The Importance of Using Free Reports to Get Sellers to Call You and Close Deals

Let’s talk about free reports. One of the things we’ve talked about is the fundamentals of marketing, including one-step marketing and two-step marketing, the fact that we really stressed that we’re going to be doing two-step marketing.
Create an Advertisement
You’re going to put out something – an ad, a postcard, whatever – and your objective is not to make the sale, but to get that person to raise their hand and to email you, call you, call your voice recorded message line, go to your website, whatever – but to raise their hand, show some interest, and then allow you to follow up with that person, capture their email, phone number, or something of that nature, and allow you to then obviously go back and to market to them over time.
How to Handle the Response
So the question then is what’s the first thing you do if somebody goes to your website and leaves their email address and says, “Yes, I’m interested in selling my house. Maybe here’s the address, here’s a little bit about the house, maybe here’s a few little information bits about the property, but I might have some interest in talking to you further.”
Or somebody calls your cell phone, or if somebody calls your voice mail recorded line and leaves their name and number and says, “Yes, I’m interested.” What’s the next step? That’s kind of what we’re going to talk about tonight.
Normally the next step would be to send out something to that individual that will then kind of move the ball forward in terms of them understanding what your business is, understanding what the advantages of doing business with you are – and we’re going to talk about that a lot – and kind of move the ball forward.
Free Report
So you send out something to them. It could be a personalized letter, it could even be a hand-written letter, but one of the best ways of doing it is preparing a free report. That free report obviously should answer or address the question, “Why should I do business with you?”
The point of the free report is to answer that question. You need to discuss all the benefits, not features, but the benefits the person would get out of doing business with you.
They may be in foreclosure, they may be in pre-foreclosure, they may be an attorney or family that’s been willed a property through an estate sale and they just want to get rid of it, so they want to know the advantages of doing business with you.
Particularly in this marketplace, there’s a lot of advantages you can lay out for somebody. One is maybe you’ve got special access to financing. Maybe you’ve been one of the really smart real estate investors and you’ve built up your private lending business and you’re out there getting private lenders, and you have access to capital that nobody else has.
“Why should I do business with you?” You’ve got 12 private lenders behind you that have money and are willing to do business, where all the other guys are still going to banks and hard money lenders, and most of them are out of business and have no money. So the advantage of doing business with you is you’ve got a true source of financing. You’ve got to lay out the advantage of doing business with you.
Why should I do business with you is because you’ve got the advantages that nobody else does. Again, you have to be constantly answering that question: Why should I do business with you as opposed to one of your competitors, or as opposed to doing nothing? It’s always easy to do nothing.
A free report starts to address that question. A free report is the process of the two-step marketing. It’s the second step, possibly the third step, who knows, but it’s one of the early sequences of a typical sequence that you’re going to go through to get a seller to start to think about doing business with you.
This is a process and it can take two, three, four, five steps. They’re not going to just send you the deed through the mail with a little coupon. It’s a process.