Successful phone sales require the patience and endurance of a marathon runner
California real estate agent James Festini is a recreational runner, about to compete in his fourth San Diego Rock and Roll Marathon.
For Festini, cardiovascular exercise is a great way to keep in shape to counter the sedentary nature of making cold calls — an activity he feels comfortable doing up to 12 hours a day. And San Diego’s R & R Marathon is more about fun than winning, featuring a course that runs through Sea World, that has up to 2,000 cheerleaders on the sidelines, has live music acts at each mile (past artists have included Smash Mouth, Hootie and the Blowfish and Pat Benatar) and offers free beer at the finish line!
You know what else is fun? Pushing the limits of the human brain and seeing how many sales calls you can make at once.
Festini, an 18-year-veteran of the real estate biz, recently rigged up special headphones to allow him to juggle four power dialers at once. You have to see it to believe it:
Let’s shove aside the technology for a moment. The most remarkable thing about this video is watching a seasoned pro handle the ebbs and flows of cold calls — a tide of rejection pushing in a few valuable seashells. Notice how calm he is when people say they are NOT interested in putting their home on the market. Without even changing his tone, Festini thanks them and moves on. The average live call takes about eight seconds. Why waste the energy getting upset over rejection when there are more numbers to try?
Festini is making cold calls to every homeowner not on the Do Not Call registry, and he really appreciates Mojo’s lead management software that organizes your phone numbers as you call them and categorizes them based on what your next step should be. We call it Advanced Call Logic and it automatically sorts your lists into redial calls, do-not-call results, hot and warm leads, while you focus on engaging potential customers on the phone.
But back to the amazing stunt of handling four power dialers at once. Festini put both ears on double duty, sticking ear buds in his ear canals and foam headphones on his upper outer ears. Just to make things interesting, he later stretched an old fashioned pair of studio headphones over all four audio sources so he could listen to a favorite movie as background noise.
With four autodialers going at once, he made about 1600 calls, and actually talked to 200 people in only three hours!
Real Estate, of course, is a pure numbers game. You can’t get sales without converting leads and even the best phone number list in the world (the ones without pesky fax machines, apartments and businesses) is useless if you don’t make those calls as efficiently as possible.
“If you are going to make calls,” Festini says, “you don’t have the option NOT to use an autodialer.”
Like Arizona Realtor Curt Stinson, another Mojo advocate, Festini is working in an especially tough market. California’s Riverside County has one of the worst foreclosure rates in the country. “Working in the center of epicenter of the bad economy,” he says that Mojo Triple Line Power Dialers and lead management software help him stay competitive.
“I haven’t even scratched the surface yet of all the possibilities,” he says.
