Streamline your vendor negotiations with airSlate SignNow's Sales cycle steps in vendor negotiations

How to create outlook signature

welcome back to the amz affiliate bootcamp course we're in module eight lesson three and we're going to talk about negotiating the sales process just a reminder my name is justin cook and i'm here with my business partner joe magnotti we're partners of a company called empire flippers where we help others buy sell and invest in websites and online businesses all right so let's get into this what are the steps to a sale in the last lesson we talked about preparing for and actually getting your site listed so that was the first step here submitting your site for sale it's really quick you fill out the form fill out all the information that's required and then sit back the second step is to pass our vetting process now this is a process we go through to match all of your numbers up to make sure that you have ownership of the site to make sure the earnings history and the trajectory everything looks good and this will generally take one to two weeks normally about a week week and a half for amazon affiliate sites it can take two to three weeks for more complicated types of businesses yeah we ask that you be patient with this process it's an important step in making sure we have all your documentation in place it's fairly straightforward with the amazon affiliate site because the information is so readily available but like i said having the documentation in place so that buyers have easy access to it is important the third step is the sales process and we're going to get into that in this lesson one of the things i should mention is it says it varies and it varies pretty significantly and this is a question we get we're going to answer this later too but how long is it going to take me to sell my website well it varies and that's the truth we've sold a 300 000 amazon affiliate site in less than 30 days and then we've had a fifteen thousand dollar amazon affiliate site that took two and a half months so it can vary pretty heavily the fourth step in the process will be transferring the site so this generally will take one to two weeks it's just the process of transferring the site from you the seller to the new buyer verifying that all the codes are working correctly that the earnings are coming in and that the traffic is expected this is critical to the buyer and this is one of the huge advantages that empire flippers has over other marketplaces and brokers most brokers would put this on you as the seller you'd have to figure it out how to change the codes how to transfer that if you're a technical person it's fairly straightforward especially with an amazon site but most sellers like to have us there because we have expertise in transferring hundreds if not thousands of sites over the years and the last step the one you're really looking forward to is receiving payment once the site's been transferred the buyers verify the traffic and earnings we're gonna go ahead and forward that payment to you we normally do it through a wire to your bank account and that normally takes one to two days just depending on the banks a couple of quick notes 90 of the sales that are completed are completed within 30 days so that means of the sites that we sell 90 of them are done within 30 days now it can take longer can take two months it can take three months even up to six months and that's why we require six months of exclusivity if you're going to list your site for sale with us we ask that you list it for six months now we like to under promise and over deliver which is why we're generally asking for those six months yeah and there's a lot of work that goes into this we'll get into that a bit later talking about what we do during that six-month process in order to market your listing but know that especially on larger deals there's a lot of high touch yeah that's high touch both from our team which we generally do most of this it's going to be mostly things even behind the scenes that you're not seeing we're doing and we're doing a lot of the work but there's more involvement both on our part and your part when you're selling larger amazon affiliate sites so if your site is making 10 000 15 000 30 000 a month and you're looking at a low to mid six figure sale we're going to have a lot more things that we need to do and things that you need to do to get the deal done we're going to talk about that briefly all right so let's get into this the next step is what is involved in the vetting process so this is after you've submitted your site for sale with us it's not currently listed yet and we're running through all the information you've submitted and looking at the screenshots and earnings and history to making sure everything is verified the first thing is we're looking for proof of ownership making sure that you're actually the owner of the site and you have authorization to sell it we don't want you selling someone else's site that would obviously be a very bad thing we're also looking to make sure that your earnings match the stated amount so sometimes people get it wrong right you submit the information saying oh it's making you know 30 300 a month comes out it's making 3 100 a month not really a big deal but would be a big deal if we started telling buyers mismatched amounts and our staff can help you with that if you're having trouble getting the numbers right calculating everything especially if you use multiple amazon associates count one from the usa one from canada one from different european countries our staff can go in collect those numbers for you match them up to a p l and make sure that everything equals out the next thing we're looking for is to make sure that your traffic sources are stable and consistent what that means is just to make sure that your rankings have been similar over time improving or slightly decreasing is okay but to make sure there's not huge variances in what's going on with your traffic sources we're also looking to make sure the age of the site and the earnings history are verified so making sure that month over month everything is as it's supposed to be now during this entire vetting process it'll take generally one to two weeks our team is going to be emailing back and forth with you it can be anything from two to five emails back and forth just to make sure if we have any questions that you're able to answer them and also to make sure you're responsive in keeping up on it and getting us the answers we need to you know finish the vetting process two other things we didn't mention that we do check are the content of the site and the backlink profile we want to make sure that your content is 100 original not copied or spun from any other sources and we want to make sure that your backlinks are fairly clean that you're not using any black hat techniques in order to build links and have a risky backlink profile a quick note i should mention is that we reject a little more than 30 percent of the sites that are submitted with us so someone you know puts all their information together they submit their site for sale and they're hoping to list with us unfortunately we have to give them the bad news that usually comes down to inconsistencies not meeting the requirements that we've talked about in previous lessons or just generally not being a good fit for our buyers now this is not personal there's nothing personal about it no issues there what we're looking to do is protect our buyers and our sellers the good news is is that if we've accepted your site and it's past our vetting process and listed on our marketplace it is a very high likelihood of selling of the sites that we list over all time we've sold more than 90 of the sites that were listed on our marketplace so we have a pretty good indication and understanding of what our buyers are looking for so if you've been listed on the marketplace it's great news for you you have a high likelihood of selling all right so let's say you passed the vetting process we've now emailed you told you exactly what we're gonna list for make sure everything's good to go and we're gonna put you up on our marketplace for sale here's what happens as soon as the site is listed we're gonna send an email out to more than 30 000 potential buyers and it's going to mention your listing and your information and invite them to ask more questions and to get deeper involved and potentially buying your site we're also going to put a social media push on that includes things like twitter it includes things like facebook in fact if your site path is large enough we're actually going to give you a call and do a seller interview it's not a requirement you don't have to do it but it's a great sales tool for potential buyers to listen to an interview with you and don't worry about that if your site qualifies we're going to be in contact with you and we're going to walk you through the entire process it's really easy so after we've done that we're going to start to get some inquiries from potential buyers and the way they do that on our marketplace which is a little bit different is they make a deposit so if your site is for sale for let's say a hundred thousand dollars generally they're gonna make a five percent deposit that's a five thousand dollar deposit that's a refundable deposit it's a test for us to be able to verify that they have some access to cash and the reason for that is we don't want a bunch of people hundreds or even thousands of people looking at your site and potentially making copycats now your site is likely to sell so it's not actually to protect you as the seller now a lot of sellers think oh thank god i don't have to show my url and everything to thousands of people but the truth is you're going to sell your site so there are copycats it ultimately affects the buyer not you yeah and i love using the deposit as a sales tool as well it's a great filter for us to see who is a qualified buyer yeah if they have five percent does it necessarily mean they have the entire purchase price perhaps not but most people that that put down the deposit are genuinely interested in the site and know that they have to have the funds available and empire floors we get tens of thousands of people visiting our site and looking at our marketplace every month it's a great way for us to weed through the tire kickers and make sure that we're engaging real potential buyers so let's talk about that now we're going to start getting some initial inquiries we have people contacting us and asking us basic questions about the site sometimes those questions are already listed in the listing itself where we're selling your site and so we can have our agents and our team get back to them and answer some of the basic questions some of the questions are a little more detailed or weren't actually initially asked of you so we don't have that information and sometimes we're going to pass those questions on to you so we act as a buffer we handle some of the initial inquiries the basic information we've already collected from you but if there's something very specific or different then we're going to forward that question on to you and have you answer it so that we can then get back to that potential buyer and it's very important that you answer those questions quickly if possible if we sit on them a long time buyers become disinterested and they want to move on to other listings keep in mind while there are plenty of buyers hungry buyers looking specifically for amazon affiliate sites you're not the only rodeo there are other sites that are available and for sale that they're looking at so they can move on and end up buying other sites all right so the next step and this is really important for larger sites if your site is probably 60 000 or more definitely a 100 150 200 000 is the buyer seller call so this is how this works once some of the initial questions have been asked from the depositor either we've answered them or we've forwarded the questions to you and you've then answered them we've done kind of the preliminary questions now the buyer wants to talk to you on the phone and this is especially important for six figure deals they're going to want to have a conversation it's not just to wire you the money and good luck so what we do is we actually help set those calls up we're going to pick a time that works for both you and the prospective buyer and schedule that call so once the call is scheduled what we're going to have is generally one of our sales guys that'd be joe my business partner or another guy named mike or someone else on our staff that's going to schedule that call with you and they're going to actually prepare you for the talk with the buyer so this is something that i think a really unique value add we have so maybe 20 to 30 minutes before your call with the buyer you're gonna get a call from joe mike or someone else on our staff that says hey look i want to explain to you who this buyer is what they're looking for some of the things maybe to answer some of the you know things you're going to want to make sure to tell them some of the things to prepare so we can knock this buyer seller call out of the park yeah and this is where i spend the vast majority of my time personally in empire flippers i spent about 30 hours on the phone with buyers and sellers a week making sure that these conference calls get done right so we're going to walk you through step by step on how to do this process make sure we're there during the call and help you to present your business in the best light available so it sounds a little weird to say this but we actually hold your hand to the buyer seller call to make sure you have the best chance and because our team has done this so many times they have a very specific process they're going to walk through now sometimes on these buyer seller calls you're going to get an offer now it doesn't mean you have to accept that offer it doesn't mean that it's written in stone but this means generally that the buyer is particularly interested now normally that offer is not accepted on that particular call it's normally in a call or follow-up where joe or someone our staff will call you after that buyer seller call to kind of discuss how the call went and give feedback on future calls and to discuss any offers made yeah and this is i think you know where a broker really shines for most sellers is we can help you negotiate that sales process and make sure that we get the close to list value as possible and that might require you know some negotiation some back and forth but we have done this process before and we're very good at facilitating deals so sometimes the offer is not made on the buyer seller call sometimes you know it's a negotiation or there's an offer made a week later after the buyers done more due diligence which duel just means they're looking to the site verifying the information checking everything to make sure that this is a purchase they want to make so let's say that an offer comes in and your site was listed for a hundred thousand and you get an offer for let's say seventy thousand dollars or eighty thousand dollars and one thing you think is well no way i'm selling for that i'm not selling my website for seventy thousand i reject the offer but generally that's not the best approach there may be something more that the buyer is looking for than just the discount and that's i think where guys like joe and mike and our team shine is they're able to talk to the buyer massage out of them exactly what they're looking for sometimes they're worried about not knowing the keyword research process for example so they want a discount because of that and simply talking to you and making sure you have a documented process on the keyword research process that you can hand over to the buyer is going to get you more value maybe they go okay i don't need to discount or yes i'll i just want five thousand dollars off or ten thousand dollars off so this is all part of the negotiation process that our team will help guide you on right so there may be one person asked for a discount another person asks not for discount but more training and as long as you're flexible and willing to discuss and you know negotiate back we can help you get a deal now once a deal has been made specifically for sites under 50 60 000 once a deal has been made usually it's just a wire we start the transfer process we finish the transfer process and we pay you out for larger deals 200 300 500 000 there may be a contract involved again that's just a continuation of the negotiation and you know sometimes lawyers are involved and that's probably not lovely we don't love that because it can be some back and forth but we bring lawyers in get the contracts make sure everything's agreed in principle and then both parties sign the contract but once that's done then we begin the transfer process yeah we can definitely help you navigate the contractual obligations we have templates in place and we actually have legal staff that can make modifications if necessary to our template contract to help you do that the transfer process is fairly unique to empire flippers and it's something that i think is one of our unique selling positions so the thing that kicks off the transfer process is the wire from the buyer once the buyer has wired the money over we have that money ready to go we're going to be in the transfer process and that's something we actually do for you and we do it because not everyone's selling their website you know does a couple dozen website transfers a month and that's something that we do on a regular basis and we're happy to handle for you to get it into the hands of the buyer once the buyer has received all the information everything has been transferred to their accounts they're up running receiving traffic and earnings we then pay out the seller we're going to pay you out 85 of the ultimate sales price we keep 15 as commission and that's it and the deal is done now it's important to remember that the deal is not done until you're paid out so in terms of continuing to run the website as you normally would to keep up on everything to make sure everything is running smoothly you're going to want to do that even when you've come to an agreement over the phone with the buyer let's say you're on a buyer seller call they say i give you a hundred thousand you say yep i'm in let's do it you can't stop working on the site you need to make sure the site is updated running until you get paid that's the actual end of the deal all right so we've talked about the sales process we talked a lot about what you know value we provide and what we're doing for you during the sales process let's talk about your responsibilities here are the things that you're going to be responsible for and the first thing is to respond quickly to buyer inquiries once we have your listing up once we have your website for sale and we have those inquiries coming in you're going to need to be responsive we've seen there are times where people are busy and it takes two three four six days to get back to those inquiries that's not good it means it's gonna be more difficult to sell your site because buyers sometimes move on they might be looking at multiple listings at once and if they figure you're not responsive and someone else is responsive they might end up buying that website instead the second thing is to make sure that you have time available for buyer seller calls this is particularly important for the larger sites where the buyer seller calls required if you're selling a 15 30 60 even a 60 000 amazon affiliate site you may not even have to get on a buy or seller call but if it's a larger site or we do set up a buyer seller call it's important to make sure you make that call yeah and as we've stated before i'm going to help you through that process or someone on our staff will so you don't have to be afraid of saying the wrong thing on the call if english is not your native language that's not a problem again we'll referee the call we'll help you with all the questions and we're going to prepare you pretty well for it one thing you're going to want to remember and something that's really important for you to do is to be flexible with the offers again don't take anything personally if you have a hundred thousand dollar site someone offers you 70 don't think it's a slap in the face don't think they're offending you they might be trying to weasel a deal we know these buyers because many of them i think over half of our buyers are repeat buyers so there's a good chance that we know them we know where they're coming from yes you got an offer maybe it's a low ball offer but we're going to help you navigate this process we're going to help you get through it now a good thing to do is to not be completely unreasonable we've had deals that were almost lost over like less than a thousand dollars and it was like you know hundred hundred and twenty thousand dollar deal and it comes down to like an 800 difference and the buyer and seller won't budge which is crazy for a hundred thousand dollar deal eight hundred dollars you know it's good to have principles but don't get so stuck on such a small amount of money when the deal is on the line and don't worry i know it can be stressful it can it can be intense the selling process and the buying process so that's one of the reasons we can step in and help massage those deals to get them done yeah the key thing is to work with your sales person whether that's me or mike or someone else on our staff and let them know what your your minimum available amount is and then we can try to negotiate with the buyer to come up to that or to find a structure that will work in order to get your minimum price out one of the other things you're going to need to do is to update your traffic and earnings monthly if needed so let's say for example that we get your listing up and live and available to our buyers on march 15th let's say april 1st rolls around yes april fool's day i know let's say april 1st rolls around we're going to need updated information from you for march we're going to need traffic information we're going to need earnings information so that we can update all the information and keep it fresh one of the things buyers look for is that they're looking at a listing and they see that a month or two has gone by and that information has not been updated they're going to wonder what's the problem here why hasn't it been updated is the seller not responsive do they not care so that really doesn't look good for you you want to keep that information updated the other thing that's really important is that it is likely to change the price especially if it earned more money so if april first rolls around your site earned more money in march if we're using a six month or a 12 month history and it made more money in march that means the price for your site is going to go up one of the things we do is anyone that had been interested in the site previously at the lower price we emailed them right away and said hey if you want to buy this site you better buy it now because the price is going up now the price will go up if they don't buy it quickly but what that does is it motivates them say look you may save two three ten thousand dollars if you buy it now you better act right and we can use that as a sales technique in order to hurry a buyer along in a nice way to make them make a decision on purchasing your site and even if your amounts have gone down it's important that you update us quickly because this again is something that we can use as a sales technique sometimes especially close to the end of the month buyers sit on the sideline to kind of see how the month worked out so by just delaying getting us the data you're pushing back a potential deal and the truth is if your site did go down in earnings and the buyer comes along makes an offer and then they find out the site went down earnings they're going to expect a discount or they may not do the deal at all thinking you're not being trustworthy and honest about the deal so always on any of these deals you're doing it's better to just be very straightforward with your earnings your traffic history everything so that you get the buyer that's the right buyer for you all right so let's talk about some of the common seller mistakes now some of these mistakes are things that will lose you the deal frankly and if it doesn't lose the deal it can actually lose you a lot of money in the sale we've seen sales goes for 10 20 30 40 less because of some of these mistakes so the first one is selling on potential and this is a rookie mistake for people selling a website for the first time you know sometimes they'll say look the website is only making a thousand dollars a month right now but with a couple of tweaks we can get it up to two three thousand dollars a month you should buy it for way more money because it's so easy to double or triple the earnings and the problem with that is you're treating the buyer as if they're kind of dumb right you're saying look it takes two months i can double or triple the earnings you can do it too buy it for way more money but the truth is the buyer knows this if it was so easy for you to do it you just do it right now and sell in a few months yeah and the other thing is is that even if a buyer believes in your plan in order to expand the potential of the site their offer is most likely going to can turn some sort of significant earn out so they'll give you a lot less cash up front and say if you hit these lofty dreamy goals then one day i'll pay you that amount and you wind up sitting on the sideline and never getting that cash keep in mind that the value always equals net monthly profit times your multiple the multiple is generally 20 to 30 months so if your net monthly profit is you know 2 000 and your multiple is 20 you're likely to get 40 000 for the sale now this is true because it's based on previous earnings over the last 6 or 12 months we're not basing on future earnings this isn't twitter this isn't facebook where you get some crazy huge multi-billion dollar valuations this is the rest of us and we've done a lot of deals this is the formula and the process used for selling websites under 5 million another common seller mistake is when they stop working on the site after listing it for sale so what happens is a lot of sellers they have multiple projects they're working on they have multiple sites they're working on once they've listed a site for sale they think oh you know what i'm done it's in a cell quick i'll be done i'll move on i'm not going to do anything with the site anymore and that can be problematic so if they do that and leave it alone and there's a decline in earnings or there's some kind of problem with the site they don't recognize on site was down for a day or a week or a month that can be really really bad can cost them money in a sale yeah we see this a lot from rookie sellers and i think it's something that it's important that we harp on a little bit to make sure that you understand how important is the deal is not done till the money is in your account and anything even simple things like updating wordpress plugins should be done on a regular basis until the deal is completely finished the next point we've mentioned this before but being unresponsive to buyer questions or increase if you're not getting back to them quickly within a day within 24 hours like that's not good you don't want to wait three four days to get back to these questions you want to answer them within 24 hours when or wherever possible one of the other tips or tricks i can tell you is that sometimes buyer questions are a little all over the place and they're hard to kind of decipher and it's hard to kind of like you know break those questions down so what helps me is if i get what looks like four or five questions i parse them by numbering them i say okay here's question number one and i write an answer to that and i rewrite their question number two and here's the answer that and that generally helps keep everyone clear a lot of times our team will do that too to make it much clearer for you one of the other common seller mistakes is just being inflexible with offers so sometimes you'll get an offer like i said that may be you know 70 or 80 percent of lists and not understanding that you know what they're really looking for they're just looking for like a slight discount which is you know reasonable or you know you offered let's say one week of email support and the buyer really wants 30 days they want 30 days to feel comfortable that they can email you maybe they want two skype calls normally a lot of the times we don't the buyer doesn't actually need you for the skype calls they don't need the email support so offering that additional support gives them kind of the warm and fuzzy to actually get the deal done to make the offer and to come to an agreement with you so if you're inflexible you say look i'm only giving one week of email support and all they're looking for is 30 days and that's gonna keep the deal from getting done that's pretty painful it's pretty painful for us because we're trying harder than you are to sell your site so we'll help guide you on these things if you have any questions about what you should be flexible on or shouldn't be or what other people are looking at your site or what potential offers are going to be made all you have to do is ask and we're happy to guide you through that process all right so the next thing we want to cover are some frequently asked questions the first one is what are the chances that my site will sell well the good news is that if you've passed our vetting process there's a pretty good chance your site is going to sell to empire flippers as i mentioned before of all the sites we've ever listed more than 90 percent of listed sites have sold through our marketplace so that means there's a very good chance that your site is likely to sell if it's past our vetting process so that doesn't guarantee you that your site will sell and it's hard for us to state there's a very good chance it will the other thing i'll mention is that amazon affiliate sites are relatively easy there are plenty of people that have or can get amazon affiliate accounts relatively easy everyone understands the monetization process and if you're using google analytics or clicking or following the guidelines that we've laid out in this module you're going to have the best chance for success again no guarantees but your likelihood is high the next question we get is how long is it going to take my site to sell and again that varies so we've sold 300 000 sites in less than 30 days and it's taken us months to sell a 15 20 000 site a lot of those things are going to depend on problems you don't have because we do sell sites other than amazon affiliate sites they're all different monetization methods and some of them can be quite complicated or very technical so it's a very technical site there's a complicated site sometimes it can take three months six months nine months i'd say amazon affiliate sites generally sell a lot faster i will refer to uh one of the statistics that we've used we've looked up is that of the sites we sell ninety percent of them are sold within 30 days that means from the time we list the site for sale by the time we get the money in the bank it's less than 30 days for 90 of sold sites yeah and i think that speaks to the marketing process that we have in place for getting buyers connected with the right listings and that's why it's important that you know you help us when we ask you for questions like we've said before we're going to assist you in navigating the entire process but we are going to need information and input from you so set aside some time for that while you're selling another question is should i accept a lower priced offer and this is going to vary depending on the offer depending on how long your site's been listed and how it compares to other some of the other sites we've sold and this is one of the things that's very subjective right it's going to depend and so one of the things we asked you to do is to rely on our team and our expertise we've done a lot of these deals we do deals on a regular basis and all you have to do is ask a lot of times an offer may be sent from a buyer and our team submits that or forwards that offer to you and says would you like to accept would you like to counter or would you like to reject at any point when you get that email all you have to do is say hey would like some guidance here what do you guys recommend and we'll step in we'll get on the call with you and we'll walk you through it yeah i mean some of the things to keep in mind are the speed at which you need to sell the business i tell sellers all the time empireville is not going anywhere the marketplace is going to be here if you want to keep the site listed and try to get as close to list price as possible that's something we can absolutely do for you however if you want to get the money in your bank account a little bit faster you might be you need to be flexible on your actual sales price so one of the other questions that we get are like you know what's the value of a broker like why why am i using a broker can i just sell it for myself aren't i going to save myself 15 and there's a bunch of ways to answer this but i think one of the easiest is is that generally when you sell with a broker we put the information together and have a larger network than anyone individually selling their sites now i have friends in the entrepreneurship industry that have you know hundreds of thousands of followers those people can pretty easily sell their sites themselves they have a huge network of people that would potentially buy an amazon affiliate site from them on the other hand most people aren't in that scenario that's a very rare scenario whereas we have those networks another thing you need to consider is that as a seller there are ways for buyers to scam you just one example would be sometimes you know the buyer wants to send over let's say 50 of the fee or 50 of the list price and then have you transfer the domain to them and then they'll send you another let's say 25 and then you transfer some more information and then transfer the rest what you may not know is that by transferring a domain they can then take control of the site and cause you all kinds of problems so you know there are ways for buyers to scam sellers i think it's more likely the sellers to stand buyers but it actually works both ways so you know brokers have negotiated this before guys like us and we've this is our this is what we do for a living this is our main gig and this is all that we do so we do it on a regular basis and i think ultimately the fact that we can give you a higher sales price and save you from potentially getting scammed and make the transfer process really smooth is a great reason to do business all right so now that we've negotiated the sales process walk you through exactly how to sell your website we're going to move into the more advanced tips tricks and tactics in lesson four we're gonna be talking about becoming a website selling and buying pro