When the going gets tough, it’s said, the tough get going.
Jeff Silva, nice guy that he is, knew that as the economy—and along with it, real estate sales, in particular—began to tumble, it was time to get tough and turn up the heat on cold-calling. If he was going to continue to produce listings and close sales anywhere near the volume he did in the ‘good old days’ when selling houses was more akin to shooting fish in a barrel than today’s challenging environment, something had to change in the way he conducted business: He got the Mojo dialer.
One of the tools Silva enlisted to help him prevail where others floundered or failed was Mojo’s dialing and lead management software applications. A nine-year real estate veteran, whose territory includes Blue Bell and King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia area on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border, Silva averaged about 140 units in sales both this year and last. He used to cold-call using two phones and two hands. The process was tedious at best, and tough on the dialing fingers, at worst. His two-fisted approach yielded about 100 calls a day.
About two years ago, Silva decided to try an auto-dialer. He cycled through two other applications before finding his “Mojo.” One application, talked a good game but never really got off the ground, Silva remembers. The other application was so complex, he quickly abandoned it. “What I found with Mojo was that it was easy to implement, easy to learn, and easy to use,” Silva explains. “I didn’t have to load lists, create campaigns, or take time to set up a bunch of weird settings. With Mojo, I was up and running in a day.” A day for Silva and his team (he takes a team approach, using full-time assistants to handle marketing, listings, closings and office management) now nets 300 to 400 calls generated by Mojo’s three-line dialing system. “We are literally three to four times more efficient now at cold calling. If I had to go back to manual dialing, I don’t know what I would do,” Silva says.
Not only does Mojo increase cold-calling volume, but Silva also leverages the host of features the application provides. “If I get a voice mail or answering machine,” Silva explains,” I just click a button and Mojo leaves a prerecorded message for me. If I need to send someone a follow-up email, the system has the templates pre-loaded. I just load my email settings into Mojo. Then, all I do is click the email button and Mojo merges the data, inserts the client’s name, addresses the email, and sends it off.”
Mojo has made the difference, Silva explains, between sustaining pre-recession volume and, as happened to less-fortunate real estate agents, falling off a proverbial cliff. Silva even uses Mojo’s mobile app. “I’ve set appointments, gotten listings and made sales; all while driving around or out-and-about town.
“The people at Mojo have been great to work with,” Silva says. “They’ve been extremely responsive to our unique needs in real estate. They listened to us and develop the products based on our input and feedback.” Consequently, Mojo delivers and delivers promptly. “It’s simpler than it looks,” Silva explains. “If you just take a little time to figure out how it works, you’ll be up and running the first day.”
