The Cold Call Opener That Books More Appointments (Ask Jeb)

0:00There's nothing like my American Express Platinum card. I love that I can earn hotel credits when I travel. I can also earn resi credits. So you know I'm hitting the restaurants everyone's talking about. Plus, with the digital entertainment credit, I'm even more excited to catch my favorite shows. All in all, I can access over$3 ,500 in annual value with benefits and eligible purchases across travel, entertainment, and more. Learn more at AmericanExpress.com slash Explore-Platinum. Enrollment requirements, monthly, and other limits in terms apply. Black Friday is coming. Last year, businesses on Shopify made billions in sales.

0:36This holiday season, you could be one of them if you start now. Shopify helps you launch fast, so you can design your site and start selling before the biggest shopping days of the year. What are you waiting for? Tis the season to start selling. Start for free at Shopify.com. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi, I'm Jeb Blunt, best-selling author, fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked, and I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check.

1:13You know, I sell real estate here in Brooklyn, New York. Ultra competitive, very fast-paced. I do cold calls, everything in between. When I crafted my because statement, I would craft it in state to get some time on your count, right? But as I'm moving forward, I feel that maybe that might not be the best approach. I wanted to get somewhat of an insight from you. Should I go in and say, hey, I just want to ask you a few questions in regards to the reasons why maybe your home didn't sell the last time? Should I lead with that instead of saying, hey, you know, I just want the appointment on the first call?

1:50Are you doing this in person or by phone? By phone. Okay. And tell me what you sell. Real estate here in Brooklyn. So real estate in Brooklyn. And you're approaching people for listings. Is that correct? And I'm approaching expired homes. People whose homes have expired on the market. And, you know, I don't call them as much, but FSBOs and stuff as well. But the majority of calls are the people whose home has expired. And you're looking for expired listings and then, to some extent, going after FSBOs. And all residential. correct? Yes. So if we think about calling them, we think about a because statement, clearly from your standpoint, it makes sense to go, you want to physically go to their location, to go to their apartment because meeting them in person matters.

2:32You could do it over the telephone, but it's going to be really hard to convert that listing over the phone. And especially with FSBOs, and to some extent with FSBOs, what you're doing is you're building a relationship with them because if they've had the property listed for six months, in those cases, they may blip because they're tired and they're worn out trying to show their home themselves. In the early process, if they've just listed it for the first month or so, you're probably building a relationship with them and nurturing that relationship over time so that when they get tired, they give it to you.

2:59So with expired listings, I think the number one thing I would say to you is timing really matters with those. Once it's expired, how soon do you start calling? You try to reach those that expire the same day. Chances are you might not get them, but then you might get folks two weeks out, a month out. Okay, got your timing right. So the timing would be you're building your list. Do you think about your prospecting pyramid? So when you start making your calls, the first people on your list are the ones that have just expired. Then you're moving down to the ones that expired a little bit longer and a little bit longer and you're managing those relationships.

3:29So when you start thinking about your because statement, if I were to do it like this, let's say, hi, Ryan, this is Jeb from blah, blah, blah, real estate company. And the reason I'm calling is to grab a few minutes of your time because why? What reason? I saw that your home recently came off of the market. and for one reason or another, the process didn't end with the same. I'm just curious to find out if you were considering reentering the market. So the problem with that is it's almost passive, right? So they had their house listed or had their home listed. It fell off. So what happened? Let's just call it like it is, right?

4:02It expired because it didn't sell. That's the only reason they expired. It didn't sell for some reason, right? It didn't sell because the other real estate agent didn't market it, right? They didn't get out to enough people. It was overpriced. There are issues with current rates on the marketplace. I wouldn't go in and say, are you interested in relisting it? Or is this something you consider doing? I'm calling and saying, hey, Ryan, this is Jeb from blah, blah, blah, real estate agency. The reason I'm calling is to grab a few minutes of your time because your home listing just expired from MLS.

4:29And I've got some specific strategies that I'd like to run by you that will help you get your house back on the market and sold. How about we get together? I can come by this afternoon at six o 'clock and I'll walk you through those strategies. strategies. I'm making the assumption that they still want to sell their house. Now, if they don't want to sell their house, they'll say, no, you know what? We decided not to sell it. You know what? We're going to wait. And you know what? We're going to give our real estate agent another chance. And then you get an objection. You might even dial it in and say, the reason I'm calling is to grab a few minutes of your time because the listing for your home just expired from MLS.

5:03And I've got three strategies that we use to help sellers like you get their house sold faster. and I'd like to come by and walk you through how that works. If you have three strategies, if you have four strategies, whatever. But I wanna get direct because the objection's gonna be, no, I'm not gonna put my house back on the market. What happens when you were doing it is you were telling me, do you wanna put it on the market? Like you're giving me the objection. I wanna get focused on value. It didn't sell for a reason. You could even say because your house just expired off the MLS and a lot of home sellers like you are having troubles in this market.

5:36And I've got four strategies that we're deploying right now that are helping home sellers like you get their house sold faster for the price they want. Because what do you want? You want the meeting. Because my guess is, Ryan, that if you get in front of them, you get the listing. Majority of the time, yes. The majority of the time, yes. So right now, you got to get in front of them. So I'm just going to call and get super direct about getting in front of them. Going into a follow-up call, I want every important note right at my fingertips, not buried somewhere in a scribbled stack of notes. And with Plod Notepin S, I always have them because it's a wearable, portable note taker that lets me stay present and focused on customers during every single meeting.

6:13Plod captures the conversation and turns it into organized summaries and action items so I can follow up faster. And if I need a specific detail, Plod's recall has that ready for me. And that's why Jeb Sr. and I and all of Sales Gravy trusts our Plod Notepin S. Try Plod and stay focused on the conversation while it handles all of your notes. Go to plod.ai forward slash Jeb. That's plod.ai forward slash Jeb and use code JEB to get 10 % off your purchase. The challenge I'm having is I just took over a business to business sales team that's been neglected over the last five years and they don't understand pipeline.

6:50It's funny how bad they are at it. I had one sales guy tell me he has to increase his closing percentage to get to the numbers he wants. He quoted 1.2 million this year to get to the numbers he wants. He has to close 1.4 and he's positive he can do it with closing percentage. And that's the whole time across the board. So how do you first start to level set pipeline with a brand new team? How many people in your team? On that team, six. Okay, six. And what do you sell? Windows and doors. And are most of your leads inbound? No. So these would be business to business. So it's contractor sales. So you're selling directly to contractors.

7:20So I'm assuming that your folks have like a book of accounts and they cover those accounts. So they know the contractors and builders in their marketplace. And then they're out having conversations with them. You're being very generous to assume that they've done anything. They're basically sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. So you're not going to make anybody understand that in that marketplace. You've got years and years, and it's likely, I'm just guessing that you've got folks who have done this for a long time. They get enough calls in, they get enough relationships, and if the phone rings and they put together a quote and they put a lot of effort in putting the quote together, but you're not going to help them understand it.

7:53You're going to have to lead it. You're going to have to say, here's what we're going to do. And where I would begin is recognizing that you're probably going to lose some people along the way, and you need to be really careful with that, because in a relationship-driven business like yours, blowing out the entire sales team will break you. So you wanna take this nice and slow. Where I would begin, just to make this super simple, is I would take each one of them and I would work on building what I would call a business development plan. And in that plan would be, if they have assigned accounts, if they assign markets, it would be, let's make a list of all of the businesses, the contractors, the builders that we can sell to in this market, and then work with them each to build a list.

8:31and then start working on a outreach plan that you not asked for, that you demand. In other words, we're going to do 10 outreaches a day every single morning. If you've got to go back and get super remedial, we're going to do five. Like we're going to call five a day, everybody. Are you all working in an office together? Are you spread out and remote? It's a mix. It's a mix. So the people that are remote, can they come to your office? Yeah. Okay, good. What I would do is I would start with one or two days a week. Everybody comes in and you spend two hours doing outbound prospecting. But the most important thing, Michael, for you is gonna be building the right list and you're gonna need their help with that.

9:06So who are the contractors in the marketplace? You probably have some data tools where you can find that information out. And then we're gonna call and we're gonna either set a meeting or we're gonna call and we're going to talk about a new product or we're gonna call and we have a conversation. We're gonna follow that up with an email. We're gonna follow that up with a LinkedIn touch. You're gonna start running those sequences with your team and you're just gonna have to do it. And they're gonna bludgeon you, Michael. They're gonna be so angry. They're gonna be mad. They're going to tell you that you don't know what you're talking about.

9:30You don't think about the industry, that they're never going to do it, that it won't work. They're going to make excuses. They're going to do everything possible to make you go away by making it so painful on you that you want to go away. But you will not go away because you are Teflon. No excuses stick. Because what I know about businesses like yours, especially in situations where you've got a marketplace selling business to business, and you've got a bunch of reps who have been around for a long time, is that the moment that they start doing outreach, really good things happen. But even if like the rep who says, I got to sell 1.2 million, sold$3 million from your outreach, next month that rep's gonna say, Michael, it doesn't work.

10:08I just need to increase my closing rate. You're never gonna change their mind. You just have to lead it. And then over time, what you wanna begin to do is either add more people to your team that you bring on that get outbound and get pipeline building. And by the way, relationship building as well and referrals and all the things that they have to do in a market like that. You want to either bring those on or replace the people who are just unwilling to move at all. That's the only way to move the bar on that. There's no motivation. There's nothing you're going to say. Nothing. Now, I would recommend taking your team of six and drop them in one of Jessica's Fanatical Prospecting Boot Camps.

10:43That will help them. At least that'll send the message or bring them in. Like we've got a team hub on Salska University. Set up a team hub. Get with Jessica. She can help you do that. but you can bring all your folks in and we can build some prospecting learning paths for your team you can drop them into a mastermind group with other people where they can have these conversations but you do things to train them to teach them to send the message to repeat the message but what's going to move the bar is you saying we're all getting the office on monday morning bring your list of 25 we're going to call and then you can go do whatever you want to and you're going to do that repeatedly over and over and over again until everybody gets that you're not going away because right now the pain you feel is the pain that they're making you feel like trying to make you just disappear.

11:22Does that answer your question? Yeah, thank you. Probably not the answer you were looking for, but that's the answer. No, it's where my head's been going. And the other part I've been looking at is changing compensation. Compensation change is a little bit more difficult, but just changing compensation won't change the behavior pattern. That's gonna be through your leadership, your messaging, training, and just basically, you know, bullheadedness. We're just gonna do it. And there's no other choice. This is what we're gonna do.

12:07We'll be right back.

12:20Yo, Mr. Pitt.