When your property management business isn't growing, hiring a salesperson might seem like the obvious solution, but what if that's actually where most owners go wrong…

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull break down why most BDM hires fail, the critical mistakes owners make with commission-only roles, and the exact systems required to make a salesperson successful. They dive into DoorGrow's Three Fits framework, the three non-negotiable ingredients for BDM success, and tease a game-changing new growth model designed to help property managers scale without burnout, bad leads, or broken systems.

You'll Learn

(00:00) Introduction: The Three Fits for Hiring (01:16) The Challenges of Hiring a Business Development Manager (BDM)

(02:42) The Three Key Ingredients for BDM Success

(04:40) Mistakes in BDM Compensation: The Commission-Only Pitfall

(05:40) The Three Roles of a BDM and the Problem with Buying Leads

(09:54) The "Door Machine" Teaser: The Easy Button for Growth

(14:39) Advanced Community, AI, and Final Thoughts

Quotables

"A BDM has zero chance of success if you hire the wrong person."

"If they're not all three, they will fail. Or you'll fire them. Or they will leave you because they're not making enough money."

"If you do not have the right system to plug a BDM or a salesperson into, you can hire as many of them as you want, and they will still not work."

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:01)

All right, five, four, three, two, one. All right, we are Jason and Sarah Hull, the owners of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching company for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGrow, we have spoken to thousands of property management business owners, coached, consulted, and cleaned up hundreds of businesses, helping them at doors.

improve pricing, increase profits, simplify operations, and we run the leading property management mastermind with more video testimonials and reviews than any other coach or consultant in the industry. We're the best. At DoorGrow, we believe that good property managers can change the world and that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management, business owners, and their businesses. We want to transform the industry.

eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. Now, let's get into the show. All right. So today, we're going to be chatting a little bit about the challenges of getting a business development manager, a BDM, or a salesperson for your property management business that we've seen. Yes. So a lot of times people think, hey, I need to grow my business.

and they either don't wanna do it, they don't have the time to do it, or they just want help doing it. And then their go-to is, well, I'll just hire someone to do it, right? What could go wrong? Yeah, and that's where they make their first mistakes. Hiring is tough. Hiring is tough. And so, a BDM has zero chance of success if you hire the wrong person. And so, we...

started solving this challenge for our clients by building out a hiring system. We call it door for a hiring. And we focus on what we call the three fits. They gotta be the right culture fit, which means they actually share your values. You can trust them. Because if they don't, aren't a culture fit, they'll steal from you or they'll do something off. And if culture's off, generally everything else goes south. It doesn't work. They have to be the right personality fit, which means they have to have

the right personality to be willing and love and be able to do sales. And they have the right skill fit, which means they have to be intellectually capable of developing the skill or they have to have the sales skill already. If they're not all three, they will fail. Or you'll fire them, which is basically because they're failing. Or they will leave you because they're not making enough money. Okay, then once you hire them,

assuming you get the right person, there's three key ingredients we found that are critical for BDM success and it's really difficult to get all three of these dialed in. It's even difficult for our clients who we coach to do these three things and so generally we see a lot of other BDM coaching companies they probably do a good job of maybe hiring the right people. My guess is they know how to read disk assessments and they use other tools and they can find good salespeople.

but I hear a lot of them fail. Like my brother hired two salespeople from one of these BDM placement coaching companies and he fired both of them. And it probably was my brother's fault. I don't know. Sorry, Brian. But it might've been he just didn't have these three key ingredients in place. They might've been able to have a chance. So these three key ingredients are one, training. And.

Basically they have the right strategies and training in order to succeed. Second, they have to have the right accountability. A lot of business owners just are like, here, here's what you do, or they rely on the BDM coaching company to just make it work. And sometimes they just get bad strategy. I don't think anybody has as good a strategy or clever or unique as I do as Dorgo does. We were very innovative on that.

I think then ⁓ the third piece is we've got training, we've got then accountability, there has to be transparency, visibility, metrics, things like this. they're being, you you can see where the gaps are, where the problems are. And third, compensation. And so the compensation has to be right. If the compensation structure is off, compensation is incentive. And if the incentive structure is off, either they won't be making enough money,

and they'll quit or you'll be paying them maybe too much money in the wrong way and then they get lazy and they're not incentivized to continue because they're making enough money or they're not getting motivated enough to get the results that you need so you'll fire them. There's so many ways compensation gets messed up. A lot of you think, I could just pay them commission only. Then I don't have to pay them anything unless they make money and then they're not motivated or they're not doing the leading actions.

and then they fail. So we've just seen a lot of mistakes made there. And I think one of the biggest ones is the idea, well, I'll just pay them commission only. And that's a really nice thought, but in practical application, it's just not a way to set things up to be successful. And the reason is, I know everybody's going, that's what I want. Yes, we can want these things, but...

In reality, the problem is that unless someone can start working in your business today and have the ability to close deals this week, then a commission only structure is just not going to work. And what I mean by that is not just, ⁓ no, they can, they can close a deal. They could close a deal right away. Great.

do you have a few thousand leads for them to call today? So if they get hired today and they get trained today and then tomorrow they start making calls, do you have a whole list of people that they can call and then close deals as early as like four days later, three days later? Because if the answer to that is no,

No, Sarah, I don't have an entire list. If I had an entire list, I would just call them myself and I would just work that list myself. Great. So then what you're doing is you're bringing someone in who can only make money if they close a deal and somehow expecting them, you're expecting them to close a deal, but not providing them with leads to work. So it's essentially saying, all right, I...

We'll pay you if you close deals. You can get started today. I don't have a list, a long list. Don't give them 10 people. 10 leads is not good enough. I don't have many leads for you to work. I have some, but I don't have a whole list of leads ready for you to just start working that are already in the system. ⁓ You need to go find the leads and create the connections and the relationships.

to get the leads and then you need to build a relationship with them and take them through the entire sales process and then you can close them and that might take two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, two months, three months. So what usually ends up happening on a commission only structure is the BDM, the first month makes zero dollars. So imagine if you did work for an entire month and you made nothing.

Would you want to be in that situation? Probably not. But then we're expecting other people to want to be in that situ...

DGS 322: The Three Key Ingredients for BDM Success