If you are one of the many real estate investors that struggle with attracting joint venture capital, I believe I’ve found the answer for you:
As simple as it sounds, you fail to connect emotionally with your prospect. For some reason, you have yet to convince them of the value your offer gives them and that they’d be better off with your investment than they would be with the money it costs to invest with you.
After speaking with so many Real Estate entrepreneurs frustrated with using ‘techniques’ and ‘systems’ based on the results of others, I noticed a very similar trend that they are approaching this from the wrong angle … they are trying to influence their JV prospect with logic, numbers and spreadsheets backing it up with all sorts of market data.
Humans are emotional beings and everything we decide is based on emotion. We just THINK we’ve made a logical decision.
How many times have you walked away from a JV meeting thinking “why didn’t they understand this?”
Maybe, you didn’t understand them?
If you ask a business owner that just closed his business what the problem was, he’ll say “we didn’t have enough customers.” If you ask why they didn’t have enough customers, he’ll tell you “because the market didn’t understand our product / service.”
The truth is he DIDN’T understand the market … and the same goes for the struggling real estate investor; she doesn’t understand her prospect.
The Main Problem
When most real estate investors learn about joint ventures by reading books and attending workshops listening to how other successful investors attract capital, most walk away trying to model them…and I was no different. Even though it’s great for inspiration, it wasn’t working for me – how’s it working for you?
If you’re like many of the real estate entrepreneurs we personally coach, I’m guessing you still have trouble attracting JVs. It’s perfectly normal because what is missing is NOT more information, it’s the understanding of how to connect with your prospects.
What IS Connection?
Attracting and connecting with people to work with you is NOT you telling them about your business, how it works and why it’s the best; it’s about you telling them what SPECIFIC resolution your business provides that solves the problems they have TODAY.
This is a major disconnect so many real estate investors have. They focus on ‘selling the future’ (build a retirement portfolio or save for children’s education are great examples) instead of connecting their offer to immediate problems their prospect has… that will eventually get them the retirement or college fund.
How To Find Out What They Want
I learned very early in my businesses that I didn’t know it all – that sounds fairly obvious right? But the fact is that almost EVERY entrepreneur believes they KNOW their customer if you asked them…just like every real estate investor believes they know what their JV wants.
The hard truth is that if you have never actually ‘asked’ your potential customers:
- What their biggest problems and frustrations are and,
- What they think is the solution to those problems
Then you don’t know your customers as well as you think.
Each time we prove this simple strategy with our coaching clients, they have come away with new ‘data’, understanding ‘emotional triggers’ to use when communicating with potential partners.
Obviously this is a HUGE subject that needs more explanation and I’ll talk more about this in future posts, but if you’re so intrigued as to how and what to ask your potential JVs, simply post your question below and I’ll answer it for you.