Episode #278 – Encore: Qualifying Seller Leads On The Phone With Vince Hall from Call Porter

You're listening to the REI marketing nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors. Like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer more awesome life. And now your host Dan Barrett.

(00:39): All right. Hello everybody. And welcome to this week's episode of the REI marketing nerds podcast as always. This is Daniel Barrett from AdWords nerds.com. And if you need more help finding leads and deals online for your real estate investing business, you know where to go it's ad words, nerds.com. All right, this week I am interviewing Vince hall from call Porter. Now, if you are unfamiliar with call Porter, they are a sort of phone answering service. So work specifically in real estate, they work with many, many real estate investors. They also work with agents all across the country. And look, there are a number of services like, uh, call Porter, right? There's a number of places that are gonna answer your phones for you, help you qualify your leads, whatever it's gonna be, but time and again, and I'm telling you this from personal experience time. And again, we have found with our clients at AdWords nerd, that call Porter does hands down the best job at what they do.

(01:46): They just are really, really good at it. And I don't typically bring people on this podcast to market their service. It's not what I do. I don't have a partnership with anybody. I don't make any money from this. I just wanted to bring Vince on because call Porter is really killing it for our clients. And I wanted to dig into not just how do they do what they do, but also what can other real estate investors that aren't using call Porter take away from how they talk to sellers in this call. We're gonna get into what the most important pieces to know about that whole sort of first impression process gonna be. I'm gonna talk about how you can get the exact script that call Porter uses with their sellers for free. We're gonna talk about this cool new technological feature they have that actually cuts the speed to lead down to 90 seconds. There's a ton of super valuable stuff in this interview. So without any further ado, here is my interview with Vince hall from call porter.com.

(02:50): All right. I'm here with Vince hall from call Porter. What's up Vince. Thank you for coming on the show, man. I appreciate it. Hey Dan. Yeah, it's uh, uh, great to be here. Glad to be here. Yeah, I, I love the beginning of podcast where I have to say that. And then we pretend like we haven't been talking for five minutes and right, totally normal and a natural thing. I'm super excited to have you on the show and to talk about your service, which is called Porter, which is C a L L P O RT E r.com. So call porter.com. I do not generally like the show isn't we don't shield services or whatever. It's not a thing we do a lot, but, um, we have really noticed a lot of value coming from call Porter to the clients that we work with that are using you guys. I really wanted to have you on and talk a little bit about what you guys do. So for people that aren't familiar with the company or with you, right. Give us, let's start with the company. Give us a quick bit of context on yeah. What call Porter is, who you work with, that kind of thing.

(03:49): Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. I'll give you like that, you know, 30,000 feet overview. And so, so call Porter, we're the, we're the, the nation's only live answering lead intake service for real estate. All of our reps are us based. They're all trained in real estate. And so, you know, we say, Hey, we're the only ones that do this. Um, we're the only ones that do this. Now there are other live answering centers and lead intake centers out there, but they're not unique and built exclusively for the real estate industry. So that's why guys come to us, they're looking for, you know, reliable professional people to take the, in the, the calls off of their marketing efforts and, and process them, process them so that we're only sending them the good qualified deals so they can focus solely on those and not with the tire kickers or the people that are cussing them out and saying, Hey, you know, please take me off your mailing list or whatever it might be. So that's basically what we do for the real estate industry.

(04:45): Yeah, I think it is, uh, it's such a cool service in the sense of that thing that you talk about where everyone's us based, they're trained in real estate. That is such a huge differentiator from the vast majority of companies in this space. I mean, really is unique. It is. That is not how most companies like this work. So we're gonna come back to that cuz I really, really wanna talk about that. Yeah, for Sure. Yeah. We get all the details of everything. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Uh, I'm gonna trust me, you're gonna be sick of hearing my voice by the end of this. Well, so give people a little bit of background on you. Like what's your role at call Porter? You know, how'd you get started there? Um, a little bit of context.

(05:24): Yeah. So, uh, I, I do sales and I also do, you know, their marketing on social media. So, you know, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. You're gonna see my, uh, my face on all that. And, uh, before, before I worked for, for call Porter, um, I did, you know, eight years in the military in the army. Um, I was also a school teacher. Wow, cool. And, uh, and, and I've known Ryan Dossie, he's the, the founder of, uh, of call Porter and also our sister company, ballpoint marketing known him for years, you know, li of, uh, of service in the military and, and being a teacher, uh, while it's, you know, noble, they don't pay well . And so, you know, I'm looking for, you know, different career direction and also just my interest in real estate. So I, you know, I am a licensed, um, real estate agent. I put my license in referral mode, but, um, you know, just real estate just opened my eyes to so many more possibilities as far as generating wealth and things of that sort. So got Ryan back on the phone one day and was like, Hey man, uh, we need to talk. And so, you know, the rest is history. So I, you know, quit my job, being a teacher and came and did this

(06:34): That's wild. I was also a teacher. What did you teach? I taught middle school science. All right, cool. I taught high school history. These are both cool things to teach. Hey, you know, it was, it was actually my high school history teacher that prompted me to be an educator. Okay. So similar to me. Right. For whatever reason, I had a real deep connection with my history, a couple different history teachers that where I was really like, oh, I wanna be that person. So yeah. I'm curious. I know my answer to this. I'm cur we, we won't stay too long on this. Right. Yeah. Have you found that the process of teaching your experience, teaching whatever you learn teaching you end up applying in your current business life in some way or another, like, do you find there's some sort of overlap there?

(07:17): Absolutely. For, for sure. So like, like when people book a phone call with me to learn about call Porter, you know, we call it a strategy session because when people come to call Porter, I know they're not necessarily ready to sign up with us. Um, there, there might be, you know, a, a, a bunch of different business technologies that may they need in place. And so it's, it's almost like an educational phone call for a lot of people, you know? Um, because we're like the capstone, their business technologies to, you know, we're the last stop, um, for them whenever they're ready to sign up with us, because if they're not marketing, they don't need us. Um, if they're, you know, so there's, there's some, some different things. So I use, I use a lot of that, um, you know, kind of helping them reverse engineer, why they need us or when they need us, um, and kind of building out, you know, okay, here's step one, here's step two, here's step three, here's step four.

(08:11): Um, because if our clients are ready, um, and they have all the technologies to be successful, that means we're gonna be successful, right. That's client retention. So if, if they have the things that they need to be successful, we have the thing, you know, we'll be successful on our end because I'm not just gonna sign someone up and be like, oh, welcome to call Porter. And they're not ready. That that would, that would be ridiculous. And it, you know, the same thing was with my students. You're not going, you know, graduate a student. If they're not ready, they gotta have all the necessary tools and things to be successful. The same thing goes with a business. Yeah. I love that. I definitely will ask you for goofy teaching stories in a little while because that's oh, dude, I got, when I go back, I got so many being a science teacher.

(08:53): Let's go back. Let's talk about picking up the phone. Okay. Because this is, it's really interesting timing. So literally right before our interview, right now, I was doing a different interview. I was interviewing Mike Simmons, incredible real estate investor coach. Um, he's doing a hundred deals a year. He works about two hours a week in his business. Dude's just killing it's firing on all cylinders, beautiful family, like everything. Right. And I was saying, you know, where do you think that most real estate investors like your students, people you work with, what are some of the common mistakes that they make when they're building their businesses, thinking about systems, processes, et cetera. They told this whole story about how this, you had this student and, uh, you know, students like I'm really struggling. You know, my marketing stinks. It's not generating the results that I want. And Mike kind of sits down with him on the phone and they go through all his numbers and he realizes like he has tons of leads coming in the door.

(09:41): And so they sort of plot out the funnel and they plot out the entire thing and he's got like a good salesperson. He's got a good thing and everything's good. But the person who picks up the phone hates it and hates the process and like does not want to be there. Right. Mm-hmm , mm-hmm . And he was like, that's the person right there. Right. And he tells this whole story about how, even as a young investor, Mike really felt like anybody with a pulse can pick up the phone mm-hmm . But now as an experienced investor, he realizes how critical that moment is. So can we talk just about that moment where, you know, a seller or whoever somebody is coming through your pipeline, they call you for the first time someone's picking up the phone, like, why is that important and what should investors be thinking about? Making sure happens in that initial moment of contact.

(10:29): Yeah. Yeah. So, so first up, I mean the whole, the whole reason why call Porter exists. So, so Ryan Dossey, he's the, the founder of our company, real estate investor, you know, tremendously awesome, uh, mentor, but, and, you know, I'm just giving you kind of the, the minor details of it. But basically he sent out marketing, he was, you know, out with his wife or something like that, his phone rang, he looked at it and he was like, I'll get it later. You know, um, call went to voicemail called the guy, you know, a few hours later said, Hey, you know, this is Ryan got a missed call from you off my, you know, one of my marketing pieces. And the guy's like, well, if you would've called me three hours ago, I would've gave the deal to you. And he was like, oh crap.

(11:09): And that really prompted him, was of, of him thinking I really need to answer as many phone calls as I possibly can. And that, and that's the problem with real estate investors, because there's a lot of investors that still work at W2, whatever the reason they're not picking up their phone, maybe they're, you know, showing a house or not showing a house, but they're in a house, you know, viewing, you know, an Okta, an already existing deal. So answering that phone is super, super important. I mean, right up front, because we found that, uh, especially on the investor side of things that a, seller's usually going to go with the first person that answers their phone. And so what's gonna happen at call Porter is that when you send out your marketing efforts and we're talking direct mail door hangers, we have clients that have TV ads, radio ads, you know, their websites, social media, whatever the case might be.

(12:01): However you're getting in front of sellers. Yeah. When those inbound calls are coming in, we're gonna answer the phone as your business. So it's gonna seem like we, you have a totally legit assistant, you know, within your office. And we've already mentioned that our clients are us based, or our reps are us based. So when, when they're on the phone, they sound local, they sound very professional. They're trained in real estate. Um, we have a really great, um, you know, tried improve and script that we're using that is, um, really based upon Steven Covey's, you know, um, how to win friends and influence people. OK. Um, and so when they're on the phone, they collect, you know, the, the, the seller's information. And then we go through what we call the pillars of a good real estate. You gotta get property condition, you gotta get motivation. You gotta get timeframe at a price point. Once we have all of those data points, we go into appointment setting. Bam, you got a good qualified lead in your, in your pipeline.

(12:56): Yeah. I, so I want hit on a point that you made because, um, this is another, like really good timing where the story, right. Mm-hmm so I had another investor. Oh, uh, is a client of ours, really good friend, been a coaching student for a long time. Now a client of the agency really successful in Baltimore. Right. So he's been in Baltimore for a long time, knows the market's small team. It's like him and his wife. And I think his mom and his dad, and like, you know, probably a cousin or something. Right. And they just, they have their process down. Like he is a, he is a, an operator's operator. Right. Mm-hmm , they are so efficient, so effective. Right. So they recently were changing up some of the marketing, changing up some of their processes and what it was happening was his wife was answering the phone.

(13:40): Pre-qualifying the leads mm-hmm and then passing it on. Right. And so they wanted to get her out of that role. So they hired a VA from the Philippines. Right. And, you know, we were talking through this and he was like, you know, the VA is great. His English is perfect. He doesn't have an accent. Right. It's great. But they noticed that they, it just over and over and over again, the feedback they were getting was, Lee's not motivated. Lee's not, you know, whatever, like the leads weren't becoming deals right. There, there was this hole in their pipeline. Mm-hmm . And so we were scouring, their online marketing for is, you know, is there potential problem in the targeting or, or whatever. Right. And so temporarily just an experiment, they switched the wife back in mm-hmm and close rate went back up. And what they realized was she's from Baltimore.

(14:30): Yeah. Right. So she just had this very subtle, this very subtlely different way of relating mm-hmm where people felt like, okay, you're like me. Right. And it's totally unconscious. I, I really believe. Right. Yeah. But it's just like, oh yeah, you're near, you know, whatever Ziess pizza place or whatever. I go there three times, it's just something, something there. So I think that this whole idea of having reps that are in the us is such a cool differentiator for the service. So, so let's talk about that because obviously like on Cal Porter side, it's more expensive to do that. Right. The, the reason that most companies outsource to the Philippines or Vietnam or whatever is that they're taking advantage of currency arbitrage and, and it's cheaper. Right. So how did you guys make the decision to do that? Like why was that such a critical element of, of what you ended up doing?

(15:19): Yeah. I mean, well, well, actually it's cheaper to use call Porter than it is at VA, even at Philippines. Um, you know, on, on average, those are 14, $1,600 a month to, you know, have them doing both, even the outbound and the inbound calls and, and qualifying them. But I assume it would be cheaper for you guys if you were just like, well, our whole team's in the Philippines. There's that? Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, well, the, the whole idea is when you have investors working in the United States and they're, they're sending, you know, mail, and there are a lot of investors that are really strategic on how they do things. So let's say direct mail, for instance, like with ballpoint marketing, when ballpoint marketing, you know, creates these letters for the investors, um, they, they stuff the envelopes, right. They put the stamp on it and they send it to that investor's front doorstep. Why? So the front door, so that, that investor drops that mail in his local coast office and it gets postmarked in his local town. So it would be, it would be super weird for an investor to send a, a bunch of mail or whatever the case might be, and then get somebody that's in the Philippines to pick up the phone for them.

(16:27): And, and we get the, and, and we get these kinda in inconsistencies all the time. When I talk to clients, they're like, well, I have a cold caller. Well, was that cold caller local? No. Okay. Well, your cold call is from the Philippines. Right. And what, and sometimes what they want to do is they want drop. Um, like if the cold caller leaves a voicemail, they'll drop the phone number in the, in voicemails for someone to call back and then will reach our call center. But it's inconsistent to have someone from the Philippines cold call. And then when they call back, they get us and we're really professionally trained in real estate. Um, we're local. And, and you can pick up, as you said, it's kind of like subconscious, right? Mm-hmm like idioms. They, they don't pick up on those over there. Yeah. Or, you know, rapport building.

(17:08): So that's really big with, with our reps now it's like, how much rapport building can you really do in a, you know, six to seven minute phone conversation? Well, a ton. So like we train, we train the reps to, if you hear a dog bark say, oh, wow. I hear a dog, you know, a dog in the background, kind of dog do you got, oh, I got a Yorkie. What's your Yorkie's name? Luna. And, you know, we've actually had instances where investors show up at the person's house and they see the dog and they're like, oh my gosh, that's Luna. You know? And the person's like, how'd, you know, my dog was named Luna. And you're like, oh, well, my assistant Brandy told me. Yeah. Because that, because our reps were taking those notes, you know, we train our reps to, uh, let's say they, uh, an investor sent a probate mailing list or something like that. It, it would be a really crappy thing for a person on the phone when, you know, the sellers saying, oh, my husband just passed away and just saying, oh, and, uh, you know, how many bedrooms do you have? Right. Yeah.

(18:02): You know what I'm saying? So the rapport building, you're Probably gonna need to downsize those bedrooms now, I guess. Huh. Yeah, Exactly. So, you know, there a V a VA and the Philippines might not pick up on that. Like we will. And we're saying, no, you gotta touch on that. That's I'm so sorry to hear that. What did your husband do for a job? Oh, well he was a firefighter. Wow. That's, that's really fantastic. You know, you know, I've personally been into a house where the husband passed away and that was the, that was the, the, uh, scenario where he was a firefighter. And I went in there and all over the shelves and stuff was like his fire hat and his, you know, like metals and all kinds of things. And it was like a point for me. And this potential seller was really cool Yeah. I mean, I think it's so much of sales, right. When it's done well, mm-hmm is about human connection. Right. And ultimately it's about understanding that other person's needs and meeting those needs right. In a way that produces value for both people. Exactly.

(18:59): And I think it's just, you know, whether whatever the reason is, I do think that having that sort of localized thing is so important, but I, I think ultimately so many people are like, well, I can just, I could do it cheaper or faster, quicker this way. And they end up missing the fact that even if, for example, cuz like you said, it's like a lot of times actually cheaper to use call Porter. But like let's say even if you're like, okay cool. Like I got this like really good deal on this person. You're not optimizing for the amount you spend on your phone person. Mm-hmm, , you're optimizing for the amount of revenue, the business generates mm-hmm and if this person does half as well, then something else that would've cost 20% more, but is gonna do twice as many deals you are losing out so much. Right. It's it's such a shortsighted sort of calculus that I think a lot of people have Tried to use. Exactly. Yeah. I agree. I agree for,

(19:52): So what are some of the, you know, you mentioned earlier kind of like sort of like in passing and it's sort of like the common joke, right? You get the person that's like, I'm gonna call the FBI on you because you send me this postcard, which is my FA my personal favorite. Like I've seen like four people threaten to call the FBI. First of all, you dunno the FBI's phone number. And then too, I don't think it's illegal to send mail to people, but yeah, whatever. Um, but you know, it's not always, even in the best case scenario where you have a really motivated seller, it's calling in mm-hmm they wanna sell their home. Right. There's still this barrier up because I think a lot of sellers have anxiety. Mm-hmm that either they're gonna get taken for a ride, they're gonna get trapped on the phone and they can't get off or they're gonna be kind of like hard sold or whatever it is. So you mentioned, um, how to win friends and influence people, but like what are some of the ways that you think, um, investors or, you know, people work in acquisitions for investors can help to put sellers at ease or build that rapport that you were talking about before?

(20:55): Yeah. Um, I, I think, I think, um, you know, investors need to be consistent to, you know, for, for one. So like, you know, again, I'll just use kind of direct mail or, you know, like they send their direct mail, they have their local phone number on it. If they got a website, put it on there too, so that a seller could go to that website, see that they're local, you know, throw some, you know, throw some things in your carrot site that's about your city or, you know, um, throw a, an Instagram and a Facebook and a YouTube, you know, link in there as well. Like let them see that you're real people. Yeah. That you're genuine, that you're here to help the, the community. Because I mean, there are some just jerk investors out there that do wanna take advantage of people. You know, we we've had clients that say, you know, that are, I, I wouldn't even say their clients, but they would be like, Hey, um, when, when they call, I don't want you ever mentioning my business.

(21:47): Don't ever give out my name. And it's like, that's kinda shady right up front, you know? And it's like, I'm sorry, we're not gonna really kind of do that. Um, so if they're, if they're consistent, you know, have that website on your mail or, um, you know, have some videos or something like that, that shows that you're a human being that you're, you're local, you're kind, you're caring, you're genuine. Um, you're not just, you know, out there to, to drive a Lambo and, and, you know, show your rings on your hand or, you know, like, you know, you know what I'm saying? Like, yeah. Not, not everybody's like that. Um, and so when they call in our, our reps are, they're, they're very conversational. Um, they're not robotic at all. And each of them have their own personalities on how they do things. And, and we always love it when clients send us, um, emails or text messages or things.

(22:39): And they're like, they're like, dang man, Amber was phenomenal on the phone. Like absolutely amazing how she handled that phone call. And I'll tell them, I'll say, Hey, I'm gonna share that with Amber. Right. We, we have a, a slack account. We all can talk to each other in there. And that makes Amber's day knowing that she did something, you know, awesome for, for one of our clients. Um, so yeah, I think, I think that once, you know, once our reps, you know, get on the phone and let's say we, we do book an appointment, the investor needs to follow in, follow follow through on that. Wait. So they actually have to show up. They actually have to, I'm out, I'm out. I don't want anymore. No I'm and, and, and you, you, we laugh at it, but it happens all the time. If, if you, if, if you go in and you actually have an appointment at the house and you say, I'm gonna give you a cash offer in 24 hours and that's, what's on your website. Well, damn it, you better give them an offer in 24 hours. Yeah. You, you know, and so stay consistent. Um, I, I just made a post about consistency today and Instagram. Yeah. You know, are you consistently marketing? Are you consistently answering your phone calls? Are you consistently following up on deals? If not, let's talk about call pointer,

(23:56): Just enter your, your email. I mean, it, it, it's so funny. Right. But always talk about this, right? It's like all marketing is ultimately about building trust, right? Mm-hmm, so all about building and really every part of the business down to the moment where you, somebody gives someone else money for a service that somebody's always doing something first, right. Either I have to give you the service before you give you the money, or you have to give the money before I give you the service. Right. It's, there's gotta be trust involved. Right. And one of the, really in many ways, the only way to build trust is you have to consistently tell someone what is going to happen ahead of time. Mm-hmm exactly. And then have that happen, right? I'm gonna give you an offer in 24 hours. And then within 24 hours, you got the offer.

(24:41): Mm-hmm every time you break that process of, Hey, I told you something was gonna happen. And then it didn't happen that decreases the amount of trust in that relationship, which is why, you know, it's like I do online marketing and do a lot of Google ads, Facebook ads, whatever. I'm very careful not to promise things that can't promise. Yeah. Right. Because if I'm like, absolutely you're gonna get a hundred leads this week. And then you don't, which by the way, like, I don't have a complete power over the universe, otherwise I would do it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You, I mean, so it's, it's such an, a critical way of thinking about it. You, you mentioned your Instagram, um, which is how can people find that it's a call Porter Instagram. So how can they, Yeah. It's a call Porter official.

(25:21): Okay. Call Porter official on Instagram so they can go check that out. Yeah. I am very curious. Obviously you have military background teaching background. Of course. I wanna ask you about TikTok. So I'm super curious about TikTok is mostly the selfish portion of this podcast. I think that most real estate investors are aware of TikTok. They've probably heard people say TikTok is like the, the fastest growing social media platform. Mm-hmm in a couple years, Facebook is basically gonna be kicked in the face and it's gonna be all TikTok. And the young people are in TikTok and TikTok TikTok. Right. It's in the news. Um, it's a thing, but I think, at least for me, like I'm 42, I was kind of like TikTok was the first social media thing. I just felt like I'm too old. Like I just missed it. It's it's too much.

(26:07): Right. But I'm exploring it now. And I actually think that for real estate investors, it's an important channel to be aware of and to think about. And at least mm-hmm, , you know, if you don't wanna invest a ton of time into it, to at least know something about, so I'm curious, were you a big TikTok person before you started doing TikTok for called Porter? And what has been your experience? You guys are obviously your B to B, so you're not doing the dances. And like, that's like not the whole vibe of it. So like mm-hmm what has it been like for you guys to use TikTok for your business? So I've actually just incorporated TikTok maybe a month ago. So I'm far more comfortable with Instagram. Um, you know, like I'm, I'm really good at, you know, taking advantage of Instagram, trending audio and, you know, being silly and things like that. TikTok is, is just a different animal. Like it, I'm still trying to kind of figure it out mm-hmm . Cause when you, you know, when you're, you're thumbing through the reels or, or, uh, the videos on, on TikTok, it's just a lot of obnoxious people. And I I'm like, I can't handle this, like, like right now,

(27:11): You know, I, uh, I had a very similar experience where I was like, okay, I'm an online marketing guy. I have to know about TikTok. Right. I had like seven people ask me about TikTok ads in a week and I'm like, fine. I'm gonna learn TikTok ads. Mm-hmm . And also Facebook ads are like, kind of a nightmare now. So I was like, OK. And I got on. And when you, when you register for TikTok, they asked me like, what are you interested in? Mm-hmm and I skipped that part. And later I was like, why did I skip that part? Because it's just like, Hey, let me show you complete horse shit. Just like nonstop B BS, you know, whatever, this is supposed to be a family show. So I'll edit that out anyway. But, you know, it was like just, and so, um, I was like, oh my God, like, I couldn't take it. I kept cringing off of it. Like almost immediately. Yeah. I I'm the same way.

(27:54): Yeah. It took me about, I kept going back to it a little bit at a time over the course of, of several weeks, I was spent literally like five minutes on her week or something. And by week four, that algorithm had figured out, Hey, you like funny cat videos. Mm-hmm you watch those? Here's a good, a stream of the funniest animal videos on the internet. Yeah. And so now my, both of my kids are like, Hey, can you open that funny animal video app? That's what they think it's called. They don't know what it's called. Um, it has one of the best, I mean, as a matching algorithm, it is absolutely mind blowing. Like it is not a surprise to me anymore. Why it is what it is. So like even, well, we can broaden this to Instagram, right? Because I think investors need to be more aware of social media in general than they are. I think investors are so used to doing direct response marketing. Mm-hmm , mm-hmm that as an industry, we've really lagged behind on social media. And I think as the generations that are young today become the predominant sellers and buyers of homes. This is something we really need to get better on. So what's been your experience, like in terms of being on Instagram, you know, what, what are the types of content that you think about putting out there? Like how do you approach that as someone who's using social media to grow your business?

(29:14): Yeah. Um, I I'm definitely for real estate, whether you're an agent or an investor, social media is definitely a way to go for sure. Uh, I mean, I have, I have agent friends here in, in, um, St. Louis that are, you know, rocking on social media with, as a realtor, um, or realtor, I have to say correctly or Yeah, get it right. It's real tour. It's realtor. Yeah. OK, perfect. Um, not realtor , um, you know, that, that, that social media is just, it, it reaches so many people. It, it, you know, especially if you, you know, you can geo target and things of that sort. My, my approach with call Porter, um, because call Porter is, is for agents realtors, and it's also for investors. So sometimes my, you know, my reels or my posts or things like that are geared towards both of them. And sometimes it's geared just toward to, towards the realtor sometimes just geared towards the, the investor. But I like, I like content that, and, you know, when we hop off or whatever you go and, you know, see the, the things I dork around with on on call border official. But, um, I like things that kind of grab your attention, you know, making good use of trending audio is, is really key to,

(30:31): Yeah. So I don't know much about this at all. Uh, I haven't, I, I got off Instagram a year ago, not because of business, but purely personal. I was like, I'm actually on it too much. And I wanted to kind of chill out for a while. So Want to find motivated seller leads online, but don't know where to start download our free and motivated seller keyword report today. AdWords nerds have spent over 5 million this year researching the most profitable keywords for finding motivated seller leads. And you can grab these exact keywords when you download our report at www dot AdWords, nerds.com/keywords For people who are familiar, like what what's the trending audio feature of in on. So if you, if you like, look all the way down to the bottom left hand corner of an Instagram reel, if there's like a little arrow pointing up next to the music or the, the sound that means it's trending up, which means that when you're on Instagram, it's going to, to, to grab onto the algorithm. And, and Instagram's just gonna show it a little bit more. OK. And especially if we get more likes on that trending audio, if you see one going down, you probably shouldn't use that. And then there's, you know, just a bunch of things in between, but

(31:49): This is like a musical accompaniment similar to what they do in TikTok. That kind of Thing. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know how, like when you, when you, um, and it's not just music, it's, it's it, you know, like when you go on Instagram, there's voiceovers where people are, you know, doing silly things. I do a ton of those they're, they're, you know, 5, 10, 15, second long, uh, but they're attention grabbers, right? Yeah. And, uh, like I love to, to hit realtors, um, you know, sometimes as far as like them not answering their phones so like, I got, I got a, a post that's like, you know, what's hotter than a hot rod, cuz I was sitting in a hot rod car and I was like, it's a realtor actually answers their phone, you know? So like those kinds of things and, and you know, I want people to be like, Hey, why are you picking on me? You know? Yeah. Just to kinda engage in conversation, but I always do the real and then I always post it as a story because your story's gonna get your current audience and your current followers. Um, So, oh, you should like, um, It's fun. What do they call that? Like the, you know, when they send the, um, the secret shoppers, you know, send secret shoppers in, like you just record yourself, calling realtor line, just log out their personal information or whatever, and just be like, listen along, is this person completely screws up this phone call or whatever that would be yeah. Yeah. Um, that's actually, um, a video. I have written down a couple of videos. One of them's gonna be, you know, just calling, uh, local agents in a city and you know, 10 of them and seeing who actually picks up and who doesn't and

(33:15): Oh God, we, I was at a real estate investing conference once and the guy on the stage, just talking about phone mm-hmm and he was like, who here is brave enough. I'm gonna call someone life, call your number life. And your team's gonna pick up, I'm gonna put it like on this speaker and you have never felt the tension in a room go up. Like it was so it was palpable. Right. It was, it was like, it was like, they, he had said then like I've released an army of tarantula in the conference room or whatever. Like it was just, some people were like, huh. Yeah. And, um, you know, ended up being fine, but like the person that the person was like, yeah, I'll do it. Like, it didn't go great. Right. And it was just like, you'd realize like how rarely people actually go through the process with their own team mm-hmm and, um, like listen to their own team's calls. And like, for example, if you're listening to this and you're like, well, I don't need call Porter because I have a person that answers the phone and they're great. Mm-hmm what I would say is like awesome. When was the last time you listened to a recording of that person picking up phone? Yeah, because if it's been a while

(34:18): Yeah. And I would say, are they great? 24 7? Cause we are that's the other thing. Right. Because sellers, a lot of times we'll call like two in the morning. Right. Because you're stressed outta your mind. Right. Mm-hmm so you guys are 24 7 answer services, Correct? Yeah. So how do you a little bit in the weeds, but we'll, we'll talk shop a little bit. So leads come in. They're they're getting you guys, you, you are presenting yourself as part of the, you're not like, hi, I'm from Cal Porter. You're saying hi, I'm from, you know, Barrett industries. Right? Yep. Whatever. So when you go through that process, you set up the thing, how are you passing that lead onto the investor? Is it going into their CRM or how do you, how do you guys interface with the investor's team?

(35:06): Good question. So most of the time it goes into their CRM. Um, so we don't get, uh, login credentials to CRM just for, you know, liability issues. So how we access their CRM is via web form link. Okay. So as long as you know, the C and, and if there's investor friendly, CRMs, you know, re simply REI black book investor, F investor F um, you know, most of them have these, you know, Salesforce, they have web form links. Yeah. So when a seller calls in, we're gonna pick up the phone, we're gonna answer the phone as that, um, client's company. And the way that we identify that company right away is that we provide a forwarding number to that investor. They put that forwarding number in their call flow. So that forwarding number, you know, essentially acts as the code or the key that opens up their account whenever a seller calls in.

(36:04): So it's automatically already on the, on our reps computer. So they know how to answer. They see the web form link, they see the calendar link, they see the notes about the company. So they're, they're ready and they're prepared. So the seller, the seller calls in, we pull up that web form link. And as they're on the phone, they, they type in all the contact information. They get the property information, they get the, you know, Mo how motivated they are, their timeframe, a price point. We always ask if there's like an additional comments field, and, um, in web form links, in case anything else comes up, we hit submit. It goes into their CRM in real time. Now, depending on how that, that investor gets the notifications, some CRMs, you can, you know, get text message notification with a new made or an email or whatever.

(36:49): And then they, they follow up on that. Um, whether that's please take this person off the list. This is a really good qualified lead look at all the notes they've even booked an appointment. And then we have, you know, what are kind called follow up and investors are familiar with this. Like someone calls in, they get our, they get our call center and they're like, Hey, um, Dan sent me a letter and said he could gimme a cash offer on my home. Can I talk to him? Well, Dan's not here right now. He's not available. I can take, you know, take a message for you. No, no, no. I'll talk to Dan. He's the one with the money. I wanna know what he has to say. Right. You know? And so they don't give us a ton of information. So we get what we can and we forward it over to that Investor. I mean, I look, everybody wants to talk to me and I look the only way to do it is to get on this podcast. So I dunno what to tell you. We're gonna do this on the weekly, right.

(37:37): yeah, of course. Yeah. Look, I'm the one with the money. Right. One makes sense. Uh, so, uh, I, I just love, I just love every part of that. So I, I have a, you know, we're coming to the end here. I don't wanna keep you super long, but I, I do have this questions, maybe a big one and, and we, we can kind of touch on it where wherever you want, but kind of getting into, to, to your guys' business at call Porter and where this overlaps with a lot of investors is about hiring the right people, right? Because call, Porter's all about obviously building this team of people that you guys are gonna train in real estate. You know, obviously they've gotta be able to talk on the phone and not just talk on the phone, but talk on the phone in a professional and intelligent way.

(38:19): But also, like you said, build rapport. Mm-hmm I know you guys have this training process, but to some extent too, it's about finding the right people to put in those roles. Yeah. And it strikes me that you guys do this a lot, right. More than the average investor is gonna get to do this and probably have more reps in terms of hiring and fi you know, finding the right people, then the average investor will. So how do you guys think about hiring, right. How do you tell when someone's a good fit to be a part of the call Porter team? I mean, and it strikes me, right? It's like, it's so critical for you guys because they're not just representing you, they're representing the client's business. Yeah. Um, so it's such a sort of critical role. How do you, how do you guys go through that process of finding such great people?

(39:04): Yeah. I, I, I mean, I really wish that that, uh, Cassie, our CEO is on the, on the call or, or, and he's our, our rep manager. Cause they would be able to answer that so much better than I would, but we look for, you know, people that have thick skin, because one phone call you're getting cussed out. Mm-hmm, the next one. You might get someone that's, you know, super cute and smiley and ready to go. You know? So it's like that, that transition from call to call. Um, and you know, they're trained, they're trained before they're even on the phones too, which is great. Right. So just because, you know, they have call center experience or whatever doesn't mean like day one, they're, they're gonna be taking call like they're trained. Um, they're trained frequently, you know, like I mentioned, when we get good phone calls that come in, they're trained on the great phone calls that, you know, this is how you, how you handle a really good phone call, or this is how you handle a frustrating phone call.

(39:56): We're also trained on the not so good phone calls. Maybe, maybe there's a rep that really did drop the fall on something. We're gonna train them on that. Um, they're, they're trained on the ins and outs of real estate. They walk the walk, talk the talk, know the lingo, know the acronyms, those kinds of things. So that's about really all I can speak to on the hiring part of it just cause I'm on the sales and marketing side. But, uh, but they, they really are a, a great team of, of people. And I mean, we get, we get people shouting out them every single day. Well, and it, it just strikes me, right? Like it's literally, if you guys weren't world class at finding the right people and training them to do a good job, you wouldn't be in business. No. Right. Like if I tried to Getting better and better and better.

(40:40): Yeah. If I tried to build call Porter tomorrow, I would be out of business in three days. Right. It's like that wouldn't take very long. Cause that's just not my perfect skill set. Right. Mm-hmm so, um, I don't know. I just, I was telling you this story before, but um, you know, Lou on my team, you know, he was the one that kind of originally sort of struck up a relationship with you guys who I think we originally found out about you because one of our clients was using you and you know, Lou is a phone guy, he's a sales guy. He is a, he's been a real estate investor talks to real estate investors. Every single day. This dude loves being on the phone. He takes calls on vacation. He takes calls like four in the morning and I am like, you don't have to do this. And he is like, but that's what I do for fun. I don't know what to tell you. You know, we

(41:21): We've been on the phone and email Rasin each other during the NHL playoffs too. I'm that surprised he's supposed to be working gush. Darn it. But, um, but you know, but he was the one that pulled me aside and was like, I think this is a secret weapon for our clients. Right? Because then I, I will say this, that, you know, for the folks that are listening to this, obviously this REI marketing arts podcast marketing is what people come here for, but you can have the best marketing in the world if you can't answer the phones right on time and in a really productive and efficient way, it doesn't matter. Right. And that's gonna be a lesson that's gonna come up in like multiple, it's gonna already come up in like 10 interviews that we've had on this podcast. Right. Yeah. I just think you guys are providing such an awesome surface. So for people that wanna learn more about call Porter. Yeah. You, I could see I've started to mumble. I was like Marvel out for a second, uh, for people who wanna know more about you guys and what you do, what is the best way for them to reach out to you and learn more?

(42:25): Yeah. Um, I wanna, I wanna say something real quick first Though. Yeah. Please, please. Because we didn't hit on it. Um, and it's, and it's just connects so well to Edward's nerds. We have what's called instant web lead capture and dot. So when people are getting leads off of their website or their social media or PPC or Google ads or whatever, we can hook up to those leads, make an automated phone call on their behalf within 90 seconds of that lead coming in. Yeah. It's it's so speed delete. And the whole reason why we do that, if someone goes to, you know, their carrot site, their website, because they're looking for a cash offer on their home, they're not just going to that website. They're gonna go on Google and they're gonna hit two more, three more in that city. And it's really, who's gonna call 'em first. So with call Porter, if we can hook up to your online leads, we will make that call on your behalf. Typically on average, within 90 seconds, that's pretty darn quick. I speak to clients all the time and they're like, yeah, I got leads in my queue that I haven't talked to. That happened a week and a half, two weeks ago. And I'm like, yeah, dude, they're gone. you know

(43:31): That person's not, that's not a good, person's not in your queue anymore. Yeah. I'm so glad you brought this up because this is really, um, this was really, really amazing. And so like for, for people that didn't catch that, right. Literally what it means is someone comes to your website and fills out your form. Yeah. Your landing phone Landing, that phone is auto. That phone is automatically ringing on their end and connecting them to call Porter without you doing anything. Right. You don't have to do
Anything. It's literal. It's literally a machine. Once you set up the Xer on, on, on the leads end and on our end, it's automatic. It just keeps going. And then all of a sudden you're like, wow, these phone calls are coming in. And then we're sending you the good qualified deals and tax that you focus on.

(44:09): Yeah. And I, I said this actually on the last interview that I did too. And I'll say it here again, because I feel like the more often you say things, the more people that remember it. So I'm gonna say this again, right. It was like, we did a study at AdWords nerds because we were like, what really makes people stay as our clients? Like what determines client longevity? This is something that we do. Is it the market is their budget. Like what can we do? And the number one factor that was correlated with long term success in AdWords return on investment revenue, whatever you wanna measure, the number one success factor was speed to lead speed to lead, right? It's like our average close rate for clients is about one deal for every 12 leads or so mm-hmm um, that come in the, the funnel, right?

(44:53): Our best ever closing client is a, uh, this, this wonderful guy, Joe McCall, who's a well known real estate investor. Right. He was using our service at the time was closing one outta six. Wow. One outta six. And so we, when we sat down with him, we were like, what is your secret? I don't, he doesn't, I don't think he'll care that I tell this story. I was like, what is your secret? Is they were on the phone with nearly every single lead that came in within five minutes of that person coming in. Right. That's five minutes. We're talking about 90 seconds. Yeah. So thank you so much for mentioning that. That is such a cool, Yeah. I just had get that in there before we, uh, before we hopped off. Yes. Yeah. So for people to wanna learn more about who are like, well, I wanna close a million deals. Uh, how do I, how, how do they learn more about call port? Um, I, I mean, definitely, uh, you know, go, go to call porter.com, you know, navigate our website. Um, you know, we're, we're trusted by hundreds of investors around the nation and you know, if you're an agent, uh, same thing, go, go see, you know, the reviews, there's videos on there. You can listen to sample phone calls. You can, you know, find us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, um, you know, research us. Um, Hey, if you wanna go to pat live, try them out, go for it. You're gonna find out you're not gonna like them. So come over at that call port. And, um, you can try us for free for 30 days. So we have,

(46:13): Oh, I didn't even know that You that's true. Yep. It's it's it's and it's a, it's a true free 30 days. The reason why we do this is because like, let's say your example, you are an investor and you're sending out marketing efforts and you don't necessarily know like, what, what, how many calls you might get in because we're a, we're a monthly subscription, but we're also minutes based. Yeah. Yeah. So if we give you a 30 day free trial and you, and you are within your, you know, sending that new campaign out, you're gonna get a pretty good idea of how many calls came in, how many minutes you used. And then from there, we're gonna give you, um, a courtesy email about three days prior to that 30 day trial, uh, free trial ending. And you're gonna say, Hey, this is a perfect tier for me to fit in. Or maybe you need to drop me down a tier, or maybe you need to boat me up a tier. Um, or if you didn't think that the services were beneficial, which most stay with us, then you know, there's no obligation to you. There's no harm, no foul. We go our separate ways. Um, and, and that's it, but it's a true 30 day free trial.

(47:12): So look, folks, I mean, this is for, I mean, it sounds like a canned, I sound like I'm getting paid for this. I'm not getting paid anything to do this interview by the way. So, uh I'll, I mean, I'm open to it, but I'm not getting paid anything. Right, right. Yeah. Here's what I'm gonna say. Right. Because I am an, a data guy, right. A data guy. So if you are not sure, right. If phone, you know, picking up the phone, that part of that process, if you're not sure if that's important for your kind of revenue and your long term, like longevity in the business, test it out. You can do 30 day free trial split. 'em up half, half take half the calls yourself, send half the call Porter and just see what the difference is. See what the experience Is. Dude, I'm stealing that on Instagram. I'm using that exact language.

(47:56): oh my God. I mean, it's, it's look, it's it's worst thing that happens is you're like, that was kind of a waste of my time and you don't do it. The best thing that could happen is you realize that you are unlocking this major constraint in your business that can really change the way that things work. And the reason that I'm sort of harping on this, um, is one, I think call partners are great service, but really it's just about, I know for a fact, there's so many investors out there that struggle and they try to solve the problem in the wrong place, right. They tried to solve, you know, an economy problem with marketing. They tried to solve, you know, whatever. They try to solve a profit problem with just more funding or whatever it is. And if you are having issues with your follow up or your back end systems, fixing that up even a little bit can have a massive, huge, massive multiplier effect on your revenue. So I, Vince Vince, I cannot tell you how awesome this was. I really, really appreciate you coming on now you have a link on the site where people can actually talk directly to you. So if you're listening to this podcast and you wanna talk to Vince, actually walk through a little bit of your business sort of situation or give him some context, you can do that. That's at call porter.com/schedule. Yeah. So call porter.com/schedule if they book a call Forward slash yeah. Slash schedule. Yep.

(49:15): Yeah. So, so if they book a call with you, like what should they expect? That's a strategy session that you mentioned Before. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and that's really what we call it is a strategy session because, um, you know, the investors are on, on so many different levels and where they are with their, with their business. Right. And we have huge corporate clients and we have investors that are solders. So you call me, um, I'm gonna get a good idea about who you are, what's your background in real estate. Um, you're gonna kind of tell me, you know, what your marketing looks like. Um, I'm gonna ask you, how do you manage your deals? Do you got a, a CRM? Oh, you got an Excel sheet. Okay. Well tell me how you, you know, stay on top of that and things. Don't go through the cracks. Who's your phone provider. All right. You got your cell phone. Okay. We're gonna have to talk about that because you need to, you need to get off your cell phone and get yourself a marketing number with like call rail or RingCentral or , you know, so like, so I'm gonna educate them and figure, and, and they're gonna educate me as, as well.

(50:08): Like I get, I get educated all the time, um, with, uh, with potential clients calling in, but yeah, it's really just a strategy session. Um, and they're gonna find out I'm not super salesy. Like when we get off the phone, I'm not gonna hound them, you know, every day for the next two months or, you know, whatever, like it, the service is what it is. You either want it and need it, or you don't, that's it. Yeah. So, so I'm, I'm not, I'm not salesy in that regard and I'll let 'em know, like, Hey, I'll probably give you a bump, you know, next week or any, or something like that. I always try to resource people. Um, you know, if you have a strategy session and you want our, um, our script that our reps use, I'll send it to you. You know? I mean, that's, that's something that we, that we just give away for free.

(50:52): If you want it, you wanna see what our reps say and how they do things here. It's um, yeah, if you, if you need, um, information about CRMs, I'll give you a list of, of, you know, CRMs that I think are really good for the investment world or, you know, so I'll, I'll resource them. And it really is a strategy session for the, for the folks that do wanna sign up with us. You know, we do have to have a, a, a credit card on file, um, to sign up for the 30 day free trial. Um, mostly that's for, you know, our reps pulling full 40 numbers and things, you know, for them, but also when they decide to stay with us and most do, there's literally no interruptions on their service. It just, the 30 days is over. Then they get charged for their subscription for the next month.

(51:33): Like, I think, look, if you are listening to this right now, you're an investor you're like, and I don't know if it's for me, just call, steal the spirit, but literally just told you, you could steal their script call. Look, these look all Vince, just hold on for a second. Just plug your look. These, these morons are giving away this million dollar script for free. You need to go steal, uh, thank you so much, Vince. This was awesome. Yeah. Uh, I really, really appreciate all your expertise and time. Again, if you are listening this, the website is call porter.com. You can find him on Instagram call Porter official TikTok. Of course, if you wanna go see what, what the heck he's doing on there, he can go check that out as well. Yeah. Vince, thank you so much, man. This was a blast Man. It was, it was awesome, man. And, uh, and I'm sure we'll be, uh, talking again in near future.

(52:19): Yeah, for sure. All right. Thanks man. This week's episode, I hope you enjoyed it as always. You can learn more about AdWords nerds over@adwordsnerdsdotcomandyoucanfindeveryepisodeofthispodcastatadwordsnerds.com slash podcast. We got the show notes. We've got the links. We got everything you're gonna need over there. Hey, if you are listening this podcast, I would really appreciate it. It would mean a huge amount to me. If you could leave us a review wherever you got this podcast, it helps other people find it. And I cannot tell you how much that means to me. I read every single one. All right, folks, I'll be talking to you next week. I hope you have a good one.

(53:05): This is the podcast factory.