As I drive across Arizona, I want to show you exactly how I make a virtual wholesaling business work even when I’m on the road. So today, I’m talking with my VAs LJ and Ralph about the marketing work they do for me. Using different tools, including Podio, REI Simple, text messaging, and Mojo, my virtual assistants work their way through lists looking for sellers.

I really believe that everything is in the follow up, and that’s why we put a lot of effort in tracking our calls and keeping good notes. As expert cold callers, LJ and Ralph have some tips for how to have casual and natural conversations with potential sellers that open them up for a follow up call. You can really see how they support each other as a team and work together to train and perfect their cold calling techniques.

Because I want you to see the magic that can happen with cold calling and CRMs, I’m going to revisit an old CRM in a market I haven’t visited in two years. LJ and Ralph are going to go through my list and find out how many houses have already sold for cash, how many deals I would’ve had if I’d continued working that market, and if there are still deals sitting there waiting to be sold. It might be a painful lesson to work through, but I really want you to see the possibility in your lists, no matter how old they are.

You don’t want to miss this case study, so make sure you’re on my email list so that you can get actionable tips on how to be a better cold caller, and smash those goals with your follow up.here I’m going to work on a CRM that I haven’t touched in two years. We’re going to document how many deals we lost and how many we can close on. If you want in, make sure you’re on my email list so that you can see how I revive this CRM, and make money off of incredibly old leads.

Watch the Episode:

What’s Inside:

  • How to overcome the negative callers and fix your mindset.
  • The difference between cold calling and warm calling.
  • My VAs share their scripts and conversation starters.
  • How do you talk with a phone number that’s listed as an LLC?

Gavin: Hey, guys, how you doing? Gavin with REI network. I have a special little episode today, something that I’ve never done before. I’m going to introduce the guys here in a second. Just before I do. If you haven’t already. Make sure you go to REINetwork.com/downloads. I have two or three little gifts for you that you can download that I think is going to help your business. From cold calling scripts and my one-page contract. My lead sheet, especially right now. I’m traveling. I’m in Arizona. I’m sitting outside a Starbucks working. And that’s kind of how I love to, you know, to run the business, to run it from anywhere from a phone to a laptop, Wi-Fi. And I can do a podcast, coaching calls, deals while I’m traveling around. So it’s pretty awesome.

Gavin: So you’re gonna get a lot of use from them. So remember REINetwork.com/downloads, go and grab it and I don’t think you’ll be inspired. So let us know. Also, if you’re watching us on YouTube or the podcast, make sure you like and subscribe. I appreciate it. Give us any comments, any bad/good feedback would be great. Well, let’s dive straight into it. So today, a little different. I’ve actually got two of my VAs on. Two of my cold calling VAs with me. that work with me. One’s worked with me a long time and I’m gonna introduce them. We’re going to interact with them. Just talk about what it is like working with me and how we kind of run the business and what they do. They are very, very valuable part of the business on the lead gen side. So I thought it’d be pretty cool for everyone just to show our interaction, you know, with our team. And kind of you can listen to them and get feedback on what they do. So LJ and Wreck-It Ralph, how are we both?

LJ: We’re good. Guys. Good morning.

Gavin: I appreciate it. They even got their videos on guys. They don’t have web cams, so I let them off. I said, okay, last slide the. Well, we’ll do it without. So here we are. So, guys, I appreciate you getting on. So I’m probably gonna go back and forth. You can, you know, ask questions as well if you’d done anything for me as we go. We haven’t talked about this. I’ve kind of just threw this together. So I know you guys aren’t the peg, which is which is the point. Right. I just want you to be honest and talk about kind of what you do. So let’s start with you LJ. LJ, you’ve been working with me now for, I don’t know, two years, three years.

LJ: More than two years I think.

Gavin: Three. Yeah. So just I mean, you kind have developed into multiple roles, right? You know, the way in terms that I run the business, I like to make sure that everyone can do multiple jobs because I can keep it fresh. And it’s always changing. We’re always doing something different. And we have got something to announce actually later on in the show. So make sure you stay tuned for that. So LJ, let’s start with obviously cold calling. Right. That’s kind of why you started you started on the dialer. Just tell us what you do. You know, kind of the process that we worked through.

LJ: And I yeah, I did start doing cold calls for you for more than a year, I think. So that was back in 2018. I used the styler Mojo. I don’t know if you know, anybody else is familiar with that, but Mojo is definitely a good dialer on some points. Just the audio delays. Maybe just that’s just one of the bad parts of using mojo. But cold calling. I just asked or we just ask people if they want to sell the property or if they have thought about, you know, maybe selling or if they maybe consider issuing an offer for their property. And then that’s just it. If they say yes or if they basically say, yeah, I have maybe thought about it, I may consider hearing an offer. I just go through the questions after that. I asked them if maybe my manager could call them some time to talk further.

LJ: Can I ask them, I go on to asking them about the condition of the property. Is somebody else living in the property? Are they themselves living in the property or basically, you know, the condition of a property? And if they have an asking price or whatnot, what are their plans on doing the problem with the property? Do they want to rent it out, get it leased or what? Whatever. And we just send it to this Web forum that goes to Podio afterwards. Did that for more than a year and switched to other tasks that you made me do. Follow ups. I think you had me do some lead application sort of transfers.

Gavin: Yes. Moving leads over. We did that. And we’re going to come on here, to your other tasks here in a second. But I just want to pick up what you were just saying, though, about the cold calling. And so our goal is to try and find out if the seller is interested in selling. If they’re interested in offer. Gather information of the price, the condition, the timeline and kind of gathering motivation, then we take good detailed notes. We use a web form that then drops into the CRM. So a lot of people know that we still build on Podio because we’ve been with it years and years and years. But we also use for a couple of our campaigns. We use REI Simple as well. So we have a Web form that also goes into REI Simple to operate in the same way of moving leads from Mojo into REI Simple or into Podio, depending on what market it is and what team that I’m working in on the ground. So I’m going to pick back up with you, LJ, in a second. So Ralph, tell us a little bit about, you know what you are doing the same thing. You’ve worked in multiple markets as well. So what have you got to add on what LJ, if you’ve got anything to add on that cold call side?

Ralph: For the cold calling, I will just add the dialer with mojo. I mean, we talk about in the past days that the bad audio recording for Mojo was just like robotic and static and all that. And for cold calling, because I’ve been with this in Kirchher, my previous client, for two years as well. And we had a lot of success moving from markets market in a different location in Oklahoma. What we’ll add is when doing some cold callings back then, we’re trying to tweak a little bit the script instead of asking Hi, I’m looking for a Gavin Timms. You know, that would actually put their guard up and would ask us, who is this? And we kind of took it a little bit in a way that when somebody answered a call, Hello, Gavin? And they would put their guard up. They would actually think that, you know, you are someone that they know and you, actually me and Dustin think that that actually is pretty effective in a way that we’re actually getting a lot of leads and are closing deals.

Gavin: Absolutely. So that’s an absolute gold, absolute little gold nugget right there, guys. Right, the way that you start the phone calls is crucial. From what Ralph was just saying. It’s like, hi, I’m looking for Gavin Timms. People are like standoffish or hey, is this is this Gavin Timms?  It kind of is as Ralph just said, it puts their guard up so they’re like, well, who’s there? Who are you? Who’s asking? You’re getting them things where you want to start the conversation with more confidence to say, hey, Ralph, like you again, know that person. And something as small as that can get a conversation going really quickly. So that’s a great little gold nugget for everyone. And that’s actually in our script. Guys, we have that in the cold calling script, REINetwork.com/script. You’ll be able to get that. And it’s just says, hey man, the name. And then people are like, oh yeah, that. And then the conversation will start. So that’s great. Sorry, Ralph, carry on.

Ralph: All right. And I actually watched LJ yesterday. You know, dialing his driving for dollars leads. We encountered this person that doesn’t have first name. Essentially, it belongs to a company. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. LJ was actually hesitant to dial it because he doesn’t know who to look for. So I told him why not start a call by. Hi. I’m looking for the order of ten fifty-one Main Street and you know, I actually went from there.

Gavin: Okay, that’s great. No, that’s great. Well, this is the point of the team and this is what I try and get across to all of my clients that I’m watching. Is that you guys are super smart and what you do. Okay. And I’m very much like, you know, the visionary, like, hey, guys, we need to do this. And you guys go ahead and implement and help each other out. And that’s what it’s about, right? Everyone can be improved and I can improve. We all can, but these little techniques you guys are using and helping each other when is still driving the business forward as a whole. So that’s awesome. So how did that call go yesterday? I’m just curious.

Ralph: Well the lady knew the deceased owner, actually, they were friends. Yeah, they were friends for that. She just asked for my name and my phone number. She said she might be able to bump into one of the family members, you know, the living family members. And yeah, maybe she’ll just have them call me back someday. But she didn’t really give me a timeline yet.

Gavin: Okay. So we need to stay on top of that, right. We want to make sure that she’s on follow up to you, LJ. So give it three days. If we’ve not heard a thing which we won’t, she won’t do it. We need to call back and say, hey, this is LJ. We talked a couple of days ago. Let’s have another go. Let’s be persistent with this. Okay. And because, again, it could turn into a deal. So how many of the calls when Ralph was listening yesterday, how did that go?

LJ: There was just one phone number who answered. Really. I mean, some of them did answer, but they were just wrong phone numbers.

Gavin: We’re going to get that a lot, aren’t we? We know that when we skip trace, we can have up to three phone numbers per record. We only need one out of three. So you’re always gonna get more wrong numbers, right? That’s a common thing that every VA, everyone asks in the industry. She’s always had a lot of phone numbers wrong. Yes. You will. Because you only need one out of three to be right. That is going to happen. Okay. That’s great. So LJ. Let’s come back to you. You’ve done the cold calling same as Ralph. To bring in leads. Okay. And then you also do texting and phone calls individually in our follow up. So how does that conversation go differently to the original cold call when it’s a new lead. How are you handling your follow up?

LJ: Way different from cold calling. So basically one calling or follow up. They already know that we already talked to them before or I basically just remind them that we spoke to them before. Like, we’re maybe a few months ago, a year ago, they might be able to. I mean, they might not be able to remember, but at least I have already established that, you know, thought with them, that we have spoken to them, to them before about this property. I tell them or I remind them that, you know, sometimes I see notations on Podio where they say things about the property that nobody else might know about. And that just really helps me a lot. And, you know, building their trust with me. So it’s really easy doing follow ups. I mean, when it comes to building trust with the other person on the other line compared to just cold calling.

Gavin: Absolutely. So, you know, that’s really good. So you look at the notes from what the last conversation is, because remember, we’re always good and big on taking good notes. Whoever’s on the phone call these acquisitions, whether it’s relisten, whoever’s doing that lead. And then you look at the notes when you call back your reference and things from what happened last time to try and then build on to that report, to then try and warn the lead actualization. One is interesting. Now, that wasn’t before. What do you do then?

LJ: So if they weren’t interested before and now they are.

Gavin: Yeah. So if it was originally it wasn’t a deal. They came in. Now you come across some on it and they’re like, actually I’m interested in selling or their situation has changed. What do you do then? What’s your next move in in the lead?

LJ: I just thank them first of course, and just acknowledge their interest. Basically what I usually do, is I say. Well, that’s great. That’s good to know. Do you have a minute to talk about it right now or should I just have my manager, you know, maybe call you back to talk further? And if they say yes, they have the time now they can talk to me. I reconfirm the notations that I see on Podio. Well, I just want to confirm some, you know, some things here because maybe things have changed already. We are right with regards to thecondition of the property or whoever lives in the property now. Or maybe your asking price has changed. Also with mortgage, sometimes they are open to talking about whatever they owe on the property. Sometimes they’re not. Yeah. If they do have those notations there that they were open last time, I just tell them or remind them that, hey, by the way, you mentioned last time when you spoke to one of my managers that you owed, you know, let’s say 50000 last time. I’m pretty sure that has changed now since, you know, it’s been a while. I just ask them what the current amount is.

Gavin: And then, though, you tag it right back into obviously acquisition or the list or whatever side that you’re working. You get them back then on the phone. Yeah, right. Yeah. So your job is to go back through, re rewarm leads. Okay. And then you bring you bring them back in play. Why bring in they tell you what, hey, this one’s in ingested. Call them and then acquisition again. We’ll pit that lead up to that. Go deep and see if we can get the contract. So that’s exactly you know what we wanted to do. One thing that I do want you to change, though, just while we’re talking on this, I want you to try and make it a little more personalized in terms of instead of managers. I want you to start using names like, you know, Melissa or Alex or Carry or whatever. Right. Yeah. Because that’s a little more personal. Hey, well, let me have Melissa back on the phone with you now that you’re interested. It gives them a maybe. That’s why I know we’ve talked before. Maybe you do that. You just say it in this reference because it could be any of them, depending on who’s on that lead. You’re just giving me a variation of that. So just make sure that we continue to, you know, to do that.

LJ: Just a question. What if you know, since let’s say, for example, you dialed a lead from before, let’s say from two years or three years back and they’re interested, and then you’re going to tell them that Melissa will be calling you. How are we going to address Melissa if they ask, who is this Melissa? Let’s say just for example, that they forgot her.

Gavin: Yeah. OK. Good question. So if that comes up, you can just say then that you can use manager or colleagues or Melissa is the decision maker on you know, what we offer, you know, to move forward by the property. Anything like that  is who she is. You know, you can just position it, as you know, is on the ground she’s on, makes final decision on the property. So she’ll want to, you know, probably ask a couple more questions and then we can, you know, make the best offer possible, see if we can move forward. Mr. Seller. Yeah. So that’s how you would handle that? Because some people here. You’re right. Won’t remember. So that’s going to happen. Absolutely. Well, good. What else do we do? So I know obviously we just you mentioned, LJ that driving for dollars. So we pull drive four dollars less. We don’t actually put them less in the Dialler because they’re smaller and niche. So what we normally do on that is we normally call, text, we leave purse sized messages. Sometimes, sometimes depending on how many times we’ve dialed. And also we do to let direct mail and these lists, LJ will probably well, only a hundred, one hundred and twenty, something like the time that you’re calling through?

LJ: Right now, I’ve got more than 500, I think, on this list. Yeah. the D4D leads that I’m working on right now I’ve got 500.

Gavin: OK, ok, but that’s more. But still it’s something that the dialer is going to eat very quickly. Right. If we put it in the dialer we’re going to blast through it real fast. That’s why we normally text and call them and we use. There’s two ways that you can do it, guys who are listening. We use dial pads because that goes in with, you know, we we can use dial parties, unlimited text messages, text messages, sorry, and calls and so they can use that. Also, if you’re using REI simple, which Ralph does, Ralph uses REI simple, then he texts and calls directly from ReI simple or sometimes he uses Funbar as well. We’re very big as well on changing the numbers. Right. We like to rotate the numbers in MoJo every 30 days. Everyone should be doing that because they will get flagged as spam from an auto dialer. So if you guys listening are using any auto dialer, you should be changing the number at least every 30 days to refresh that cycle. What else should we got, guys? What else do you do?

Ralph: I think I can give some advice. Some of these will, you know, would be working alongside with some clients for a real estate. Is it just a matter of yes or no? You’ll get some. Yes, you’ll get some, though. Don’t let a bad no, or somebody who is irate get in your way or change your mood, because that will actually change your mood for your whole shift. Let’s say you’re working for three or four hours, seven, eight hours. And if you got a bad no and you know you led that’s stuck in your head that will actually hinder you from getting more leads. So what I can say is, you know, your angle, you’re going to get some no’s. But, you know, cherish those. Yes. That you will get along the way.

Gavin: Absolutely. I love that because not only is a cold call and what you’ve just said, well, that’s actually like us as investors on the phone. Right. We got a lot of no’s still and we’ve got a lot of irate people. Qalat. That’s great. You have got kind of thick skin and just get in the right mindset that if someone goes crazy, you have the big Red button and we can we can move on pretty easily. We don’t have to listen to it. And don’t let that define your day. You know, building momentum are very big as well on as soon as you get momentum and you get one leads.

Gavin: Now is the time to use the energy going in and get the next one to the next one and bring it right, because we do get a lot of no, you know, the word no is negative, a negative word, but we try and turn them into our mindset is the next one’s gonna be. Yes, the next one is going to be yes. So yes. So that’s awesome. That’s another great little little nugget. Well, good. So we’ve got something as well exciting that we talked about yesterday. Okay, guys, is it. We’re going to be doing a case study using these two guys as part of it where I’m going into an old market of mine and these leads are over two years old. The last comment made in that workspace was two years old. And what we’re going to be doing in there’s 134 leads and we’re gonna be calling and texting every single one of them. And we’re gonna be documenting a couple of different things. We’re gonna be finding out how many in two years have sold. How many sold for cash? How many deals could I have had and my partner on the ground and we would have continue to work that market.

Gavin: And also, is there any deals that we can actually do? Are any of them deals? One hundred and thirty-seven. Is there still a deal sheet in there for us to make money? No one has touched these leads for over two years and I’m going to be doing a case today. I’m going to be sharing my screen. I’m going to be proven that they are two years old. You’re going to be able to see everything is going to be live. We don’t know how it’s going to go. And we’re going to put these records together and release it as as a case study. So super excited about that. Kind of a game plan for this is going to be these leads are in Podio. So we’re going to call and text them individually. And any positive response is going to now move over to our new CRM, which is REI simple. And they’re going to be work from there with one of my coaching clients in on the ground while he’s on the ground. Sorry, it’s one of my coaching clients that invests in this market that I used to invest in and we’re all doing this virtual.

Gavin: So my whole team in this is all virtual in a virtual market. So the guy who’s going to be partnering with me on this, he’s virtual. I’m virtual. All the guys, VAs, whole team is virtual. And we’re gonna go and find out how much money we could have made. Can we make any more money? And we’re going to document everything. So I’m excited. And the reason I want to do this is because I believe everything is in the follow up. All the deals that we do, over 90 percent of them come from. And I want to prove that hopefully in this and there’s going to be a little…. It’s going to hurt. And I hope it does. I hope we go and find X amount of deals that sold that we could have made X amount of thousand dollars on because that it should have been ours. Right. It couldn’t have been ours. And we didn’t do our follow up.

Gavin: And I think when you see this case, are you going to go, you know what, if I follow up, that could be me in my market. And I think that’s what we’re going to see. So we had a quick call yesterday going over this. And also in this case study, you know, Ralph, is they’re both cold calling you know, using auto dialers. They know that. But Ralph has not been using Podio or Dial pad and he uses REI Simple and Vumblr, and a couple of different services. But LJ is actually going to be teaching Ralph how to use Podio to do this. So I’m not going to be the one doing it. My team is teaching my team. Okay on how to do it and then we’re going to start implementing this document. How many leads are going to come in from their staff and so on? I think it’s going to be really fun and these guys are gonna be involved. What do you think about the case study, guys?

LJ: Super excited.

Ralph: Oh, are we going to record it through Zoom?

Gavin: Yeah. We’re going to be doing that. I’m going to be doing a recording so every few days we’re gonna get I don’t know because I’ve not thought about it, but I think we’re going to do is, you know what I’m like. I just take action. So we’re just going to wing it along the way. But I’m going to be getting updates. Yes. So we’re gonna be getting on Ralph and LJ right. Okay. You’ve been calling for three days. What’s it looking like? And you’re going to be like Look, you know, I spoke to 10 people and nine have sold or one still interested or they weren’t interested. We’re going to gather this data over a week or two and see what we can do. And our goal is, is to not only document how many leads we’ve lost, what can we do a deal from this and how quickly can we do a deal? So anyone that’s still interested in selling. Now we’re going to work them is like now we’re going to be on the follow up to see how long it takes us to do a deal from these a hundred and thirty leads. So that’s what we’re what we’re gonna do. And I need to actually removed two because we did two deals from that already. But I can take them out and because which you know notated that. I’m super excited. Awesome. So anything out there you guys want to share or talk about before we get done?

Ralph: I think I’m good. You know, I’ve already given my advice when it comes to dialing or doing some cold calling, some follow ups and hopefully some, you know, for future VAs will be able to pick it up and be more confident over the phone. I’m sure that’s going to be the key thing in our dialing. Or some cold calling confidence.

Gavin: Absolutely. 100 percent agree. You know, that’s really good. Good. Couple of tips that guys that you should get so let us know what you thought about this absolute. Again, no one else does this. I might bring in my team on, you know, to podcasts, videos. I might be doing a lot more of it because, you know, we’re all in the trenches trying to do this along with you. We’re not special or normal people, and we have the same grinds as you do. So I think hopefully you got some value from this with a case study. Watch out for the case study. Make sure that you’re on my email list. Go and get them downloads and then we will be emailing now. That’s probably the only way that you’re going to know about this case study together. If you are watching. Okay. Make sure you go to REINetwork.com/downloads or grab the REInetwork.com/leadsheet.

 

Gavin: Once you’ve done that. We’re going to email our when this case study is ready to launch and it’s probably gonna be free. Okay. There’s gonna be no cost. If we have a cost, it’s going to be anywhere between one dollar and five dollars to stop any light thoughts or anything and just to keep all that craziness out so we might do that again. It’s not a moneymaker. Just to basically Stop, stop the bots from, you know, pulling links and get a load of spam in that show. Cool. Well, I’ll I’ll make slide. Guys, I appreciate you. We’re gonna be doing another one about the case study alone when we get going when we got some updates along the way. I appreciate you both. Thank you so much. Have a good day. I appreciate it. All right, you guys. Thanks, guys. 

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