This week we're analyzing a subject that is at the heart of any successful business: How do you go about hiring the best people to benefit and grow your business? More specifically we're looking at how we can land excellent salespeople. I go over some of the key questions when searching for talent such as: What type of salesperson we should be looking for - a hunter or a farmer? What personality assessment tests are available to us? What are the differences between hiring someone for single and/or multifamily? How are we going to write the job description to communicate our JD effectively? These are all vital questions that I answer in this week's episode to help you get the most out of your hires. So jump in - join the community and the conversation. If you have any hiring strategies of your own to add, then drop them in the comments below… we’d love to hear them!
This week we're analyzing a subject that is at the heart of any successful business: How do you go about hiring the best people to benefit and grow your business?
More specifically we're looking at how we can land excellent salespeople. I go over some of the key questions when searching for talent such as: What type of salesperson we should be looking for - a hunter or a farmer? What personality assessment tests are available to us? What are the differences between hiring someone for single and/or multifamily? How are we going to write the job description to communicate our JD effectively?
These are all vital questions that I answer in this week's episode to help you get the most out of your hires. So jump in - join the community and the conversation. If you have any hiring strategies of your own to add, then drop them in the comments below… we’d love to hear them!
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Ask what type of salesperson you want - a Hunter or a Farmer.
2. Email me at steven@vonfinch.com so I can recommend some of the best, and some of my favorite, personality tests that are available for you.
3. Single and multifamily are going to have different requirements when it comes to the hire.
4. How are you going to write the job description specifically for the person and role?
5. Have a process for processing your final group of candidates
6. Use personality tests to ascertain if the candidate is the right fit for your business
BOOKS
The Passive Investing Playbook - https://theinvestormindset.com/passive
LINKS
Join the MultiFamilyMBA and get exclusive free training: https://theinvestormindset.com/mfmba
Learn more about investing with Steven at
https://theinvestormindset.com/invest
Steven: [00:00]: Welcome back to this week’s mindset minutes episode with the Investor Mindset. I'm Steven Pesavento. And each week we share mindset tips and investing strategies that can help you grow your business and investing career to the next level. And this week will be focused on a subject that's really important if you're in the operation side, but even if you're on the passive in your day to day job and it goes into how do you go about hiring and bringing on the right sales people. So join us each week as we share more tips and mindset strategies to help you reach true financial freedom through real estate by hitting that subscribe button right down below and make sure you never miss another episode. So diving right into things, I was talking with one of my clients the other day, and they were running into a big challenge on their growth. They had been buying and taking down multiple deals every single month, they were seeing that growth happening. But they're running into this challenge where they realize that the amount of time that they had to go out and do sales activities and the amount of time that the right-hand person, the other salesperson their team had was limited. So it was time to bring on another salesperson but they hadn't really gone through this hiring process before and they were thinking about hiring salespeople all around. So I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about some of those key nuggets to think about when bringing on a salesperson, and depending on the answer, this questions is going to change the type of salesperson that you're looking for, and therefore how you're going to end up searching for that person. So let's get right into it.
INTRO: This is The Investor Mindset Podcast and I'm Steven Pesavento. For as long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with understanding how we can think better, how we can be better, and how we can do better. And each episode we explore lessons on motivation and mindset from the most successful real estate investors and entrepreneurs in the nation.
Steven: [01:58]: So looking, first and foremost at what type of sales is this person going to do? And so I like to ask the question, is the person on my team need to be a hunter or do they need to be a farmer, or maybe some kind of blend of the two and let's talk a little bit about the difference between those. So a hunter is somebody who's going out, they're going to go take down those buffaloes, they're going to go find new business, they need to be out prospecting, connecting with other people dealing with rejection and focusing on how they are going to bring new business into the company, or if they're a farmer; they're going to be going out and working existing business, existing accounts that are already there. And working with those existing accounts to gather more sales, to handle account management and to deal with things on a consistent basis, the type of salesperson that is going to exceed in each one of those areas is very different. And therefore, it's really important to understand "where does my type of sales role fall into?" So if you happen to be on the multifamily real estate side, and you're looking to go work with brokers to find deals and work with those people on the acquisition side, that tends to be more of a farmer type role. Yes. Absolutely, you're going out and finding new business, you need to build those relationships. But oftentimes, you're working with those existing relationships continuously, so that you can source those opportunities. And so it ends up being kind of a little bit of a blended role but leaning more towards the farmer side. Now, if you're on the single-family front, like I was, for a large part of my career, you are going to be focused more on the hunting side. So you're going to be working leads or going out and finding new business. And those are going to be one and done, sales type closes. So the focus there for that person is they need to be driven and ready to go out and find new business, close that business, and then they move on to the next contract, there's not as much opportunity for that long term type of relationship on the account management side. So depending on the business, or the type of investment you're doing, you have to answer that question for yourself, " where do they fall into?" or is it maybe more of a blend of the two.
Steven: [00:04:02]: So the next thing that I think is really important is based on those answers, is to understand the personality profile of someone who succeeds well in that position. So taking some type of assessment, one of the assessments that I like to recommend to people because it's really accessible, and it's fairly affordable, even though we've used tons of different ones and there's some assessments that I absolutely love. So if you're interested in learning more about some of my favorites, shoot me an email Steven@vonfinch.com to find out some more and I'll shoot you those personally. But when it comes to assessments, I absolutely love the DISC because it's simple, it's universal, and it ends up being something that's very affordable and achievable for most people implementing their business until they can get up to that next level. And so, with the DISC it's a personality profile that ends up telling you and informing you about the different types of typical behaviors or personality traits that somebody might have. So there are four different categories. And rather than walking through them in detail, I'll just share with you what we look for depending on the type of salesperson you're talking about.
Steven: [00:05:11]: So for the single-family example, whenever we were hiring for that role, we were always looking for somebody who is going to be more of a hunter, somebody who is going to go out and build those relationships quickly, and be able to close the sale. And so in our case, we were looking for somebody who was assertive, a high D, they were assertive, they're not afraid to ask for the sale, they're not afraid to deal with that rejection. And then somebody who had a fairly high I as well. What that really meant on this particular assessment was that, that's a person who is a people person, they're comfortable talking to other people, they're comfortable building rapport quickly, they actually in some ways, want to please people. And so that's one of the things you gotta watch out for. You have to make sure somebody is willing to ask for the business more than they are being afraid of having that person reject them, whenever you're looking for somebody in that hunter type position. And for this profile, typically, that person would have a low S and a low C and, and what that means for people who aren't familiar with DISC is that they're going to be a little bit faster paced. And they might be a little bit less organized. And in our business, it was more important for them to be driving after. And so if you're in the wholesaling side, or the flipping side, or the direct to seller acquisition side, and you're going to be looking for quick closes or people to make those decisions, this is the type of profile you want to be looking for. If it's more of a farmer type, you might have a little bit of a blend in between because you don't want somebody to be too assertive to direct. But this profile can be blended really well. So definitely use some kind of personality profile assessment on your best salesperson or find other people to model and understand how those salespeople think so that you can go and find other people who can succeed in that role.
Steven: [00:06:55]: And so the third thing that I think is really important is understanding based on those two questions above how you're going to end up writing that job description. So when we're really clear on what that person is going to be expected to do and what the outcomes we're looking for in that sales role, it makes it much easier and more effective for us to be able to put a job description together, that's going to attract somebody who is going to be a good fit. So going along that same route of somebody who's going to be a quick closer, someone who's going to be asking for that business, the hunter mentality in this type of role, I'm looking for a job description that's going to be shorter, that's going to have less of all the details in there, it's going to be more focused emotionally on how that person has independence, how they're able to create up to or almost unlimited income potential based on the incentive structure. And I want to tell a story in a very short, succinct manner in that job description of what this person is going to have as potential in the role, as well as just a little bit about what they're going to be doing and dealing with on a day to day basis. And the reason for that, again, is back to the personality profile. This type of role is not a detail-oriented type of person, and so with that assessment in mind, we know that that person is going to skip over most of the details or frankly, they're going to be turned off when they see a really long job description.
Steven: [00:08:19]: So when you go to my last point here, the mindset of hiring, when we take all of these things into account, we want to be thinking about this hiring process as prospecting itself, it's very similar to the sales process that we want to be bringing in qualified leads, we want to be bringing in candidates that have the potential to fit the type of role that we're looking for. And we want to get as many of those candidates as we possibly can and then we want to run those candidates through some kind of screening process. We want to have a process for processing those candidates coming into our company and whether that is based on the assessments that we're talking about, whether that's based on a series of questions that we can ask, while they're applying online, whether that is through a phone screening process, we're actually jumping on the phone for three to five to seven to 10 minutes max doing a very quick phone screen to understand very quickly, "Hey, does this person have the kind of qualifications that are going to make sense for me to invest time diving deeper with them?" And that's the same as it goes, when you're out there selling in the market, you don't want to be spending an hour five hours with somebody who has no potential to be the type of customer that you typically would sell to or would typically buy from you. And it's the same goes as true when you're looking at hiring somebody on the sales side, you want to be bringing in those prospects, bringing in those candidates and then working with them through a set of steps of processes and procedures to understand if they're the right fit and then eventually close them by offering them that job by making that call to action for them to join your team.
Steven: [00:09:54]: And so as we're thinking about this, definitely shoot me a message on LinkedIn @Stevenpesavento on all of the social media out there, and let me know. What do you think about this? Have you used a similar process yourself when hiring or let me know down in the comments below. What are some of the biggest challenges that you've dealt with on the hiring side? So go out there, take action, apply this in your life. If you're somebody who's looking to hire a new person, think about how can I put together a process to bring in the best candidates, so then I can bring in the best people on my team and be able to grow exactly the way that's most important. So for all you real estate entrepreneurs, I hope you take action for all of you investors out there, I hope you understand a little bit more about what's going into the back end of putting this kind of business together, and I will see you guys in the next episode. Thanks so much.
Steven: [10:51]: Now is one of the greatest times in history to be investing in multifamily real estate with hundreds of millions of dollars literally moving from the stock market into alternative assets, like real estate every single day. We're in the midst of a golden era. And one of the keys of success is learning how to avoid those upcoming pitfalls and mastering the process of how to scale as an operator in the multifamily business. Regardless if you're just getting started, if you've been in the game for decades, you've got to join us for this very special training put on by the multifamily MBA on how to scale from 0 to 2400 units. The three biggest secrets for building a $320 million dollars multifamily portfolio. Register to join us at theinvestormindset.com Look forward to seeing you there.
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