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In this series of episodes, Jeff dives deep into each step of the Y.E.S.S.E.S Framework for Getting Off-Market Sellers to Accept Your Offers. In this episode, Jeff does a deep dive into the second step of the framework, the letter with E, which stands for ENGAGE THOUGHTFULLY. Listen in and learn how to determine your brand, positioning and message to the Sellers you’ll be marketing to. Discover how to deliver your message in the best possible way, how to field incoming Seller calls and what your objective should be when Sellers call you back from your marketing.
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Episode Transcript
We continue our discussion, our deep dive of the six steps of the YESSES framework, our framework for getting off market sellers to accept your offers. And in today’s episode, we talk about the second letter, E. E stands for engage thoughtfully. Let’s cue up the theme song we’re gonna dive right into the letter E.
Welcome to Racking Up Rentals, a show about how regular people, those of us without huge war chest of capital or insider connections, can build lasting wealth acquiring a portfolio of buy and hold real estate. But we don’t just go mainstream looking at what’s on the market and asking banks for loans nor are we posting We Buy Houses signs are just looking for, quote, motivated sellers to make lowball offers to. You see, we are people-oriented deal makers. We sit down directly with sellers to work out win-win deals without agents or any other obstacles and buy properties. Nobody else even those are for sale. I’m Jeff from a Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur. If you’re the kind of real estate investor who wants long term wealth, not get rich quick gimmicks or pictures of yourself holding fat checks on social media. This show is for you. Join me and quietly become the wealthiest person on your block. Now let’s go rack up a rental portfolio.
Hey, thanks for joining me for another episode of Racking Up Rentals, show notes for today’s episode our at www.thoughtfulre.com/e46. Please do yourself a big favor and do us a big favor, as well as you’re doing a favor also for your fellow thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs, who are trying so hard to find shows like ours by hitting that subscribe button in the podcast app. It really does help others and it helps us so much. Thank you so much, onward with the episode.
Okay, so over the last couple of episodes, we begin to unpack the YESSES framework for getting off market sellers to accept your offers. Now, if you haven’t heard the last couple episodes, I would strongly encourage you to go back and to listen to those because they’ll give you the background you need. You know, what I’d recommend you do is go over to yes.thoughtfulre.com. And you can download a PDF version of the whole yesses framework. So you’ve got a handy and you can refer to it anytime. So head over to yes.thoughtfulre.com. Download your free copy, it just takes a second, and we’ll go from there. But as a quick recap, the YESSES framework is six steps. The letter Y is for you. It’s all about you. And what you want. E which we’re going to talk about today is engage thoughtfully. S is solve the person. The next S is solve the deal. E stands for empathetic proposal. And S at the end stands for sharpen and agree. And today we’re going to dive deep into E, the second letter for engage thoughtfully.
So at this point in the process, we’ve done the hard work to decide what we want to accomplish. And so we know our objectives and ourselves and our criteria really well. And we’ve also then decided as a result of that, who is it that owns the properties that we want to buy. So we’ve started to focus now transitioned our focus from ourselves to the seller of the piece of property. So in this step of E for engaging thoughtfully, we’re going to begin reaching out to these exact sellers who own the properties that we want to be able to buy that process you’d normally refer to as marketing lead generation. And the E here is really at the intersection of lead generation and sales. So sending our messages out to these sellers is marketing. And then the second part is those people are going to start calling us and when they start calling us, we really begin interacting, interacting with them at person to person. And that is the beginning of the sales process. So one really important point I want to make sure that you’ve got in your mind from the very beginning of this is that not all leads are created equal. And I don’t just mean quality of leads. What I mean is how you generate a lead has a great deal of impact on the ultimate results you are going to get. Let me give you a crude and simple example outside of real estate just to kind of make the point. You know if you wanted to find a life partner, and you said okay, I need to generate some leads of these people. And you ultimately end up with a list of 10 leads of this ideal life partner. And here’s how you got them. Three of them you got from dating apps, four of them you got from Craigslist ads of people Seeking, you know, companionship, two of them, you got off of a bathroom wall. And one was an introduction from your best friend who knows you best in the world, that’s 10 leads. Now do all of those 10 leads to feel like they’ve got the same level of promise to you. No, of course not. Some of those leads are probably garbage. Maybe they’re not bad people. But the way that you are going to be meeting them the introduction, the way that you have found them, does not set the stage. For the type of meaningful connection that you want to have with this person, your ability to really see is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. So if we take that silly extreme example, back to real estate, we see that how we generate leads matters if we have 10 names on our list, and three of them came from bandit signs. One was a referral from a realtor three words from letters that we sent ourselves and a couple were listed properties, that’s going to be 10 leads, but there’s 10 very, very, very different situation. So how do we choose which way of generating leads is right?
To answer that question, we really need to start with the end in mind, we have to think about what type of a dynamic do I want to end up with, with this seller? What type of conversation do I want to have? What type of situation do I want to find myself in. And if we know that, then we can work backwards from that. And we can choose the marketing media and marketing strategies, marketing approaches, that are going to deliver leads that will set us up for that type of situation, that type of den dynamic that we want to have, if you gave me the exact same property as three different leads, you know, one is, let’s say as a listed version of this house, the next one is coming from a wholesaler version of this house. And the third one is a directly that I generated myself through my own letters, exact same house, three different ways coming to me, I’m going to have three completely different experiences, because the buying environment is completely different in that, so we have to be really, really careful and intentional about how we generate these leads, because that will have a huge impact on what happens downstream from that. So the first thing we’re going to think about is our brand, our positioning and our message. Okay, so when I talk about brand, I want you to know that I don’t mean what color is your logo, and what fonts Do you use and things like that. As a matter of fact, what I’m talking about doesn’t involve graphics really at all. That’s what most people think of when they think of branding. But I can tell you from my 15 years as a branding consultant before, being a full-time real estate entrepreneur, that your brand is the experience that people have with you. That experience comes through in lots of different ways through all five senses, it’s not just about how things look on your business cards. So when I say we need to determine what our brand is going to be in our positioning, what I’m really saying is we have to define in advance what experience we want people to have with us, and how we want them to think of us. positioning is like it’s actually kind of like real estate, but in somebody’s mind, in somebody’s mind, they already have a whole bunch of thoughts and ideas and perceptions. And they might think of quote real estate investors in a certain way, they might think of landlords in a certain way they might think of We Buy Houses people in a certain way. And the question we have to ask ourselves is in relation to all the stuff that’s already in their head? How do we want to position ourselves in relation to those things? So how do we want to help them categorize how they see us in their mind so that they can make sense of what they’re experiencing from us? How do we want them to perceive us as the simple way to put it, and then ultimately, what is our message to them going to be now for myself, and I do strongly recommend you consider this for your own strategy. But as I look downstream at the types of deals I want to do the types of conversations I want to have, the type of dynamic I want to have with the seller from the very second we start talking all the way through to the closing table is one where the seller and I are on a level playing field. I want them to perceive me from the second they meet me as one of their peers, I want them to perceive me as a relatable and approachable non-threatening person who they can are more are more than safe having a conversation with and are not at risk of being taken advantage of by or anything like that.
So my guiding principle is that I want to position myself as a regular person to them. I am a regular person for crying out loud, but I am also a regular person who has a lot of experience with real estate but I want them to perceive me as a regular guy, a mama Pop landlord, just like they are, I’ve determined I’m going to be primarily marketing to other landlords. And so I want them just to see me as a peer, a regular person who’s reaching out to them in a regular person way, to them, who they too are a regular person. That is my guiding principle. So as I move on to the second step, which is how am I going to deliver the message to them, I’m using that guiding principle to determine the right way to reach out to them. So if I just very simply and straightforwardly ask the question, how would a regular person reach out to another regular person to express a sincere interest in buying a piece of real estate? One way that I feel is very appropriate and conveys that message of Hi, I’m a regular person is a simple letter. Now you can call this direct mail. And it is direct mail marketing, but it’s really letters. It’s not magic, mass produce letters, it’s not letters that look like solicitations. It’s not yellow letters that are involving fake handwriting, and say things like, I want to buy your house with all cash and clothes fast. And as is and all that kind of crap. Because that’s not what real people do. That’s not what regular people do. That’s not what appear would say to another peer, a peer would say, Hi, my name is Jeff, it’s nice to meet you. I’m reaching out because of x, y, and z, I’ve got a property in the same area as yours. I really like it; I’d like to buy another one. Have you ever thought about selling yours, if you have, I would love to have the opportunity to speak with you. You know, that’s the kind of thing that like a regular person would say to another regular person. Now we have a whole program for this, of course called seller direct mail mastery, that is really all about creating a process for delivering mail, at some level of scale, but without it feeling mass produced, it all should feel very, very personal. So once we do this, we go and we send out our letters, you know, guess what’s gonna happen? Well, the phone is gonna ring immediately. In some cases, it’s gonna rain a couple weeks later, it’s gonna rain A few months later, but the phone is gonna start ringing with people who are responding to our letters. And so the next process here under e engaging thoughtfully is we’re transitioning from marketing to sales, we now need to feel these phone calls. And the most important thing when you’re fielding the phone call is what I would call congruency. You’ve probably heard the expression brand consistency. Well, I would encourage you to think more about brand congruency. What is the experience that somebody had with you, of you, when they read your letter when they received it? When they looked at it? When they touched it? They opened it, they read the content? What was that experience like? And then now that they’re calling you, the experience should be exactly the same, right? So you would have a massive disconnect if you had this nice, personal peer to peer kind of letter. And then they call them the first thing you said was great. How much do you want? How many bedrooms are there? What square feet, oh, man, what’s the lowest you would take, that’s not going to fly because that’s not congruent with the experience you created for them in the marketing itself. So as we feel these calls, we need to be very congruent with our positioning. And our messaging that we conveyed in the initial contact of the letter.
Our goal here is to establish rapport with them. But frankly, it’s then it’s to get off the dang phone as fast as we can, because we are personal buyers. We are relational negotiators. You know, talking on the phone isn’t that bad, it’s surely better than you know, texting or emailing. But it’s nothing like being face to face with somebody. And so we want to intake this the seller, but we then want to naturally transition to setting a time for you to come meet them. And that’s the fourth step under the banner of he engaged thoughtfully is we’re going to go meet them in person. And we’re ideally going to meet them at their home, right? So the property you sent them the letter about very well may not be the house that they live in. So a lot of people sellers and most investors alike would say, Well, great, let’s go meet at, you know, the house, the rental house that I sent you the letter about. And I would encourage you not to do that. I would encourage you to meet them in their environment. You know why? Because meeting them in their environment will tell you a billion more things about them. This whole game is really about knowing your audience and knowing who the seller is knowing how they think and they feel in their opinions and everything else. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in the next episode when we get to the letter S for solve the person but you’re going to be able to solve the person a lot better if you are seeing their environment in person. It’s like the difference between watching black and white TV over the air with rabbit ears like they did in the 50s versus watching 4k High Definition TV today. You’re Get to know so much more, you’re gonna see so much clearer detail of what you’re really looking at when you’re there in person in their house. And I just want to point out that if we go back to the idea of branding being the experience that people have of you and us kind of intentionally designing the experience we want them to have, how you show up, when you literally show up at their house, how you show up, is very much your brand. If when you show up, if you are dressed in a certain way, that is absolutely having a huge impact on the way they’re perceiving you and the experience of having if you don’t shake their hand, or if you do shake their hand, if you shake it firmly, or if you don’t shake, you know, shake it loosely or limply. If you offer to take your shoes off, or if you don’t offer to take your shoes off. If you are polite, and you say thank you, and you know all of those types of things. That is your brand. And that too should be congruent with the whole experience they’ve had up to this point, because they got a letter from you. They had a first conversation with you. Now they’re seeing you show up at their house. And when they when they see show up at their house, they should be thinking, Okay, this is pretty much what I expected of this person, because that’s the expectation they set for me and I see this congruency throughout.
So the second step in the YESSES framework is we engage thoughtfully and we have to be thoughtful. And we’re not just using the word thoughtful because we’re thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs. But most people just say, Well, I need to find some leads. So they just start slapping up some marketing and gathering of however they can and they don’t really care. But we care greatly how we gather the leads and sort of the pre experience we deliver for people because we know that has massive downstream effects for the rest of our deal.
In the next episode, we’re going to be talking about S – solve the person. And then from there, we’ll continue on through the rest of the YESSES framework. That’s it for today’s episode of Racking Up Rentals. Again, show notes for today are at www.thoughtfulre.com/e46 for episode 46. Please do us a big favor by hitting that subscribe button and your podcast app. And if you wouldn’t mind, take a second to rate and review the show. Just give us your honest feedback. But again, the more ratings and reviews we have, the more it helps other people who might be searching for something just like this, to find us. Did you know that we also have a Facebook group for thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs? It’s totally free and it’s called Rental Portfolio Wealth Builders. We would love to have you join us there. If you just go to group.thoughtfulre.com. It’ll redirect you right there and you can hit the Join button. If you liked this episode, please take a screenshot of that and post that screenshot on your phone to Instagram and just tag us We are @thoughtfulrealestate all spelled out on Instagram.
Alright guys, I’ll see you in the next episode. And until then, this is Jeff from the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur signing off. Thanks for listening to Racking Up Rentals where we build long term wealth by being a win-win deal makers. Remember solve the person to unlock the deal and solve the financing to unlock the profits.
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