Converting Online Leads Into Closings: Success Lessons from Conversion Monster & CINC

See the full video and transcript below. 

Transcript

Jeff Walker: Welcome everybody! Again this is CINC and Conversion Monster. We're very happy to be announcing our partnership and talking about lessons learned on lead conversion today. I'm Jeff Walker, head of product at CINC. And happy to see everybody again, and I'm joined today by Ro, Scott and Jordan. And so I'll let each of you guys introduce yourselves real quick. And then we'll get started with our content. So I'll turn it over to Ro. 

Ro Malik: Hey, everybody, thanks for joining us today. I'm super excited to be on this webinar and to announce this integration that we have with Commissions Inc. It's been a couple of years in the making and it's, really, it's a great day for us. And we're looking forward to the partnership. I am the CEO and co founder of Conversion Monster. And in case you don't know what that is, we are a real estate inside sales agent company that are helping agents all over the [00:01:00] country convert Internet leads into opportunities.

I also run 2 real estate teams. I have 1 in Chicago and another 1 in Buffalo, New York. And soon to be maybe expanding to Dallas, where we've got a number of ISAs working with us too. So thanks for having me and I'm looking forward to an action packed webinar pretty soon. I'm going to be going through a deck here and just want to let you guys know that normally, I'd probably go through this information over the course of an hour and I'm going to try and I'm going to go really fast. So I'm going to go through in about 10 minutes. If you got a notepad handy, it'd be good to take some notes because I want to get give enough time to both Scott and Jordan to hear, like, how they're leveraging and their best practice as well.

Looking forward. Thanks. I'll turn it over to Scott. 

Scott Martineau: Thank you. I'm excited to be here. I'm Scott Martineau been a long time CINC client and. [00:02:00] I've been with Conversion Monster now for about the last year as well too, so I've gotten to work with both of these companies. I do real estate consulting work with lots of different kind of tech companies that are coming into the space that are looking to empower and work with agents.

Was an agent, ran a team. Owned a brokerage actually was able to sell the brokerage back in 2021. But my passion is actually helping agents build what we call lead share platform. So it's a hybrid team model that we build. That works really nicely in this conversation that we get to have today.

Excited to get to be a part of it. Excited to get to see Ro go through an hour and 20 minutes. Like an hour presentation in 20 minutes. That's going to be awesome. And yeah, I'll turn it over to Jordan now. 

Jordan Kinsley: Hey, good afternoon everyone. My name is Jordan Kinsley. I'm actually located in the Memphis, Tennessee area.

I am chief operating officer of Morrow Group Realty. We are the second largest team in Tennessee. We [00:03:00] are in the Memphis metropolitan area, as well as in Mississippi. So we have about 80 people in our brokerage. I am in production myself and in real estate several years, and I've been a client with Conversion Monster and CINC and have had a tremendous success. I'd say with both. So I was happy to jump on the call with them and share some best practices, answer some questions for you guys, and just see where this conversation takes us. 

Jeff Walker: All right. Awesome. Thank you guys. Thanks, Jordan and Scott. And again, what brings us here today is that earlier in the year CINC released our public API, which makes it easy or easier a lot easier for 3rd party technology companies to integrate with the same platform.

So it really opens up opportunities to create these deep integrations. So you can work seamlessly with other tools that are specialized to help you grow your business and that's what Ro and team have done with Conversion Monster building the deepest integration. So far, interesting platforms [00:04:00] to really be able to work as 1 with with the real estate team clients through CINC.

And again, we want this this, webinar to be valuable for everybody today, whether your individual agent for your team if you're using an ISA or not. Yeah. To capture some information about what's working and what Conversion Monster has learned by offering these services across many agents.

And so they've, done a lot of lead nurturing and a lot of lead conversion. Ro has some data to share with us about what they've learned about converting leads. And so we'll go ahead and kick that off now. 

Ro Malik: All right. Thanks, Jeff. Yeah. Hey, again, guys, I love seeing everybody from all over the country. Appreciate you joining us live. I am going to share my screen. I want to go through some data with you again. This is something for those of you guys that are just joining. Normally, I'd maybe spend an hour going through and I'm going to try and get through it in about 10, 15 minutes.[00:05:00] 

So we've, we analyzed over we've been in business for 7 years. We analyzed over 2 million leads over the past 5 years. And what we were able to determine was that the average agent is calling their leads 1 and a half times. And they're missing out on nearly 70% of the opportunities they would have had another thing that we learned is that nearly a quarter of those opportunities are actually happening after the 4th phone call.

And so I want to break that down for you right here, like what that looks like. So basically 32 percent, so nearly a 3rd of those opportunities are really happening in the 10 minutes of a call. I know we always say 5 minutes and speed to lead and yes, that's true. We're just, there's certain lead sources where it matters so much dramatically more, but basically that 1st call that speed to lead nearly a 3rd of those opportunities are happening.

50 percent of those opportunities [00:06:00] are happening within two calls, which means that if you're only calling your leads one time or one and a half times on average, you're missing out on another bulk of opportunities. And then a whopping 77 percent actually happened by the fourth phone call, which only a very select few agents are actually taking the time to make that many phone calls per leads.

And so one of the startling statistics we saw was that 77%, but then also 23 percent of those opportunities are being left on the table because they actually are happening after the fourth phone call. And why do we know that? We know that because we actually call leads and text leads and email leads and ringless voicemail all the way for up to a year before we consider a leap cold.

So we're seeing where opportunities are happening throughout that process at later stages. And nearly you take a quarter percent of your opportunities. And you multiply that by your average sales [00:07:00] price in your market, then you can get a pretty much a decent estimation on what you're leaving on the table, right? By not calling your leads and not following up your leads enough times. 

In our research, just to let you guys know from lead registration to actual opportunity, the average across all boards 17 days. Okay? So sometimes they're right away. And sometimes they're a little bit longer. Now, an inquiry lead is something like, where they request a property showing, or they want more information. Google PPC, 17 days, Facebook leads about 23 days and the whole mixed bag is about 17 days. So just keep that in mind when you're going when you're going through with your Internet leads. 

And then this is for everything. So our aggregate for all of our lead sources and everything when we put it into one bag, we've determined that it takes about 12 attempts in total [00:08:00] to get to an opportunity. Once again, it varies by lead source, it can change. But the average is around 12 total attempts to get to an actual opportunity. Flying through this part, the one thing that I wanted you guys, this was a little bit shocking for us to find out through our data. Was that in the short run, Google PPC and inquiry leads again, property showing requests or more information outperformed in the short run, but what we saw in the long run was that Facebook leads actually with longer term nurturing actually started to outpace and outperform pay per click leads. And that was shocking to us, just from an understanding of where Facebook the whole industry's thought process around social media leads or Facebook leads. I think we only understood that they're longer term, but it was actually shocking to see that at a certain point in the process with the longer term nurturing, that they [00:09:00] actually surpass PPC on an opportunity rate basis.

For those of you that are relatively near the business or newer to your internet leads very quickly, obviously, these are the three keys: speed to lead, having systems and processes in place, and long term lead nurturing. Those are definitely the three keys to conversion. And then this I just want to show you guys, whether you are working with an ISA whether you're working with an ISA company like ours, you're doing it on your own, you're doing it with CINC.

You need to don't worry so much about this right now. What I wanted to show you is. You need to have different campaigns. You need to have different campaigns set up based on the different types of leads. It's definitely not a one size fits all. So a lot of the work comes in the beginning is like, you got to go in and set up these campaigns for all these different types of buyers or sellers, or if a ghost buyer, right? Somebody that you're in contact with is you're no longer in contact with, how do you get them back on the phone? Somebody that you've never [00:10:00] talked to. Wrong numbers. Wrong sellers. just understand that there's, cadences. And there's campaigns that you want to make sure you set up in CINC or whatever other CRM that you're using.

Okay. I think everybody knows this. I'm going to skip through that. That's just your your qualifiers, location, price, motivation. Agent timing, and have you been pre approved? That's our process to see if you've been looking to buy or sell the next 6 months. That's what we consider an opportunity.

Now the cadence to maximize lead conversion. So we've got different campaigns for different types of leads, but I wanted to give you a general idea of if you are doing this yourself, this is about where you need to be at if you want to maximize conversion. Everybody knows call your leads in less than five minutes, and then 17 touches in the first 10 days.

Okay, so I got the calls tax emails and then rvms or ringless voicemails. [00:11:00] That's bare minimum where you want to be at as far as a number of touches in the 10 days and then we do 76 total touches. Over the course of an entire year before we consider that lead cold. Just understand that again, if you're, if you are doing it yourself, you having your team do it, this is going to be what's required.

Jeff Walker: I've got a question there Ro for you. Earlier you mentioned that so 77 percent of the opportunities are going to close from those 1st 4 calls. Is that right? 

Ro Malik: 1st opportunities we're going to get. Yeah. 

Jeff Walker: And so those calls are in the 1st 10 days. 

Ro Malik: Yeah, we're making those calls in those in the first 10 days.

Another thing I wanted to share with you guys is that there is gold in those cold leads that you have. So I think we get, for those of you guys that get internet leads, and I was guilty of this too, we're very used to, all right I got three more leads coming tomorrow. I got five more leads coming tomorrow. I got new [00:12:00] leads. I got new leads. I got new leads coming, right? And sometimes you forget about, or you're like, Oh, they're already gone. They've already chosen someone else. When we reengaged 150,000 cold internet leads over the past 18 months. This is what our opportunity rate was. So it was closing in on 4%, which aggregate gave us another 5600 opportunities for our clients. And once again, if you average commission. It's a lot of potential. There's a lot of gold still being left in those leads that aren't being worked. And I know a lot of teams and agents tend to put those in a pond and then you know agents will go on to pick them and work them, but just understand that there's still quite a bit of opportunity that's sitting in those older leads that you can be harvesting.

Jeff Walker: Ro, do you approach those differently than in terms of your scripting and your cadence and reaching out to those folks. 

Ro Malik: We do. Yeah, we have something called the revive program. So those are cold leads are dead leads and they're treated much [00:13:00] differently then a new lead in terms of everything in terms of calls, in terms of cadence. It's much lighter touch on the calling until we until we get some engagement from them and then we start to be persistent with getting in contact with them and converting that lead. But yeah it's, a different program.

Jeff Walker: Like what, how do you approach them in terms of scripting? What's what's different about calling those leads and then they answer and what you say to them versus those that are a brand new lead. 

Ro Malik: Yeah a lot of times it's we were we lost touch. We were in contact at 1 point with you, and we're just, we wanted to reach back out to see if have you purchased a home? Have you moved forward with it? Are you still in need of help with your real estate process? Very light touch just to try and get a gauge of where they're at and an understanding. [00:14:00] We asked that when they send these over to us that these are primarily either. If they let us know these are all cold leads that they've never reached. That's 1 script and then if it's 1s that they had reached at some point, they had some conversation with and then they lost touch, that's that is another script. So it's a little bit different.

One of the last things I want to share with you, because I think it's really important and I think we can do another webinar maybe later to go into depth about this. But I think it's, fair that, or it's important enough that I want to share it with you. And this is this lead ROI calculator that we put together. And what I'll share with you guys right now is this important fact. what we have learned is, through the process is that most people with their leads just stay consistent, meaning that if they're getting 100 leads a month, they stay with those 100 leads a month that they get 200 [00:15:00] leads a month, they just stay with 200 leads a month. What we have learned through our time and teaching team models is that at certain inflection points along the way, you need to double down on your leads. You need to increase your leads in order to significantly increase your ROI.

And so we'll come back to that in a little bit. I want to definitely give Scott and Jordan an opportunity to talk. And I want to walk through that time permitting, but the most important takeaway is that just understand that in this process you've got to have a runway with internet leads. And I think one of the things that I want to share is that when people first get started, there's this expectation that two, three, four months into it, they're going to have a lot of success with that. And that's 1 of the biggest mistakes I think agents make is that not planning and having that runway of really building up that pipeline in those 1st 6 months. Thanks for letting [00:16:00] me share that with you. 

Jeff Walker: Okay, great. I think we'll probably have some questions about some of the content that that you've presented, but let's balance things out a little bit and, talk with Scott and Jordan some too.

So we'll start with Scott. You have an interesting structure for your team for your brokerage. So share a little bit about your business model and, how ISAs really fit into the way that you're running your business. 

Scott Martineau: Yeah, no, absolutely. So we got started back with we call it a lead share program. We got started back in 2018, and since I had run teams in the past, when I owned my brokerage, I really wanted to build something in the brokerage where agents would have some lead generation that we could control for them, that wasn't built on them getting access to third party. So we teamed up with [00:17:00] CINC to just start generating leads and in the earliest days, I always like to tell the story. We just sent the leads to the agents because that would be the easiest thing, right? So agents get leads and we plan like we were going to just crush it and what we learned super fast was that Agents just were not consistent and I know we're full of agents today. I'm an agent so i'm speaking from an agent, But again when life gets busy, when work gets busy, when buyer sellers start to come in Our motivation starts to fall down. So what started to happen was You know, Ro touched on the six month ramp up. We never had a consistent six month ramp up. And so we went through this platform for about a year or so until we realized we really need to make some changes.

And at that point we ended up going more into in house ISA and found some challenges there. They work certain amount of hours. Their follow up was good, but they were just missing a lot of things. And so we learned about the call center, not [00:18:00] learned about, but we decided let's go this route, let's give this a try. So went with the call center and what happened was all of a sudden these, I say a great call center is going to bring opportunities to agents, right? So when people come in as a lead and I'm not a big fan of lead because I look at these as people, right? So I know we call them leads, but at the end of the day, they are a person with a something that they want and a solution that we can provide to them.

So I always try to get agents to think about these are just people. They just happen to be people you don't know, right? So there are people you don't know that are actually interested in real estate. And so it's a really good opportunity, but in order for us to really get the consistency that we wanted, we really needed to find a call center that was going to be very consistent, right? Cause it's just, it's a math formula at the end of the day when it comes to getting these opportunities. And when we partnered up and [00:19:00] found Conversion Monster and really and truly a lot of the stats that Ro was going over today just blew my mind because I assumed every agent was calling leads 12 times in 12 days. I didn't know agents weren't doing that. I'm kidding. I know that's a lot to do right there, but we did start to really see how much we were missing out on and the platforms just never got consistent. And so what starts to happen with a great call center like we've got here merged in with these lead sources coming in is that there is going to be a consistent path of opportunities. The contact rate is going to be much higher because of the consistency. The pass rate. So I love the pass rate, but my other favorite number is the nurture rate, because when I go into the platform and I take a look at things, I can see how many leads have been passed to my agents and then I can also see how many leads are still being nurtured by the call center, because these are people that have semi raised their [00:20:00] hand a little bit, but they're just not ready in the next six to eight months. So they're going to continue to stay on a very consistent cadence until they are ready to talk to an agent.

So once we found the call center, our numbers just got super, super, consistent across the board. And then it became a matter from an agent side. We always talk about as agents, we always hear about leverage, right? We're doing too many deals. So we need to leverage out this. We need to leverage out that. When I look at a call center, to me, it's all about leverage. It's all about taking the time off of my agents of having to qualify opportunities to go from opportunity to a closed deal. So now the agents that are in this platform. They can literally just focus on building that relationship when an opportunity has been passed.

Now again, one of the biggest misconceptions, and I always educate agents since the very beginning. They're like, hey, I got a lead past [00:21:00] and the person wasn't ready, or hey, I got a lead past and they didn't close just because you get an opportunity does not mean they're going to close. I have friends of mine that used to call me and they were an opportunity, but they weren't ready to close.

The same thing's going to happen with these strangers right here. And so what it allows the agents that on these platforms to do is put all their time, effort, and consistency, and focus on the leads that have actually raised their hand just a little bit higher by being passed over as an opportunity. So for us going through all three different systems on our hybrid team model approach, lead share approach, the consistency of the call center has just been amazing for us. And then, like I said, it just allows the agents all the time to focus on the leads coming in, but then they can take their other time and then go focus on their sphere business. And do everything else. 

Jeff Walker: That's awesome, Scott. So how does that pass actually happen? I'm curious about that between the Conversion Monster ISA and then [00:22:00] your agents. Is it email or is it warm transfer? What's the actual process? 

Scott Martineau: Yeah, so it is a it's a warm transfer that comes over. In the earliest days again, I love telling everybody about my mistakes that you don't make the same ones and you can learn. In the early days, I would have two agents who would get calls like one week. And then I put two more agents the next week and I tried this and what I learned was two agents was not enough to answer the calls. And so what would happen is when a lead was ready to talk, we want that warm transfer answer. So I can tell you from the stats that I have. If one of my agents misses that warm transfer, then Conversion Monster will set the appointment. And it's awesome. They'll set the appointment. They'll put it on my agent's Calendly account. My agent looks on their calendar and they're [00:23:00] so excited to wake up at 10 AM and call this appointment. And guess what? The conversion rate goes way down because that person was ready to talk back at four o'clock when that transfer happened.

So we totally go hunger games. We put all of our agents on there, everybody's phone rings at the same time. Whoever answers it gets it. And as soon as they get that lead, there is a process that they have to follow that is really easy to follow and focus.

Jeff Walker: They're ringing at the same time. Okay, so that creates a lot of motivation to be quick.

Scott Martineau: It does. It does. And I'm running six to eight agents on a platform right now. If I was running like a 25 agent platform in this, I might mix it up in different weeks. I might put eight to 10 on one week and do it that way so I could rotate it. But I want at least eight to 10 people who are actively ready to answer that call. Cause we never want to miss when I go into the Conversion Monster, I never want to see appointment on there. I love [00:24:00] they do it, but I don't ever want to see that. I want to see a live transfer and I want that conversation starting because that's when the relationship can start to be made right there. Versus I do it all the time, if somebody tells me I'm going to set an appointment for you and it's something that I'm not that ready to go do. I'll miss the appointment lots of times.

Jeff Walker: So that's a number that you're measuring, you're looking to see what is that live transfer rate? 

Scott Martineau: Yes, it better be 100%. 

Jeff Walker: All right, cool. Jordan, do you have a similar process for that live transfer on your team.

Jordan Kinsley: Yes. So it's funny, a lot of the things he's saying really resonates with me because you have a lot of growing pains, especially when you start to get up to 30, 40, 50 people. you're always learning, you're always evolving to see what processes and systems work the best.

So what we actually do is I've built a tiered system and it's tier one through four. And as Ro was saying, every lead source [00:25:00] is different. You might have warm Zillow Flex buyers that you have to call immediately. We run different lead sources through Conversion Monster. And the way I do it is I take our top 10 agents from the previous week in production. That's either be it contracts, closed deals, and I reached out to all of them on Monday morning and said, Hey, you're the 10 people that are going to be on Conversion Monster this week. Get ready to take your 855 calls and we actually run it through, if the lead comes in, we run it through talk route. So similar to him, it's a shark tank style where all 10 of the people on that week, whoever picks it up, they'll get the email. they'll get the phone call. We transfer it in our system and that gives them incentives. When the market shifts down, you keep wanting to feed the dogs that are feeding your brokerage. So that gives them incentives to keep selling because guess what? If you were the top people last week, you keep getting more at bats, especially if you're one of the guys producing or females producing on our team. we try to reward people that are doing the work, but it is a very similar system. 

Jeff Walker: That's great. So [00:26:00] there's competition that if you're not in that 10, then you know what you need to do that week to get back to that 10 that are getting those opportunities.

Jordan Kinsley: Exactly. And it could be an off week. It could be an off week. And I tell people, Hey, you just got to get 1 under contract and you can set yourself up for success for the next three weeks.

Jeff Walker: And you mentioned Talkroute. Is that what you said is the tool ? 

Jordan Kinsley: Yes, sir. So it's an answering service. So they will dial a number, that way everybody has the same number coming in and they will dial that number. And that number immediately calls 10 of our agents. So they all get it at the same time. And whoever picks up first. We will then get an email, and we will forward that email. And I actually do it myself manually. I transfer the lead to them in the system and let them know in the notes Hey, this was your call. Here's your reminder. And so I'm pretty still involved with getting them to make sure like he was watching the leads to know that we are following up because I don't want to see any zero missed connections or set appointments for us. We should [00:27:00] be doing that on the front end. 

Jeff Walker: And what times of day are those appointments coming in? Is there a cutoff of as far as when those conversions are happening and those warm transfers are happening? 

Jordan Kinsley: If it was me I'd say 24 hours a day. But no, we actually just run it from 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM and anything after that, I'll take care of myself and I actually have it set up if we ever do miss a call, I would be the one to take it and then I just hand it back over to one of my teammates or one of my agents.

Jeff Walker: You can get calls after that time, Ro? 

Ro Malik: After eight o'clock, we don't transfer. 

Jordan Kinsley: Yeah. After eight o'clock they don't, but sometimes you will get emails and stuff and we always, like I said, wanna stay Up to date on whatever's coming in. 

Jeff Walker: Is your team, Ro, reaching out to anybody by text or phone during those late hours if they're a new lead coming in or active?

Ro Malik: Not phone. Not beyond calling hours that's regulated, but if somebody does engage over text, if it's two o'clock in the morning, then we will, we, we do have a live person that will engage. And then the [00:28:00] idea is to try and just set that appointment for the morning for a caller to reach out. That's what we try to do. 

Jeff Walker: Awesome. Great. Jordan, what were you doing? How, were you guys handling this part of the business before you enlisted the help from Conversion Monster? How were you doing that, that lead nurturing and follow up? 

Jordan Kinsley: So before we rapidly grew we, did actually send them to our agents directly. And just like Scott was saying, you expect them to call three times the first day, three times next day, and the ball just gets dropped, and when you're investing so much, like we, we invest in 17 lead sources. So we're spending 30, 40, 000 a month when the ball keeps getting dropped, you're putting your own brokerage and team in jeopardy. We want to use that leverage. Like we were saying to. Hey, you know what? You're paying splits to a team.

Let's go ahead and keep you doing dollar producing activities. We will get you the appointment set up. You've just got to follow up and do the job. So how we were doing it, we were sending them to [00:29:00] the agents. We still have an in house ISA team that we call customer service agents that might follow up on appointments within the city. They get them to closing. Conversion Monster actually does a lot better job on the front end with setting the appointment quickly. We have, sometimes we have leads come in and within three minutes, they've already transferred us an appointment. So it's pretty impressive. There's a reason we continue to use them. They actually, if I had to say they do a better job than our in house ISAs.

Jeff Walker: I'm curious about that. And this is for you or Scott. What are some of the trade offs of using an in house ISA versus enlisting Conversion Monster? because the 1 thing I think, and maybe people run into or worry about is not having the local knowledge of if you don't have someone who can speak to the neighborhoods and has that personal relationship.

What's been your experience in going from having folks who would handle [00:30:00] those calls? And of course, the agents directly in house versus going with the third party? 

Jordan Kinsley: I would say that's probably the biggest trade off- having the local knowledge. If they like, I want a three bedroom, two bath in this part of the city, being able to speak on that, knowing what those prices are.

But I will say this, Conversion Monster does a Really good job on, through texts especially, seeming like they know the current market of wherever you are enlisting them at because I've had people reach out to me before and say, Hey, can you tell these people to stop texting me? They're not my agents, so that means they're doing a good job if they're thinking my agents are reaching out and it's Conversion Monster. but that would be the biggest disconnect, not having that intuition of the current market where you live and being able to answer those questions quickly and get them moved in the right direction. And that's all we have for those people, because if we go down that road, we just let them take care of it. 

Jeff Walker: Anything else in terms of what you notice in terms of a [00:31:00] difference, maybe advantages or disadvantages of having an outsourced versus in house. 

Jordan Kinsley: It's a lot harder to manage your people in house that sit here from 9 to 5 o'clock all day. It's a tiring job. We got to all be honest. We've all been agents for the most part. Being on the phone eight hours a day is not an easy job. It's cumbersome. It gets tired and you get call fatigue. So I know with these people in the call centers, they're so motivated. That's that's their only job. We have people in house, they get to talking, and they're human beings. We can't just make them make phone calls all day. But I feel like the quantity through Conversion Monster is probably higher. The quantity of outbound reaches.

Scott Martineau: Yeah and I would I would echo, Jordan, exactly what you're saying, exactly what I've seen. Managing two to three ISAs in house, like to me, the only pro is the local knowledge, but the reasoning for the local knowledge is so [00:32:00] minor that the consistency, the managing of the ISAs, that they get tired. they leave the position. you got to go find a new one. Especially if you've got, I've met agents like, oh my gosh, I got the greatest ISA ever. They're amazing. They crush it, and then the month later, they're like, oh my gosh, my ISA left. That's a huge hole to have to fill. 

And so what I have noticed that has been, like, we have not had any issues with the local knowledge because what I tell our agents is, you're the local knowledge. So when that transfer happens, you are the one that gets to be that local knowledge. You are starting to show your value right there. And so there was issues with my in house ISA where they stopped and the agent started and sometimes clients were like, Oh, I want to go back to that ISA. I want to go back to that local person because I built such a good relationship with them. Whereas there's really like the agent gets to come in and be the hero once this transfer happens. And so for [00:33:00] me, the concern of that was a concern has not come up at all in the platforms that I've ran.

Jeff Walker: Is there anything you're doing in your side, Ro? So that your your ISAs are able to handle those types of questions elegantly.

Ro Malik: Yeah. So we started with 1 of the processes was just saying that we are an assistant to this team or an assistant to the agent assistant, and then saying that's a great question, but the agent has much more knowledge than I do about these things. And it's always a leading opportunity to get them engaged with the agent because they say I'm just I'm an assistant in the office. Now we're, getting to more of like learning through this process. We're just talking as we're a representative of the agent, a representative of the team, and that our job is to provide service and reach out, but we want to get you right over to the agent as quickly [00:34:00] as possible because the agent is the expert. The agent is the one with the local knowledge. And so they're the ones that you want to have this conversation with. 

Jeff Walker: I noticed some questions are coming in about where your ISA team is located.

Ro Malik: So we're primarily based out of Buffalo, New York, Texas, and Florida. We do have some near shore people that are working that speak great English out of Colombia that help with Spanish speaking and we had a lot more requests for Spanish speaking as a late. Native Spanish speaking agents. We've got we have a team down there that's helping with some of the overflow in the Spanish speaking.

Jeff Walker: And then interesting question from Sandy Miller. She asks, so is Conversion Monster considered an ISA or a call center? 

Ro Malik: Pre COVID, I think we were probably a call center. Post COVID, [00:35:00] we're not really, everyone's not sitting in the office like we were before. We had 10,000 square foot office in Buffalo and everybody was in there in Buffalo, New York, making the calls. Post COVID, we've got them, we just got them spread out. So they're ISAs we still, it's a call center environment, but not in a true call center environment at the moment. 

Jeff Walker: And are they do they cover does each team member cover a certain number of your clients? Or is it everyone's optimized to go anywhere so that you can respond as quickly as possible?

Ro Malik: It's optimized to be as quickly as possible. Basically how the system is built. As soon as the lead comes in, it hits our system and it reverse rings the next available ISA. and so it brings up the information right on the screen about what about the lead. And so they're able to act on that. So they are going from call to call.

In that environment, it's like a call center. But from a [00:36:00] speed standpoint, they're not doing any outbound dialing. The leads hitting our system and reverse ringing the next available ISA.

Jeff Walker: Alexia Craig asks and this is a great question because as part of the reason why we're talking today, which is how does the CINC system get updated? Is it up to the agents to change pipelines and notes on the CINC site? So this is what's new and different now. Why don't you explain what you guys have done with the integration?

Ro Malik: Yeah, I think we're still putting some finishing touches on it. But what we're excited about is that in our before the systems were disconnected. Right so we are working in our system and agent is working in their system. Now with integration with a two way integration, the systems are going to be connected and because CINC is one of the people that we've worked with kind of from the beginning. Two years ago we started talking CINC has been very open to what information should be able to pass through.

And so what's going to happen now as we launch [00:37:00] is when you go into your CINC platform, you can see the work is being done. So you're gonna see updates happening in real time. data is flowing back and forth in real time. Information is flowing back in real time. And really most importantly, I think 1 of the things that's going to be released very shortly here are these behavioral events. Certain triggers that happen. Whether a person favorites a property. they come back to the site. They've they return the site. These different triggers. That information is going to come over, which with a lot of CRMs, it doesn't. And so that gives us more information through this API connection that we can act on those leads. And so that's a really important part of this of this integration and now the systems will be disconnected. So you just can work out of your CINC, right? But we're not working in their CINC, right? 

Jeff Walker: Yeah. And so it feels like they're in the CINC in terms of the systems are literally in sync. Pipelines can be updated. Notes can be [00:38:00] added. Stages can be changed through the updates that your team is making are making in their system. So when you're getting that you're going to have access to the behavioral events and so you can, you'll be able to get basically, the events when someone's favorite property, they're coming back to the same listing multiple times. They were somebody that wasn't on the site for a while, and they come back to the site. How is that going to change your follow up? So what have you found works? Does that initiate an instant phone call when they hit certain of these behavioral triggers? 

Ro Malik: It may not be instant. It depends on every day is managing the call volumes and getting those speed to lead is always first. But with other companies that we do this with it's that trigger alert becomes a prior what we call a priority alert call. So if a certain trigger happens and it passes through, we're notified of it, and then we will act on that lead. And we've shown that to be have a [00:39:00] much higher opportunity rate because of those trigger alerts. And so that information passing through to us definitely gives us a leg up with CINC that we don't have with certain other CRMs that don't pass that information through. So that's what we're really excited about. 

Jeff Walker: Great. Yeah, we're excited to see the impact of that as well. Another question is. One of the things we've heard from clients is with this year and the fewer number of transactions are being generated and buyers on the sidelines and all that, that it's taking more phone calls or more follow ups to generate the same volume of transactions that our clients have had in the past. What have you noticed, Roe, on your side that's different since you're acting as that first line of making those calls? 

And then I'm curious from Scott and Jordan's perspective. Do you feel like that's been impactful or that you've been immune to some of the market [00:40:00] changes based upon the flow that's coming in? But we'll start with Ro. And I'm just curious. Have you guys had to adjust your approach at all with the market? 

Ro Malik: Yeah absolutely. We're definitely seeing a longer term nurturing approach and just for everybody that's on here. We only transfer a call over a lead over that's under 6 months ready to buy or sell. And we nurture everybody else that's 6 months or longer. We are definitely seeing a longer term nurturing process taking place with leads because there's a lot of uncertainty right now. With interest rates we get that question all the time. With interest rates where they are. With home prices being where they are, they're uncertain.

And so I think 1 of the things, whether you use an ISA service, or you're an agent talking to these leads. 1 of the most important things that we do on our side is we say that's great, but if you just listen to the media, and you're just paying attention to what's happening nationally. That might be telling you the whole story. And you need to, you [00:41:00] talk to an agent because they have that local market expertise. And not every state, city and neighborhood has the same market, right? Like it varies so drastically right now, by the West and the South and the Northeast and the Midwest right now. It's almost a tale of two nations shifting. So we always say great questions. I think you should talk to the agent because it matters. And I always give the example to my team that even in Chicago, you can be in that neighborhood and it can be separated by a street and it could be a different market on this side of the street and a different market on this side of the street.

And so that's why it's so important to talk to an agent. And we train our ISAs to say what's the worst that's going to happen? You're going to walk out of this a little bit more educated about the local area market to help with your research while you're just looking. Right, so that's the worst thing that could possibly happen is you have a little bit more inside knowledge from a local market area expert. But, yes.

Jeff Walker: And building that [00:42:00] rapport, not just saying, just, oh, we'll call you back in 6 months. Building that rapport. So that the moment that they're ready, whatever that incident is that gets them from later to urgent that they're thinking of this agent.

Ro Malik: Keeping their name in front of you. Yeah. Keeping the agents team name in front of them consistently and checking in with them. We want to meet them. We're meeting them as they're beginning their journey. And that's where we should all be meeting them is at the very beginning of the journey. I hear agents say this all the time. Oh leads suck, internet leads suck. And I'm just like, it's just they're you're, meeting them at the start of this journey and you're staying with them through the process. It just takes a little bit longer, generally speaking, but if you stay on top of your leads, you stay in front of those leads. If you nurture those leads, they will work out. Eventually. Somebody's going to buy. Somebody's going to sell.

Jeff Walker: And so for Scott and Jordan, you can chime in now. How [00:43:00] has it been from your side just receiving the warm transfers and the leads which are ready to talk to an agent? How has that changed for you guys in the past, say 12 months since we've seen some of this slowdown?

Scott Martineau: Yeah I'll, start with that. What I'm seeing, and this is again, what's to me, it's super exciting, right? So obviously market is what the market is. We can't control that. I don't waste time on things I can't control. And what's interesting is the pass rate percentage has dropped, but the nurture rate has gone up.

So Ro, very interesting. You just said y'all are nurturing longer, right? So everything makes perfectly good sense there. What really excites me is the 20 percent of the leads that I have that have come through in the last 12 months are being nurtured. And are being nurtured by a consistent call center. That is freaking exciting to me because We do know at some point the market the market will change, right? It's either going up or [00:44:00] it's going down. It's always moving. It's always dynamic. So in the past, I really wouldn't have had that because it would have been very inconsistently thrown across a bunch of agents dashboards and I'd be hoping those agents are going to be nurturing those things. As for the leads that are being transferred, if you look at a market, when a market's on fire, you have have tos and want tos in the market, right? Have to sell, have to buy, want to sell, want to buy. When we're in a market like we are right now, there's some want tos, but most of the people are have tos.

What are some of the life events that could be a have to? There's lots of things out there that could be have to, but one of the biggest things is moving states. A lot of people that are moving states, they don't have a relationship. And they don't know an agent, right? If I'm moving down the street, I probably know a handful of agents. So if I'm just moving down the street from where I am. but if I'm moving out of state, and so [00:45:00] the have tos that we are talking to, a lot of them being out of state, are bringing great opportunities to my team because we can be the local expert here for them when they come into our platform. And so what we are seeing though, is that it's not the people that are coming in that are like, let's go see a house tomorrow. I want to make an offer. Again, the agents are also having to nurture these people a little bit longer, but what it's given the agents the ability to do is to really build that relationship. I love what Ro just said about people coming in and going, Oh my gosh, internet leads suck. The leads suck. Again, I always say these are people. So if you just put people in place of the word lead, I don't think you'd say people suck. You might, I don't know. I hope not. But basically, These are people that are starting a journey, and we as agents get to walk them through this journey and it takes building that relationship at first.

And real quickly, [00:46:00] I look at this, I'm old, so I don't date anymore and I'm not dating. but I look at this as a first date with an internet lead, like on a first date, you're typically asking questions back and forth to engage and get to learn about each other. And so I look at this lead transfer for my agents as an opportunity to ask some questions and to learn about the person's motivation, right? The when, where, why. Why are they looking to make this move? And what can we do to continue to build a relationship? And our goal on every one of these first calls is to really try to get to a place to where we can have that face to face appointment.

Once we get that face to face appointment, the opportunity Goes way up. Now again, the person might not find a home that they want. You might have to show them more homes cause there's not much inventory. They might be freaking out because they read that the fed was going to raise the rate again, or they were watching some kind of news [00:47:00] channel.

But you have to be able to build these relationships. So it is just taking a little bit longer, but the people are also in our platform are being a lot more loyal to the agents that are taking the time to really walk them through this journey and solve their problems. 

Ro Malik: Jeff, if I can just jump in on what I think what's Scott made a point there that people may have just glazed over that is so important and crucial in this process, which is one of the biggest mistakes I see agents make is. and it was one of these questions I think that you had sent over, Jeff, which is hey, what was the mistake that an agent makes or after a 1st conversation. And it's not setting proper expectations of what's going to happen next. And by then getting face to face. Getting on a zoom call. Right like they have this just because you had a 15 minute conversation with somebody on the phone doesn't mean they automatically you're just going to choose you and [00:48:00] go with you. You've got to take that relationship to the next step so if you do get that opportunity, whether using us or you're calling that lead.

Man, you got to get them. You got to get face to face with them and what I see agents do over and over again. Oh, you're 6 months out. I'm going to set you up on an MLS drip. I'll start sending you properties when you see ones you like favorite them when you see a few that enough and we'll go out and we'll take a look at some. Okay. And then that's it. Instead, the good ones are like, all right, I'm going to send these to you. I'm going to give you a call next day. How about 3 o'clock on Thursday? We're going to sit down. We're going to review these together over zoom or can you meet for coffee? I'd like to review these properties with you in person. Like setting this expectation with the goal of getting them face to face, that's going to deepen the relationship because we have something in America here. That's fairness. And as soon as they see you, as soon as they've seen you visually or met you in person, you're their guy or you're their girl, right? There's just there's that deeper sense of loyalty. And that is a step that's critical and missed way too often with [00:49:00] leads that are a little bit further out that aren't ready to go out and look at a property tomorrow.

Jeff Walker: And I'll give you a chance to chime in on that too, Jordan.

Jordan Kinsley: Yeah. Those are great points. I think that's like you have to ask the qualifying questions and the main thing, these are humans and you need to as a real estate agent, respect them enough that they're looking for a house. Just like anybody that goes and looks for a car. If you're looking for a house, if you're going to look for a watch, whatever you enjoy buying. The worst thing in the world is for somebody to try to pre qualify you, not ask you qualifying questions, not genuinely care what your motivation is. 

The main thing I teach my agents on these first calls, if it's transfer, warm transfers, appointments is to always like Scott and Ro were saying, set the appointment. It should be appointment, location, motivation. Hey, we saw you're looking at 123 Main Street. I can meet you tomorrow at two or four, which works? And what interests you about that location? And why are you moving? And let them speak. When you let them speak and asking those qualifying questions, they'll see you care. And [00:50:00] when you get in front of him, like Ro said, you're their person. You've got to really mess up once you meet somebody, be it zoom, Starbucks, at a house for them. "Man, this guy just drove 30 minutes and asked me questions, cared about my situation, but I just won't work with them." If that's happened to you, you're probably doing something tremendously wrong, and you should probably step back and look at your scripts and what you're doing.

But treating everybody as a human being, and the nice thing about this market, you can win in any market. This market's down in our market right now, I'm looking at 23%. We're up 13 percent month over month. We're doubling down trying to win, and it's because we teach them to treat these people with respect. Ask them the right questions because it's also going to save you as an agent, a lot of time from running around, showing them houses and they don't like any of them.

If you set those expectations up front. this is what you want. Why are we going across town, looking at something completely different? The buyers are out there, and the good thing about the buyers that are coming in now, they know [00:51:00] they're getting a 7 percent interest rate. It's not like you're talking to somebody from 8 months ago that thought they were getting a 3.2%. If they're coming over pre qualified now, you've got a buyer that's ready to buy. Not tired, everybody's a buyer at 2.5%. Keep that in mind. There are people out there buying and selling houses. You just have to do the right things as an agent to get them to do it. 

Jeff Walker: All right. Awesome. Thank you, Jordan. All right. Wanted to just hit a couple additional questions that came through before we wrap up and Conversion Monster you can share Ro you can share the the offer that you guys have, but Canadian market. So that came up. Do you service just the U.S. Market or also to are you able to call?

Ro Malik: We're in Canada as well. Yes. 

Jeff Walker: All right. Great. And then the other question- does the agent get notified of the new lead through CINC then they wait for Conversion Monster to set the appointment? You can correct me if I'm [00:52:00] wrong Ro, but what's going to happen here is you'll still see all of your leads in CINC.

So they'll be flowing into CINC. And then it's just that as they're coming into CINC, Conversion Monster also receives that through the integration. And do you advise the agent to do anything with those leads, Ro, while you're working them, or is it just let, them sit there in your CRM and you'll be notified when there's activity on them?

Ro Malik: No I think it's if somebody sees and they're working right alongside of us and they see an opportunity where they can jump in because they know that property or they know something they inquired about or they like there's something within that lead that is a trigger for them where they could take over, sure. We want it to be more of a partnership, right? 

You can have a total hands off approach and say, I'm not going to touch this till we get a live transfer. Or you could be somebody who's working the, if you have an ISA team, they can be working alongside of us. If you're an agent, you can be working right alongside of us. We're just doing [00:53:00] some calls and tasks and email, but you're welcome to jump in any time you want and take over that relationship. 

Jeff Walker: And so all of those notes of what's happening, if there's any questions, do you capture information if they're interested in specific areas or features of properties, is that all captured and added?

Ro Malik: Yep. It's all captured and put into the lead with the qualifiers. 

Jeff Walker: All right, great. 

Thank you guys. Thanks everybody. That was very useful and informative. So thank you, Scott and Jordan for joining us and sharing your experiences. Thank you Ro for being a great partner and doing the work on this integration to create a really seamless experience for CINC platforms and the Conversion Monster service.

Very excited again to be partnering with you guys think it can make a huge difference in client success, and thank you for everybody who attended. So thanks all participants as well. 

Ro Malik: Thank you guys.