Commercial Real Estate Mastery: Episode 39
More Successful Cold Calling Methods
One of the best ways to find a property to buy is utilizing “cold calling”, which translates to simply picking up the phone and reaching out to potential sellers. In this Commercial Real Estate Mastery podcast we’re going to explore some modifications and refinements to this approach that can increase your odds and reduce your stress.
Episode 39: More Successful Cold Calling Methods Transcript
There are different ways to find a property to buy. There's online listings, there's brokers, there's direct mail, and then there's cold calling. Now, back in the 80s, when I first got into real estate and started doing my very first cold calling, I hated it. I much preferred the other options. Cold calling was a real downer. But I quickly realized that most of my success was coming from cold calling, and that I better learn to love it if I really wanted to succeed. This is Frank Rolfe with the Commercial Real Estate Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about cold calling and how to make it more successful, how to make it less stressful, and some things you definitely should watch out for.
Now, cold calling basically means reaching out to potential sellers and saying, "Hey, I'm looking to buy a property, is yours for sale? And if so, at what price?" It's not rocket science. Most everyone knows what you're doing. They know when they get a call and you start maneuvering to that direction exactly what's going on. It's a cold call. But cold calling, and I mean straight up cold calling, requires a whole different level of salesmanship ability than blended way when you blend cold calling with direct mail. So one way to make cold calling easier for you, I found that was my trick, is I would send out a direct mail first and then I would cold call to follow up to see if they got the direct mail. It seemed much more professional. I got much better results. You see that kind of thing today from Fisher Investments. You probably see all their ads for Fisher Investments. If you ever respond to any of their investment things, and you might, 'cause you'll see there's a free report on tax benefits and things like that. What they'll do is they'll start sending you information and then they'll start calling you to see if you got the information, if you had any questions with it. It really is a much easier initial cold call strategy.
Another way to get better cold call results in real estate is let people know that you have a pending 1031, even if you probably don't. Because when anyone hears the word 1031, they immediately think, "Here's a buyer who has money in their pocket burning a hole in it. They have a very short fuse before the 1031 runs out." That's another thing that some people have employed that just had pretty good results. Also, if you just truly, truly hate cold calling, sometimes you can hire someone to do it for you. Now, I'm not talking a virtual assistant in some other country in some other part of the world, someone where when they call the mom-and-pop seller, you hear chickens and roosters in the background. That's never gonna work. But maybe there's someone you know who's retired with good people skills and would have fun cold calling for you. And if so, you could work out an arrangement to pay them. Maybe pay them a base and then commissions if things can get acquired.
Another way to get better at cold calling is to take the stress off and realize all it is is you're simply trying to see what's available to buy at this moment. Because that really is what you're doing with the cold call. You're not passing a yay or a nay on the property. You don't even know the property. You just want to make sure that if you're gonna buy something, you got the best thing for your dollar that was available. So you're trying to just cast a really big net so you can make a decision on which is the best property. Another way to make cold calling fun is just enjoy people. Enjoy talking to people, learning about their lives. Never been on a call in my entire life where I didn't learn something, something about the history of the property or just human nature itself. So look at yourself more of a scientist who's just talking to people and learning about people.
Now, here are some ways to ruin cold calling, though. If those are some good ways to do better with it, here are some ways to ruin it. Number one, psych yourself out that every call is literally life or death. I knew a guy once, he did cold calling, worked for me, and one time he was talking to somebody and he got so upset that they weren't willing to sell the property at this very moment that he snapped a pen in half and the ink went all over the carpet. And I realized that is not the personality trait that you want. If you want to compete with something, compete with the number of calls you make that day, some kind of healthy competition. But if you look at each call as life or death, if you don't get this deal under contract, then you're gonna die, you are gonna ruin yourself, you're gonna get ulcers. So don't make cold calling that kind of a negative chore like that.
Another way to ruin your cold calling is to mechanically read from a script and not be yourself. It never works. You can't read a paragraph when someone answers the phone and expect for that to give any kind of immediate bonding. Bonding is that powerful force where two people like each other, and the seller is therefore more motivated to say, "Yeah, I'd sell at this price." You will never get there from reading the script. The script could be a guideline to get you going, but realize you gotta get off the script, gotta be yourself. Now, for most people, if they work from a script initially, after a few calls, they'll condense it, they'll realize what worked for them and ditch that which did not work for them. But professionals don't use scripts. They might have used it on day one for a few calls, and then they adopt their own better way to do it.
Also, if you're gonna cold call people, make sure you're cold calling the owner. You cannot cold call the manager. If you want to buy a property, you have to take the extra step to go to the tax assessor's database and get the name and the address of the actual owner. And then you can use a lookup service like whitepages.com to give you that property owner's phone number. But you can't just take the lazy approach and call up managers. Managers are not the people who would sell. And if you call a manager and say, "Hey, is your property for sale?" Of course they're gonna say no, because they know if the property gets sold, more than likely they're gonna get fired. But the most important tip I can give you in cold calling is don't ever not do it because it frightens you. If you talk to many people and you say, "What was the best deal you ever did?" You ever notice how many of those deals started with cold calling? If you take that out of your acceptable ways of finding deals, if you say, "No, I'm only gonna get deals online, brokers, and direct mail," you are missing one of the most valuable mechanisms to harvest good deals. You must never let your fear conquer this one item, take this away from you. It's not fair, it's not right. Even if cold calling seems unnatural initially, it gets better. After only a few calls, you will be shocked at how much more polished you are and how the stress just evaporates. So the number one tip on doing good cold calling is just that, do cold calling. This is Frank Rolfe with the Commercial Real Estate Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.
