Real Estate Investors: How to Use the ABC Method to Follow Up on Potential Sellers

Rank Your Sellers as A, B, or C

All my leads I rank as 'A, B, or C'. A's are clearly motivated potential quick sales. They are the ones you really want to focus your time and attention on. Potentially they're a deal in the next two or three weeks to a month.

B's are people that I think are very serious. There's something going on in their life where they're going to need to sell, but they're not quite ready to do it today. I classify them as a 'B'.

A 'C' is somebody who it's unlikely I'm going to be doing business with but there's something there that says maybe and I want to keep them in my follow-up system. I'm certainly not going to be calling and spending time on 'C'.

That's the way I do it - A, B, C. You guys can do whatever you want - point systems, 1-2-3-4-5, whatever you want. I think A,B,C is a fairly quick and easy way of doing it. I'm kind of paper-oriented. I have a piece of paper with all their contact information. I literally write right there in big letters, "A", "B", or "C".

Obviously the A's I keep in my folder. If I'm on the road or something, I could even stop and call people. That's the system that I use.

Continue to Send Out Contact Information

Again, just stick with this. I would continue to send out contact information probably as much as 18 months. Again, if you do the newsletter thing, once they're in your system, who cares? It's just one more newsletter going out. It doesn't matter. It's automatic. Same with the private lenders. Just keep them on there. You never know. Eighteen months down the road something might happen.

Referrals

The other thing you never know is that they may never become your client, but their friend or associate or family member may come into a situation where they need to sell their property. Because you've followed up and you've impressed them with your professionalism, they'll pass your card or whatever onto that person.

Again, it just gets you out there with more and more people. That is the key to being a professional real estate investor - follow-up. That is where the deals are. That is where you fill your pipeline so it just starts to happen.

Many of you have probably experienced this a little bit where you start a marketing campaign. You get a lot of sellers calling you. You go out and get inundated with a bunch of sellers. You have to go out and meet with them and do the research and all of that.

Then you stop marketing. A month goes by and you start to market again. You go through this yo-yo cycle. It's natural for everybody to do that, but if you do a follow-up system some of that will stop happening.

What will happen is six months out or nine months out, you're going to be getting phone calls from people that you spoke to nine months ago. Your marketing from nine months ago is finally going to pay off. It will smooth out some of that yo-yo process that you probably go through.

That's it. We had the three calls. Tonight's the follow-up system. Make sure you do that. Develop your own system - whatever it is. It's important that you do it. That's really where the money is, in that follow-up system.