June 27, 2017

Job Back Ground & Introduction

So here I am starting a blog about cold calling and my job, because cold calling sucks, and I am kinda hating my job today.

A little background on my job... I am a real estate agent working at Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services. For those of you who aren't familiar with the difference between normal real estate agents and commercial real estate agents here is a little break down. Most real estate agents sell and buy homes/houses for their clients. The commercial world is very very different from the residential world. Most commercial agents are leasing agents, meaning the represent landlords in finding tenants to lease their properties. What I do is called investment sales. Basically I sell investment properties. There are a lot of different types of investment properties, I do something called single-tenant net leased investment sales. This means I sell buildings that have on tenant in them, and they are net leased. Net leased means that the landlord doesn't have any responsibilities regarding the property but that the tenant is responsible for everything. Within the single-tenant net leased (stnl) area there are multiple different types of properties, mostly within retail. I am doing fast food restaurants, more particularly Wendy's restaurants. I have built a database of all 6,000 of the Wendy's properties in the United States. This database has the contact information of all the different people who own each of these properties. Basically what I do, is I cold call these people, and if they want to sell their property I sell it for them.

(side note: this job pays commission only, so I am not getting paid anything while doing all these calls. I only get paid if I close a deal. This is great because it makes it so I am have all the freedom in the world regarding everything about work, but it also sucks because I am not making any money and living off of the savings my wife and I built up so I could do this job.)

There is a big long process that actually describes what I do when I cold call people, and everything it takes to turn the cold call into closing a property. It would be boring to write and boring for you to read so I won't get into it. But basically I have to make a LOT of cold calls before I have a good chance of closing a deal.

So, to deal with the constant rejection I am facing on daily basis on the phone, I am starting this blog to talk about cold calling, how some days it is the worst thing in the entire world, and how some days it's not so bad, and how the days when you get something good you feel on top of the world.

Today

Today hasn't been the worst day ever, it just started out with a really bad phone call, which has put a damper on the whole day. Basically I called a lady who I have never called/talked to before, she was really mad and told me that she considered calling her stalking. I will never call her back, because I hate talking to people who are mad, but also because I don't want to bother people. I know that when I call people it bothers most of them. My goal is not to bother anyone, I call people because I truly want to help them sell their property, if that is what they want to do with their property. When people tell me they don't want to sell I am super nice and friendly about it and understand that they don't want to sell, I am not a pushy salesman. But I have to call a lot of people so I can find the one person who does actually want to use me as a resource to sell their property. Sorry that I bother people, but I have to bother some people to get to the one person who actually needs what I am doing. So ya today hasn't been that great. I have kind of been down all day and have been feeling discouraged all day because of that one really bad call at the beginning of the day. I have talked to more people than I expected to today, which is good. No one has wanted to sell or get an evaluation, but I am still talking to owners which is better than hearing the phone ring endlessly. Basically today has sucked and I have wanted to go home all day, but I only need to do 20 more calls and I will get them done.