Talking Business and Technology
Mike:
We’re right around the corner from the Thanksgiving holiday. One of the things I committed to you was that we’re not going to do advertising and not try to sell you anything in these videos. I want to make sure you understand when we have a person like Jim Eggleston with us today, it’s informational to help you become better.
Jim is one of the Owners and he’s the CEO of Cole Information. You’ve heard about Cole a lot because they are at all of our events. We push Cole hard on all of our clients because they are the technology, they’re the information that allows you to prospect. When I say the word prospect, this audience cringes. I talked about prospecting for years, then I changed it to lead generation instead. It sounds easier. Then, two years ago let’s just have conversations with people. All this is a disguise for prospecting. Technically Jim, you are a prospecting-oriented information services company. So, can you define what you do in a simple sentence or two? And I want to show you why I said it that way.
Jim:
Absolutely. What we do for agents across the country is make it easy for you to get the phone numbers that you need to prospect because you don’t want that to be a challenge also. As you mentioned, prospecting is hard to do. So, when you’re ready to go, you’re fired up, ready to jump on the phones, the last thing you need to do is try and find a list somewhere. So with our product, our goal is to create it so that you can just start immediately. Put in an address of a Just Listed property and instantly you have 20 neighbors up and down the street with phone numbers ready to go.
Mike:
How accurate would those numbers be because I’m always hearing that this service has more accuracy than that service? There’s a lot of competitors in the market for what you do. I would assume your company is one of the larger players in this arena, correct?
Jim:
We are, and we’ve been compiling data for 70 years, so that’s our business.
Mike:
I want you to hear that. When you’ve been compiling data for 70 years, and you’ve stayed in business for 70 years, it’s because you’ve been doing something right. How accurate is that data? So I subscribe and we’ve used your service here in the company, so it’s great. Is it going to be 25%, 50% accurate? Because phone numbers change all the time.
Jim:
This audience knows better than anybody that there’s people moving every day. And that’s the challenge, staying up with those moves. On a typical day in a typical area, it’s about 85% that you’re getting in front of the people at that house at that time. People are moving constantly. Especially today with the mobile society, it used to be that you would have a landline tied to your house and that was it, it was there. With cell phones, people change cell phones all the time, they change carriers, they move back and forth, so there’s a lot of turn. The key is that we have 85% that you can talk to.
Mike:
A friend of mine, Paul Callahan, was an agent with me years ago and I’ve talked about Paul in the past. Paul said whenever he dialed a number and it was a wrong number, he thought it was an exciting moment because now he got to talk to someone he didn’t expect to talk to. So if the number is wrong, they can still talk to that potential person.
Jim:
Absolutely, and typically the number isn’t wrong. It may be that they just moved, they’re not at that house. And back to cell phones, their cell phone goes with them so you’re talking to someone else who is just a prospect as much as the person you intended to call.
Mike:
Your client is more actively engaged in what you and I would call proactive real estate versus the kind that so often today are relying on social media, technology, buying leads off the internet on say Zillow, while you and I talk to them about FSBO, Expireds, Just Listed/Just Solds, neighborhood farming, cold calling. That’s really your expertise.
Jim:
Absolutely, and we dovetail with those people. We don’t necessarily look at them as competitors, it’s just an alternative method of getting in front of prospect. And what happens is, if you only have one inbound lead come in a day, what will you do? You need more than that. The close rate is 1 out of 100 or something, right? So you can’t just stop if you have 5 leads today, you can’t stop. You have to backfill that with something, so we work hand in hand with those agents doing both methods.
Mike:
We have a lot of agent who use the Cole services. I used it in 1970-1972 as an agent. It was a large book and I would tear a page out of that book and I would start calling people and knock on doors because that’s what we had to do. Those times were easier because everything was simpler. How complicated is the service?
Jim:
I actually don’t want to take exception to you, but I don’t think it was easier. We’ve made it easier today because you can go directly. Basically, the service, all you do is put in an address as a starting point anywhere in the country and we will tell you everything you need to know about that household. Press one button and you know everything about everyone in the neighborhood. It really is that easy. We’ve created it this easy because we know there’s obstacles in prospecting. We don’t want to be an obstacle, we want it easy for agents to jump in and get phone numbers.
Mike:
They can create more distractions as to why they shouldn’t do it than you and I could ever imagine, and what I tell people all the time is that if you’re hesitant to pick up the phone, which people are especially if they haven’t had a lot of training with us and you, I will tell you to call 4-5 past clients or centers of influence, which I call favorable conversation; people who will talk to you, like you, trust you, and then from there you move into these other types of calls. How do you help them get through that hesitancy? I know you guys work very hard with us in trying to help you make the calls to get the listings to get the contracts. How do you help them?
Jim:
What we really focus on, one of our buzzwords is, don’t bite off more than you can chew. One of the things we see when agents sign up new for the product, they log on and they see 800 phone numbers. Let’s go, and they think they have to call all 800 that day. So we really try to educate, train them on practice on family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and then make 10 calls.
Don’t make 800 calls, just make 10 because then you can come back and do a little self-evaluation. How did I do? What did I hear that I liked? What did I say that I didn’t like? How will I overcome that objection? And jump back in and, again, we try to create our product so that it supports that. There are many list companies in the world that you go to, and say I want to list and they sell you 10,000 names. What are you going to do with that? So with our product, we make it so you work in small, bite-sized chunks around your sphere of influence or around prospecting so you can start small and get your feet under you.
Mike:
I would assume, like with us, they get excited, they get discouraged, then they get excited again, and they get discouraged, and then it’s the lack of consistency that keeps them from producing the way they want to. They come to us and say they want to be involved in our seminars or coaching because they aren’t consistent, is it the same challenge you face?
Jim:
Absolutely. In fact, how we educate and recommend is that the agent, our agents, the most successful agents using our product set up a routine and come in every morning at the same time and pick up the phone and they start making their calls, and it’s a religion to them. If they get an interruption, they just ignore the interruption. These are the people that report back to us that are most successful with the product, because they stay away from the peaks and valleys of making 800 phone calls and getting burned out and stopping. They make it a part of their everyday lives, those are the most successful agents in prospecting.
Mike:
Our most successful clients all use your service, we know that and they’re religious fanatics when it comes to talking to people. So, part of it is of course you furnish a number, we furnish a script, but they have a sales mentality. And I would venture to guess that a lot of the clients that you attract wish they had that sales mentality and don’t. How much does that stop them?
Jim:
It’s where they always hesitate in getting started. They get excited about something, they think about something, they go to a superstar retreat, and say they’re ready and then the start off is, how do I get started? And they call us to get started, and fortunately we have a lot of video testimonials from successful agents that are happy to come on and share their story. We always find that when they see someone else actually doing it and having positive results and understand how they do it and the regimen they bring to it, they become much better at adopting the program because they’ve seen someone else do it and they understand they can be successful and everyone wants to be successful.
Mike:
I’ve always said I love that. I’ve watched those videos and Tyler’s been very kind to use a lot of our clients in those testimonials, but there’s also a lot of people who are skeptical by nature. Are those the ones that start and then stop?
Jim:
You know, that’s part of the reason, absolutely. They’re skeptical by nature. They’re looking for an early win, really. And that’s again where biting off more than you can chew is an important concept, because it is easy to get burned out and they do jump in fast and they are enthusiastic and it’s strange that we want to temper that enthusiasm a little bit, but you want to temper it a little bit so they learn and ramp up.
They can become highly successful, but really what we have to do is get them that first sale, that first appointment. That’s where we need to help them. Once that occurs and they go through the program, they make the calls, they follow the scripts, they get in front of them and they get an appointment, and they get the listing, and once that occurs they are disciples and they’re in.
Mike:
If one of our people says I want to be involved in Cole and use the system, briefly step by step how does that take place?
Jim:
We really start off by talking to them about what their objective is, what they want to do. Usually they come to us and they have something in mind. They’re thinking just listed/just sold, circle prospecting, neighbors and that’s what we want to tap into, is what they want to do because I don’t want to convince someone that they should do some sort of prospecting effort that isn’t already in their head.
So we start with that on what they want to accomplish and then basically hold hands with them through the process. We show them how to do that, how to make that work, and how simple it is with 2-4 clicks of a button. How you can get the phone numbers ready to call, so they don’t recognize that as an obstacle. Secondarily to that, we have our customer success team who are available all day, every day who take calls from agents across the country and answer those questions for them. Because I got really excited about it, I’m ready to go, but I forgot how to do this or where to go and we help them with that as well. We’re available 8 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday, coast to coast.
Mike:
If an agent says I’m going to start this type of prospecting, I want to do just listed/just sold and they sign up with Cole. We tell them to talk to Tyler and the team, sign up. First of all, it’s very inexpensive. What does it cost for a regular service, $300 a year for home lines and $900-1,000 for cell phone lines? They decide to go sign up, and then they get discouraged. Obviously for you and me, if we can sell 500 tickets and 100 show up, it’s very profitable for you. If you get 1000 people to sign up and 400 use it, it’s very profitable, but we’re not looking for that, we’re looking for constant use. An agent says they want to do 25 or 50 deals a year and they sign up, how much access do they have to phone numbers?
Jim:
Again, it’s another obstacle that we want to remove for the agents. Using our product, they can access it 24/7, 365 days, totally unlimited. There are no caps or limitations, no speed bumps, because again, we understand the challenge to the agents. We get it, we don’t want them to be blocked in to a certain time, or number, a certain quantity. They may go on a rip and call 1,000 people this week, and I don’t want to penalize them for that. So our service is completely unlimited, completely accessible, 24/7. We make it available to their team members. Their team members can join them on product because many have producers that are working for them, making calls as well so we make it available to them.
Our success only comes because they’re successful. If they’re not successful, we wouldn’t have made it 70 years. If they’re not successful, they don’t come back, they don’t retain us, so we constantly strive to improve the product, enhance the product and make it simpler to use so they can be more successful in theirs. In fact, one new solution we added this year was an aerial, rooftop view with pushpins in every house so we can make the conversation very relevant by saying, “Mike, you live on the corner, you’re back to the busy street behind you.”
They make themselves very familiar with the neighborhood, they can talk about the neighbors across the street or next door like they’re best friends. They do this all from the screen of our product with the pushpin on every house and who lives there. So things like that, technology that makes it much easier. It’s not like calling off of a spreadsheet, that’s not what it is, it’s highly interactive online conversations.
Mike:
Jim called me a couple days ago and asked if he could come spend time with me at the office. I said great. And our conversation today has been mostly about the improvements he’s making with the service. Technology changes fast, and probably faster than anything we’ve ever experienced. So your primary function then, is to just make sure that you’re one step ahead and able to deliver something to them at the highest level. If they want to go online, how do they go online to find you?
Jim:
They can go to www.coleinformation.com and click on the real estate agent section. We’ve got, in fact, a lot of free content there to help you understand how the product works for you, and again thank you to you, Mike, for providing that content and recommending your coaching clients for that. But, you can learn a lot from there. I also would recommend calling us at (800) 800-3271, I would invite you to call us anytime to have a conversation. We’re not there to just sell you a product, we’re there to help solve a challenge that you have and our people are very in-depth in understanding what it is you’re doing, how you want to accomplish it and what solution we have that would satisfy that.
Mike:
In Las Vegas, when we were together a couple weeks ago, one of the people walked up and said, “did you really use this service?” and I told them I used it every day. It was the fastest way to get to people that I could find, so I’m so glad 7 or 8 years ago, we reconnected. I’m so glad that our clients have accepted your service at such a high level and are using it, and more importantly thanks for sharing your time today.
Jim:
You’re very welcome. Thank you, it’s always a pleasure.
Mike:
Thank you Jim, and thank you all.
Mike Ferry is the global leader in real estate coaching and training. Watch Mike each week as he discusses a variety of topics to help real estate agents and brokers. Grow your real estate business by improving your mindset, developing your skills and creating a plan of action to increase your production!
Join The MFO Newsletter:
