After more than two years away, I’m back with a brand-new season of That Real Estate Tech Guy! In this first episode, I set the stage for what’s to come and dive into core lessons from my new book, Click Call Scale: The Real Estate Investor’s Ultimate Phone System Playbook.

We explore why the phone is still the most powerful tool for real estate investors, why clean data is more than just an efficiency issue, and how proper training and performance management can turn your acquisitions team into a revenue-driving machine. Along the way, I share stories, cautionary examples, and proven strategies you can implement today.

Important Links

Watch & Listen

• Click Call Scale: The Real Estate Investor’s Ultimate Phone System Playbook
• smrtPhone
• ThatRealEstateTechGuy.com

I can tell you one thing. Technology is the single most important aspect of every business that has successfully scaled. It’s time for That Real Estate Tech Guy. It’s your weekly chance to explore how technology can help your real estate business explode. Each week, you’ll hear from real estate investors who have been there and done that and find out their favorite technology tips.

Listen in as Jordan speaks with tech companies and learns about new technologies and new ideas that will help you scale your business. And now join your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO of smrtPhone, for this week’s episode.

Hey, it’s Jordan here, and welcome to another episode of That Real Estate Tech Guy, the only podcast fully dedicated to the technology space for real estate investors. Now, it’s been about two and a half years since we last recorded, and it’s fair to ask why now? Why restart the podcast? Well, really very simple. And that is the truth.

AI is taking over and technology’s moving faster than ever. There’s never been a more important time to dive into all the areas of technology that real estate investors can leverage in order to scale their businesses. So I’m back. If you haven’t listened to some of the previous episodes, we’ve got crackers out there. Check out the website. thatrealestatetechguy.com.

You can listen to all of our previous episodes. And I’m excited to be joined in the coming weeks by, again, an incredible, incredible group of real estate investors who have leveraged and built amazing businesses as well as technology providers, people in the space who build the tools that help you scale. It’s going to be a fantastic journey that will take together, a great way of making sure that on a weekly basis, you are keeping up with the absolute best practice.

As regards to real estate technology, as well as just making sure that you’re not left behind with some of the new tools out there. So that’s what’s coming out. But what about today? What are we going to do today? In the first episode of the new series? Well, today you’ve got me. And I’m going to really dive in to something that’s very near to my heart right now.

And that is some of the themes from the new book that I have recently released. Book is called Click Call Scale The Real Estate Investors Ultimate Phone System Playbook, and I wrote it really because, you know, there’s so many things out there. And yet the phone, you know, getting into people’s pockets on the phone is still it’s still the best way of getting hold of sellers.

It’s still the best way of building relationships. And that’s why I wrote the book. In some ways, that’s why I started this podcast. It’s definitely why I co-founded smrtPhone. And so today I want to go through a couple of the main themes inside the book. And of course, I’ll be giving you some offers on how to get the book for yourself.

I really did concentrate when I wrote this book on diving into all the things that I have learned, working with hundreds to thousands of investors for over a decade. And I kind of thought back to some of the key ways I’ve seen people succeed, and some of the key ways I’ve seen people fail. I’ve you know, seen how some of the best people I’ve ever seen in the real estate sector have really leveraged the phone, really built amazing teams.

And I’ve seen people absolutely drop the ball and destroy reputations by just being kind of dumb with the phone. It’s why I wrote the book. So what are the themes that I want to review today? The first one I want to talk a bit about is data funny, right? Not the phone system, but data. But data is really important.

It’s actually the first chapter in the book. It’s a chapter entirely devoted to why your data really matters. And people think that your data really matters. You know, they think, okay, that means that, I can’t buy cheap lists, and that’s true. But that’s not the only reason. Or it means that I, you know, making sure that I’m not wasting my agent’s time by calling people who are, have already told us no or who have already sold their property.

And that’s true as well. But there’s some more fundamental things that I think are really important, to know and think about when it comes to your data and why it’s not just about the efficiency of of your calling, although that is definitely true. But it’s also about reputation and not losing leads by treating people as though they were just names on the list.

I’ll give you an example, an example that I quote in the book. Imagine you’ve got someone and I think the book I think I think of the book, I’ve called it Linda. In the book I changed everybody’s name. So most of the stories are ones that I directly list, like witnessed. Some of them were told to me, but I’ve always changed the names, so that I don’t get anybody in trouble.

But imagine you’ve got a lead, and, And Linda, for want of a better name, she’s in your system 4 or 5 times because, again, your data hasn’t been thoroughly cleaned and isn’t kept on top. So you’ve got an acquisitions team, and they have, tasked to call, call, call and really get in touch and work the leads.

But Linda’s sitting there and in the space of a couple hours, Linda, because your data isn’t very clean. Linda gets cold on a cell phone twice by two different people, two different agents of your company at her home phone, on a work phone. And maybe even her husband gets call because her husband is, his number is in under her lead.

So Linda has been called 4 or 5, six times by different people from different numbers, but all from your company. How do you think Linda is feeling right now? Right. Linda, Linda’s pissed. Linda’s not feeling great right now. And Linda’s likely. Well, a couple of things. One, the chances of Linda you regaining Linda’s trust and starting to build that relationship so you can understand her, her needs and what she’s you know, what if she needs if she does have a sales to sale and if so, we know what’s a driver, what’s her urgency levels, the chances of you building that relationship.

Now they’re pretty low because you’ve lost her trust, because you just hammered her on the phone by different people with different numbers, because your data wasn’t very good. That’s both stupid and easily fixed and is a really, really important part of building a successful system that’s going to let you communicate to sellers in the right way. Data, data, data.

And it’s not just about getting the right data or getting the right leads in, although that’s of course, incredibly important. It’s also about how you manage and keep your data clean so that you avoid those sorts of pitfalls. I have seen this personally way too many times in people’s, you know, offices that I’ve worked with, people that I’ve been invited in to speak to, etc. I have seen the data become a real, real liability.

Not only is it not performing, but Linda, not only is she not likely to recommend you or work with you or want to develop any sort of relationship, but depending on the day, Linda’s just as likely to report your number, and that can open up a world of fines and difficulties that you have around compliance. All of that could have been solved if we had treated Linda’s data properly, if we’d done a good job on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis of keeping our data clean and keeping our systems clean.

It’s first chapter in the book. And I put it first because it’s something that isn’t a luxury and shouldn’t be a second thought. It’s before you pick up the phone that your data either gets you in the win column or the lose column. And I have just seen way too many put themselves in the lose column by not taking, that a little bit of time and making sure the data is correct.

Like so I do woodworking as a hobby. And, you know, if you’ve ever done, you know, you’ve you must have heard this, you know, measure twice, cut once. Well, I kind of feel like that about data. In in data terms, you know, you’ll see people on lines talk about garbage in, garbage out. And that’s very true.

But it’s also it’s deeper than that for me because it’s not just about your outcome in terms of, you know, what what the systems can utilize for your data. But it is about opening yourself up to a silly mistake that loses trust. So data is the first thing I talk about in the book. Another reason I talk about data as just absolutely critical for you to think about as a real estate investor is that your phone system is only really going to be powerful when you’re able to use your data through a really good system.

It’s one of the reasons I it’s a smrtPhone. Just so you know, smrtPhone has always taken the view of we are there to really make your CRM system and your acquisitions teams sing. We there’s a reason why we only connect with, I think this point 11 systems, and that’s because we don’t just offer up kind of very, surface level integrations.

We chose very carefully the systems that, that we admire and love within the real estate investor community. And we are continuing to talk to more that we really like to, to integrate with them. But we we choose really carefully to do that because we want to make sure that when we build an integration that integration is really seamless and works like really seamlessly with your system, because that’s where the magic really happens.

When you have your data managed inside an amazing CRM system that lets visibility, actions, automations, performance metrics, all of those things makes them very, very clear and very, very efficient and simple to achieve. Then when you combine in the fact that every call you make, every text message you send, every power dollar you do, every voicemail, everything that happens when you then put all of those touch points against your system, against the data in your system, against the leads that you’re managing in your system.

That is where absolute magic happens. Because when you then when you look at a lead and you know that the data is strong and they’re inside your system and you can see that every single call you’ve made, that history is tracked there. The transcripts of all of those calls are in there. They’re recordings of all those calls are in there before you make another call, you know exactly what you talked about the last two times.

You remember and see, because it’s there in front of you, the text messages you traded back and forth, that customer visibility, that ability to really see the context of why you’re calling someone before you call them that is absolute currency when it comes to sales, because when you are calling someone and you’re saying, you know, hey, Tim, great to speak to again.

Now, last time we spoke, you were going to talk to your sister for one of their example. You know about the house. Did you did you have a chance to have a to chat with her? How did that conversation go? Well, you’re not coldly, you know, you’re not just following up. They’re not feeling like they are a lying in a spreadsheet.

Or some a bit of data you purchased. You’re creating that human connection with them. You know that. You remember what you spoke about last time. They feel like you remember them, even if it’s just because you’ve been able to see all those data points. Brief yourself before the call and make sure you have them at the tip of your tongue.

From their perspective, you’re not just some random cold person calling them. You’re someone who’s following up because you’ve had a conversation, that data, that system, and then combining those two with the phone. Well, that that’s that’s everything. And I really dive into the book on that. And it’s something that I really, you know, the first thing I do when I talk to a new company and I speak to companies, a lot of times every week I speak to customers.

A smrtPhone. But I brought in or I get referred to someone to, to people all the time, and I’ll give pretty much everybody at least a half an hour to an hour of my time just to listen to them. And give some advice almost every time. My first question is around the data and the system. Not so much the phone when they’re saying that they’re not performing well.

For instance, they bring me in to troubleshoot. Why are they not performing well on the phone? I rarely go straight to scripts or, training agent performance. I rarely go there immediately. The first thing I almost always will dive into is the the data and the systems, because that those fundamentals, if you don’t have them, then everything else is at a massive disadvantage.

And you’re starting out with, I don’t know if it’s a whole hand tied behind your back, but it must be pretty close. Now, the second kind of real theme or thing that I, I dive into the book on that I think is hugely relevant. For every real estate investor who is, you know, scaling up and wants to scale their real estate investment business is is around their agent performance and training.

I am still shocked in some ways. I don’t know why, I’m still shocked, but I am still shocked, when I see people sort of treating treating cold callers as as transactional items at this point. Right. Oh, I’ll just swap in this person for this person. They’re not performing well. I’ll just buy another one. They’re only five bucks an hour or whatever.

I’m getting a VA from the Philippines or South America or Egypt, wherever it is. Okay. I mean, I guess if you just want to do lots of volume and play the game of performance, then matter, because volume will get me off line. I think that’s a really dumb game to play most of the time, because it costs you a lot of money.

You’re making unnecessary calls, you’re building reputation loss into your system, and every time you have to swap someone in out, you theoretically should be training them a little more. So it costs all money, right? Alternatively, there is an alternative and that is building a good structure of training and managing performance. And it’s the those are really critical parts of the book, that I dive into.

And it’s really, really important, because the to the next stage after your data and systems, I will go into you. How are your agents trained and how are you maintaining performance? So let’s break that down into two sides. Now, I’m sorry to interrupt this amazing conversation, but I wanted to make sure you knew that smrtPhone, the only phone system built for real estate investors, connects to the best in class real estate.

Invest in CRM and because as its my show and I am co-founder and chairman of smrtPhone, I got some great deals for you. Click the link make. Take advantage of 5000 minutes free calling with smrtPhone. The only phone system built for real estate investors. Click and call close more leads back to the show. Let’s start with the training and then we’ll move on to the the rich, you know, kind of maintaining performance.

From a training point of view. You know, there are I have worked with call centers that invest weeks and and sometimes some one even months into training their agents to their methodology, and not just their methodology, but skills that they need to think on their feet, because the best calls you’ll ever have and the best agents I’ve ever seen are not ones that slavishly follow a call script or a structure and, and, you know, and sort of keep the, the conversation on the tracks exactly as prescribed.

Because prescribed conversations like that, they don’t feel natural. It would be like me right now, just speaking to you and reading off of the script. You’d know that pretty quickly. You know, you’d be able to tell, you don’t talk like that. You don’t think like that. People surprise you on the phone. People surprise you.

The people will say amazing things. And if you’re not a tune and your agents aren’t attuned to being able to hear them, then they’re going. They’re not going to perform very well. And that happens a lot when you just train people on a script and sort of drill them into, this is exactly how I want you to do things versus giving them a really great training on fundamental sales skills that you need to them to apply, and then the structure that they need to work off of instead of adhere to.

They work off of it. And I’ve seen, you know, so the mistake I see happen a lot. And I kind of go through this in the book is where people are investing in training, but they’re doing that very sort of narrowly defined training where, you know, they are they they’re teaching the script and they’re teaching exactly how, you know, here’s your objections, here’s how you handle them, here’s the script, etc..

It’s very rigid structure. And that tends to mean that the agents get flummoxed when something unexpected happens. Right? When when the conversation goes in another place, they get flummoxed, or they come off feeling like a robot because, you know, they’ve got someone on the line who maybe has is talking about how, man, this is really tough because their mum died and they’ve got this house and they live over here and it’s really hard, but they don’t pay attention to any of that emotion, the human connection.

Nope. They’ve got a script to run and they got a process to run. You come off sounding, cold and callous and horrible and you don’t build any relationships and relationships. Yes. Okay. Your cold callers will often be the people who qualify so that your internal sales can close, but you’re never going to get to that qualified moment.

If your cold callers come off, and they and the people on the other end kind of go, well, no, I’m not talking to them. I’m not these I’m not interested in deal with them. You’re never going to get to that next step. So when you’re training people don’t think rigid, think structure to play off of, to work from, not within and think core sales skills.

Now, what do I mean by core sales skills? You’ll this isn’t there are a number of things and I can’t go through all of them in one, one episode. But I can give a kind of overview. There are a number of key. So sales skills that I almost always will train and teach. So the first is active listening.

Active listening is listening. People get hung up on the active and they go, well, it’s special. It’s not really, active listening is just listening. It’s listening with intent. It’s listening with the intent of understanding, absorbing and feeding back to what they say. It’s not sitting there waiting to get to the next part of the script or making sure that you can know.

No, but okay, let’s. But that’s fine. Let’s go back over here because this is where I’m comfortable. It’s certainly not just sort of listening to them talk just so that you can come back and go, okay, well that’s great, but right, as in what you had to say, they don’t really care that much because I’m going over here with this conversation.

This is where I’m being told to do active listening, is being able to actually really listen in, absorb and feedback appropriately. And it builds trust in a big way. And it’s really not that hard. Some people do it naturally. But you can train it. There’s loads of great sales trainers out there. In the book I go through some, some techniques and things that you can think of as, as you build up your teams.

But active listening and and getting people trained in, genuinely listening to what the other person is saying, so that when you respond, they can be they can be confident they’ve been heard. That’s what builds relationships, way more than almost anything else. Because when you don’t feel like you’re being heard, when you feel like you are just a number, you know that they’re never going to deal with you.

They’re never going to want to talk to you. Unless you offer them such good numbers that they go, well, whatever. Fine. This is too good a deal to pass up. So active listening is one of those core sales skills that I almost always will teach. One, the second one, really easy one, is is mirroring.

Now mirroring? I don’t want to say it’s controversial because some people really hate it. They think it’s fake. I don’t think it is fake because. So I’ll tell you the story back. Back in the day, long time ago, I used to, work when I was doing my postgraduate work. I used to work in a scuba diving shop, and I often would work the floor in sales, and I.

I was a very good salesperson. And the reason I was a good salesperson was not that, when we didn’t work on commission, but of a wish. But one of the reasons I was a good salesperson is that very quickly I could see how someone wanted to what someone was like. I they someone I can have a bit of a joke with to maybe even an off color joke when they’re trust that way, because some people like that, some people are super straight laced and sort of like, you know.

Yes, sir. Thank you, sir, that sort of thing. Some people, you know, some people are always going to look for the most expensive thing because they want to flash out. Some people are going to really value when you give them that middle ground of very good quality and very good price. Everybody is different. There’s no one way to approach same.

It’s true on the phone. There’s no one way to approach speaking to someone and mirroring is not fake. It’s it’s being responsive to who this other person is and and their style and how they are. So in the shop I was able to size that up really quickly. And so for those guys who I who those guys who I knew were just one of the most expensive thing, I could flatter their ego and talk about that.

And sadly, I was on commission, those people who I could have a bit of a joke with, I could get that. And we started to bond and they be customer for life. Same is true in real estate. On the phone, if you got someone on the phone who is, you know, quite bubbly and bright and you’re sitting there going, yes, and what about this?

What about this? And what about this? There is it’s disjointed there. That doesn’t mean you have to falsely sort of go, hey, you know, or anything like that. But it does mean that when you adjust your patterns of flow, someone who talks, you know, very detail oriented and you’re waxing on about the emotion behind the deal, you’re going to it’s disjointed, it doesn’t feel right.

It doesn’t feel natural. But when someone is very analytical or very focused on details, I zoom in with being focused on details. I zoom in to the structured things. If I’ve got someone who is very emotional, I will explore that with them and I’ll build that trust that way rather than trying to to draw them into the details or the emotion of the or the is or the or the analytics or the metrics or the numbers or whatever.

I’ll go I’ll go through that, that emotional bit, someone’s, you know, quite energetic and happy to chat. I’ll chat with them if someone doesn’t want to chat because they clearly just get to the point, people, I’m going to get to the point. Mirroring is not false and it’s not faking who you are. It is responding to how people are so that you can better relate to them, and they can feel like more.

They can feel more comfortable talking to you. If you did two things to train your your staff properly, active listening and mirroring would be two really great ways to start. I explore a couple really core, sort of sales skills in the book. And you can, you can kind of dive in further there now training people.

That’s great. And a lot of people will, whether they do it well or not. That’s another question. But a lot of people will say, yes, I invest my time in training my team. Great. Whether I agree that they do well or not is beside the issue, an area that I see failing more often than not. Definitely more often than not is maintaining performance.

Now the best teams I’ve seen maintain performance through a regular cadence of improvement, of review, of scoring and of identifying weakness. Regular like every week. Now with the new tools, we have access to things like, objection proof AI Steve trans, amazing call scoring. I call scoring tool. You can do this more efficiently than ever before, but the principles still matter.

And that is, you know, are you maintaining performance every week or are you kind of saying, thinking, well, I’ve trained them so I can focus on something else? Because if you do that, I’ve trained them so I can just let them go. They will start losing you deals relatively soon, because no matter how good an agent is without a constant, even if they’re really good, they’ll do it.

Self-review. But without that constant review and making sure that you’re, you know that that you’re in the right direction and everybody is, is heading in the right way, then you are just as liable to massively drift and you will end up losing deals you could have won because your your agent’s performance has dropped. So, in the book, I go through this kind of, you know, different methods and different structures that you can have to build in a regular cadence of improvement to build in that ability to go every week, review your, you know, every agent’s performance can be reviewed, can be scored, weaknesses can be identified.

A lot of times you can identify weaknesses very quickly and correct them. So they, they never really impact you at all. And you are bringing a culture of self-improvement and team improvement that is always, always focused on a weekly basis. It’s never let drop. And that’s really important because if you, you know, say you start out doing these weekly call reviews and then after a month it’s a pain in the ass and you have a lot of time, so you let them drop.

Well, what is the message you are sending to your team? You’re essentially sending, a message that says your performance doesn’t really matter. And then when you fire a couple of them because their performance is down there, the whole team becomes a wait, what? What? So when? Well, what? You know, you can really you can you can massively take away the, the culture that you’ve tried to build by doing something as simple as negating their need, their, ability to have self-improvement and improvement in their skills, and then simply firing people who are, you know, performing well enough.

If you need to fire someone, fire them, of course. But if you’re firing people and you’re not giving them that, that structured, you know, way of making sure they’re improving, their performance is good enough. You’re going to end up losing, you’re going to end up with your people losing faith in you and not really knowing what’s going on.

And it wasn’t true. And you can fix that so easily by simply building in a weekly structure of performance review and metrics review. So metric reviews are usually mainly focused on quantitative things, right. How many calls they’re making, how many connections, how many it way, you know, average length of the calls, the conversation length. You know, those sort of core numbers you’re going to know and you’re going to be able to build up an awareness of what numbers you need to hit to hit the performance you want.

That comes over a couple cycles. You start to see the patterns. Those quantitative elements are really important, but there’s qualitative ones as well that are massively important too. Because if you just look at numbers, how many calls you make said it says, etc., you’re going to miss the fact that actually this person’s stopped asking questions properly, where this person’s now kind of this person’s not listening.

So he’s missing all these signs. He’s missing the emotional cues where he could build relationships or he’s missing the the, the fundamental truth of why this person wants to sell. He’s just not listening anymore. So he’s missing all of that. That’s not a quantitative thing. Aside from maybe his close rate dropping or her close rate dropping, but it’s a massively important qualitative thing to make sure that you are, you know, that your team is performing the way you want them to do.

And those two quantitative and qualitative elements, they need to be done every week. Because if you don’t do them every week, then you are going to have a massive, massive problem. I guarantee you that. So, well, I at the start of this, kind of journey back into the podcast. I hope you guys found that useful today.

I really wanted to dive into some of the core, some of the core themes in the book that, you know, so that you would know that, you know, this is a book, a playbook that can help you out. Absolutely. And, I’ll make sure that there’s links in the description of this, to be able to get a copy of this book.

And inside the book, not only is there an enormous amount of useful information, tips, playbooks, all of that, but there’s also some deals as well, including some smrtPhone deals in there as well. So, stay tuned. We’re going to be coming up, coming to you with weekly episodes. I’m really excited about some of the, guests that we’ve got on, we, you know, obviously, for those of you who’ve seen the first, season, we’re going to have some heavy hitters back.

We’re going to have people like Stephanie Betters from Left Main, Trevor Mauch from Carrot, Steve Trang, Objection Proof. I’m sure we’ll have Tiffany back on from Results Driven REI. Fantastic community and coaching program she has. We’re going to have, the technologists. We’re going to have investors. We’re gonna have community people all giving you a look as to what makes their businesses thrive, what technology you can use to build and scale your ROI business, and really make sure that you are always here at the forefront, building in the most efficient way.

So make sure to like and subscribe. It’s on YouTube. It’s, everywhere you get your podcast, make sure you are subscribed so you can get the new episodes. And of course, visit the website if you would love to be a guest. If you’ve got a great story to tell about technology or, how technology is affected your real estate investor business, head over to thatrealestatetechguy.com.

Switch details and we’ll hit you up for a future episode. Until then, have a great week. Thanks for listening to another amazing episode of That Real Estate Tech Guy. Head over to thatrealestatetechguy.com to check out all episodes and get special discounts on tons of awesome real estate technology platforms.