Do you need a business development manager (BDM) to double the close rate and double the amount of deals and business you get in the property management space? Maybe you can’t afford or find a BDM. Maybe you like doing it yourself or want to double the amount of deals faster.
Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about how to get help closing deals for your property management business and selling people on using you for property management. You could double your property management close rate without a BDM.
You’ll Learn…
[03:22] Simple Secret: Get a sales assistant to help with follow-up to close more deals.
[04:10] What would an assistant do? Schedule appointments and make calls.
[05:00] Sales Assistant Requirements:
- Must love making phone calls.
- Must enjoy talking to people.
- Must enjoy connecting with people.
- Must be somewhat driven.
[06:12] Onboard and Train: What are they going to do for you? Help you qualify people. [06:24] Qualifying Questions/Criteria: Where’s the property? What’s the address?
[08:26] Preframe: Creates future emotional state, positive sales call/pitch experience.
[10:25] CRM Follow-up: An assistant can take notes, make calls, and enter updates.
[11:03] CRM Requirements: Needs to sort and track deals, opportunities, leads, sales.
[11:55] LeadSimple: Initial follow-up for texts, emails, campaigns, workflows, and drips.
[12:54] Process Street: Facilitates tenant and owner onboarding processes, checklists.
[13:10] Calendly: Scheduling tool handles calendars, appointment settings, scheduling.
[14:28] Zoom: Face-to-face sales is far more effective and video sales calls create trust.
[15:37] Prospecting: Give good sales assistant scripts to start functioning in a BDM role.
[16:34] Double-Barrel Close: Someone who does both sides of deals – finds and closes.
Tweetables
“It’s nurturing these leads and opportunities to get them warm enough, to where they trust you, know you, and like you enough that you can get the deal closed.”
“Having somebody that can help to nurture these along, follow-up, and get appointments scheduled can be really powerful and effective.”
“Nobody wants to buy low value, so having an assistant can establish you as high value.”
“This can eliminate the biggest time-suck in sales, which is all of the follow-up they can do. All of that follow-up for you.”
Resources
Transcript
Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.
DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not doing it because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.
Today’s topic came up on my group coaching call today. We were talking a little bit about sales, and I don’t mean real estate sales. When I talk about sales, I’m talking about closing deals for your property management business, selling people on using you for property management, just to eliminate any confusion.
My topic today is going to be how can you double your property management close rate without a BDM. A lot of people think, gosh I would need a BDM or I need a business development manager. I need somebody that’s out there hustling and acquiring business. I’m going to assume you’re doing the sales in the business or you already have a BDM or you have somebody, but you want to speed things up. You want to go a little bit faster. You want to double the close rate, double the amount of deals and business you’re getting.
I’m going to share with you a secret today, really simple. A lot of clients come to me and they’re like, gosh. I just need somebody doing sales all the time, but I can’t afford a BDM or I can’t find one. Now, there is sort of this waystation in-between, getting a full-time BDM, offloading it completely off of your plate, and doing it yourself.
If you’re doing it yourself, you’re probably doing it part-time. You’re maybe dedicating two hours a day, maybe less. But you should at least be doing two hours, five days a week, which means 10 hours a week. Somebody is doing sales or focused on that side of the business. It’s the lifeblood of the business. That means, you’re at least a […] part-time salesperson for at least 10 hours a week in your business. You’ve got at least that going on.
Now, if you have that, this waystation in-between, really simple, you can’t afford a BDM, maybe you can’t find one, maybe you like doing it, you just want to go a little bit faster, and you want to double the amount of deals.
One of the things I did when I got overwhelmed in my own business, back when I was doing all the sales, is I got an assistant. And they were like, what do you need? Well, I could use some help with the sales follow-up. Getting a sales assistant is this secret, this little waystation in-between, that can help you double your close rate. It can help you double the amount of deals that you’re getting on.
The most challenging thing in sales a lot of times time-wise is just follow-up. It’s nurturing these leads and opportunities to get them warm enough, to where they trust you, know you, and like you enough that you can get the deal closed. Having somebody that can help to nurture these along, follow-up, and get appointments scheduled can be really powerful and effective.
What would you have this person do? A good sales assistant, really, is just an appointment setter. They’re calling these people up saying, hey, this is Jason Hull’s assistant. He just wanted to get back together. When would be a good time? Do you have some time on Wednesday at two o’clock, or would Thursday maybe at three o’clock be better? What works for you? That would be really effective.
Me, getting a sales assistant or an assistant that was facilitating this at the time back when I needed it really badly, helped me double the amount of business that I was able to acquire. My revenue doubled, my gross revenue in the business. So this could be very effective.
The thing you’re going to have is a really good sales assistant. Let’s talk about the requirements. They need to be somebody that really loves making phone calls. This is a challenge nowadays because a lot of millennials and younger do not like talking on the phone. They don’t like talking to people. There’s a lot. They opt for text messaging, they rather send an email, so they’re always trying to shift away from having a conversation, as if that’s uncomfortable.
You have to find somebody that actually enjoys talking to people. On a DiSC profile, they’re going to show up as probably a high I, they’re going to have a lot of conversational skills, they’re going to like to talk or feel comfortable talking about themselves and with other people. They enjoy connecting with people. They probably also need a certain amount of D in the DiSC profile, which means they’re somewhat driven. This is the stereotypical sales profile as a DI.
Now, they can have other attributes. They might have some S for stabilizing, which means they want to take care of people. They don’t have to be an aggressive, natural salesperson. They just need to be somebody who’s comfortable making phone calls.
If you find this person, now you need to onboard and train them. You want to make sure that this person, what are they going to do for you? They’re going to help you. One, they’re going to help you a little bit with qualifying people. They can ask qualifying questions. Hey, I’d love to get you on a call with Jason. In order to do that, he’s really careful about his time. I’ve got a couple of qualifying questions just to make sure you’re going to be a good fit. Does that sound fair? Then you say, yeah sure.
Then you have some qualifying questions that they can ask. For example, if it’s for property management instead of my business model, you would say maybe, are you current on all your house payments? Where is the property located? What’s the address? What are your long-term goals? Okay, cool. I really appreciate you giving me all this info. I think this will be a really good fit.
Give them some criteria so they can help with the prequalification question. What that does is it places you—who is going to be the closer—in a position of being kind of the sexy girl or guy at the bar. You’re the one that gets to make a choice. Instead of them being the prize, it shifts. It’s them realizing that hey, this person that I’m going to talk to—which is the business owner—is the prize. They don’t work with everybody. They’re careful about who they take on, which suggests they’re high value. Nobody wants to buy low value, so having an assistant establish you as high value.
Not only that, but assistants get a pass when it comes to follow-up because they’re not the salesperson. Just by them being able to reach out and say, hey, this is Jason’s assistant. He wanted me to reach out, it sets me on sort of a level of value that’s higher because I’m an assistant. It will make you look even more valuable.
Back when I got my first assistant helping with sales, that was almost my only team member. It was just me and I had an assistant, and I was doing pretty much everything. But people perceived me differently and they treated me differently when I would get on the phone with them.
The other thing that your sales assistant can do is to preframe. Preframing or some might call this future pacing, but is really effective, like you having a better sales call or sales pitch experience.
Preframe might look like this. Hi, this is Suzy, calling to get an appointment scheduled for Jason. I’m his assistant over at DoorGrow. He was really wanting to meet with you again to chat about X, Y, and Z. I think you’re really going to love talking to Jason. That’s a little preframe.
Now, if you schedule a time, when’s a good time? Thursday at [2:00] PM or would [3:00] PM be better? He has some time then. Which would work for you? Oh, not that? Okay, how about Friday? Giving them time is going to be more effective.
Once you book a time, cool. You schedule that time, then you can use a preframe. They’re going to say something like, Fred, you’re really going to love talking to Jason. It’s going to be an awesome experience for you. Bring your questions if you have some problems with your rental property, or in my case, your property management business. I think you’ll really love what you’re going to hear during that call.
That’s a preframe. It creates this future emotional state, they’re imagining this while you’re saying it, and they’re far more likely to experience that one when they talk to you. Make sure that they’re educated and trained in this art of preframing the call. Some sort of positive experience or outcome.
They might even let them know future pacing. Yeah, he’s going to get on a call, he’ll talk with you about this and about this, and he’ll talk all about our pricing, how things work, and what we’ll do for you. I think you’ll really be excited to hear what he has to say and how we’re different from other companies. That’s a really powerful, effective thing to do as a preframe.
Now, they also can handle all of the follow-up in your CRM. But keep your CRM tight. Make sure all the deals have good notes, follow-up with people, making text and email as you if you want them to do that. Or they can reach out and say, hey, this is the assistant, and they can follow-up. They can feed all this data into the CRM. They can keep notes. If somebody says they’re not interested, they can update that so you don’t waste time. This can eliminate the biggest time-suck in sales, which is all of the follow-up they can do. All of that follow-up for you.
Let’s talk about some requirements to really make this work. What do you need? You already have somebody else helping you do sales, assuming you’re doing this all by yourself. At the very basic level, you’re going to need a CRM. You need some sort of sales CRM to keep track of the deals, opportunities, leads, and sales.
Each of you can keep notes so that you’re not stepping on each other’s toes. You can see what communication has occurred, and you need to use it. You need to put in your notes from your calls and conversations. You need to mark this deal or opportunity at a certain stage. They know what the next stage is that they need to help move this towards, so that they can call and get an appointment scheduled, to move it to that next level. You want to be able to use this with your assistant and yourself. You need separate logins for this so that you could see who did what.
The most common recommendation in the industry is LeadSimple. You can check that out at leadsimple.com. They really should be giving me some sort of affiliate, commission, or something. I’ve sent so much business over to them, but I don’t get paid. But anyway, check out leadsimple.com. And tell them they should send me a kickback. I’m just kidding.
Check out LeadSimple. I get really positive feedback. It’s a cool CRM. It can initiate a phone call once a lead comes in to you, which makes it look like you followed it up right away, like you’re just on top of things. Leads are only good for maybe the first 10–15 minutes, and then conversion rates can drop dramatically, maybe even 80% on a lead. It helps you with that initial follow-up, and then you can build out text message, email, nurturing, campaigns, workflows, and drips.
LeadSimple also has kind of a process street, sort of clone that can facilitate some of the onboarding tenant and owner onboarding processes and checklists that you want to build in your business. So you’re going to need a sales CRM.
Another tool that I would recommend is that you have some sort of scheduling link. This makes it a lot easier to handle calendars, appointment settings, and scheduling, so get something like Calendly. I really like Calendly. You can check it out at calendly.com. They do have a free version, I believe, but you want to get Calendly set up.
You can have some different appointment times. You can have separate links for these. I have a 15-minute, 30-minute, and 1-hour appointment link. My assistant knows initial things will be 15 minutes, maybe a lengthier call after that will be 30 or an hour, depending. They know at various stages in the sales pipeline to skip the scheduled, what kind of timeframe.
You can also assign follow-up tasks in your CRM to your assistant instead of to yourself as a reminder. And it can be for the same day to (say) get them booked for a 30-minute call, or follow-up and see if they’re ready to schedule another call with me for an hour or whatever. You can book that in using a follow-up task you can assign VA your CRM. So get the Calendly link.
The other thing that I would recommend is face-to-face sales is far more effective. I would rather be on a call face-to-face on Zoom, so I would get a Zoom account set up. I believe Calendly has free Zoom integration during COVID. They set this up. I don’t know if it’s still available. You may have to have a paid account in order to connect Calendly to Zoom.
Get Zoom. I believe there is a free version of that as well. I have a paid version because I like to be able to record calls to the cloud using Zoom, for coaching, and stuff that I do for later. You can integrate Calendly and Zoom, so they can book a call. They’ll get the Zoom call details and they can show up.
People are pretty used to face-to-face. It allows you to read and see their body language. It allows them to see yours. It creates trust and relationships a lot easier by using video, so recommend you try to have video calls, if at all, possible. That could be part of the preframe and the expectation set by your sales assistant.
If you want to be able to leverage your sales assistant, somebody has to be dedicating some time through prospecting and growing the business at least 10 hours a week. A really good sales assistant, if they’re not just doing inbound and follow-up, they might be able to do some outbound.
If they are a bit more driven and they’re comfortable kind of interrupting people and doing the prospecting side, you could also give them some scripts and have them start to function in a BDM role, and they can graduate to that. You can come up with a commission structure and you can give them half of the commission. You can give them half commission if they initiate or find somebody and then you close them.
Later, you can graduate them to a full commission if they do both sides of the deal. Finding them and they close them. This allows you to use a strategy that I learned from one of my mentors, Alex Hormozi, which he called the double barrel close, where you have a setter and a closer, and it can be really effective.
Anyway, that is my tip for today. Get yourself a sales assistant. Even if you want a BDM or you’re hiring somebody as a BDM, it’s a great way for them to start to learn your sales process, to start with the follow-up, to just help you go a little bit faster initially. And eventually they can graduate to being a full-fledged BDM. So, starting them as a sales assistant.
That can be very affordable, even somebody just stepping in part-time to assist for an hour or two a day can do a lot of follow-up and probably double the amount of deals (at least) you’re getting right now.
If you need some help learning how to prospect effectively, you want us to help onboard or help you figure out your sales process, you want to help your BDM or sales assistant figure out how to prospect and help you grow your business, reach out to us. This is the stuff that we do in the DoorGrow & Scale Mastermind.
I’m your host, Jason Hull. I hope this has been helpful. And reach out to us if there’s anything that we can do for you. Let us know in doorgrowclub.com, which is our Facebook group. If you’ve gotten yourself a sales assistant and be curious, leave in the comments. As always on our iTunes, please leave us a review if these podcast episodes are effective for you. We would really appreciate it.
That’s it. Until next time, to our mutual growth. And I’m out. Bye, everyone.
Enjoyed this episode on how to double your property management close rate without a BDM? Get equipped with more content like it by exploring past episodes of the #DoorGrowShow.
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