my manager and if it looks like a good deal, we’ll call you back. Is that okay? Yeah. Great. So, what’s the address? What’s the phone number? Just get basic information about the house.

One of the things I like to have a VA ask the seller is, is this a now thing or a later thing for you? Or another way to say that would be are you just looking to sell your house for the highest price possible or are you trying to sell it as fast as possible? Like, what’s more important to you? Price or speed. Some basic simple prescreening questions. Right?

So, your VA asks those questions and then puts the responses into the CRM and they go to you or your local wholesaler that you’re partnering with. Okay. And I’ve done a lot of those kinds of deals where we do the marketing, we pre-screen the leads. Real simple, basic pre-screening, no negotiating or making offers or nothing, and then send that pre-screened seller lead to a local boots on the ground wholesaler or an acquisitions manager. Does that make sense, what I’m saying guys? Alright?

So, don’t try to automate too much or delegate too much. Like, there’s certain things that are important that you should automate and delegate out. Like number one, your marketing, all your marketing should be automated and delegated out to somebody else. Maybe a printing company, maybe a mail house or a PPC company or Facebook ads company, or just your virtual assistant, right?

That can be outsourced. That marketing has got gotta be going out every single day, right? The other thing that you can outsource is updating the CRM. Get a VA to update the CRM for you. They should be your CRM expert. Podio, REI Simple, FreedomSoft, REI Blackbook, whatever it is you’re using, they should be the ones that are managing that for you.

And then third, they should be the ones that are sending the offers and the follow-up for you after you’ve talked to the seller already. So, if it’s a, you know, if it’s a warm lead, you should be the one following up, right? You should be calling them every two, three, four weeks. But if it’s a cold lead, which are most of them are going to be, that is follow-up your VA can do for you. Sending a text, an email, a letter, all of that can be done inside of like my CRM, it’s called REI Simple… all of that can be done in there that your VA can do it and it looks like it all comes from you.

So, anyway, last thing you outsource is the talking to the sellers part, right? The negotiating, making the offers, doing too much prescreening. Cause, you guys, bottom line… You don’t want to make your sellers jump through a bunch of hoops to get to you. That’s a huge mistake. You don’t make them listen to a five-minute voicemail and then you only call back the ones that have listened to all of it and leave a voicemail. Like, no, you should, number one, if a seller is responding to a letter or a postcard, you should be answering all those incoming calls. You or a VA or somebody.

And then and then… Boy, these people. Hold on a second. Okay. people in St Louis are, I think, just too nice. We’re, all four of us are sitting at a four way stop sign and everybody’s staring at each other. And I know I was the last one there and they’re waiting for me to go or maybe I wasn’t the last one there. Anyway.

So, that’s it. That’s all I got to say. Hope you guys are doing well. Listen. You want a good book to read? I’ve been getting great feedback from it. It’s called REI Secrets. It’s a book I wrote kind of from these REI Secrets or REI in Your Car podcasts where I just talk about cool things that work and don’t work. And I put that stuff together in a book. It’s called REI Secrets, subtitled “Daily nuggets of real estate investing wisdom to help you get more leads and close more deals”.

And if you’d like a copy of it for free, it’s like a serious book. It’s an inch thick. You can get it for free REIsecrets.com. REIsecrets.com. Just pay a little bit of shipping and handling, I’ll send it out to you for free. And it’s really good book. In fact, I lose money when I sell, I think I only charge eight bucks for shipping and handling and it costs me about $11 to print it and ship it. So, that’s a good value. You should get it. You can’t get it on Amazon. You got to go to my website and REIsecrets.com. I wrote each chapter to be like two or three pages long.

I’ve already had people send me screenshots of things that they’ve implemented. But one of the things I talked about in that book, excuse me, it was a question that you can ask sellers of I was just talking about this, you know, is this a now thing or a later thing for you? And that’s something that was in that book, and people are sending me screenshots of them actually implementing that into their scripts, which is pretty cool.

So, anyway get the book, REI ecrets.com, and I will see you guys later. Take care. Bye.