Transcription
Welcome to the Land Investing Business Secret podcast, where in each short episode we talk about the strategies, experiences, and the tools to help you launch, grow, and scale your land business. Learn how to find freedom within your own business, find out ways to build consistency in your processes, and hear how other everyday land investors are winning so you can get to the next step closer to building your dream life through your land business. And I'm your host of the Land Investing Business Secrets podcast by Pebble, Jesse Quang.
Hey, how's it going? It's Jesse here from the Land Investing Business Secrets podcast. I've got an old friend here—not an old friend, but a friend here—um, he's been on the show before, A Sharma. And man, this episode, I—I recorded it with him, you best get your pen and paper ready because it is very, very tactical. Um, A is gonna jump really into the sales uh process side of things. We're going to talk about things like objections, um, you know, disqualifying leads quickly, the kind of metrics that he measures as well, um, and some very tactical things. I—he talks about how many times he dials, and I'm going to let him talk about this uh, so I hope you enjoy this episode. There's tons in this episode.
Anyways, before we get started, if you are interested in learning more about scaling, getting processes in place, um, having a centralized source of Truth for you and your team to actually grow a sustainable business in the land investing area, make sure you head over to pebblrei.com, can jump on a demo call. I'm happy to share more about that. But anyways, this podcast is brought to you by Pebble. I hope you enjoyed this episode here with my good friend A.
Hey, how's it going? I've got my good friend and special guest; he's been on this podcast before, A. A, how are you doing?
I am living the dream, Jesse. Appreciate you having me on, man.
Yeah, absolutely. I know it's been a while—while—since we last chatted together, so why don't you give us an update as to where are you currently with your business? What are you—what are you focusing on uh recently?
Man, um, I'll give you a little bit of a rundown. I think last time I was on the Pod, I want to say I had a team of about three staff. Um, we are up to seven now, and were—we were at nine two weeks ago and then fired both of the new hires. Unfortunately, that's a—that's a story, um, but we'll be hiring again for another lead manager here shortly. Uh, but we are up to seven staff now, which is super exciting. Um, you know, previously we were all in on texting. When we got punched in the face by AT&T back in October, we pivoted our SMS team to be 100% on Market deals, so they're just looking for on-Market subdivide opportunities for us now. We've gotten three under contract; two have fallen through; one looks really promising. We find out tomorrow um how good it'll be, just based on water. Basically, it's a big deal out in Texas. Uh, the rest of our staff is Acquisitions or dispositions basically. Um, we've got one dedicated dispo slc gal, and then I have an executive assistant as well. So we are up to seven staff; we are cranking; we're having fun, man. Um, mostly comprised of flip and wholesale, but we're working on our first entitlement project, and we're working through a couple minor lot splits right now and just trying to scale up the biz, man. Having a lot of fun. A big focus the past few months for us has been a lot of sales processed stuff, so how do we buy more deals with the same leads? How do we convert deals better? How do we buy it discounts? Wow.
Sales process. Now you're talking—just for the listeners here—you're talking about the acquisition side of things or the disposition side of things?
Yeah, I mean, it affects both, and I'm happy to talk about both and how we're doing some unique things that I think not enough people are talking about, but primarily the acquisition side. You know, I think both are a problem, especially today, you know, as of uh, probably what was it now, mid-22? Sales really started to slow down when the FED decided to hike up interest rates. Um, we don't need to go down that rabbit hole, but the fact of the matter is the result for a lot of us investors was that sales slowed down, and um, you know, Acquisitions has continued to get more competitive, to be quite honest. Um, even though sales slowed down, Acquisitions has gotten more competitive, and—and quite literally, if you cannot buy deals, you cannot have a business, because that's how we get inventory. We acquire deals. Most land investors are buying stuff in the 30 to 50 cents on the dollar. I remember when I started, it wasn't uncommon to get 10 to 30 cents on the dollar, and the—the days are—you know, they're—they're in the past. Um, and I still get some great deals, don't get me wrong, some stuff at 25-30 cents, but um, holistically, you know, you build a business on base hits, right? And base hits are 30 to 50 cents on the dollar in today's market. We do some double closings as well, where we can pay up to 70 and find a buyer, but what's really important to have a buyer trust you to double close a property, because you need more time or to buy at deeper discounts, is to have really predictable Acquisitions, right? I mean, when you scale to seven, I've got an overhead of five figures a month now. Um, that's before I pay myself, so it's really important that we have really consistent inventory so I can have semi-consistent sales so I have money to like, eat—stuff, you know.
Yeah, so tell us what—what does that sales process look like? I mean, what are you exactly trying here? What are you guys doing?
Totally, man. So here's the first thing that I think, um, you know, if people are a little bit newer to the business, I want to break a few things; and if you're not newer to the business and you've listened to me before, I've talked about some of this before, I'm sorry if you're hearing it again for the fourth, fifth, sixth time, um, but, you know, the first thing is uh, truly focusing on some key metrics. I think if you were to focus on no metrics at all, or excuse me, just one main metric, it would be offers made: how many offers are you making? And see, this metric's really important because it signifies that you drove a lead to the point where you got the due diligence and the comping completed, and then you fought to get on the phone with the seller and then completed the essential activity that allows somebody to say yes to you. I'm saying a lot of words. I feel sometimes when I talk like this, it's like when you were in seventh grade and they were like, "Oh, you have a word requirement for your essays and stuff," so I apologize if I sound fluffy. Um, my point just being that offers made is the most significant metric. Now, that being said, um, a couple of things in there that I want to set up. Um, number one is just a couple of assumptions: like leads or leads, okay? I think a lot of people say they have bad leads. Um, I'll be hon—you know, there's different lead qualification and lead quality based on marketing channels, based on conditions, based on property evaluations. Don't get me wrong, but holistically, this business is no different than any other marketing and sales business in the sense that if you generate enough leads and make enough offers, you will do deals. Okay? Now, there are ways to make all of those activities stronger, right? We have output; we have volume; we have activities; we have process, right? Or process, as you would say in Canada.
I'm just teasing you, man.
Um, same thing, you know, I'm—I'm just messing around. Those who don't know Jesse and I are good friends; we've met in person a couple of times, so I'm teasing him like a—like a brother, right? Uh, and so anyways, now early on, um, what you want to be focused on first is what I call the connection rate, which means when I make calls, do people actually pick up the phone, right? Um, it's essential that we fight for this connection rate because you've already spent a lot of money to generate this lead, especially if you're doing direct mail. If you're doing direct mail right now, you're getting a cost per lead of anywhere from 50 to 500, $100, right? Depending on a variety of—of attributes, but it's a very expensive lead, so you need to fight to drive that lead forward, right? And our goal is primarily two things: to either expedite that lead, get it forward through your pipeline as quickly as possible and perform all the essential activities, or to eliminate the lead. We eliminate based on two variables, right? Write property; write seller. I can disqualify a property, say if the seller doesn't actually own it, is a scammer, is maybe a realtor, whatever, right? I can disqualify the property if it's one of those long skinny properties; if it's 100% wetlands and a quarter-acre lot, I can't do anything with it, um, right? So you figure out what your disqualifiers are, but define them, standardize your language across your company, and—and get to it as quickly as possible. And now you want to fight for your connection rate, right? Now, what that really looks like: couple of different tactics. The one I talk about the most, the one that people have started to make fun of me for in the land business is the double dial. Okay? And what the double dial is, if you've not heard of this before, is simply when I make a phone call, ring ring Jesse, ring ring, and you do not pick up, I hang up—well, I don't hang up the phone; it gets to voicemail. I wait 5 seconds and then I call again. Now, the reason for that 5-second pause is to make sure that you register that there was a pause, and this person is calling again, okay? Um, the reason for that is you're going to invoke curiosity. Somebody's short-term memory will register that that phone number on the phone was the same phone number, and they'll be like, shoot, like Jess, you've got a kid, right? You're gonna be like, "Oh my gosh, is my kid in trouble? You know, is my wife okay? Uh, did I forget something? Do I—delivery? What's going on?" Right? There's curiosity that's invoked, right? Now, we actually triple dial the first two days a lead has hit our pipeline, and I say two days, I want everybody to recognize we prioritize our leads based on two factors: recency—how recently did the lead come into the pipeline? The story I always like to tell is, um, you know, we want to limit the amount of times a seller can do one of three activities: eat, sleep, poop. All right? Every time you do one of those three -ities, you're in a different head space after, right? And so my seller is going to forget me more and more after every single one of those, so I want to prioritize based on recency. The next one is urgency: is there a reason to believe we are going to do business with this lead, like they've already volunteered an asking price well within our means of pay, or they've got some super motivated situation like they need to make a payment, they're in foreclosure, um, they're moving, whatever, right? But are there um, degrees of urgency just notably within the lead that's going to boost our probability of doing business with them, right? And that's really the underlying thesis of how we've designed a lot of our sales process is—is how do we fight to get on the phone with the right people? How do we make sure we're doing business with the right properties and the right people? And what process can we put in place to boost our probability of talking to the seller, right? And that's just all the sales process that's functional; we haven't even started talking scripting, staffing, or anything to follow after that, right?
I'll pause there, Jesse. I know I just talked for like—what's going through your head?
I didn't want—I didn't want to—I didn't want to stop you there and just keep you—to get unloading there, but um, a couple things here: you mentioned connection rate. Yes, can you reiterate what that means, and is there—is there a good percentage to that? And same goes with—um, you're—you're also tracking—sorry, it was connection rate, and you also talked about offers made as well, correct? Um, is there a percentage we should be looking for, and can—again, can you explain those two again?
Totally, totally. So connection rate is every time I try to call somebody, who picks up, okay? And here's what that means: if I've got five leads and I triple dial all of them, and two of them pick up, that's two over five; for people that are really bad at math, that's 40%. Uh, so that'd be a 40% connection rate. In terms of baselines, what I can tell you from our data—we've been tracking stuff since about November of 22, so we've got a decent amount of rolling data at this point—is when you single dial, so if you're just calling somebody once, you will on average get about a 23 to 27% connection rate, depending on how quickly you called that lead back. Okay. Okay. Um, now keep in mind, guys, like people are getting tons of Robo calls these days; people are getting all kinds of stuff—that you just—like, when's the last time you looked at your phone, got a phone call from a number you don't have saved? And unless it was probably a title company or an agent you hadn't saved in your phone yet, you did not pick up the phone, right? And so we're calling people that don't deal with agents and title companies a lot of times, which means they're not going to pick up our calls, so we have to invoke curiosity, and the way we do that is with a triple dial. And so our goal is to ultimately boost connection rate to then either expedite or eliminate that lead. Um, now, sorry, in terms of baselines, like I said, it'll be about 25% uh, when you single dial over a long enough time horizon, assuming you're following up with your lead um a decent number of times. The average investor probably does about three to seven attempts to reach out, and when I say attempts, I'm strictly talking phone calls. People like to tell me their follow-up cadence is split up between, you know, phone calls, emails, text messages; that all sounds nice, but I'll be honest, we are a heavy phone call shop, and I think all that other stuff should just supplement. The reason for that is once I'm on the phone with you, I know we can do business together, so we try to follow up with a lead 25 times. We're very aggressive, right? Now, somebody can simply pick up and tell us they don't want to do business with us, and we'll stop calling, right? Now, 25 times as a phone call, correct? And a triple dial would be one attempt. Now, triple dial, like you explained, double dial, as I would call, wait five seconds, call again; with triple call, you wait another five seconds and call again. Now, what difference do you see going from a single dial to a triple dial?
Yeah, so—um, we get—gosh, when I start—you know, when I started talking about the triple dial, after I started talking about the double dial, people like, "Oh, A, what's next? You know, quadruple?" My good friend, if you know Josiah Ronco, um, great investor, super fantastic guy, uh, he posted in the RE Tipster Facebook group some funny picture of me when we were together in Tampa a few months ago, and it was like, dreaming about the heptuple dial or something. That's where it came—it—it was pretty funny, man. He was super respectful; asked for permission, like—he was—Josiah's a good friend of mine, for anybody that saw that and wondered if he was bullying me, um, he was, but it was okay because we're friends. So, now that being said, in terms of what we see on a rolling basis, so see, we don't necessarily have it isolated strictly by dial because it's on a rolling basis, meaning we track these stuff daily, and some sellers, no matter what, are just not going to pick up at the time that you call them; they're on another phone call; they're—they're, you know, at a doctor's appointment; they're at work, phone's put away; they're on a jog, whatever, right? Um, and so on a rolling basis, what I know is when we do triple dial our first two days in a lead—and we do that twice a day for two days, okay?—so we essentially have four attempts, 12 calls over those four temps, right? We will get anywhere between 45 and 60% pickups in that 40-hour window, which is really, really big. Again, if you're trying to unclog your pipeline, how many leads—if—if you're somebody that has, you know, 30, 40 leads in your pipe, and you're like, "Oh, yeah, well, this lead did this thing, and that lead did that thing," and you keep them all in one big stage in your Pebble, right? We have tons of stages in our Pebble, uh, which has helped us a ton, just breaking out, and you know, you guys implementing deal boards has been really helpful for us to segment different stuff we're doing in the business, but um, in terms of baselines, um, any average person should be getting about a one in four, one in five, just like single dialing every time you call. So—so you know, keep that in mind, guys, when you're building out your process. If you're lame and lazy and you do a single dial all the time, you're going to get about one in four, one in five pickup rate, so don't even say you're hitting the phones if you're doing less than five calls at a time, because people aren't gonna pick up the phone, right? Um, you start triple dialing, and you're gonna see a lot more success just getting on the phone with people. Once I get on the phone, Jesse, I know if I can do business with them because I'm gonna ask qualifying and disqualifying questions, and I have the opportunity to build rapport. So this is something—I think the first person I ever heard say this was Summoner Healey, who I think you've had on before, um, buddy of mine as well. He said—um, that he tracks talk time in his business, which was super unique; I'd never heard anybody actually track that before, and—um, what we found is when we had longer talk times, we had a better ability for people to—um, do two things, okay? Number one is we're a two-call close shop, and what that means is—um, we do one phone call strictly to get information from a seller, and at the end of that, the desired outcome for us is two things: number one, to book an appointment with our closer, and number two, to get an asking price out of the seller. So what we saw is longer talk times equaled both of those things being more probable in our outcomes. I don't have exact numbers for you, but I know that when a lead manager call was over 10 minutes long, almost every time we got some form of an asking price, and my lead manager spearheaded this, found out herself, actually built her own objection handling out of it, which was phenomenal. But that's the biggest objection or—like—no, you're going to get out of somebody is them, you know, "Hey, you called me; you reached out to me; you tell me what you would pay—pay for it right now." Um, uh, we're a two-call close shop. I feel like I had something else that I was going down, and I forgot what it was. Let me—let me follow with something totally different here, but you talk about disqualifying your leads quickly. Can you explain to us the reasoning? If we're not sales experts and we don't understand a lot of this, why should you be disqualifying leads quickly?
It's a great question, Jesse. The short answer is that you don't want to waste bandwidth on bad leads, right? So here's—here's just an example to think through: is if I wake up in the morning and I run a land business and I look at my Pebble and say, "Oh, look at this, I've got a great CRM," and uh, I've got, you know, 15 leads in my pipe, and let's say I single dial all of them. Now, about one in five are going to pick up, so I connect with three people; of those three people, I, you know, spent time calling all 15, right? And even when you don't get a pickup, you're going to spend anywhere between one to three minutes on a lead, right? Because you're doing a little bit of prep work; you might check out the property again; you might even re-comp it a little bit, just in case, right? You're going to do all these ancillary activities that are going to eat up bandwidth, and over a long time horizon, that stuff really compiles, and like, let's be honest, guys, we're going to get distracted along the way. There's just more variability for—less success; there's more variability for you just going down some rabbit hole and not working on production-based activities that bring in revenue. Now, I'm equating a um, contract to bring in revenue, because that's essentially our inventory and how we build margin in this business. Now, all that to say, Jesse, um, to answer your question, if I don't connect with my leads and disqualify those every day, I'm going to spend excess time on those leads that ultimately I would not have done business with anyways. So I want to fight to disqualify people that we wouldn't be a good fit to work with. So what would you say if somebody had to remember easily what is the easiest way to disqualify leads? A couple things that they would have to keep in mind to do that and fight to disqualify leads as quickly as possible?
Absolutely. So two things—I guess two buckets we break it down to: our property and seller, because those are the two parties that we get to do business with, right? So quickest thing you can do is property, because ideally you already have your—your property ID, your county, your state, and you can go look it up in a map, right? Now known as Land ID, still adjusting for all of us that have been in the business since before I think it was 22, but uh, you know, um, you can check out wetlands, floodplains; depending on what state you're in, those are killers a lot of times, right? If you're in Florida, floodplains are okay; if you're in Arizona or Texas, not so much. When I say okay, depending on the flood zone, you can get flood insurance. Guys, do your due diligence; check your facts; don't take this as truth, but every state's a little bit different, right? So know your markets. Um, but I'm gonna eliminate something if it's, you know, totally wetlands, right? Now, there might be exceptions in there, like if I had a 100-acre property, maybe I can duck hunt on it, but I've got to comp it solely for that. Now, anyways, okay, but my point being, I'm gonna eliminate for wetlands, depending on the state, floodplains, access. A lot of times, some investors love going for landlocked properties; I don't. We eliminate for access, right? If there's terrible access, meaning like muddy, swampy, poo-poo type stuff, we're gonna get rid of it, um, or if there's just, you know, no legal access, we're typically gonna get rid of it. Um, you know, on the ownership side, we're going to be asking, "Are you the actual owner of the property?" "Well, no, it's my brother got it." "Well, like, can we speak to your brother?" "No, I haven't talked to him in 25 years." Probably not going to do business with that lead, right? So figure out what your deal killers are. Some people are to do a little bit more work than others on some deals. You know, we've got a six-fig potential deal right now that's got a deed restriction in it in Massachusetts, and—um, in Massachusetts, I'm not an attorney; this is not legal advice—but you might be able to get rid of deed restrictions after they've been in for 30 years, so we're working with land use attorneys and some other folks and real estate attorneys and trying to figure this out, and it's, you know, a unique problem to solve, but we're buying it for, you know, less than 50 grand, and it could be worth 150 to 200, and I'm like, "Ah, let's put a little bit work into this," right? So figure out what problems you're willing to solve on a recurring cadence, put some process in place so they're easy to solve, and—um, yeah, learn what you want to disqualify in your pipeline. You have—I hope you—
Guys, listening, are rewind because you clearly hear me ask the same things that A has already explained, because I need to process this. There's so many things that that I could only cut. I'm trying to type here quietly and be ninja about it so I remember to ask you now. One other thing that you mentioned earlier, um, goodness, it's somebody on your team, uh, um, objection handling. Yes. Um, they've sort of developed the process for that. What, what do you typically see as common things in terms of objection handling? Is there, is there a framework that you guys have now in place? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Totally, and I'll tell you, I'm putting together some, um, basic objection documents for my team right now, but, um, I'll give you, uh, I'm gonna give you the gas here, Jesse, because I, I just want to give it all to the audience. So here's the thing about objections: is, is they come up when you don't get ahead of them. Okay, and here's what I mean by that: is you shouldn't find out about a spouse objection when you go for the sale, when you go for the contract. You should find out earlier. So in your scripting, right, and script is just process, right? Scripts, um, are not meant—I tell this to my team all the time, guys—this is not meant to put you in a box. I don't want you to read off this word for word. I want you to understand the framework of why I designed it this way. Here's why I put this question. And so when I'm training new staff, I'm not kidding, Jesse, we go down line by line on our scripts, um, all the way down to: hey, the reason I use the word "it's" instead of "this is" is because if you say "it's," you sound like you belong. Hey, "it's a how you doing?" versus "hey, this is A, I'm introducing myself," right? Immediately, you're building subliminal rapport with somebody that you belong to be there, right? And so we go through our scripts. Now, all that, all that to be said, ideally we're handling as many of the objections up front as we can. Okay, and there are only four types of objections right now. There's a million objections, but there's only four types; they all fall into four categories. Okay, the first one, and the hardest one to overcome if you don't screen for it early, is certainty. Right, and what that really means is: I don't trust you. The most common objection you get when somebody doesn't trust you is: I need to think about it, or I have to have my attorney look at it. I need to talk to my attorney, right? Those are the two most common ones we get in land, which basically mean: I don't trust you. You get "I don't think about it" or "I need to think about it" honestly with any of them, but uncertainty is like a pretty common one, right? And so here's, um, here's a quick thing just to think through. Again, I like teaching Frameworks rather than just scripts. So the framework here is: uncertainty breeds fear. Okay, if somebody's uncertain about where this is going to go, they're gonna get scared, and if they're scared, fear breeds inaction, lack of action. If I don't understand something, I'm gonna be kind of scared of it because I don't understand it, right? And if I'm scared of it, I'm not going to go do it, right? And so here's an example: is at the end of our calls, after we've agreed to a price, right, let's say $44,000, and maybe we're on the phone and we've just signed an agreement together—it's another thing called an agreement, not a contract; it's less invasive—is I'm gonna say, "Hey, Jesse, just so you know, here's what the next steps look like. Let's pretend this is a four-week rolling cadence, and we're going to close in about four weeks. So I'm going to send this document off to title; uh, we work with Truly Title out of XYZ, you know, city; um, you're going to get a call from Jennifer in the next couple of weeks, weeks. I'm going to send you an email with her contact info; she's going to get an email with your contact info. All right, step one here is the title search; that typically takes about seven to 10 days; that's just going to let us know there's no leans on the property, title is clear. Any questions on that? No? You want to ask that throughout. Okay. Um, after that, you're going to get XYZ, and then you're going to get your documents, and at the end of that they're going to ask you wire or check. All right. Um, should I assume you're going to plan to come in or you going to do remote closing?" Right? But it's, it's that type of stuff where, number one, when you talk through next steps, now they see it, right? And so something we do when we send every single contract is we actually have a document that's before the agreement, so it's a two-page DocuSign. The first page is like your journey through working with Assets for Acres, like your Ro customer road map, and it's some cheesy 2010-like road that kind of goes through and just six different points that the seller goes through and what those timelines look like, right? And the reason for that is we knew that fear, or excuse me, uncertainty breeds fear, and so if we could bring certainty in every way possible, we were going to see more of it. Okay, so that's, that's objection number one. Objection number two is price. Now, this is the most difficult one to overcome and probably the one we get most often, right? Is just like, "Nobody, you're out of your mind," right? We get that all the time. And so you know, you can do a couple of different things here. Our team double-closes properties, right? Some people do options; we, we just get it under contract with an assignment marketing clause, or we'll use an attorney-in-fact document to get it under contract, and basically, I always say that's power of attorney light. Um, the key difference—I'm not an attorney, this is not legal advice—but the key difference is that power of attorney is typically going to require both a notary and a picture of an ID, whereas attorney-in-fact does not, and it is satisfactory for a good chunk of the flat FMLS services. Okay, again, not an attorney, do not legal advice, but if you get a price objection, I'm gonna go for the double close, right? Where I'd be like, "Okay, John, I understand, um, that 45 is, is too low. I can go a couple different directions, right? But I'm be like, 'So I guess let me ask: if we were able to come to terms on price, would there be anything preventing us from working together?' What you're doing there is isolating your objection, making sure there's no other reason you couldn't work together. No, like if we could do price, I'd be good to go. Understood. And your price, just so I understand, was going to be $70,000. Let's pretend it's a $100,000 property, right? And they're, 'Yes,' got it. So if I could get $70,000 to you, right, we'd be able to do the deal. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think there's a way I could get that to you; the terms just might look a little bit different. Do you want to hear more about that?" So now what you've done is you've isolated the objection; you've gotten them to say yes. Um, now you need to go repitch what a double closing is, right? So, "Hey, here's how this is going to look: with a higher price means higher risk, and so we're essentially going to need to," right? And now you build out your timeline: 90 days, 180 days, 365, whatever. Um, you can even preface it with like, "Are you in a rush to sell your property? Do you need the money for anything soon?" Right? And if they say no to that, well, then you can handle those objections if they come back where they're like, "Why do you need 180 days?" "What, John, you told me you weren't in a rush; is that still true?" "Well, yeah, no, I'm not in a rush." "So why does it make a difference whether it's 30 or 180? You said you could sit on the property for another year if you needed to," right? So you can kind of use their own language to your favor. Um, so we've got certainty, we've got price, spouse—I've got to talk to—now spouse, partner, right? Business partner, husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, siblings sometimes, right? "My brother and I own the property," was a state; we get that sometimes, probates, right? Um, and again, uh, what you're going to want to do is we set up appointments with the party. Totally understood, John. Can I ask, could we set up an appointment with your wife? Or, "Oh, totally makes sense, man." And if they're a little resistant to that, totally okay. Next, I'm going to go for the more obvious route. Okay, "Well, John, you live with your wife, right?" "I do." Right? That one always gets a little bit of a chuckle. So, "Can I assume, um, or you know, use a little bit of Chris Voss, 'Would it be ridiculous to assume you guys are gonna chat tonight?'" "No, no, it wouldn't be ridiculous; of course we're gonna chat tonight." "Got it, man. So is it okay if I go ahead and follow up in the morning? What's the best time to follow up tomorrow morning?" And see there's a little thing there of like, "Do you have time available?" is a yes or a no. When I ask, "What's the best time?" I use this tactic called assuming the sale; you just assume it's going to go that way, and people will follow suit. So see, there's all these little things we can do in our conversations that are going to drive to the desired result, right? The last objection is time. Some people like, here, the two sliding scales we get in the land business: we have price, we have terms; that's all we got, right? If you're in houses, they would tell you there's a third option of access, which is like when they do inations and walk people through the property and that type of thing. We don't really, we don't walk the property; doesn't matter as much with a double closing because it's not like people that like live on it typically. And so time is the last objection: either, "Now it's not the right time," "This thing just happened," okay, got it. "Can I follow up in 30 days?" Or, "It's no, I need it closed in 30 days." Okay, so what's going to happen to you if nobody gives you that price in 30 days? Because now we've got price and time objections, so now you need to go down negotiation talk tracks, right? Which are a series of scripts, and I say tracks because there's different roads you can take, right? So that's how we're designing a lot of this is, is um, we're trying to get ahead of it the most that we can. Your goal is an objection-less conversation, but the fact of the matter is, you know, there's so many nuances to this business that you're just gonna get them, but they're typically gonna fall in one of those four buckets.
A, how into do you have a sales background yourself? Um, YouTube University, baby. Now, I've, uh, man, I've, I've done, um, I've done a lot of different trainings. Cole Gordon is a pretty big, uh, sales trainer; he's got some good content. Jeremy Lee Miner, um, Eric Brewer has been a big one for me, um, done a little bit with Ren Bartlett, some guys in Collective Genius, um, my buddy John K has given me some—he's just a good buddy of mine; he doesn't like have a paid program or anything like all the other guys I name do. So, man, to be honest, Jesse, it's been a lot of trial and error; it's been a lot of paid education, um, just a combo of things, but I test with my team, you know, and, and uh, we've been able to test these things and see what works and see what doesn't. And how do you get, and how do you get them on board, you know, with, with trying these things? I mean, they, they might have a sales background; are they going through these things with you? Are they, are these coaching programs with you? Are you sort of meeting with them to come up with ideas? How do you get the buy-in from them?
Totally. So the first one is, um, we do pay a sales trainer on our team; her name is Jenny Hudspith; uh, she works with—well, she owns a company called REI Sales Tools; she has been phenomenal for our business, not just on sales, um, she helps with leadership, she helps with culture building; she's been just an amazing asset; she's somebody I now consider a really good friend of mine. But, um, our team sits in group calls with her twice a week, so you know, basically like a mastermind, which has been really good because I'll push my Acquisitions manager, Veronica, "Hey, go, go ask questions to Jenny during this time," and she will, and she always comes back with new stuff, which has been great. Number two, Jesse, is we do weekly call reviews, sometimes more often than that. This is something that nobody in the land business does for some reason: is guys, listen to the calls from your team. This is one of the most high-leverage activities. Like we said, if you don't make offers on properties, the answer is no, right? If you don't ask, the answer is no. So we can equate that—Alex Oroszi has this really good metaphor—I'm gonna take a step back here, Jesse—Alex Oroszi has this good metaphor where if you want to know what the most important parts of your business are, ask yourself this question: which activities, if I were to stop any, would kill the business the fastest, right? And I know for a fact if I stopped making offers on properties, I would stop buying deals, right? And I need to buy deals because without deals I don't have properties; without properties I can't sell properties; and without selling properties I can't make money in business like this, right? And so what I know is that okay, if it's making offers, there are only two ways to scale, and it's more and it's better. So I can make more offers, which you should fight to do, and I can make better offers, right? Which is sales process. So those are the two things; those are the two options we have; we choose to do both, right? And so, um, you know, a lot of people come to me and they'll say, "A, I'm having trouble in this business; I'm not seeing any success," and I'll ask—a guy just recently asked me that that exact question—I said—he said, "Hey, can you hop on a call?" I said, "We don't need a call; how many offers are you making a week?" He said, "One to two." I said, "Make that 20 a week, and then come back to me," right? So like, you know, it's—I think even if you're a terrible salesperson with a decently qualified lead, you know, somebody raised their hand, said they'd be interested in selling a property, you're going to get about one in 20 of them. Um, our team gets about an 11 to 133% verbal acceptance, and then we get about 70% on the low end—I'll stick there—about 70% on the low end of our contract signed. So you know, a lot of people will, will ghost you on the contract. We put good process in place there where we either have them sign it live or we set up another meeting to go through the agreement together, and that way they can sign it live and you can answer any questions and go through objections they might have from the agreement, right? But you've already spent so much money on this lead; you've already nurtured it; you've already, you know, done the sales pitch; you already know you can come to terms on price. Um, if anybody's listening and you need to get a deal tomorrow, your fastest way to do that is to hit your pile of people that have said yes to you once upon a time. We'll triple dial them; we'll send them click-to-mail; I'll send them a gift card; I'll send them a freaking basket if I need to, of, of what those called—goodie baskets—I don't care, right? I actually, right now we have this property in Florida we're trying to buy; it's 100 acres; it's beautiful; the seller gave us a price that works; there's like a slight legal issue that can be worked through, and we're trying to work them with them, but we're gonna make a quarter million dollars on this deal when we do it. And so I have my executive assistant doing research on him through like his Facebook and LinkedIn and some other stuff to be like, "Hey, how do we send him a personalized gift to get him back on the hook," you know? And so there's, there's all these things you can do, but the goal is to be memorable, which again is why I'm trying to reduce those three things I mentioned earlier: eat, sleep, poop. Okay, try to reduce those because you'll stick in somebody's memory longer, and your chance of doing business is higher. So my goal with every single one of these things, Jesse, is: how do I engineer us to, to you know, um, let's boost the probability of us doing business together? How do I boost the probability of me doing business with this property and the seller, right? That's the lead; the lead is comprised of those two variables.
A, I, I feel like we need more than a podcast to see what's in your head here, and I, I want to take a step back here: if, if somebody were to start thinking more seriously or beefing up their sales process, what's the first thing you would say? This is where I'd start at, yeah? Um, it's a great question; honestly, I, I would start here: if you were like very beginning, is, um, I mean, you can listen to a couple of my podcasts; that's a little selfish, you know, I've done some pretty good interviews with, um, Ari Tipster here, um, Kendall Leun, good friend of ours, um, you know, done some episodes with him. I give away everything we do; I'm not like gatekeeping, right? Like this is, this is exactly how I do everything. Um, listen to that stuff. Now, if you want real professionals to help you, because I'm, you know, I'm, I'm me; I love me, don't get me wrong, but, uh, you know, some of the, some of the folks that have been around four times as long as I've been alive, Dale Carnegie comes to mind, right? Read some of those books: "How to Win Friends and Influence People." The first sales book I ever read was called "The Little Red Book of Selling"; it's not a phenomenal book by any standard, but it introduced me to these topics that are silly now, but you know, your network is your net worth, and make people feel special, and that type of stuff. Now, what I would say to everybody is: when you're reading "How to Win Friends and Influence People," here's what I would focus on: is a lot of people try to think through: how do I say the right things, um, but really, I would be focused on: how, how do I make this person feel right? Because there's that old expression: people don't remember what you said, but they remember how you made them feel. So focus on making your sellers feel certain, right? Feel trusted, feel protected, feel safe, feel like you are a good, trusted person that's going to do the thing you say you're going to do, right? Um, so you know, I would, I would dive into some of those old classics. Chris Voss's "Never Split the Difference" is phenomenal; there's a ton of sales books out there that are absolutely great. Um, the fastest way to learn it would be just to learn from an investor that has stuff pretty dialed in, you know? Um, I love the house guys, like a lot, because they've just been in the business five, 10 years longer than us and have had time to mature this stuff. That's a lot of where Ben and I have learned this stuff from is from a lot of the more advanced house guys. I mentioned Eric Brewer; he's got a team of I think 40 Americans in his office, right? And so you can only imagine what type of sales process you need when you've got that many people working for you. Um, so yeah, if you were starting all over, I'd read a couple of those books, listen to some podcasts; there's a tons of free resources out there; you know, you don't necessarily need to get anything paid. I would say YouTube University can help so much more than you think.
A, if people want to find your podcast, what should they look up? Yeah, um, I don't like have my own, but if you Google "A Sharma podcast" on Google, you should get some stuff. Again, I've done stuff with Kendall Leun over at Only Land Fans, um, with Seth Williams, R Tipster of course, um, uh, you know, I'm trying to think—those, those are the two where I've talked about my sales process most intimately, um, so I would, yeah, and I'm happy to link those over to you if you want them in the show. Yeah, we, we, we'll grab those and make sure those, those are in the uh, show notes. Sweet. I wanted to quickly dive, uh, here with the few minutes that we have left, um, because I know you're very involved with the community, and you know, you just mentioned, you know, you met with Josiah not too long ago, but I know you're a firm believer in masterminds. What are they? What are they? And maybe what are the biggest misconceptions about masterminds?
You totally, totally, and you know, I think, um, to answer that question, we got to start at the very beginning, Jesse. I was, I give short answers and long answers, and a lot of times you get the long ones, and if you think it's brutal, imagine, uh, my poor fiance, Aaron, having to listen to, to me all day. But, uh, now, Napoleon Hill, famous author, wrote the book "Think and Grow Rich," um, I think the Mastermind was first introduced widely in his book, referencing something I want to say Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan did, um, I, one of the two, one of the two, and J.P. Morgan might actually be two different guys, I think father and son, but one of the Morgans or one of the Rockefellers, or Carnegie, one, one of those old rich guys in the book, tycoons, um, they used to get together with several men and basically like break bread together, solve each other's problems. Like the goal is just to bring your problems to people, and everybody works together to solve them, right? Um, I think it's a big reason I don't gatekeep, um, when I, when I jump on these podcasts, is like, guys, like I just, I want you to have the info because I'm sure it'll come back to me in some way in the future, right? I, I know there are people that have listened to my stuff and have called me and we've talked, and I've learned from them, and you know, when you learn together, you just, you grow so much faster. And so a mastermind is just a way to facilitate that growth; it's a way to be around other people that are doing it, that are facing the same problems as you, or even better, have already been through those problems and know how to solve for them. So you know, here's, here's an example: is if I were stranded on an island, right, and I needed to learn how to build a teepee, right, it might take me a decade to learn how to build the perfect teepee by myself, right? Now, if I were here in Frisco, Texas, and I loaded up WikiHow or whatever pops up first, YouTube on how to build a teepee, probably gonna get a lot of tips on what type of wood to use, um, what to use to tie it together, what types of leaves or bark or whatever to make sure water doesn't get in, how do I insulate it the best, right? There's going to be like all this stuff, and I could probably build a decent teepee in 24 hours, right? And so the point here is that information is very accessible, and, and nowadays it's too accessible; you don't know where to delineate, which is where it becomes really valuable to be around people that have actually done the thing that you're struggling to do or are actively going through it at the same time because you can learn together. So masterminds are truly just a way for people to get together, share their problems with one another, and helping support each other. You know, I'll tell one more story: I, um, I held a private mastermind in Tampa, Florida, um, about a month and a half ago, the beginning of February. So fun; we had seven guys, big house, pool, everybody, you know, had their own bedroom, just great time, and, and you know, the...
The goal was a hot seat for everybody. Everybody got a two-hour designated hot seat. I stole that from how Dave Denniston did it in Puerto Rico not too long ago. Dave, if you're listening, I did steal that from you. Um, I don't know that he invented the hot seat, but I do want to give him credit because he's a good friend of mine now. Um, the thing was, for two hours, it started here was the format: Hey, tell us about your business; share your numbers; tell me your strategy; what problem are you solving for; what business are you trying to build; what roadblocks are you facing? For two hours, all six other guys are just focused on solving that person's problem. Right? How powerful do you think that is? I saw the gravity of it when we were in Puerto Rico back in January of what it did for our business and how helpful it was to hear this from people and how much I got to help other people's businesses, and I said, "Wow, that thing's beautiful. I want to do the same thing." And so I stole the format, um, for mine and, uh, yeah, I just—I think it's it's so, so valuable when you're in a room with people facing the problems because, truthfully, like Jesse, this business is so lonely, man. Like you go to a Meetup, and there's not a lot of land people, if any. You know, if you were a house guy, you throw a rock, and you'll go find another house guy. You know what I mean? Us in land, man, it's lonely. And so it's so important to be in community with one another to, uh, to do that. So I'm a big fan of masterminds. I've been to dozens myself. Been to like—I've spent six figures on education, coaching courses, masterminds, um, events, all all types of stuff. I've been to Patrick Bet-David's, not because we're good friends, just because I paid a bunch of money to, you know, get the premier ticket at his big event, The Vault, every year. But, um, yeah, man, I'm I'm a big, big proponent of, uh, of masterminds.
So if somebody wanted to start one, what's sort of the easiest way to do this? Yeah, man, if, um, if you wanted to start one, um, I would say just—you already know a couple of people, right? Text three, four, five of them. Keep it small, keep it intimate. Um, you know, if you can, like three to six people is kind of the sweet spot because you build deep relationships. I would recommend a format where you re-evaluate every 90 days so it doesn't feel like a long commitment. Get on a Zoom for 60 minutes every week or every other week, and in that, bring something to share and then bring something you need help with, right? And if you just do that, I promise you're all going to learn from each other and and just go up much, much faster together. But that that sweet spot is like three to six because it doesn't get too crowded, um, and, uh, yeah, I think I think you'll just start to get a lot of value out of something like that, you know. And if if you don't know how to build one or you don't know, um, you know, what exactly to do to to get one going, if it's okay, Jesse, I'll plug that I, you know, I like to host a couple of—a year. I did one in Tampa, and I just loved it. I don't make hardly any money off these guys. I mean, I charge a decent amount because we like to get a private chef and go to cool things and, you know, just have an extravagant experience. Um, but this isn't really a profit center for me; it's really just a way for us to like break bread together and dive into each other's businesses. And so, um, this this July, July 17th through 20th, I'll be holding one here in DFW. We haven't gotten the house yet, but we will here soon. Um, the goal is that Wednesday through that Sunday, everybody will fly out Sunday morning ideally. Um, we're going to be masterminding together, and at the end of it, Saturday night, we're all going to have tickets to go see the, uh, Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson fight. So I don't know how many spots I'm going to sell for that. I'm thinking about four, and I I posted a teaser on my Instagram and got like four people reach out. I haven't, you know, really reached—like, again, I haven't booked the things yet, so I probably will here in the next week or two and really get that rolling. But if that's something you're interested in, you're a six-figure land investor, you're really looking to grow your business and meet some other people, I like holding these events. I get a lot of joy from them, just being able to help people connect, people network, all that type of stuff. Um, so yeah.
A, we're running out of time here. I could have you probably talk here like forever; it's just so interesting to see how deep in the details you are, um, and you clearly have, uh, done your not only homework but experimented quite a bit. I I feel like I'd like to ask you after this to come back on to talk a little bit further, but, um, how can people engage with you? Is there a way that they can engage with you, follow you, learn a little bit more about you because I've heard people call you a genius before, and people be following you, um, and this is a true story. So how how can they, uh, how can they follow you? A, what's the best way, or how can they engage with you? Totally, totally. I appreciate the kind words. Um, the best way to get a hold of me, I'm pretty active on Instagram, so investing withth a—um, that's investing with an "A" spelled A-J-A-Y. Super active on Insta. I still get push notifications for my DMs, believe it or not. Um, my fiance is like, "Why do you not turn those off?" And I'm like, "Ah, some people need help," you know. I've—I'm not going to say I volunteer this, but I've definitely hopped on, um, a lot of calls with, you know, random folks and just giving them free advice because I know I just—I heard once, like, "Try to be the mentor you wish you had." Um, and I was so lonely the first like 14 months of my land investing career. I didn't even know there were Facebook groups. I didn't know anything. I did—the only podcast I knew of was Ari Tipster, which was awesome, and I learned a ton from it, um, but I didn't realize there was, you know, community and and people and and I started in COVID, so nobody was getting together in person. It was just—man, it was crazy. And so, um, just a lot of the things I talk about are both things I just recently got on the other side of and also things that I wish somebody had told me. Like, I wish somebody had slapped me in the face and told me about lead management; I probably would have 10xed my business so much faster, you know. Um, and so all that to say, uh, yeah, you can get a hold of me on my Instagram. And if you don't have Instagram, you're welcome to email me, um, just a assetsforacres.com. Um, and then, oh, I I did also include, Jesse, I've got a link for anybody that wants a sample script. Ask me for scripts all the time. I'm always so hesitant to to do them, but I put together a two-page script. Um, there's a little freebie link. Um, I will get your email out of it that I will use to tell you about events I'm throwing, so try, you know, proceed with caution, full transparency there. Um, but all that to say, it's a free script; it's two pages; you know, no catch. And, uh, yeah, I hope you guys are able to use it and close some deals. I'll make sure to include that in the show notes for those scripts. So if you guys are interested, head over to the show notes. A, we really appreciate you. I mean, this was super tactical, so I I'm sure people are going to have to rewind this. I felt like I had to live rewind this with you and ask you the same questions over and over, um, and and thank you for being so open to sharing the things you you you shared here and being, um, you know, fully open about that. So we really appreciate that, AJ. Thanks for coming on the show.
Totally. Thanks for having me, Jesse. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Before you stop this episode or hit the next episode, I want to personally thank—thank you for listening to this episode of the Land Investing Business Secrets podcast by Pebble. If you found this helpful, we greatly appreciate any awesome reviews and ratings on whichever platform you are listening to this on. And if you have two minutes and wanted to step it up even more and help others, feel free to share this in other Facebook groups or Pages or any communities, giving others a heads-up of the Land Investing Business Secrets podcast or the specific episode that may help them on their land investing journey. Once again, thanks so much for listening, and catch you on our next episode.