Seth: Hey folks, how's it going? This is Seth Williams and Ajay Sharma. You're listening to episode 233 of the RE Tipster podcast. Today, we're talking about bottlenecks and why land investors are having a hard time getting as many deals in 2025. We're going to do a little bit of sales training on the acquisition side of the business. We're going to cover four different types of objections that we commonly encounter when we're talking to motivated sellers.

Ajay has even put together a pretty nice script that you can download for free. If you go to the show notes and check it out, retipster.com/233 is where you can get it. I think the inspiration for this conversation kind of goes back to when I was hanging out with Ajay at the Supercars event in Golden, Colorado, earlier this year.

He was talking about some of the sales training stuff he's been putting together and going through. He was just talking for like 15 or 20 minutes and my mind was just blown. Like he just had this stuff so well figured out and he had these little things that he was saying, like these ways to overcome objections and just deal with motivated seller leads. It's just like, man, if I could just remember, like, one sentence of what he said and repeat that in the future, like I can totally see how this would be way more effective at getting the job done.

So if I think this is pretty awesome, maybe other people in the REtipster community will too. So that's what we're going to go through today. It's going to be awesome. I'm looking forward to it. Ajay, welcome. How's it going?

Ajay: Thank you very much, Seth. It is going fantastic, man. It's always such a blessing to be able to get to share stuff here on the REtipster platform. I've shared this before in previous episodes and I'll share it again. I wouldn't even know what land investing was if it wasn't for REtipster.

So it's so fun for me five years into this to be able to come back and just share with the world all the things I've learned, the things that are working in our business and so much more, man. So yeah, I love it. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Seth: Yeah, it's unbelievable sometimes to me to know that I played some role in the great Ajay's evolution as a land investor. That's a huge honor. So appreciate you mentioning that.

Ajay: Yeah, no, definitely. Quick side note, my wife and I always have fun side chatter where I'm like, you know, if I had never seen that random REtipster video in my YouTube algorithm, I have to wonder, like, would I run different businesses? Would I still be at a W2? Probably not. Would I own a couple rentals? Like, I don't know.

You know, it's so hard to know, but I do know we're here now and this is where life's brought us. And it's been so fun getting to be a real estate investor, getting to be a land investor and just rubbing shoulders with the great people in our niche, man. So yeah, no, you've played a much bigger part than I think you give yourself credit for. And it is awesome to be here. So let's dive in.

Seth: Yeah, let's do it, man. Where do you want to start with this? The fact that I guess maybe this isn't true for everybody. In fact, I was actually just talking to somebody yesterday. I said, how's your land business going? And he said, it's better than it's ever been. I was like, oh, okay. I thought people were struggling in 2025.

So this might not be true for everybody, but certainly a lot of people that I come into contact with, and I know you as well, Ajay, have been finding things to be a little bit more difficult in some markets in terms of finding deals in the first place, which is the most critical component of this whole business working.

So any theories like, why do you think people are having a harder time with this? And what is the solution here? How can we use our brains and our sales skills to overcome that and get more of these deals to work?

Ajay: Yeah, no, this is a great question, Seth. I will say when I'm looking at an acquisition portion of a land business, and I've audited a couple hundred land businesses, I do one every time I onboard somebody into our sales training with the inner circle. I just look at a bunch of people's land businesses. I have conversations like we did in Colorado, and honestly, I can't help myself.

And so I see themes of why people are getting deals, right. You get to look at what's working in the businesses that are printing money in 2025, which is the minority and what's not working in other businesses. And I find I see a couple of themes, right. I'm going to boil it down to a macro framework and then we're going to go a little bit more micro framework on the macro side.

I heard this from a friend once and it's never left my brain. Every single day. Problem in the world where you're trying to numerically do more can be solved by asking, is this a leads problem or a conversion problem? Okay. I'm going to say that again. Is this a leads problem or a conversion problem? And those can mean a lot of different things inside of those buckets.

Now I will say I use this in other areas of my life as well that are actually quite funny. I had a buddy of mine that was trying to find a girlfriend at one point and we would use the same framework. Hey man, are you just not talking to enough gals? Is this a leads problem? Or are you not asking for a date? Is this a conversion problem?

So it's so funny, but sales and human nature, I mean, it's all one in the same, right? It's all human interaction to get a desired outcome, so to speak. And again, dating is a unique case and it's different for everybody, but it's a funny example to paint the picture that at its core, there's a numbers problem or a skillset deficit it somewhere, right? So those are the first two buckets that I want to pay.

Going a layer deeper, right? So tactically, if I'm looking at your land business, Seth, or my land business, and it's, hey, I'm not getting as many deals as I think I should be, or I'd like to. Right? Which are two different problems. But either if that's you, if you're listening to this, and you're not doing as many deals as either you want to be, or as you think you should, you feel like you should deserve of more based on what's coming through your pipeline, right?

This problem be solved at three different points, right? So the three biggest failure points that I see with investors are number one, not enough leads. Number two, not enough offers. And number three, like some issue with how we're like comping and making our offers, right?

So you and I both know back in, what was it? 2019, 20, 21, even parts of 22, you could send out thousands of blind offers and you'd get tons of stuff signed back. It was insane. I honestly look back at that and that was the best business I've ever laid eyes on. I wish I understood the world of business back then, but the point just being, you could pick stuff up at 30 cents on the dollar all day long, right?

Well, as we're sitting here in 2025, seller sentiment is always a couple of years behind where the market actually is. And unfortunately the market was at the top about three years ago. And so what that means is seller sentiment is still stuck there a lot of times, unless we're finding some level of pain from our sellers.

Because of that, we're finding ourselves having to offer a lot more than we used to, right? If it was 30% of market value, some of my friends that are some of the best flippers, guys that you know extremely well that have been doing this since 2016, 17, 18, 19, they're still flipping, but they might buy 50 to 60 cents on the dollar right now, right.

And I know in prior conversations, we've talked about wholesaling. You're obviously mathematically going to convert deals. If you offer people more money. Okay. Let me paint that at the extremes. So if I offer a hundred thousand people, 1% of market value versus a hundred thousand people, a thousand percent of market value, 10 X what it's actually worth? In which scenario do you think I'll have more people say yes?

Seth: Yeah, probably the latter.

Ajay: Probably the latter. I would agree. I could be wrong, but I think that's probably where you'll have more success.

But the point being, I mean, Seth, even I'll ask you with your self-storage facility with the boat and RV rental, right? Let's say that thing is worth, you know, let's call it 3 million bucks today. I have no idea what it's worth market value, but let's pretend we've made a wave to magic wand. That's market value. If I called you up and said, Hey, Seth, I'd like to give you $30 million cash for that right now. Would your ears perk up? Would you be intrigued? Would you probably say yes?

Seth: I need a few nights to sleep on that before I decide. Yes, I would say yes to that for sure.

Ajay: Totally, right. And so I just, I like to paint the extremes so people understand the different failure points here, right. So I know I'm drilling down on that number piece because it's actually the one I'll talk about least here in a second, but the point just being we're having to offer more than we did in the past, right?

So that becomes a really important piece or like your comps are just a little bit too conservative. So you think you're offering 40 cents on the dollar, but you're actually offering 25 cents on the dollar, right? Which are drastically different effects based on extrapolating the example we just painted here, right?

Now the first two leads and offers are somewhere we can spend a lot of time in. Where do you want to start?

Seth: Well, maybe it would help to just point out where is the failure point on each one of these things. So not enough leads, that basically just comes down to, as people sometimes say, send more mail or send more texts or more cold calls, like just do more of that, the initial outreach, right?

And then not enough offers is, you know, basically. Answer the phone when they call and call them back and follow up, like really get to the end of the line on every possible lead that responds. Like don't just shrug it off or take a week to get back to them. Like really make the most of every opportunity.

And then the offers portion is make the best possible offer you can. Like don't just flippantly throw stuff out there. Don't make it too low. Like try to understand each prospect before you make the offer. Is that Am I on the right track with all three of those?

Ajay: Absolutely. So I'll get really specific on this. I think anybody that's followed your and I's conversations for any amount of time, you and I are not known to be gatekeepers. So I want to get really specific so people have very, very tangible action items coming out of this.

I'll also say, it's so funny in my sales brain as I hear you say this, all the information you said is logically true. And in my brain now, I'm like, well, but we might have negotiating chips and bargaining chips and, and, you know, things in negotiation that we could do differently. Guys stay till the end. We're going to talk a lot about that stuff a little bit later on. So you can lock up deals with deeper discounts than you would otherwise.

But to answer your earlier question, Seth, I want to first say, you know, here are like the five or six key performance indicators that I'm going to track. And I've talked about it before, but if this is your first time listening in on one of our sales conversations, these are the activities that are leading indicators to deals.

So like these are the things I need to know to know how to predict what my deal flow will look like or diagnose what my bottleneck is in my business. OK, so the first one is gross leads. So when we say leads at a high level, I'm talking about how many people in your pipeline are saying, hi, Seth, my name is Ajay. I own a piece of vacant land and I would sell.

Okay. So it's just a person that owns a property that would sell. Generally, I would call that a lead, right? The key difference there is anybody that's been here for any amount of time. And especially if you've sent direct mail, you get a bunch of FUs. Don't call me back. Lose my number. I'm on the do not call list. I'm going to sue you and your family and take anything to own or whatever, whatever convoluted schemes people have. It's so funny, but that's our gross lead, right?

Person owns a property wants to sell. So you send them out text messages. Somebody says, yes, you qualify, you push them. Cold call lead, somebody says, yeah, go ahead. Even if it's not the best lead, but it's just, yeah, I own a property, I'd consider selling it, make me an offer. Direct mail, they call back, what's your offer, right? So like any of those would say that's a gross lead.

Now, net leads are up for interpretation in terms of definition. I'll state how we keep track of them on our team. It is a prospect that I want to do business with, is how I think about it, right? Because when I qualify a property, I do that based on two different variables, Seth. Number one is the property and number two is the person. Okay. And here's what I mean by that.

If you call me back, right, but you don't own the property, your deceased brother's wife owns the property, right? It is hard for me to do business with you. Like, I don't know that I'd call that a qualified prospect for me to talk to. Now you might be gatekeeping. You might not. You might just be like a scumbag that's trying to sell this out from under her because he thinks he should have gotten his inheritance. I don't know. We deal with a lot of different dynamics in this business.

My point being at the person level, I need to verify I'm talking to the right person. They would sell for a reasonable price in a reasonable amount of time. And I'm able to just like get back on the phone with them. Right? So those are all my people classifications for a net lead.

On the property side, we all know in this business, we have to do some level of high level due diligence. So you get a property that hits your pipeline. Let's say it's covered in floodplains is landlocked and the person wants 300 K for it, which I don't know that I want to open the can of worms of asking price just yet. But the point there just being, as I paint that picture for any investor that's ever gotten leads, you and I both know we're like, okay, we're probably not doing that deal for being honest, right?

Seth: Probably not worth my time.

Ajay: So the point just being there's a level of qualification between a gross lead and a net lead. And I do that based on the person and the property. I like alliteration. So you're going to hear it a lot.

Next, you have your actual offers made. Okay. And this is honestly one of the most important things when it comes to anything in sales. I painted the picture of a dating earlier. And you'll notice one of the things I said, I hope I said it, I think I said it in my brain, was like, did you actually ask the gal on a date? Gal or guy or whatever, right?

Because you go talk to a thousand people, a thousand prospects, but if you don't ask a single one of them to go join you for the movies or ice cream or whatever kids are doing on their dates these days, I've been happily married for over a year, so I don't know. I've been with my wife over five years, happy to say it, but the point being, whatever it is that you kids are asking people to go on dates and do, are you actually asking for the date? Because people can't tell you yes or no if you don't.

Well, in the same vein with land, right? I hear from so many investors, they're like, ah, their asking price was 120 grand and it's only worth a hundred. So I didn't even call them back. And I'm like, okay, so if you didn't call them back, what are your odds of doing that deal? Well, zero. Okay. What are your odds of doing that deal? Well, if you do call it back, probably more than zero.

So my whole thesis, Seth, and I'll continue going through these KPIs, but my thesis and so much of my process is all based on probability. What can I do to raise the probability of my desired outcome? So reasonably, I can deduce if I talk to more people, if I make more offers, and if I do it in a way that helps the seller see this is a good path for them. I can make mathematical deduction that more people will work with me, right?

And so that's offers made. Let's drill down another layer. Offers accepted. So that's when a seller actually tells you yes. And I'm going to clarify and call some people out here. That's not, yeah, sure, go ahead, send me the contract and I'll think about it. That's not, yeah, I just need to go talk to my wife. That's not, call me back in 30 days, but sure, you can send the contract. Those are all objections.

I want, yeah, no, $75,000 would be great. There wouldn't be anything stopping us from working together. Yeah, go ahead and send it over. Let's go. that's a yes, right? But after that, we all know there's a drop-off point in people saying yes to contracts getting signed. So that's the next KPI, right? So we've got gross leads, net leads, offers made, offers accepted, and then contracts signed.

Seth: Based on what you said there, to clarify, we are not just sending contracts without them verbally saying, yes, I will take that number, right? We're not throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. We're sending contracts when we know they've said yes. Is that accurate?

Ajay: That's correct. Yeah, that's our sales process internally. I have some other investors I've talked to, like our mutual friend, Mike Balcom, who I know historically will go ahead and send it out. They might get an extra one or two PAs every quarter. I don't know how to weigh it out in terms of like, well, what about all the people that don't sign? Would they have signed if we had withheld this piece of information that we have from these sellers?

So I don't have an answer for that. My personal philosophy is I don't like sending out PAs until I've got a yes, or at least some level of commitment, right? So that's the biggest thing is I want commitment out of my seller. I don't want things to be wishy-washy. I want a promise ring, Seth.

So I'm trying to remember what your initial question was about a leads problem. Yeah. So here's where I want to drill down on specifics too, is I'll tell everybody right now, when we say a leads problem, right? I would really focus on the number of leads at both the gross lead level and the net lead level, right?

Because at a gross lead level, right? Are you just getting enough leads? I would tell every investor out there, if you're getting less than 30 leads a month, less than 30, you're probably not bringing in enough lead flow to do deals every single month. So that's a minimum. That's a bare minimum. If you want to be doing one to three contracts, you're getting signed every month.

And we all know here, if you've been doing business for any amount of time, you're going to get somewhere between a 20 to 40% drop off after a contract gets signed because of title issues you either can't solve or don't want to solve, or you can't find a buyer if you're double closing within an amount of time and your seller won't let you extend. Like there are reasons these deals drop off.

So you always need to plan for even more deals, more contracts to be signed than deals you actually are hoping to get done. So just another thing when it comes to planning with your investors, but I'd say at least 30, if you want to make sure you're doing any reasonable amount of business. I tell most investors I work with, like you should really try to get up to like 120 to 180 a month if you want to be making meaningful amounts of money in this business. So.

Just to make my point too, so at the gross lead level, you're looking at just a raw number. At the net lead level, you want to see if there's something you could fix in your data piece, right? Could we be scrubbing better? Is the lead channel not bringing in quality leads for some reason? Is there a check that's supposed to be in place that is not?

Should my VA at the texting level should have double checked if a property is landlocked and they did not? And now we're getting landlocked properties in our leads. So those are the two pieces that I'm mainly looking at when I say, is it a leads problem? Do I have enough? And then is there something in my data that we could fix? So we're getting enough of properties we actually want to do business with. Is this making sense?

Seth: Yeah, absolutely.

Ajay: Awesome. Let's talk about the conversion problems. How does that work?

Seth: Yeah, that's fantastic.

Ajay: So like I said, leads problem, conversion problem. So I'm glad we painted the picture in terms of key performance indicators here. As we start focusing on a conversion problem, the first thing I'm going to ask people oftentimes is, hey, how many offers did you make? Right?

So like, if you're telling me I'm not getting deals, well, if you only had three leads that week, you probably didn't make more than three offers. So we can usually work backwards from there, right? So there's like the center point of how many offers did you make this past week, this past month, just yesterday, whatever. And that's going to tell a story for us.

Right now, there are some people that make a lot of offers. I was on the phone with a gentleman yesterday and he made 120 offers in the month of July and got one contract signed. Now, if you don't know, that's a bad ratio guys. And I'll, I'll, I'll point you through some good ones later, but that signals to me conversion problem. We have done the activity that should elicit the result, which is offers. And we're sitting here without the result, which is contracts, right? And so that tells me there's a gap.

Now here's where I see that process begin to fail is my first question would be okay on those offers how many verbal acceptances did you have right which a lot of times if that's low like if that's below we'll say five percent on like the lowest level then i would say we have a scripting issue we need to revisit the script we need to do role play which is where i sit in with my my acquisition manager and we just practice we have fictitious fake conversations and we go back and forth and back and forth so that you get the repetitions right.

It's like making, if you guys are basketball fans, it's like shooting free throws before you're actually playing a game, right? You're just getting practice before you actually go in. Is there something in the verbiage you're tripping up on, you're not comfortable with? You probably got some quip in your verbal Rolodex that you say all the time.

The easiest picture to paint is when somebody says, hey, good morning, Seth. How are you? And if you're Ajay, you say, live in the dream. That's like my go-to quip, right? Easy for me to say because I've said it 25,000 times. Scripting is the exact same way where if you've said it a bunch of times, it'll come out naturally. You'll be able to think on it quickly.

Another example I like to paint for people is I'll ask them like what their favorite movie is. And because we're all salesmen here, I get a bunch of people telling me The Wolf of Wall Street, which is not a PG movie. Excuse me. Yeah, just very rated R. Do not watch around kids. But hilarious film.

Now, in that, though, I would ask you, hey, does Leonardo DiCaprio seem scripted? And you'd be like, well, no. Like, he's a phenomenal actor. I'd be like, OK, well, did he have a script? Yeah, of course. OK. So the script isn't the issue. It's not a matter of does a script mess up a conversation? It's a question of how good you are with it. because Martin Scorsese knows what he's doing when it comes to scripting and directing, right?

Seth: Does it ultimately just come down to practice? Is that the bottom line? Or are some people just terrible actors? Like they're never going to get it.

Ajay: How I would answer it is some people are going to be stronger with that skill than others, right? It's the same reason that, maybe not the exact same reason, but I was going to say it's the same reason that LeBron James was better at basketball at 18 than I was, you know, but I'm also five foot 10 and very different genetics. So I'm making myself thinking about it.

But the point being, we have natural gifts. I think what I will say is anybody can be a salesperson, as long as they are willing to to do enough, to train enough, to have enough of these conversations, right? So I wouldn't say it's natural for everybody, but I would say that some people are going to need more work with a script than others, right?

I mean, even between you and I, man, I got tons of love for you, Seth, but there's a reason we're both sitting on the sides of this podcast. We are, we're like, Hey, I'm brought in for this. So if we were going to have a conversation about a new script that got in front of us, thankfully I've got sales as a skill. I'd learn it faster than you. Does that mean you're bad at it. No, it just means that I am able to learn that rapidly because that's a skill set I've got in, in my toolbox.

Whereas like on the other side, if I was like, Hey man, I wanted to start a podcast and go viral. I wouldn't know where to begin. I'd be terrible for a very long time, right. And so that's something you've acquired. And there's so many things that are probably second nature in your brain between thumbnails and hooks and copy and like all these things that I wouldn't know, right. Maybe I can speak the language in the same way you can about sales. But there's a skill set and an experience and a piece in there and growth. Is this making sense?

Seth: This is definitely helping in terms of just the acting portion of it, understanding the script, knowing how to deliver that well. But another part of it, when I think of not making enough offers, I imagine there are times when you don't make offers, right?

Like say, if you're talking to not even a motivated seller, but just a seller and they have a million dollar ranch and they say, yeah, I don't need to sell it. Give me above asking price or I'm not going to sell the thing. Do you make offers on literally everything, no matter what they tell you? Or at what point do you say, no, I'm not even going to bother making an offer.

And what if you get a bunch of people responding to your mail campaign or cold calling or whatever, and they're all like that? None of them seem motivated. Where do you stop in terms of cutting it off and saying, nope, it's not with my time to send an offer. And what if they're all like that?

Ajay: That's a great question. And I'm like chuckling as you're asking, because I would tell you there's probably 90% of people listening to this, that as you painted of that picture, their ears perked up and they were like, yeah, that's what I'm going through right now, Seth. Thanks for asking that.

So here's the reality is. This business working is so largely based on timing. And I mean timing from our seller's life. I want to remind everybody that, and I promise I'll answer your question directly, but I want to remind everybody that the average American, 50% of Americans cannot cover an unexpected $500 expense.

And what we do as land investors is we sell money. Now, I know we buy and sell land, but at the end of the day, we offer money for a property that more often than not, they do not have utility for. And so as we set that as our fundamental foundation, you realize how much power and leverage you have in these conversations.

Because sellers can tell me whatever they want, Seth. They can tell me they want a billion dollars for their $100,000 property. And frankly, I don't believe them. And honestly, I chuckle a lot of times when people tell me that stuff on a call because man, I know that other investors are not making the offer. So now I feel like I've got an edge where I'm the first person that's ever going to make them a serious offer.

I'll give you an example. I was speaking with a lady and this example does not end in a deal, but it does paint a picture to answer your question. But I was speaking to a lady who owned this beautiful industrial property about 30 miles from where I live. And it was probably worth, golly, maybe 1.5 as is realistically. But it was, man, it was awesome industrial lot, which those things can cashflow like a machine if you jig them, right? I mean, right. You know that.

And so I'm looking at this and I'm like, man, I'd be able to raise money for this. And like, I'm intrigued. And so I'm talking to this lady and I think her name was Kathy, if I remember right. But I was saying, hey, Kathy, you know, can I ask what were you looking for on the property? And she had inherited this. So I'm chomping at the bit. She's like, ah, probably 5 million.

And I'm like, 5 million? And this thing's worth like 1.5 on a good day, right? And the market's not getting better, Kathy. That's not what I said. And I was like, 5 million bucks, whoa. So my typical question is, I want to find out what people would do with the money, right? And so I ask her, I say, hey, Kathy, let's say I was able to get you that 5 million. What are we doing to celebrate?

That's one of my go-to quips. I get probably a 30 to 40% positive response on it. The other 60 is, I don't know. So it's not a majority of the time it works, but when it does, it gives me some useful information. She said to me, she said, well, to be honest, I'd probably go buy me a bottle of that nice Crown Royal. I was like, what? Like a nice bottle of whiskey? That's what we're doing with our $5 million check.

So I laughed with her about it. I joked about the Crown Royal, built up some natural rapport, and then went in and I say, look, Kathy, I'm going to be honest with you, I see investors are paying between 800,000 and 1.2 million for properties like these. I mean, what would you say if I even made an offer like that? And she was like, well, I'd probably say no. I'm like, okay. I mean, that makes sense.

But Kathy, can I ask like, what's the most serious offer you've ever gotten on the property? She says, well, to be honest, you're the first person that's ever even talked about numbers. Most people hang up after they hear mine.

Seth: And also to clarify, when we say serious offer, are we talking about the amount of money that the seller wants? Or are we talking about an offer with the actual intent to close?

Ajay: The former. So really just like numbers. Like so many people hear 5 million and they're like, okay, I'm not going to be able to get to that. I hope you have a great rest of your day. And they get off the phone, right? And I'm going to push a little bit, right?

And so I'll go ahead and make a range of offer. she says no. And I'm like, so Kathy, you're telling me if I got you a check for a million bucks right now, you wouldn't even be interested. And she's like, no. And I'm like, okay. I mean, can I ask her, are you just planning to sit on this thing until somebody is willing to offer you that 5 million? She's like, yeah, like I don't really need the money. I make some cash off of it from some truck rental, something hoopla, you know?

So she's telling me she still works, doesn't really want to retire. Doesn't really need the money for anything. So there's not a ton of motivation there to your point, but I still make the offer because Seth, there are times on the other end where they tell you this obscene number. And because you're the first person that makes the offer, they end up wanting to work with you where they're like, oh, wow, no one's ever like, oh, that's, huh. I would need to think about that, I guess.

And then if you can paint pictures, right? And this is where we're getting closer to some negotiation type stuff. But like, if you can start painting pictures for your prospects on how their life changes after they get this check, right? Oh, you want to take your wife on a vacation? I mean, how great would that be if you could do that and say the next 90 to 120 days? And they're like, wow, that'd be fantastic.

Now they're visioning this vacation with their wife or this RV they've been wanting to buy or this new backyard they're wanting to redo or put in a new fence because apparently those are extremely expensive for whatever reason, right? And so the point being like, I want to paint my prospect's desire to end state to create some level of desire from them, a desire for change in state, right? They would need to want something different is my point.

So if I can do that in the conversation, we change the conversation from the property's worth this. I want this money to, I want this thing. And now you buying my property can help me get this thing. And it becomes a whole different conversation. Does this make sense?

Seth: Yeah. That helps a ton to paint a picture. A lot of times I don't even think about that, but I can see how that really makes it more real. And yeah.

Ajay: And even to take that a layer deeper, Like when I hear about asking price, gosh, it is such a funny thing because I always say I quoted the Wolf of Wall Street earlier. I don't know if people have seen the movie. Great. But there's the scene with Matt McConaughey where he's sitting in at the table with Leo and he's like, oh, it's all a fugazi. You know what a fugazi is? It's a fugazi. It's a fugazi. It's a wazi. It's a woozy. It's you know, and he goes about this whole thing about how it's just like it's all made up.

So it's the same thing with asking price in my brain. Like every time I hear an asking price, I'm like asking prices are made up. I don't care. And what I will say is when I'm coaching people to convert more deals and they ask me, they're like, dude, I got so many leads and I got all these tire kickers asking for these crazy prices. I do tell people, go ahead and prioritize leads that don't have obscene asking prices.

The reality is your odds of doing a deal are higher if somebody is asking prices more reasonable. So you should focus your efforts on people that have more reasonable asking prices. That's not to say there are not deals in those. If you're sitting around with tons of bandwidth, hungry for deals, make offers to everyone, make offers, make offers, make offers. And like, what's your worst case scenario? Somebody curses you out and hangs up on you.

Seth: Just a normal part of it.

Ajay: Well, I'm wondering the overcoming objections thing. What are the four big objections and what's your secret to overcoming those?

Seth: Yeah, that's a great question, Seth. So before I can answer that directly, I need to set a fundamental assumption for that. That's really important. When it comes to objections, my goal is to eliminate an objection before I have to overcome it. Okay. And so here's what I mean is if I know something is going to come my way, if I know there's going to be an issue, I can drive the conversation to a place where the things that might cause an issue I can address beforehand, right?

It's a system. In the same sense, we build systems in our business. So there are not problems later on in a conversation, conversations, a system, right? So I just need to take these chunks of this conversation and put it in places where it serves me in my conversation. So the reason I'm bringing this up is it is so much easier to eliminate an objection, meaning kill it all together before it actually becomes one before we talk price. The reason for that being if you don't.

Your prospect, your seller might actually tell you about an objection that's really just about price. So I want to get as many objections out of the way beforehand, before we talk price as I can. Now, I'll answer your question directly. Okay. So there are four types of objections and different sales trainers will chop this up different ways. They're all kind of saying the same thing. Some people say three, some people say four, and then some people have different terms for what I'm about to list, but it's all the same stuff.

So first one is a partner spouse objection, right? So this is a, Hey Seth, I got to talk to my wife, Erin, before I can sign off on this. This is, Hey, my brother owns the property with me. I got to talk to him. Well, my, my kids are kind of involved since they're going to inherit this. Well, my dentist, for whatever reason, does my estate planning. No, I don't know. I'm just making stuff up, but it's a, it's partner spouse. There's some other person that has a sense of authority here, or at least perceived authority in this conversation, right? That's partner spouse.

Next, you've got a level of timing objection, right? That's, hey, grandma just died and we don't have the bandwidth to deal with this right now. Can you call me back in 30 days, right? There's some reason, some event as to why we are, we should not do this right now, okay?

Next is a level of certainty slash trust, right? And that sounds like I need to think about it or when you go for a double closing, people are unsure on the timeline because they're not sure you're actually going to close and they think you're a scam, There's all kinds of stuff that can make them think you're not actually going to get the thing that you're offering them. We offer people money and they're nervous they're not actually going to get their money or they're getting scammed out of their property. The last one is price.

And price is our most obvious objection where we're at a difference in price. Now, there's no easy way to just overcome that objection. That's where negotiations really come into play. So now let's start picking these apart one by one. Partner, spouse, and timing are the easiest two to try to nip in the bud before price. Yeah. Before we talk price. Okay.

So if I'm talking about a partner spouse objection, I'm trying to eliminate it beforehand. I might ask you, Hey Seth, does, can I ask, does your wife know we're having this conversation about the property or are you on some kind of a secret mission right now? And you might say, no, I'm not on any secret mission. She knows we're talking about it. Okay. She knows. So it sounds like you guys have had conversations about selling the property before. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Okay, great. So if you and I came to an agreement on a number, then it would probably be something you guys had already talked about, right?

Seth: Yeah, Exactly.

Ajay: Okay, great. So now I know I should not get just a random, I need to talk to my wife objection about price specifically, right? I can drill down on layers deeper of what that sounds like after a price objection, or after the price drop, I should say. But that's how I would start to address that before a price drop, right? Is this making sense how you can then kind of eliminate that all together?

Seth: Perfect.

Ajay: And so next would be timing, which is before I go into like my pitch. And that's where when I say pitch, I'm saying, Hey, Seth, just so you know, we're the best land investors in the world. We're going to make this super easy. we close in 90 days, there's no commissions, there's no da-da-da-da-da-da-da, our title companies will. Do backflips for you and all the stuff that we tell people.

And, you know, for whatever reason, in land scripts, back when I started doing this, I was always at the very beginning of conversations, I like to shower people in past experiences and authority and how our process works right before we get into price. So we build a level of certainty right before it, right? So I'm very centered around the process of our conversation is to not get objections, basically, right?

So that's how we try to mitigate for certainty slash trust. There are other ways, depending on, the actual objection on the back end. And then last is price. And that's all a function of best practices. I say, get our asking price early so we can play with that. And we have the ammunition. If it's a price that's super low, now we know we can do it. If it ends up being super high, then ultimately we can play with it. There's some different things we can do. But if we have that information, there are more things we can do with it than if we don't have the information.

Seth: When I think about the price specifically, like what we're willing to offer for this property, a lot of that has to do with what we know about the property, right? Like how much we've researched it, if we've uncovered any problems with it. So are we having this conversation about an offer price after we've done all that research? Or is this happening like first call with the person when we don't actually even really know that much yet? We haven't even asked them all the questions yet. Like at what point are we inserting this number?

Ajay: Yeah. So I would say you would do that on the conversation where you're ready to make an offer.

Seth: So is that like the second call or something, or like, say if they say, nope, that's not enough. I need twice that amount. Then you can come back with, oh, but there's this problem and this problem. Did you know about that?

Ajay: Yeah. So you have to actually have that information on hand before you can make the offer price.

Seth: That's exactly right. So we typically will have our offer conversation on the second call is what we do. We'll do a two call close. So it's on the second one.

Ajay: Yeah. To that point too, when it comes to the actual offer call, I mean, there's a bunch of stuff in this conversation that we do, and I'm just trying to give you, you know, spark notes that we can jump into on our limited time here today, right? Another one to your point is, well.

So I'll just touch on this right now. And then I want to take objections themselves a layer deeper. But it's, it's this concept that I call a reverse objection. And I learned it from a rapper, you probably know, being from Michigan, his name's Eminem. You heard of this guy?

Seth: I've heard of that guy.

Ajay: Yeah. Okay, yeah. He's like pretty well known in Michigan. There's this place in Detroit, 8 Mile. I don't know if there's this, I'm joking around, but there's the movie. Have you seen the movie, 8 Mile?

Seth: I have, yeah.

Ajay: okay it's phenomenal film again also not pg but the pinnacle of the movie the climax is in that final rap battle basically and eminem's whole thing right when he's rapping is he says everything that's negative about him right i am white i am a bleeping bum i do live in a trailer with my mom my boy is a uncle tom or something right and so he just like lists all this stuff that's bad about him then he finishes it off with like here tell these people something they don't know about me, hands over the mic to the other guy, Mr. Mackey, and then he's got nothing, right? He chokes because he doesn't have any fuel on him. He can't say anything.

Now, there's a sales principle here where if I know I'm frequently going to get an objection from my prospect, I'm going to go ahead and say it first. Here's the example. If you're listening to this and you don't do this, it is going to change your entire conversation forever. But early in the conversation, I'd call, hey, Seth, did I catch you at a bad time? No, what's going on?

Hey, this is Ajay with Essence Frakers. I'm calling about your 10 acre in Calhoun County. You know, I know you spoke with, Veronica on my team a couple of days ago, just circling back here to see if you were still interested in, in having a chat about it. Yeah, of course. Like. What do we got? You know, then I'm going to insert the frame, which is like the agenda for the call, basically.

Well, Seth, typically our process here is I just need to ask you a couple of clarifying questions and then we'll jump into an offer should take about 10 minutes. You have 10 minutes right now. Yeah. And so that whole piece there where I tell them I need to ask my questions before I can make you an offer stops my prospect from saying, well, what's your offer?

So many times early in this conversation it's a friction point that's really hard to come back from when somebody kind of swings at you you know and they hit you with well what's your offer and it's like well shoot man like i didn't want to do this right so all that to say yeah that's that's where we get some good leverage there another place it gets a reverse objection right if they if you know there's going to be friction coming if you can say it first it takes away that power right the other one we get a lot with again the scripts that people were using in 2019.

Is I would ask you a question like, hey, Seth, so can I ask, why are you interested in selling your property? And you're trying to learn about motivation. Well, the reality is they don't really want to sell. And so when you say that, you almost trigger them more often than not. And the prospect will clap back and they'll say, well, I never said I wanted to sell. You guys called me, right?

So I heard that so many times doing call reviews with my clients where I baked into the script, the reverse objection where it's, hey, Seth, I know we're the ones that reached out to you about selling, but can I ask, did you and your wife have any interest in selling your property before we had called? See how that's a very different question now, right.

And they can't say, well, no, because you guys called me. They might, you might get like 5% of people that are just dumb, but the other 95% are going to tell you they either were or were not thinking about selling before. And if they were right in the event that they were now, they've admitted to us, they were thinking about selling. Oh, how long have you been thinking about selling six months? Was there anything going on six months ago? Yeah, we have this event, blah, blah, blah, right.

And now it's a conversation where we really start to get into a piece of motivation that doesn't make people defensive. Is this making sense?

Seth: Yeah. Yeah. So super fun with the reverse objections, but going back to our initial four objections, right? We've got partner spouse, timing, price, certainty slash trust. Okay. I've walked everybody through what it looks like before the price drop, but the question is, well, what if it happens after, right?

So let's say we negotiate, we get to a price that works for everybody, or we think it does. And they say, well, I just need to go, you know, double check with my wife, right? Well, now I need to ask questions about, shoot, what's the outcome of this going to be and try to still go for the close. So I might ask, well, Seth, what do you, what do you think your wife's going to say? Can I ask you guys talked about price before this? I mean, is this in line with that price range you guys had talked about before, right.

And if it's a yes, then it's okay. Well, why do you think she wouldn't want us to work together, right. Figure out if there's already an objection and they're just deflecting versus. You know, you can also go down paths of like a lot of times I just want feedback, right. So I mentioned some level of this already, but Hey, how long you've been married to your wife? 15 years. Okay. in 15 years, knowing Kristen, you probably got to know her pretty well, right? Yeah. Super well. Okay.

Well, Hey, I mean, what do you think she's going to say when you bring all this up to her? And like, you're probably going to have some idea, right? And so there's ways we can go down the path where we need to go. And the goal is to get to a place where it's like, I don't think she's going to have any issues with it. And I'm going to say, okay, well, I mean, if she's not going to have any issues with it, is there anything stopping us from going ahead and just going through the agreement together right now?

I'm going to go for the sale again. And that's that piece where I say, Hey, are you asking the guy or the gal out on the date? Are you going for the sale? Like you need to be okay. Asking for the sale more than once, make your offer more than once. And this is a theme that's just central to getting what you want. And I think it's biblical. Like I've talked about this before where like there's that verse asking you shall receive, right?

I don't think that's just like, ask the Lord and he'll give you stuff as much as like, you need to ask the world and you will get, if you don't ask, you can't get right. And so the more you ask, the more you will get. And that's not in a one-to-one relationship. Nobody ever said every time you ask, you will get every time, right? It was asking you shall receive. So you ask for sales more times in a way that gets people to see why this is a good idea for them and you will receive more. Does this make it sense?

Seth: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Ajay: So that's a good point with partner spouse with timing. Most of the objections we get on the back end are really people not wanting to give us double closed timelines, like 90 days, 120 days. Because, you know, one of the things I'll always do before I pitch a longer timeline too, well, I'll ask, Hey Seth, you've you mentioned you've owned the property for 15 years. So can I ask you're not in any kind of rush to be selling the property, which is also, it's like a reverse objection question that I've gotten because we had so many people be like, well, I'm not in any kind of rush to sell the property. I don't need the property. I could sell it forever.

So I took it and I asked the question first where I'm like, Hey, you're not in any kind of rush to sell. Are you? And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not in any kind of rush. Okay, great. Well, we'll have this closed out within 120 days. And I go, why so long? And I'm like, and I'll answer the question with my objection handling framework that we can touch on and then come back to the question, but you did mention you weren't in any kind of rush to sell the property, right? And that always gets another layer in, right? So that's how we'll address that.

Certainty and trust, if there's some deficit, I mean, there's things you can do, right? Hey, I want to send this to my attorney. I have an attorney on retainer. I'd recommend most investors should. And I would say, hey, totally makes sense. Our process here, Seth, is if we're sending an agreement over to an attorney, we got to make sure it gets to them in a timely manner and that our attorney is available to answer any questions they have. So what's their email? So I can go ahead and get this over to them directly.

And I'm doing two things there, right? I'm calling them out on actually having an attorney and I'm also offering up my expensive $450 an hour attorney, whoops, I am very willing to pay for because he's fantastic. But now if they can talk, there's a level of legitimacy there, right? And even if there wasn't, because I'm offering and I'm offering to just go ahead and send it to them directly versus being like, no, you shouldn't do that, right? So that's how we'll address, you know, different, different types of objections when it comes to price.

I want to get an asking price beforehand, if I can. And then with my ranged offer, my whole goal is feedback. So it's really interesting. But again, lady wants five mil. I offer her between 800 and 1.2. Okay. A lot of people tell me, they're like, Ajay, I make my ranged offers and sellers don't like them. I'm like, yeah, no duh. We low ball for a living. Okay. Of course, most of your sellers don't like them. The purpose of a lot of these questions is not to become friends with your sellers, right? It is to drive to a desired outcome of us doing business together.

What I can tell you is, again, we talked about probability, Seth. In my mind, one of the fastest ways to lower my probability of doing business with somebody is for them to hang up on me and not pick up my phone again, right? And if I make an offer that's 35% or 40% of market value, I will tell you from personal experience and from coaching a ton of other investors on sales training, you get hung up on a lot.

Now, if I can shift blame, hey, other investors are paying and deliver a range, I very seldomly get hung up on. So the two things I'm trying to accomplish with a range daugher where I shift blame on my price portion is to get feedback and to not get hung up on. And if those two things happen successfully, we won. You know what I mean? We have accomplished what we've set out to do and I'm going to get information.

Oh, no, that's too low. Too low. Okay. I mean, if it's too low, that sounds like you've got a number in your head that you would take. So would you mind sharing what that is, right. And now we've opened up the whole can of worms for negotiations, right. So what questions do you have so far?

Seth: So, Ajay, do you have some kind of like a framework for how you handle these objections?

Ajay: Fantastic question, Seth. Yes, I it's funny. I did not mean to do this. But after after coaching so many people on handling objections, I realized there was like a theme as I was doing it. And so I came up with like, it's fun and quippy of like Ajay's ADEQ objection handling framework, right? So I think when Jeremy Lee Minor, who's a famous sales trainer talks about sales, he's got NEPQ. I don't know what any of those stand for except for Q is question, same amount of letters, ADEQ, and they're an acronym. All right.

So the A is acknowledge. So somebody hits me with an objection like, Hey, I need to talk to my wife, right? First thing I'm going to do is acknowledge the objection. That might sound like, hey, totally understand. I've been married just over a year and I'd want to check in with my wife too if we were selling a property. E, that next piece is disarm, which A and D go hand in hand. Acknowledge and disarm oftentimes are like in the same sentence where, you know, I say, hey, I totally understand. I would also want to do this thing. So I acknowledge the objection and then I try to disarm, diffuse the conversation. Let's bring down how tense it is.

The next thing, the E, is to educate my prospect, which means, hey, help them understand what we're doing, what the scope of this is. And then the Q there is a question. Right. So what that means is ask him a question to do two things. Number one is to take back control of the conversation. Number two is to drive it in a way that you want it. Okay.

So here's what that sounds like. If somebody says, hey, I need to talk to my wife. I'd be like, hey, Seth, totally understand, man. If I was selling a property, I'd want to chat with my wife, too. You know, typically at this part of the process is where we would go ahead and work out terms. And, you know, if your marriage is anything like mine, typically my wife likes me to bring decisions to her rather than questions to say, Hey, here's what I've looked at. Here's the decision I made. Are you cool with this?

So can I ask, I mean, again, everybody's marriage is different. Is this something that you're more asking like permission for, or, you know, really inviting her to problem solve with you, right. So I'm trying to figure out, Hey, where, where are we in this? What are we doing, right. Is this something where the wife's really going to have an opinion? Like, are we asking permission? Are we just like checking in, right. That's the verbiage I might use. I'm really just checking in. Okay. If you're just checking in, I mean, can I ask, is your wife home right now? Yeah. Well, what do you say? You just bring her over here. We all walk through the agreement together. Boom. You go for the sale, right?

But I need information. So my job as a salesperson is to help people make decisions and to make decisions, You need information. So the more information I have, the more I can both usher decisions and make decisions myself. So that's how I handle a lot of those objections as I'm going through, obviously the exception being price. And we can walk through negotiations here in a second. Did you have a question?

Seth: I really like how you kind of just ran through an example there of the ADEQ for the partner spouse scenario. I wonder if maybe 30 seconds of pop, we could role play here and we can go through that same process for timing and that same process for certainty and trust. You know, I know you said price is kind of a different thing, but I'm the timing thing. So if I come at you and say, our dog just died, our family's going through a really hard time right now, I'm totally incapacitated, I can't function, I can't do this for the next 60 days.

Ajay: I would say, Seth, I'm really sorry to hear that, man. I know whenever we lost a pet when I was growing up, how much it affected the entire family. So I don't want to begin to believe whatever it is that you're going through. You know, Seth, if I could just add one thing, what I would say is a big reason so many people work with us. Is because of how easy of a process we make this.

So just so you understand, assuming we're able to get to a place where we agree on price, basically we walk through a one-page purchase agreement. My team does everything after that. You don't need to lift a finger until in 90 days. So I know you said 60. It won't be until 90 days that the title company calls you and asks you basically to fill out some docs and whether you want a wire or a check.

So I'm not trying to add anything to the load here. If anything, I'd like to remove a decision from the back of your brain as you guys are going through this while also having the security that you're going to get a check in 90 days. So can I ask Seth, I mean, if we were to put something together like that, is that something that would be worth going through this DocuSign together?

Seth: Heck yeah.

Ajay: Now you hit me with like a pretty emotionally sensitive one. So I had to add a little bit more in there.

Seth: Oh, that's perfect. That's perfect though. I like that.

Ajay: That piece that I want to touch on too like was that education piece, right? So I need to let my prospect understand, I need to educate them that working with us is so freaking easy. When you tell me you're stressed because of timing, my goal is to make sure I add no stress to your life. I'm removing a decision. A big reason people work with me, when I say that, I'm realigning their identity to somebody that should work with me, is because we make this so easy and you don't have to think about anything while you're doing it.

So there are nodes of that in there. I walk them through the process. That's education, right. Talking through the timeline of, hey, you said 60 days, we actually won't bug you again until day 90 if you don't want us to, right. So like there's there were a lot of pieces in there, but that was all within that education piece, right. And then I come back to a question, right. Question to take back control and to drive us closer to the sale.

Seth: Now, on the certainty and trust objection, in that case, it's. It can sound a couple different ways. Yeah, you get, I need to think about it. You get an attorney objection. You get, I'm trying to think where else do you get, like, you know, what stops you guys from screwing me? Or what if you pull out at the 120-day mark? It's like all that kind of stuff. So you're welcome to pick one of those or come up with another.

Ajay: Yeah. So, I mean, if I were to say, look, Isaiah, you seem like a nice guy and all, but like, I don't know you. You just called me out of the blue. I've tried to work with other people before that have totally dropped the ball and things fell apart. I'm only looking to work with serious people. How do I know that you're serious? Why should I even continue this conversation right now?

Seth: Yeah, Seth, I completely understand. And look, I can't speak for anybody else in my industry. Can I ask what is it that you do for work?

Ajay: I work for the IRS.

Seth: The IRS. Okay. And in the IRS, I'm sure you could tell me there are some phenomenal agents, but between you and I, can we agree there are probably some that maybe are not always above board, right? Now, the only reason I bring that up is because I can't speak for other people, man. I've got no doubt that you and the IRS are squeaky clean and a phenomenal person.

To the same vein, man, I don't know what these other guys are doing that are telling you they're going to buy their property. All I can control is myself here, right? All I can do is operate how I operate. And so what I'll tell you is in the past five years, between the hundreds of properties that we bought and sold and the hundreds of happy people that we've worked with, we make it a point, to make sure that you get whatever it is we're talking about here.

So Seth, in the past five years, I've not had a situation where anybody ended up really upset about anything. What I will say is communication is usually the biggest key in that. So I want to make sure with whatever concerns you have, we can address those while we're sitting here on the phone so that you finally feel comfortable you're doing business with somebody you can trust. So can I ask what are our best next steps here?

Ajay: Yeah, I guess you can. What did you have in mind? What did you want to paying me

Seth: yeah so role play off right and this is like a phenomenal and sorry i realized when we're role playing i'm putting you back on the spot sometimes which is the point that i'm trying to illustrate though is like number one if people ever bring up another experience i want to. Disassociate me from this other person altogether right so i have funny quips depending on if it's like an old lady that's like yeah i had a guy just like you call me if it's a southern gal i'll use this for an accent and say my mama says ain't nobody like me so i don't know if that's true you know, versus like in that scenario, I'm like, Hey, what do you do for work, right?

Well, plumber, electrician, IRS agent. Okay. There's probably some bad actors out there. Can we agree on that? Or maybe even just some people that aren't as good as their, at their job as you. Oh, for sure. Cause everyone thinks they're the best at everything. And so great from there we drill down and say, Hey, so, I mean, unfortunately it's the same in my industry where I don't know who you've worked with before. I can't talk about them. I can't speak about them. All I can say is this is how we've done business.

And then I build authority by talking about my experience. I dropped numbers, how many people I've worked with, how long I've been in the business, right? So I've been doing this for five years now, half decade that I've been buying and selling land all across the US between the hundreds of parcels we bought and sold and the dozens of happy clients we've worked with. All I can tell you is customer satisfaction is my primary driver, right? Or whatever I said there, right? So like you're educating them on your experience, which a lot of times helps authority, right?

And let me make a quick sub point on that. So Seth, you and I have been friends for years and you know me really well, but if I told you, Hey man, I'm starting a car company, I'm starting this, this company, we're going to have battery powered cars and they're going to be all over the U S. Okay. I need you to write me a check for a million bucks. Now you love me, you believe in me, but do you want to give me a million bucks?

Seth: Probably not.

Ajay: Probably not, yeah. Yeah. And let's flip the script, okay? Now, and in this scenario, you've got a million liquids you're totally okay parting with. Okay, so let's set that as a fundamental. I don't know what your bank account looks like, and that's not what we're here to talk about right now, right? But the point just being, I'm coming to you as a Vuku Bucks investor in this scenario.

Now, let's say my name's Elon Musk, and I've built many companies. And yes, we're talking about the Elon Musk. And let's say Tesla didn't exist, and he says, hey, we're starting a car company. We're going to do battery powered company, battery powered cars. We're going to change America, right? Are your ears perked a little bit differently, right? Hey, I need some seed money for a million bucks, but you're going to own a very significant portion of this company.

Seth: More intrigued.

Ajay: Now I'm not trying to talk about anyone from political perspective or business or some people love them. Some people hate them. That's not what I'm trying to get into. The point I'm trying to get into is that experience builds authority in a way that makes you comfortable working with people, right? Right. It's the same reason. I don't want to be getting surgery from a surgeon that's never actually performed the surgery on somebody before. I want the doctor on this a 10,000 times and does 30 of these a week because the more routine this is for him, the more likely he is to not screw me up, right.

And so in the same vein, if I can tell a seller about my past experience, it will build authority. Now, not to the same vein where like we've got branding the same way that a surgeon might or Elon Musk might. But if we can build this in a micro way, it will help them build trust with us. Does that make sense?

Seth: Yeah. You know, I know price, that one's a little bit different, but that's probably in a lot of cases going to be the number one issue that people come across when they're offering, you know, super discounted numbers for properties. So like, what does that look like? How do you deal with that objection? And do we role play that? Or do you want to just like riff on what you do to handle those situations?

Ajay: Yeah. Absolutely. So with price and negotiations, there's a bunch of stuff that comes in here. So the first thing I'll say, Seth, is I want to make sure I get an asking price out of my seller early. Because like I said earlier, we need information to make decisions. And so the more information I can get, the more useful it is, right?

An example would be, hey, I want 40 grand for my property. I'm like, okay, great, Seth. Can I ask, we have a magic wand, like I get you a check for 40,000 bucks. What do you do next? What are you doing to celebrate? What are you and the wife doing tonight, right? So trying to use information or use the information I have to be like, okay, what would I do with 40 K? What are they going to do with 40 K? How does this affect them, right.

But once we've got the asking price, let's say we're in negotiations. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is this tactic I call looping, which is basically like I go in a circle, just asking my seller if they would take less money. And I'm going to do it both in like positive and negative formats. And here's what I mean.

So, you know, seller says, Hey, I want, you know, a hundred thousand dollars for the property. First, I'm going to ask, okay, when can I ask, I mean, if we came back with an offer under a hundred thousand dollars, is that even something you'd consider? And they have two answers here. Yes or no. And if they say, yeah, I'd consider it. Great. So now what I'm going to do is make my first offer typically arranged offer, right let's say they say no no wouldn't consider it well then i'm going to go more aggressive in a negative fashion what i mean by that is okay seth so you're saying if we came back with anything under a hundred thousand dollars like if my team came back with an offer below a hundred thousand dollars like i shouldn't even call you back now we're making an assumption that earlier i said i was going to have an offer but now i'm saying i shouldn't even call you back but it's it's painting a picture to say like i'm closing the loop we're never going to talk again if you won't even, entertain an offer below 100k they might say no and that sucks and you just make your offer and move on is what i'll tell you okay well my hands are tied here it looks like we're at 80 000 bucks right what do you think about that, They'll either say yes or no, still make the offer.

But my point being, we go down, we basically have all these decision trees when we're doing these negotiations, right? And so when I'm looping, somebody gives me an asking price, 100K. Okay, would you be open to offers below 100K? Well, yeah, I'd consider them. Okay, great. It looks like our team came back and we're going to be somewhere between 70 and $80,000. What do you think about that? And they're like, well, it's a little bit lower than I thought, lower than you thought. Okay, can I ask like where, I mean, where in that range do we need to be for us to really do business together?

I was really hoping to get at least 90,000. You know what I'm going to do again, Seth? I'm going to loop. And that's why it's called looping. We're going to go right back and get 90,000. Okay. So if our team comes back and we're below 90,000, that's not something you want to, you want to look at? Ah, look at it. Okay. I mean, we're pretty close here. My team's, you know, somewhere between 70 and 80 right now. It looks like you're at about 90. I mean, where do we need to be to move this thing forward, right.

And the goal is just to keep doing this stuff until you get to their true rock bottom. And I've listened to hundreds of calls. I could tell you confidently, maybe thousands, but I can tell you confidently, you'd be shocked at how often a seller says, I want one 50 to the cold caller. Then you get on and like, yeah, I want a hundred. And you're like, okay, so would you be open to other offers? Yeah, I'd take 70. Like, man, it's crazy how much these asking prices just get shaved off with good questioning and good rapport. And so that's the first piece.

All right. The second piece, when it comes to negotiations where things become really important is this tool called a tie down. Okay. And a tie down is really just where you are taking this information that we have and we are isolating the objection. Okay. So this is, this is what it actually sounds like to isolate objections. I think people say all the time, Oh, it's an objection. It's, it's, you isolate them direction and then you just overcome it. And I'm like, okay, I don't know what that means or how to do that.

Okay, here's what it sounds like they're stuck at 90. I know I can do 90 if I do a double close, right? Now I'm going to use a tie down here where I'm going to say, okay, Seth, just so I understand if my team could get you an agreement for 90,000 bucks, would there be anything stopping us from working together? Like, no, nothing would stop us from working together. Okay. So if I could put an offer in writing at $90,000 and we sent that over to go over today, I mean, what would our next steps be? Well, I guess we'd review it and then we'd do business together. I don't know, whatever they're going to say, right.

But the point there just being, you are asking them, hey, if I, if I give you the thing you're talking about, or if this thing didn't exist, can we work together, right. Another example would be handy to talk to my wife. So I might tie down before I try to overcome the objection. What that sounds like is, Hey, Seth. So just so I understand, I mean, if, if, you and Kristen were on the same page, would there be anything stopping us from working together? No, no, no, no. If she's cool, I'm cool. Okay, great. You know what I mean? So now we can go down the rabbit hole here, basically.

Okay. Now that we've isolated, this is the thing. Now we can go down the lines of questioning that I brought up before, but that's a tie down. That's actually putting your objection in a nice little bow. And then if it's no, yeah, nothing would stop us. Okay, great. Well, I have good news. Looks like we can do that. Let me get you this thing so we can do the next thing, right.

And then the last thing I'll say when it comes to negotiations is as we move through them, you can bring up motivation when you get to a standstill, right. So let's say they're at 90, you're stuck at 75. And I might say, okay, well, Seth, can I ask like, I'm stuck at 75. You're at 90. Where do we go from here? And you're like, well, it sounds like we're not able to get a deal. I'm like, okay, I hear you, man. But you also told me earlier, your dad was in adult care facility and you were struggling to pay that bill. I mean, am I off base here? No, that is happening.

Okay. Well, I mean, look, man, I know I can't give you the exact dollar amount you're looking for, but with the offer we're making, you guys are able to pay for that facility for at least the next two years. I mean, what would that do for you and your family if we could get you that check in, say, 90 days? See, now we're bringing it back to that motivation from earlier. Whatever it is, we were able to figure out what they needed the money for.

Sometimes they volunteer it. I'd say like 30% of the time, a prospect just tells us why they're selling or why they want to sell or what's caused them to think about selling. The rest of the time, you got to work for it. So being able to bring that back up in a way that brings them to the sale is an extremely valuable skill.

And if they're still just like, no, dude, kick rocks, then I'll go kind of aggressive and do a little bit of a Hail Mary where I'm like, okay, well, Seth, look, you told me you're getting two calls a week, man, and nobody's made you an offer for 90,000 bucks. Am I understanding that right? Yeah. Can I be blunt with you? That's a permission-based question. When I ask permission before I do something I probably shouldn't do, or that might be overly sensitive. So people will be resistant to it. Yeah, go ahead. But people always say yes to it. Yeah, go ahead.

Seth, could it be possible that your property is just not worth 90,000 bucks? You might get hung up on pretty high likelihood. I'm not going to lie. But in the event that you don't, and they're still listening, it's like, look, Seth, I don't like being a jerk, man. But the only reason I bring this up is you're telling me you're getting two calls a week. That's a hundred calls a year. And nobody's offering you this dollar amount that you're looking for. I mean, can I ask how long are you willing to wait to get this thing versus have these conversations right now?

Do you see how we're having a different conversation? Now it's taken away the pain of like this whole conversation and bringing up the motivation here, right. So this is making sense in the negotiation kind of loop structure.

Seth: A lot of this almost reminds me, I don't know if this is a good analogy or not, but it's almost like learning how to dance. Like for example, when you talk about the looping thing, like just going back to the same offer, in my mind as an inexperienced dancer, I might think of, okay, that means when they ask for a hundred grand, just keep saying, how about 80,000? Okay, how about 80,000? How about 80,000? Like that's the unsophisticated way of thing.

But what I hear you doing is a lot of maneuvering. You're just framing it and talking about it in a way that's more sophisticated, but you need to know what to say, like how to dance around these conversations and get practice with that. Do you have like a bunch of recordings that people can listen to of you having these conversations, just hearing like repetition, example after example, after example of like, what would Ajay say to this? Does that kind of thing exist?

Ajay: Man, people keep asking me for that. And so I'm like, I should put something together. I'm a little wild. So I don't know if you've seen me do any of these, but like, I'm not afraid to have people listen to my calls live. So I have actually asked clients of mine, submit your leads to me that have ghosted you and I'm going to call them and close them. And I'll call sellers live and deal with that stuff.

So I've done that before in the sense of like, hey, here's two hours of me having conversations with sellers just like live on the phone where it can't be scripted if I want it to be. These are your leads that I'm calling in front of an audience of 100 people. Outside of that though, I don't have like a bank of my calls to listen to necessarily. So there are resources out there, but I've not taken the time to create like a folder of calls that I've had where I've had objections and had these conversations. I think it'd be really valuable for people.

Seth: But, what are your stats? Like when you call people who have ghosted land investors, what percentage of the time can you actually close them?

Ajay: There's a lot of variables in that. What I'll tell you is if it's not a price objection, I, I did, I don't lose deals. So I don't want to say a hundred percent cause that's like super cocky, but like on my team, if we've ever got a deal, that's not a price objection. I closed that deal. I frequently tell investors, like the investors will ask me like, Hey man, what do you do if you lose a deal to another investor? You lose a deal because of XYZ. And I'm like, hey, dude, I'm the investor. You lost a deal too. I don't lose. It's probably the most cocky thing I say, Seth. And I both love it and hate it.

But I would tell you, if it's not a price objection, man, extremely high. If it is a price objection, then is it 0% or half half?

Seth: Yeah. I would say if it is a price objection, I mean, again, it's hard to just place a number on that. But if it's like a reasonable one and we've got a gap, like more often than not, like I'll still, I'll still get somewhere. You know what I mean? We'll get to a place where we can get something inked probably, you know, 20, 30% of the time, realistically.

Ajay: And when that happens, is it because you pointed out a flaw that they weren't aware of? Or is it because you were just able to build a better rapport or you just looped back enough times that they finally relented and said, yes. Like what is making that work when it's a price objection and you overcome it?

Seth: It's a good question. I would say it's not one thing in of itself. I would say it's, it's, you know, the biggest difference, which is not going to be a tangible one, Seth is patience. So like when I did that stream a few months ago, I called one lead. I remember for my good friends and clients, John and Kristen LeClaire. And I remember they had this lead Donna that I spoke to, and this is all public. I mean, it's, you know, I posted it on YouTube. It took 20 minutes for this seller to admit to me that she should sell the property. Okay.

And the point I'm trying to make here is. When somebody else is on the phones, they are typically in such a rush to just get through the call. Whereas my primary focus is to understand the most I can about this human to see if we can do business together. And so spending 20 minutes just to have somebody tell you, yeah, I should sell the property versus just like steamrolling them into, well, they told the cold caller they wanted to sell. So, yeah, they want to sell. I cannot make that assumption. People have different emotions on different days, right.

So like your lead, that's a bad lead might be a bad lead today and a great lead tomorrow. So it's, it's, it's hard to answer that. But what I would tell you is patience is probably the biggest driver between me close to someone and somebody else not.

Ajay: And that doesn't surprise me. But when I hear that, my brain starts going to the value of my time. And like, I don't want to spend my whole life on the phone with people. Like I've got other things I want to do, but on the same coin, like if I make six figures from a 30 minute phone call, heck yeah, I'll spend my time doing that. It makes me wonder, and I realize you probably don't have a solid answer for this. I'm just thinking out loud.

How many minutes does it take on average for you to get a closed deal? However much money that might be. Obviously, not everybody says yes. So is it like for an hour of your time, you get a closed deal? Or is it 20 minutes of your time?

Seth: Yeah. So I, I like, I need to put these in different buckets. I would tell you, prospects that are not price objections. I will honestly spend somewhere between 20 and 55 minutes on the phone with a lead like that. I would say it probably averages somewhere between 35 and 45. There's just a lot to get into.

And you know, that's, that's not me just like calling every lead in the CRM though, man, I've owned this business for several years and I'm at a place I'm not on the phones every day, but I'm not afraid of them either, right? So it's a unique thing where it's extremely valuable for me to jump on when I do, but I've got a business to run. Well, I've got two, right? Between both the coaching and the, obviously the real estate business, but I've got three full-time acquisition managers at this point and I'm able to train them really effectively because of my skillset.

And so typically they bring me deals that are on this head and yard line. And when I, when I jump on those, man, within an hour, once I'm on the phone with them, we're usually able to make something happen. So, and I get brought in for the most valuable sales to close, but yeah, Seth, you wouldn't mind jumping on the phones for an hour either. If you had pretty high certainty, we're going to make between 30 and a hundred thousand dollars every time, right.

Ajay: This is sort of going back earlier than conversation, but as leads come in, many of us will classify them as cold, warm, or hot leads. How do you define each of those types and which ones do you just ignore? Like if it's a cold lead, is it like, okay, I'm not even messing with this or like, can you convert all of them?

Seth: Great question. I wish I could convert all of them, man. I'd be super rich if, if I could, but here's, here's what I'll tell you is I learned this framework from, Andy Elliott's team. He's the, the bald six pack sales trainer guy. And I think they learned it from Russell Brunson's team. So I didn't create this framework and I want to be very clear about that. It's how you classify leads, right?

So we've all heard leads are cold leads, warm leads, hot leads, right? Here is the difference between the three, and it's all based on two different variables, okay? So the first one is problem aware. Does my prospect know about their problem, right? Do they know about the problem in front of them, and do they want to fix it? I want to sell my property so that I can go do this thing, right? That's problem aware.

Solution aware is your prospect knows that you can fix their problem, and they want you to fix it. Okay. The best example I like to give. So actually before I say anything, so a cold lead is neither problem aware nor solution aware. Okay. So they got neither a warm lead is problem aware and not solution aware. So they know they have a desired change in state. They don't really know anything about you, your company, what you can do, what you can offer them, right.

Best example here would probably be like a, some level of direct mail lead, right? Those are decently high quality. They know they want to sell, right. More often than not, but they don't necessarily know what you offer, how much you're offering, how you can solve their problem, right?

The last lead would be a hot lead. They're problem aware. I want to sell my property. I want money for it. I want to be done with it, whatever. They're solution aware. I know Seth buys properties. I know he will buy my property. We had a conversation about him buying my property. I want him to buy my property. It's funny. These are all at the person level, not at the property level.

And so what that means is from our unique sales perspective as real estate investors, we've had hot leads that are sellers that have junky properties we don't want to buy. And those are always the ones that call us back more than we call them back, right. So funny example, but that's a seller. That's a problem aware and solution aware. They just have a junky property. So you remember a qualification based on property in person. So this is just based on the person.

Now cold leads are, you put on, you know, your, your headset and you get up your ready mode and you dial and you dial until, until people pick up. And that person that picks up the phone is neither problem aware nor are solution aware, right? So I need to start my conversations with, hey, Seth, I'm reaching out about your 10 acres in Calvin County, Florida. Just curious if you'd ever consider an offer on it before. And if they're like, no, screw you. I'm like, oh, okay. They don't have a problem, right?

Versus like, well, I consider it. Okay, great. Now my job is to educate them to become problem aware on what are all the other things you could do with your money besides letting this equity sit in a piece of dirt you don't use. That's how you become problem aware. My job is to educate as a salesperson and to make them solution aware is where I tell them about our company and what we can do, how we operate, how we can solve for that problem, right?

But the whole point there, cold lead is neither problem or solution aware. Warm leads are problem aware, not solution aware. Hot leads are both, right? Problem wear and solution wear. And what's interesting here, Seth, is so many people think because a cold caller called my lead or because an SMS person pushed from launch control or roar or smarter contact or whatever you're using, oh, well, this must be a warm or a hot lead. Well, no.

Your job as a salesperson is to figure it out when you're on the phone with them. And if that day they're not as warm as when they got pushed, you now need to educate and make them go from cold to hot all over again. You've got to take them on a journey right everybody just wants hot leads all the time it's the difference between phenomenal salespeople and those that aren't now whether you can close them or not i don't know right it's you got to do discovery early on to figure out if there's even a problem what problem we could solve how we could solve it talk through price there's a bunch of different variables here real estate's very confusing in that way because of that it's also very lucrative if you can do it right you know there's not a lot of businesses out there where you have $15,000 to $50,000 widgets that you yield and can make money on very frequently.

Ajay: Of those cold leads that are neither problem aware or solution aware, how often are you able to make them problem aware or make them solution aware as well?

Seth: Yeah, I don't know that I have a number for you in the sense of like, I couldn't tell you how often. What I would say is the way I'm going to walk that conversation is, you know, the same process I would take every other prospect through. And that's what a script is for, right? It's a framework. It's a tool in your tool belt to bring a prospect from problem aware or from from nothing to problem aware and solution aware, right. So that's the goal of the script is to get them there as many times as possible without having to think about it, essentially.

Ajay: And you have a script you're going to share with us, right? I remember correctly.

Seth: I do. I do. I do. Yeah. So I'm, as we're filming this today, I'm putting the final touches on it. By the time this is released, it should be in the show notes, I think. But yeah, I've been working on this thing for a while, man. I put out version three of my script back in December and I've been listening to hundreds and hundreds of calls since then. And now, you know, finding all the little holes in it, plugging them as the markets changed, where do we need to put different questions and different orders and get asking prices out of people and yada, yada, yada, new reverse objections, all that kind of stuff.

So scripts should change over time the same way marketing needs to change over time, the same way your whole business needs to change over time. That's just part of it, right? There's no other way around it.

Ajay: Yeah. If y'all want to check that out again, go to retipster.com/233. That's where you can download a copy of that script. And if people really want more help with this, that's what the Land Closers Academy is for, right? Tell us about that. if people are interested in working more directly with you and like getting actual hands-on help with actual deals they're working on, like where do they go for that?

Seth: Yeah, great question. I would say I'm super active on Instagram. If you guys want to DM me, it's at investing with Ajay. So you're welcome to shoot me a DM. If not, go over to landclosersacademy.com. And by the time this is dropped, we should have a book a call link on there because I just hired somebody on my team that'll help with a lot of these discovery calls to see if it's a good fit. His name is Jacob. He rocks. But you can chat with Jacob on my team or myself if you want to reach out, see if the Land and Closers Academy is a good fit.

That's exactly what we do is I started all of this by saying leads problem, conversion problem. I help people make sure their acquisitions are consistent, right? Consistent and predictable. That's what we work on by diagnosing all the stuff we talked about here today, meeting every single week to get into it, and then me training your teams. That's a big thing. People don't realize how helpful it is.

But if you've brought on a full-time acquisition manager, if you're Seth and you don't want to be on the phones all day, but maybe you still want to bring in deals regularly. And so you hired an acquisition manager, but you're not a sales manager, so you can't train them. Bring them on in. And that's what we do.

The last thing I'll say is, and Seth, I hope it's okay for me to drop this, but just depending on when this drops, if you want to meet me in person, I am hosting a live event in Dallas. Seth was there last year, but has a conflict this year. Unfortunately, it's the Land Scaling Summit here in Dallas, Texas, September 19th and 20th. Landscalingsummit.com. So if you want to meet in person, shake my hand. I'll be dropping some more gas all about sales, sales training, talk about our program and have some really cool speakers out. So it'll be a very fun two day all intensive in person. Totally recommend checking that out.

Ajay: It's an awesome event. And, you know, it's just interesting, Ajay, whenever I hear you talk about this stuff, I can't help but recognize the value it is to have this kind of skill, not just for the land business, but for like everything in life. I mean, when you talk about, you know, those four objections and how to overcome them. And I mean, this is just like human relations, but at an advanced level, like really understanding what's going on, not just sort of winging it or going by your feelings, but like really being able to identify, by, oh, this is a timing problem. Here's how we overcome that. Let's deal with that version of it.

I mean, if you can master this kind of thing, man, think how much more effective you would be in all areas of life, in every interpersonal communication you have with anybody. It's a really big deal to understand this stuff.

Seth: Totally, man. The longer I'm in it, the more I realize how much I really know about sales. It was kind of by accident, if I'm being honest. I had to learn it from my business and it all just clicked in my brain that I think is in a very unique way. And then I just synthesized everything I'd learned, everything I'd spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on, on education, trainers and mentors and coaches and masterminds and all the things, you know, with me being in this niche, I've got a unique perspective where I've talked to tons of sellers. I've done more call reviews than probably anybody else.

It's cool to be able to synthesize that skillset to our specific niche, but also recognize that I've got so much security for the rest of my life, Seth, because I could sell anything forever, man. I always joke with Aaron. I'm like, ah, if the whole economy blows up, I'll go sell credit repair. You know, everybody's debt's going to be maxed out. And so we'll go, you know, and it's a joke, but the point illuminates in a down market.

Money is always flowing somewhere. If it's not in real estate, which I think there are always ways to cashflow on real estate. You just need to get in at deeper discounts is kind of my philosophy, but neither here nor there, man. I think the point just being there's, there's always something you can be selling. It is the most valuable, like sales and leadership are the two most valuable skills in the world you can learn. And if you get good at them, which is basically everything I've worked at in my twenties, I'd like to use my thirties and forties to take over the world. And I say that in like a positive way, not like a, like an evil mentor.

Ajay: I'm sure you probably can and will do that. I'm looking forward to that day. No kidding, man. Well, I do wonder like on the sales front, and I know from experience, I just don't like it and I'm not a natural talent at sales. But I think part of that is like your enthusiasm, your enjoyment of the process. But the other part of it is like just knowing what to say, understanding what is going on when I talk with this person and they're saying no. Why are they saying no? What is the objection? What precisely do I say to help get over that objection?

And I wonder if somebody out there is in a similar boat to where I've been most of my life where it's like, I don't like sales. That's not me. I don't want to do it. And if they just understand the mechanics and the nuts and bolts of what is going on, how to really recognize and identify and overcome objections, if they just understood that, but still didn't have much charisma on the phone, we're still kind of boring to listen to, could they still succeed at this? Or do they really need to learn the charisma part of this too?

Seth: No, man, you'd be shocked. Honestly, a lot of the best salesmen in the world don't have any charisma, which I know is probably shocking. Yeah. You cracked me up, man. But, you know, it's really more about genuine human connection than it is anything else. And yeah, my energy is, is a gift and it's awesome and it's unique and it helps me connect with people that I think is, is a strength. But again, I know salespeople that did not have this type of charisma and, working for the right people.

I've got a buddy who used to work for Grant Cardone, love him or hate him. The guy made 70 to 100 grand a month, and he did not have the charisma that you and I are talking about. But he wasn't afraid of the work. He made more offers than everybody else. The guy was in the office from 7 a.m. To 11 p.m. every night, and they had the lead flow, and he made the offers, and he did his work, and. He went through the mechanics and he understood people and he just got it done, you know?

So it's a mix of everything, right? You need the skillset. But man, if I was the most talented person in the world, Seth, but I didn't make any offers, everyone else would smoke me. You know what I mean? Because I'm not doing the work to actually get the deals. So the skillset is only half the battle, maybe less, you know, maybe 20, 30%. Doing the actual work that gets the results, which is where the KPIs become so valuable is so much more important in my opinion.

Ajay: Yeah. And I think it's important to realize the work can be fun when you know what to do. The reason it's not fun for a lot of people is because they're kind of just lost. It's uncomfortable. It's a very draining process when you don't know the dance moves. But similar to like if you've ever done line dancing, it's a very simple type of dance. It's fun because the moves are pretty predictable. Like you see the other person doing something, you know exactly what to do in response. And when it comes together, it just works. So like if you can understand the mechanics and like, how does this work? When I see them do this, I do that. I think it can be a lot more fun than a lot of people realize. You just need to understand what you're doing.

Seth: Totally. Well, Ajay, thanks so much. It was great to talk to you as always. Again, if people want to check out the script, links to the Land Scaling Summit, a lot more stuff, go to retipster.com/233. And we will talk to you next time.