Jill Friday – How to Wing It on the Phone with Sellers (LA 1777)
Jill Friday – How to Wing It on the Phone with Sellers (LA 1777)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steven and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hi.
Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit:
And I’m Jill Dewitt.
Steven Jack Butala:
Broadcasting.
Jill DeWit:
From the valley.
Steven Jack Butala:
Of the sun. Today, Jill and I talked about, well, it’s Jill Friday. She’s going to talk about how to wing it on the phone with sellers.
Jill DeWit:
Like we’re winging it here.
Steven Jack Butala:
Who doesn’t wing it?
Jill DeWit:
Every day, every podcast, we wing it by the way.
Steven Jack Butala:
I mean, does everybody go into every conversation or every task that they do in their life and really know what the outcome’s going to be?
Jill DeWit:
Oh, sure.
Steven Jack Butala:
There’s no guarantees. You can’t plan stuff out. As much as we all think we have control over stuff, we don’t. We have very little control over anything. Before we get into it. Let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free. If you don’t already know about it, please check out neighborscoop.com. It’s the fastest, easiest, cheapest way to find a piece of property without a U.S. post office mailing address, like 123 Main Street. The properties we deal with don’t have addresses. They have assessor’s parcel numbers. You just put that in, pops right up.
Jill DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s magic.
Jill DeWit:
It is like magic. Helena wrote, “Has anyone had success following up on a mail or via email? We sent out our first mailer and we received three responses from people who were not interested in selling. It’s been about a week so far. My partner suggested that we follow up using email and see if they received our offer. Would they be interested in selling? Does this technique help?” I haven’t done that, but I’m not opposed to that. The only thing you got to be careful of is the spam laws. Go for it.
Steven Jack Butala:
Not if they called you.
Jill DeWit:
No, I’m saying no, the people that did reach out. But if you skip trace everybody somehow and get their email addresses, because you’re not getting that off your data. I’m telling you that you got the address, but you could skip trace and get emails and phone numbers and you got to just be a bit careful. But the people who did email me, if there’s a hint, here’s what I really do though. If someone emails me back and there’s a hint, like you must be out of your mind. If you think we’re going to sell for this price. Good luck. Okay. I didn’t hear we’re not going to sell. All I heard is not that price. So I will email those people back.
Steven Jack Butala:
Jill’s Indian name is Can’t Say No.
Jill DeWit:
Right? I’m like, I didn’t hear a no, there was no real “no”. So I’m like, what is your price? But I will email those people back. I don’t think that’s nuts. Would I spend a lot of time skip tracing email? I don’t think I would. Because you know what too? A, there’s the laws that could come back to bite you. And B, all of our emails are getting so good nowadays, how much is going into spam. It’s probably a big time and money waste.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s a very nice and polite way to answer that. I’m going to counterbalance that.
Jill DeWit:
Hi, I’m Yin, meet Yang.
Steven Jack Butala:
This is the worst idea I’ve ever freaking had, ever. Here’s why people email, because they don’t want to talk on the phone. Take this from me. That’s why people text. I text you all the time. I don’t talk to her on the phone that much. Because I don’t want to.
Jill DeWit:
I call him, he doesn’t call me.
Steven Jack Butala:
Here’s why. Because I don’t want any emotion. There’s no emotion in an email or there’s no emotion in text. You just get stuff done.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, there’s emotion there. People pick up on emotion.
Steven Jack Butala:
Calling people on the phone, is an integral, necessary, imperative thing to do it in our business. You own a convenience store. You don’t have to call anybody. You don’t call your customers in a convenience store. You just watch the money. This is an integral part of what we do and one of the reasons we’re so successful at it, and many of our members are very successful at it is because they’re very natural and comfortable on the phone. So no, please don’t email anyone. When the deal’s done, you can email back and forth all you’d like to get a transaction done. But even then I think it’s better to talk on the phone because stuff goes sideways in transactions. When you talk to somebody on the phone, that’s buying a property or that you’re buying property from you’re establishing trust.
I took a lot of sales training classes a long time ago because accountants are famous for not having any personality. And I’m no exception to that. And so when you’re in accounting, they put you through all these classes. Here’s how you deal with customers, and here’s how you manage the people that you’re working for, and all of that, because we don’t think you have a personality. And for me, a lot of that stuck because I didn’t and don’t. And so one of the things they said is make stuff up about why you call an audit client, call your clients as often as you can, make up questions. Even if you have the answers, get to know them, establish trust. This is no exception.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you. Just letting you run with that.
Steven Jack Butala:
You already know all this stuff. 50 percent of the population or more are Jacks. This just comes natural to you.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jill Friday. She’s going to talk about how to wing it on the phone with sellers. This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit:
So it kind of ties into this a little bit, because just talk on the phone versus email and all that good stuff. So, here’s the scenario. You’re a new investor. You know a bit about that area because you put a lot of thought and care into picking the area. You know what mailers you sent out, you know what you’re trying to buy, right? You’re sending out all the five to 10 acres of properties in XYZ county and how you priced it. Now the sellers are calling you back and you’re like, I may not be totally ready. Are you ever really a hundred percent ready? No. So there’s going to be an element of winging it because there’s going to be questions that come at you and you’ve just got to know how to handle it.
So what do you do? So first thing always answer truthfully, especially questions like who you are, what you’re going to do with the property, how you got this price even. Where did this come from? These are questions. Initially, when these people call you, if they’re real sellers, and they want to sell the property, they want to know about you. Is this going to really happen? How’s the deal going to unfold? So be truthful and honest and answer as best you can. If you don’t know, don’t make up something, by the way. And don’t try to build yourself up or whatever, that never works. Don’t don’t lie. B, winging on the phone with sellers. Okay, we got through that now and I need to find out about this property. You got the details, you know what to ask for like state, county, APN.
You know what to ask for. Hey, are you current on your taxes? Okay. We all agree on this price. What do I ask now? I need to get more information. We know the best thing you can do is ask a big open-ended question and just say, what do you know about this property? Ding, ding, right there. Just that one sentence is huge and let them unload. And they will tell you everything they know about it and then some. My dad bought it in 1962, he and my mom were going to do a cabin, never happened. Mom passed on. They started to even build a foundation. Dad passed on, that’s when the taxes started to go back. I tried to keep him current. You know so much about the area you’re going to learn about what they were trying to do.
They were able to do some building there, they got the foundation, so I know it would check that box. I got some ideas about what’s possible. So that’s the best thing you can do, wing it. And then my last thing is wing it on the phone with these sellers, is clearly define what the next step is. So you don’t know really what you’re doing. But I got the pertinent information. I got some great backstory. So now I can sit down and do my due diligence. Make sure I want to buy this property. Now I need to tell them what I’m going to do next.
And that needs to be like, just as you’re wrapping up your call, here’s what I’ve got to do. I need to take all this information that you just provided me, thank you very much, and I need 24 hours to make some calls to the county and look up some things and get back to you. Can I call you tomorrow? What’s the best time? What’s the best number? So think about it. I could take any call in any area and know nothing about the area and wing it on the phone with a seller and maybe make a deal. Because sometimes when I’m talking to these sellers, even out of the blue, I had one yesterday, a person calling me like I found you because you had sold property in my area. So I’m cold calling you. We had never sent this person an offer. Cold calling you to see if you want to buy my property. Where is it?
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s brilliant.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. What’s what is it? Just out of the blue. And so I’m like, what state? What’s the county? He’s like trying to read me the legal description on the phone. I’m like, that’s not going to work. So he’s going to email me the APN. And then while I’m on the phone, because I record all our calls, too, so I can go back and listen to it or my team can, please tell me what you know about the property. And he told me how long he’s had it and what was going. I said, when was the last time you saw it? Because it’s probably been over 10 years.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s a great question.
Jill DeWit:
Because I’m trying to ascertain access, because that’s a big thing for us, especially this certain area that we haven’t done anything in a while, by the way.
And he’s like, I haven’t been out there in over 10 years, so I’m not sure. But if he said he drives by it all day, every week, then I know there’s access. So that’s just an example of how I can just take a call out of the blue from a random person, get all the information that I need to go make a decision. And how I left it with this person is, I said, I need to know, as you’re going to look up this APN for me, because reading the legal over the phone, doesn’t work. I said, you’re going to look up this legal description for me and get back to me, and I have his number, too. I need to know what your number is. He started asking me what I’d pay, and I said, I’m not doing that, in my head. I said, look, here’s what I need to know. I need to know what you want to sell it for.
So if you need to take a day and think about it, let me know. But I need to know what the price that you’re looking to get out of the property is. And I’ll see if I can make it work. And then that’s our next step. He needs to send me this and tell me how much. And if I’m going to give him a day, and if he doesn’t, I’m going to call him. I can do any calls, ask me questions.
Steven Jack Butala:
I mean, look, here’s my real question. I’m asking on behalf of all the Jacks in the world. Can I learn how to do this? Or am I born with it?
Jill DeWit:
You can learn how to do this, but I think it takes practice. Because I’ve watched people do this. I have watched people be so afraid to answer the phone, but they overcome their fear and they have a couple good phone calls and like, all right, I got this now. I have seen it. So I think you can learn it. It helps if you’re, it’s always easier, obviously, if you’re not afraid of the phone in any situation, but I watch people in our other companies, we just hired someone new in customer management, and she’s not afraid to answer the phone, even not knowing anything. Which is really good. She has that level of confidence, we saw when she walked into an interview with us and that’s why we hired her.
Steven Jack Butala:
I decided to hire her inside of five seconds.
Jill DeWit:
Same here.
Steven Jack Butala:
Maybe 10.
Jill DeWit:
My initial phone call with her, she’s like, you could just hear the calmness and the, I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out.
Steven Jack Butala:
Exactly. I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out. And she on paper, she’s just been doing some version of customer service.
Jill DeWit:
Problem solving in a big way.
Steven Jack Butala:
She just deals with people. She’s a people person totally. Not data or anything else. I haven’t really checked on her lately, which is great. Having a free thinking, self starting employee is what everybody wants. Get stuff done and you don’t have to manage it.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what I wanted anyway. I will never get over it, Jill. I’m so impressed with how you handle people on the phone. I don’t care who it is. It’s just truly a developed talent, probably based off of something you were born with, that you’ve just had what, 20 or 30 years of developing. I’ll tell you what you do. And I don’t know if you do it consciously, is you get what you want by just winning people over.
Jill DeWit:
Thanks.
Steven Jack Butala:
Including a purchase price on a piece of property.
Jill DeWit:
Thanks. I appreciate that. You know what it is for me? I’ll end it on this. The big thing for me, like you watched me today in the bathroom, have a phone call come in and I don’t know who it is, but I’m like in the back of my head thinking this could be a buyer. I’m always thinking that, or this could be a seller. That’s always in my head. So I need to answer the phone. I’ve got to.
Steven Jack Butala:
Who was it?
Jill DeWit:
It was our neighbor with a pool guy. It was our neighbor calling me back. Because I’m like, I need a new pool guy. Who’s your pool guy?
Steven Jack Butala:
You know what we did the first time? The first thing we did when we moved into this house, after it was reasonably redecorated, we threw a raging lunatic party.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true.
Steven Jack Butala:
And so, on Jill’s suggestion, let’s get to know everybody. So we’re all in this together on this block. So let’s do it. And now we all talk to each other.
Jill DeWit:
It pays off.
Steven Jack Butala:
Sure.
Jill DeWit:
Because we’ve accidentally flooded our neighbor’s yard. Thank goodness they know us and like us. And I bought their kids toys at the party. Thank goodness, because boy, that could have gone differently. So it’s hilarious. So there you go. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next week for another interesting episode because you are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit:
How you doing there?
Steven Jack Butala:
Good, it’s Friday.
Jill DeWit:
I’m glad. This is going to take a little bit. We got a couple things in the works. Land Academy enrollment is open. We are working on phone answering systems for you. We’re working on notarizing documents for you. We have a lot of things that we are trying to solve for you, because that’s just who we are.
We are Jack and Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
Information.
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.
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