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The Art of The Cold Call

The Person

You will likely be calling Realtors when you first start off of realtor.ca. Realtor’s are sales people — they know every trick in the book, they know what you’re doing — but they’re also humans and aren’t very smart. There are 80K+ of them in the GTA alone (gross I know). Everyone and their mom is a realtor which is great because it would take 533 days if you called every single one of them at 150 calls a day.

This is where you will get your reps in, there are so many of them to where you can keep calling till you are confident in your pitch. You will get told to f*** off, have the phone hung up on you, told to call them back after a few hours, endless objections and what you have to do is work around those objections.

The Ground Truth is that they are actually not good at their job, and this screening product does their entire job for them at the cost of a chicken shawarma.

The Sauce

The majority of realtors have their personal phone/direct work cell numbers online on realtor.ca. This is great because it makes our lives easier — just put the “rent” filter on and you have your call list for anywhere in Canada.

The downside — realtors get spammed with cold calls on the daily. The difference is that most of the cold calls they get are for lead generation or marketing of their properties. We stand out because we can provide something that no other realtor has right now, unless they’ve already been onboarded at Cove.

The Sauce is to get around this by straight up saying you aren’t doing lead generation

“I was hoping you’d let me pitch you something real estate related... it’s not lead generation I promise”

This line gets the more chilled out realtors laughing on the phone, allowing you to build rapport with them, and it gets the more tougher realtors to at least hear you out. By saying its related to real estate but not lead gen peaks their interest because even though it is something they may or may not use, it is something that is related to their field of work.

Confidence

Part 2 of The Sauce is very simple, be confident.

When you’re talking in person there are many cues that the other person picks up on — posture, stance, hand gestures etc. When you’re cold calling, the only thing they can pick up is what you say, and how you say it. That is why is it so important be super confident in what you are saying. Majority of the realtors you call have never heard of Cove before, and some of them don’t even know there is screening tech out there other than the credit bureaus, so if you talk with confidence you’ll get them to trust you and you’re more likely to close.

Engage the realtor

Getting an unexpected call from an unrecognized number puts anyone’s guard up. Especially now with the rise in scam calls everyone is careful when answering the phone. Engaging the realtor is important because you need them to open up, therefore it is important to ask the right questions, but most important you have to let them talk.

Especially when you’re nervous, silence can feel awful and uncomfortable. You feel the need to keep talking and dump as much information as you can to build value and hope that the person on the other side of the phone cares about what you have to say. Truth is if you keep rambling about how we screen people and our background checks do 180+ countries they’re going to move their phone away from their ear and wait until you stop speaking, just to say they aren’t interested and cut the call. You have to keep them engaged, and the best way to do this is to ask them questions.

“Do you currently screen your applicants manually or are you using some software?”

“How long does it take for you to screen one tenant?”

“How do you actually verify income and employment? Do you have to call the employer and check?”

“How much do you pay for credit reports?”

Reps

Cold calling is all about getting the reps in. Once you are comfortable talking on the phone, you get to figure out your own sauce. Remember, realtors are sales people as well, once you get them on good terms the convos can flow, the tough part is breaking the ice.

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