Ready to Scale? Here’s How to Hire the Right Lead Manager

Dan Austin: [0:00] Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the collecting keys Friday focus. You have me today as your host, Dan Austin. I am that sometimes friendly guy that started investing in real estate back in 2016, just as a way to add some wealth. I heard passive income was like a thing kind of, didn't know much about it, but then in late twenty nineteen, partnered up with my cohost Mike DeHaan, and we went full send on off market real estate, started wholesaling here in our market in Spokane, Washington, and then went national with it with our partnership program, where we work with partners in markets across the country, wholesaling off market deals in about 14 to 15 different markets right now. So we've been focusing on that virtual national expansion, and along the way, we've had to hire a bunch of different people at all different levels in our business. And last week, Mike talked about the acquisition manager, which is really the heartbeat of any business is sales, right? And that acquisition manager is such a key role, but if there's another key role that could possibly be the main key role, especially if you're a solopreneur who's doing your acquisitions and you don't wanna give that up yet, that other role is a lead manager, and so in today's episode, I wanna talk about when, and how, and what of lead management, and when you should bring that in, what that person looks like, and I think that will really help, because as you grow your business, you might be hiring an acquisition manager first, or it might be a good fit for you to hire a lead manager first. I know Mike and I kind of bounce back and forth between having acquisition managers, lead managers, and ultimately our model for us is we have acquisition managers and lead managers, Mike and I are not, or I should say we're rarely negotiating directly with sellers at this point in our business, because we're just a little bit bigger than that, and now we're more in the management role of our business.

Dan Austin: [1:58] For a lot of you out there looking for that next step, a lead manager might be the right fit for you. I will say this though, if rocking the sales, and you're really good at that, and you just have a hard time giving that direct to seller, like face to face with your sellers touch, look at a lead manager. And I'm gonna start off by talking about what exactly is a lead manager. And really fundamentally, it's someone that helps keep your CRM organized and does lead follow-up. And people use their lead managers in different ways, but really for us, what we like to do is we like to make sure that they're in the CRM, and they are really prospecting our warm leads and doing follow-up. So as you know, lead comes in, a lot of times the acquisition manager will you know, talk to that fresh lead, do all their work, if they can get the way through the offer, and they don't you know, the offer's not accepted, and then they keep following up, keep following up you know, a couple weeks, they might kick that out to warm leads, or maybe at some point in the pipeline, the lead falls off acquisition manager, can't get it back on. We just kick it over warm leads into our lead managers, basically prospect that and they keep calling and they keep calling and they keep calling to keep people on the phone. They'll they'll keep prospecting our warm leads category, honestly, until people tell us to stop calling them. That's about the only time we stop actually trying to get a hold of people in there, and that's where our lead managers really come in. They're making sure that tasks are getting completed and set in the CRM, so if you have follow-up tasks, they're making sure like, okay, here's the follow-up, follow-up with this customer, this seller, three, five days, two weeks, whatever.

Dan Austin: [3:33] It goes in there, they're just gonna go down their task list, and then they're gonna go right back when those tasks are done through their follow-up and make sure leads are getting good consistent touches, because we know follow-up is one of the most, if not the most important part of this business, if you want to close more than just a couple deals. You can keep spending more money on marketing, but unless you can dial in that lead management role with follow-up and plug any of the holes where you're having leads and deals fall through the cracks, you're not gonna ever maximize your business. So other things that lead managers can do a lot of times is set appointments, so if you're just a solopreneur now, you're looking for that lead manager, a new lead comes into your system, they can answer the phone, they can collect some information, know, hey mister seller, what's the condition of the property, what are you looking to get out of it, just get some really initial intake questions and then set an appointment. If you're running in person appointments, have them set that appointment for you or even if you're doing virtual appointments, they can set that phone call for you or your acquisition manager.

Dan Austin: [4:32] And that's really helpful for a lot of folks because it takes that off their plate and as appointments get set, you do the hard work, get out there, talk to your sellers, and then if you can't get the offer accepted, you can just kick out to warm leads, and your lead manager will do that hard work of the follow-up. And if you're worried about not having enough leads for them, which we'll talk about here in a minute, you can always have them do cold calling and prospecting from your list. To have them, you know, have a list, skip trace your niche list, and have them start calling those people as well to fill up their time, that's always a good use of their time, because you get some reps on the phone, and also, they're not gonna be doing anything anyways, so you might as well keep them busy and keep them focused on in the sales. So the next thing I wanna chat about is how do you know when is the right time to hire this lead manager to put them into your company. And the first thing I would say is, if you're not marketing consistently, if you're not even if you're sending out a few 100 mailers a month, you probably don't even need a lead manager, unless you just have this fat stack of backlog leads.

Dan Austin: [5:35] But I would say you wanna have consistent lead flow coming in every single month for them to, you know, help set appointments, help prospect, and help keep your warm leads pool growing. And you do wanna have a backlog of warm leads, because otherwise honestly, like if you just don't have a decent backlog, know, a 100 plus leads, there's really no point, because you should be doing that prospecting, and I'll get into that in a minute. But if you're just starting out, you're only a few months into this, you've been getting thirty, forty leads, like that's solid, good job, but you might not be ready for a lead manager yet, unless you just absolutely have no time. If you hate doing your follow-up and you're not doing it, you know, say you're getting consistently flow, you've got a good backlog of leads, and you're just, you hate lead follow ups so much, you're not doing it, it's probably time to get a lead manager. However, I'll caveat this, like I 100% believe you should fill that lead management role on your own, and learn how to do the follow-up. You wanna learn what those conversations are like, you wanna learn what it feels like to be in that role, because this is like one of those positions where this person is gonna come into your business, and they're gonna start doing what you say. How do you know what you're telling them to do is the right thing if you've never done it? If you've never had that conversation, you've never heard it. You probably can't. You know, Mike and I did all of our own acquisitions, of our own lead management for the better part of the first year we were in business, so we really understand what what it's like to do that lead manager role, we understand what it's like to do the acquisition manager role, and where the where the challenges are, where the lead manager is gonna face challenges, and also being able to give them coaching on how to do the follow-up, because that's a big problem, is like, I gotta call this person that didn't wanna sell me their house last week, why are they gonna wanna sell their house this week?

Dan Austin: [7:15] You wanna be able to help them understand the best ways to have those conversations. So back to my point here to close this loop, you know, how do you know when it's right time to hire a lead manager? You have consistent lead flow coming in, and you have a decent sized backlog of leads that need to be called through in your warm leads, and especially if you don't have time or you're not touching them. I promise you, if you have a backlog of warm leads, there's a deal in your CRM, like there just happen, there really is. You got a few 100 leads sitting in your warm leads, you definitely have a deal in there that you just haven't, you haven't put together yet, and if you get in front of folks, you will pull something out of there, I promise it. It's like, that's where the lead manager almost pays for itself, you know, say you hired a lead manager, they come in and you get a wholesale deal within the first month, that gets you $15, you just paid for a lot of lead management time right there, just by having them do the follow-up that you weren't able to do. Okay, so the third point I wanna talk about is, what makes a good lead manager? Like when you're trying to hire this person, how do you know they're gonna be a good lead manager? I would like to say that someone that does a has a DISC assessment, it's kind of like a high DI, which is typically like a sales person, that's really a helpful disc. You definitely don't want them to be like super high C or high S on that side of the disc, you want them to be more on the interpersonal side of things, and more of a person that's gonna go out there and hunt for you.

Dan Austin: [8:38] You really do want like this kind of idea of a hunter. And I say that because a lot of times, that's exactly what they're doing, is they're looking at this stack of leads, and they're gonna call through it. So now if you have a more passive person on the phone, they're gonna A lot of times, if they're passive, they're quiet, they're a little bit timid, they're just gonna get ran over, or they're not gonna want to pursue these leads as like a goal, right? But you get that like high D, like they're just ready for the challenge coming in, they wanna kick butt, and just go and like call these people, they see it as like, I just gotta call the right amount of people and tell somebody I can get them to sell me their house, or get that appointment, or get them to accept this offer, whatever it is. If they can see that as a challenge, that's super important. For that reason, Mike and I have had great success with like South and Central American lead managers, because they are pretty they're just they tend to be a little bit more aggressive. However, right now, you know, we've got a couple from The Philippines that are rock stars. They are awesome. They they are doing an excellent job for us. You know, they they do need to have a little bit of like really good English speaking skills, and I say that not because like, oh, the accent, that's obviously part of it, but also because they need to be able to have the conversation and move quickly through a conversation, think on their feet when they're talking to these sellers, so if they struggle with the English language as a second language, they just might not be as quick on their feet, and so they can't let that DI kinda come out, right?

Dan Austin: [9:58] The other thing that I say about these folks is they need to be resilient, cause they're on the phone day in and day out, dealing with the leads nobody in your company wants to deal with, right? So if they can come in, you can properly motivate them, they can come in with that really positive, aggressive hunter attitude, and they have some resiliency, they recognize, hey, I might call fifty, sixty people today and not have a single productive conversation, I'm gonna come back tomorrow, I'm gonna do it. That's what you want, because this can wear people out, and people start out usually pretty good, but after a few months of this, they might get worn out, so you gotta be careful there. So that's what really makes a good lead manager, someone that's a little bit more aggressive on the phones, a high D, high I, they need to be listeners as well, they can't just be in there like a bull in a china shop, they just need to come and ready to attack the day every single day. But now that you know what that good lead manager looks like, just a quick note on where you can hire folks. Upwork is you know a tried and true place, I mean there's all sorts of different places to hire these types of folks. Lead manager for off market real estate is now a pretty common thing, so anywhere you're hiring VAs, Thabsby, Upwork, that's probably a good spot to start. If you're trying to hire them like US based, WiseHire, you might have heard Mike talking about that on podcast recently, we've been seeing that as like pretty successful, and if you wanna do like a US based lead manager, you could likely find someone through there. There's also staffing companies, know, we we define the Filipinos that work for us, we we use Rocket Station. If you want anything to know anything about Rocket Station, just hit me up on Instagram at investor mant dan, or hit up us an email admin at collecting keys dot com.

Dan Austin: [11:28] We can send you a sign up link there, and saves you like the onboarding, which is like a thousand or $1,500. So it saves you that, but they'll staff a lead manager. Tell you what the collecting keys lead manager model, and they'll just give you everything, they'll have the entire job description, all the tasks that they're gonna be doing, how we do it, and how we like it. So it could be a super simple onboarding, just just let us know, we can help, we can connect you there. But really anywhere for that matter on these online hiring platforms, another really good way to find these folks if you're trying to do it US based, is just put it out there on your social media, put it out there in Facebook groups that you know are real estate specific, you might be able to find somebody. Honestly, there's not a lot of folks out there that are working with US based lead managers, just because of the cost, but if you can, you know, you can expect to pay you know, 5 to $10 an hour if you're gonna go virtual. If you can find that in The US and they're an awesome employee, more power to you try it, it might work out for you. But the last point before I get out of here is I want to talk about the management piece because okay, so you know what a lead manager is, you know when you need to hire one, and you know what makes a good lead manager, so you get this person, you go to you go to Upwork, you find a lead manager, how do you know how to manage these people? Because what the biggest mistake, the number one mistake I see people making when they are hiring employees in general, is they think, oh I got this employee now, I don't have to do that work. No.

Dan Austin: [12:46] You actually still have to do that work, you have to start managing them now, your workload doesn't just go away. Now you are a manager of a person, and I will start by saying this, it is absolutely unrealistic for you to expect that you can bring a new employee into your company, and they're gonna be really great at their job right away. Especially for these lower, you know, I guess entry level, entry level skilled jobs like lead manager and acquisition manager, like you're not gonna be hiring too many experts that are looking to get paid 3 to $400,000 out the gate, they're gonna come work for your small business. That's just not how it works, right? They have other opportunities they're gonna pursue. Not that that's always the case, but in general, you're going to be getting more of these entry level skilled folks, and also even if they have experience, they're gonna have to come in and learn you, learn your system, learn your market, learn your sellers. So don't expect for them to come right in, even if they said they were lead manager before to come in and be rock stars, right? You need to have daily calls with them, and a lot of the times you're gonna be prepping yourself by spot checking your CRM. What are they doing during the day? What are the calls that they're making?

Dan Austin: [13:45] Listening to the calls that they're having, and then you can have a daily kickoff or a separate coaching call with them, and go over that stuff. Listen to those phone calls with them, and say, what do you think you could have done better, what did you like about this call, and then give them your insight and your input on that, and help them learn how you want them to act with your sellers. And so take the time, you know, if you have a kickoff meeting like we do every day at 08:30AM, that night before, or at least that morning of, you should be reviewing what they did the day before, so you can understand how well they're doing, and where they need support help. Because they may not know that they need help and support in certain areas, if you're not sharing that with them. And I would say also, be prepared to answer questions. This goes back to like, you're not now doing the lead management work, but you need to be prepared to ask questions because you can only systematize so much and there's always gonna be nuances to it. Hey, what do I do with this? Hey, this seller said this. How How do I handle this situation? So just be Johnny on the spot helping support them, so that they can continue to do their job and be as productive as possible for you.

Dan Austin: [14:48] Now when it comes to how do you know you got a good one, once you hire them, because you never, interviews only get you so far, one of the things is, is they need to be open to taking feedback, and they need to be open to adjusting based on what you're telling them, so they are open to learning and developing. The other thing is, they need to be doing what you ask them to do. If you're asking them, hey I want you to call this many people a day, or I want you to call these people, whatever the request is, and they're not doing it, that's a huge red flag, especially if they're not doing it right away. You gotta obviously set expectations, reinforce those expectations and go back to them and ask them, hey what is the what like what's the challenge, why are you not able to do these things that I asked you, because there might be a legit issue right, and it might be something that you've done or you're doing or that they didn't understand, so give them the benefit of the doubt, but I've heard so many people talk about like how, I'm oh trying to get my lead manager to do this, but they're not doing it. It's like, are you not properly motivating them? Are they not understanding? Are you not clear with them? Do they not have the tools or know how to do it? Or are they just being a turd?

Dan Austin: [15:51] If they're just being a turd, you need to you know, you need to look at that realistically and check and make sure, check yourself, and then make sure that they have everything they need to do to do their job, but if they're still not doing it, it's probably time to find somebody else. And it's absolutely okay to go through two or three you know, lead managers before you find the right person, and fully set that expectation with yourself that you might not find the right person right away, but as long as you're providing them everything they need, and you're being a good manager and a good leader for them, and giving them everything they need to be successful, it should work out. And if they can't, then just find somebody else, you're doing the right things. So don't beat yourself up too much on that part. But the management piece is absolutely key, don't hire this person and just tell them to go do their job and don't ever follow-up with them. They'll be miserable, you'll be miserable. So be a good manager for them. With that, I will leave it here with you. If you have other questions, again, hit me up on Instagram InvestorMandDan. I love answering questions about this sort of stuff.

Dan Austin: [16:45] Hopefully this, with last week's Friday Focus, will give you kind of an idea, your acquisition manager and your lead manager, those are the two key roles you need in your business depending on where you're at and what you're skillful at. Maybe you're not so good at the sales, maybe you should hire an acquisition manager first. Maybe you got a shit ton of leads, just can't keep up. Hire a lead manager, look at it. So anyways, I hope you enjoyed this. Have a great weekend.