Episode 237: Batch Dialer – Podcast

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David: All right guys, welcome back to the discount property investor podcast. Mike Slane and Dave Dodge here today gonna be talking to you about the Batch Dialer. 

Mike: Sweet man. So cold calling is really the topic here for marketing for leads, and how do you get leads and what do you do? And we’ve done, you know, over the course of five years working together, we’ve done a lot of different things and one thing that’s working really well for us is doing cold texting and cold calling, and it’s very cost-effective which means again, it’s cheaper per leads but again, it’s going to take a little bit more time, either yours or someone else’s. So we’re doing a lot of cold calling and we are using a multi-line dialer and the one that we are using right now is Batch Dialer. Dave, do you want to tell us a little bit about our experience and how we were kind of you know, working with the Batch team. We have to kind of test it a little bit early and stuff like that. 

David: Yeah, so we were a beta user for this dialer. We started I think back in like September, so we’re about halfway through January 2021 at this point as of today, so we’ve been using it September, October, November, December, January, about 5 months at this point and again, yeah we were a beta user. They have come a long way since they started and that’s really the purpose of beta programs really in general, you know, to start testing features and making sure that everything’s up and running for the most part and I’m just loving this dialer man. It is phenomenal. So let’s just talk about some of the basic features of the dialer. It’s a multi-line dialer as you had mentioned Mike and you know the multi line dialer is- 

Mike: Yeah, so why is that good? Why do you want a multi-line dialer? What does that do? What does that help you with? 

David: Exactly, so the multi line dialer is actually, it’s a software, right? It uses a server so you just login, you know from a computer or a tablet or hell, you might even be able to do it from a phone. Anyway, we just use it from a computer and it has I believe up to four lines, maybe even more that can be calling simultaneously and when that happens, if there is you know, nobody that connects with let’s say one or two of those, it just drops a voicemail, which is also really great because every time that we connect with- or you know, we don’t connect with somebody but we get a voicemail, we’re able to drop that voicemail and that voicemail just basically says hey, this is Dave with Household Easy, we’re looking to buy some properties in the area and we noticed that you know, you own one in the area so give us a call back at our company number in the event that you have a property and/or you have a property and you want to sell it. So that’s really cool that we have those voice mail being dropped. 

Mike: Yeah, I think that the multi-line thing though is so powerful in the time savings. So even if you’re doing it yourself, even if you don’t have a team of people helping you call, you’ve got the ability to call three or four, however many lines you upgrade your account to or choose to use at once, you can have this dialing out three or four people at the same time. Now, why would you do that? Well, most of the time people don’t answer the phone. I mean, there’s- I mean do we see that on our reports here? I mean how many dials we’ve made versus how many connections? I believe we can and it is thousands of dials compared to actual connections. 

David: Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. 

Mike: So if you are doing this manually and your picking up your phone and trying to dial and you dial a hundred numbers, you’re probably only going to get ahold of you know, 10 people, you know best case. So that’s going to take you I don’t know maybe an hour or so to sit down and manually look at a phone number list and dial out those hundred numbers, whereas if you’re using a multi-line dialer system, if someone has five or six phone numbers for them, you can plug all those in and its going to try to reach out to all of those so whichever one is the actual number, the real number, it’s going to get ahold of them. So again, you just have a much better chance of actually reaching the people you’re trying to reach and actually connecting with people and getting people on the phone when you are trying to make phone calls. So the fact that Batch has this capability is very very slick. Batch Dialer is the only one Dave, I don’t think we even mentioned this, is the only one that’s allowing people to try it for free. 

David: Yeah, that’s huge. 

Mike: Yeah. 

David: And there’s a lot of dialers out there Mike and there’s a lot of multi-line dialers out there as well. However, they are offering a 7-Day free trial which is massive. 

Mike: And that’s only to friends of the show. 

David: That’s massive. 

Mike: So you’ve got to go to batchdialer.com/ I think it’s Dave. 

David: Dave, yeah. 

Mike: batchdialer.com/Dave. 

David: batchdialer.com/Dave, that’s right. 

Mike: Yeah, so then you can get a free trial of it. So again that is multi line dialing, why it’s so powerful, it just- it amplifies your cold calling efforts. It just takes it to the next level. Another really neat thing or powerful thing rather about cold calling just in general and then applying or using Batch Dialer is cold calling is your goal, your objective is to get people on the phone. So if you’re cold texting or if you’re sending out mail, your objective is to get people on the phone to talk to them so that you can connect and set appointments and run appointments and meet them in person and write contracts. 

David: No coupon on this one, just the link by the way. 

Mike: Just the link, cool. 

David: Just wanna let you guys know. But yeah guys, this is amazing, right? 7-Day free trial, they basically are giving away unlimited outbound dialing for that seven day period, right? So you can literally test the system out, you can drop the voicemails, there’s live agent monitoring, there’s lead scoring, it does do call recording and then it has this really cool feature called predictive dialing as well but I really- 

Mike: What is that? I don’t even know what predictive dialing is. 

David: So the predictive dialing basically will call people back in the event that you know, it drops the call or it, you know, isn’t able to connect with them and that’s also basically the tool that you use to set the multi lineup. It’s just- 

Mike: Gotcha, yeah so it’s part of the multi line. 

David: It’s part of the multi line dialing, yeah. 

Mike: Yeah, yeah I gotcha. 

David: But one of the coolest features Mike is the live agent monitoring. 

Mike: Yeah, I was playing with this yesterday. 

David: I believe you were playing with this yesterday. 

Mike: I was. 

David: Tell us a little bit about that if you don’t mind. 

Mike: Yeah so live agent monitoring, what does that mean? So Dave and I, we do a lot of things in real estate and we do some wholesaling and we do some house- some flips and we do a lot of rentals and we do the podcast here and we do a little bit of coaching and so we’re pretty busy, so we’re not the ones that are day-in-and-day-out pounding the phones like we used to. Again, when we started, we were doing that all the time. Now it’s not as often that we are actually the first line so what we’ve done is we’ve hired some people to call for us, so we have what is it Dave? Three people calling about 20 hours a week. 

David: Yeah, so 20, 40, 60 hours a week basically of calling. 

Mike: Yeah, so not a ton. 

David: Which is actually quite a bit though really. 

Mike: Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot of calling so we’ve got 60 hours a week of people calling, so when we come in and we look at our Batch Dialer account, we can go in and we can see what’s happening and we can see the number of calls going out and the number of calls being connected and then when someone connects, the live monitoring allows you to actually drop in and listen to the conversation. So you can monitor your team if you have someone else doing it in addition to the recording of the calls, you can actually do it live. So you could listen in or you could even barge in if they say something you don’t like or something that you really like on the phone and you want to jump in to be like, oh hey this is Dave, I just picked up the phone and you know, whatever. So you can barge in on the call as well, so you can monitor the callers in real-time, very very helpful tool, very neat feature that again, this service is really really slick, it’s come- like Dave said, it’s come a really long way and we’re excited for what is happening. 

David: It says we can’t pop in live. 

Mike: Alright, we’re playing with it. What does SIP mean? Why is it saying that? 

David: I don’t know. 

Mike: Every time you- every time you pop on, it says SIP which I don’t know, I think that’s just their system- yeah, I don’t know, when it’s connecting or something. 

David: Yeah it probably just says something about yeah, connecting. So right now guys, we’re literally, Mike and I are sitting here and we’re watching our cold callers do our outbound dials and it looks to me like there’s one person that’s live right now and there’s three phone- there’s three lines ringing actually and you can see the duration, you can see the campaign, you can see the contact. Ooh on call, let’s jump and see if we can monitor this particular one, one more time. 

Mike: Yeah some of them- when it says on call, it takes a few minutes before it actually connects, that’s what I noticed yesterday so you got to- you can’t be quite as trigger-happy, it does stuff like this on you. And again, I think that it’s a newer- like we said, brand new platform, brand new live service to people and again, they’re giving it away free to friends of the show so very very neat and again, they want your feedback too. We’d love to hear your feedback on it, post a comment on the show here and yeah, let us know what you think of Batch Dialer and how it is, you know, a good tool or how it could be improved or you know, how are you doing your cold calling? What are you doing that’s working in your cold calling game? 

David: Absolutely. Mike you know, I was on a little clubhouse chat last night. I got invited some people and we had a couple hundred people in the group and you know, there was a couple of new people in the group and one of the things that I really noticed and took away from that particular call was there’s a lot of new people on there and you know, they basically were you know, making anywhere from 20 to 50 calls a day basically to motivated sellers and they were new and they hadn’t done a deal yet.  

Mike: That’s great. Yeah, that’s a great start. 

David: It was good that they had started doing some cold calling, but I think the point is- the take away is you know, we’re basically making between 20 and 50 calls by 9:15 a.m., right? So we’re literally calling hundreds of people an hour and we’re doing that 60 hours a week. Now the beautiful thing is me and you aren’t really doing any of that, what happens is the callers will reach out and their role really is to just find anybody and everybody that has a house for one and two, has some interest in selling it, right? Now some people’s approach to this may be that they want to train their callers to like run comps and you know, to start making offers and that’s fine but Mike and I have chose to just find anybody and everybody that is, you know, basically raising their hand to say hey we are interested and the reason is we have a couple different tools in our belt, right? So obviously, wholesaling is our favorite thing to do. It’s our passion and that’s kind of what this podcast is about, right? However, we do have a brokerage as well, so if somebody has a property that they really do want to sell but they may not be able to sell it at a discount, well you know, there’s still potential for us to make a little bit of money on that. We also do fix and flips as well as rentals. And when we’re buying a fix and flip or a rental, we may not have to get it at such a substantial discount, you know, 30 or 35% discount like we would a wholesale deal to still make a good deal out of it. Maybe we can buy those at 15, 20, 25 cents of a discount versus a full 30 or even 40% of a discount, right? So the way that we’re doing ours is basically anybody that owns a home and has some interest in selling it, the callers will add those contacts into our CRM and task Mike and I and then from there we will jump in and give those people a call and just say hey what can we do to help you? You know, we know that you have this property over here on Main Street or whatnot and- 

Mike: That’s great Dave. 

David: Maybe you have something you want to sell. 

Mike: And I think that is maybe a little bit different approach from if you have a team or if it’s just you working the leads. And again, our way may not be the best, it works well for us, we really like the fact that we have hundreds of leads being pre-screened for us and thousands of numbers being called for us and then we’re just able to go into the ones who put their hand up. Now the flip side of that though, hey I don’t have a big team, it’s just me, I’m just getting started in wholesaling, that’s alright too. Why would you want to use Batch Dialer and how would you use it effectively? Exact same thing, you’re going to plug in your list, you’re going to upload your list and you’re going to start dialing and instead of having to dial one number at a time, it’s going to help you reach more people and get faster talking to people on the phone. Is that intimidating? Absolutely. Do I get it? Absolutely. What can you do though? There’s a pause button, right? What- I don’t remember what it’s called but yeah, you can hit- what’s it called up there? They call it the- online agents and there’s pause, yeah it’s a pause button. So basically all you have to do if your- if it’s calling and then you have a bad call and you need to take 5, hit the pause button, take a break, no big deal. Go get a drink of water, boost yourself back up again and hit that on pause button, get back on the phone because again like we just mentioned, you’re churning through tons- we’re churning through tons of phone numbers and tons of leads. 

David: Yeah, we got two callers on actually right now. 

Mike: Sweet, go back. See if we can listen. 

David: Yeah, which is really cool. 

Mike: Well they’re online, they’re not calling. 

David: Yeah, they’re just call- it’s just dialing right now.  

Mike: Yeah yeah yeah, I gotcha. 

David: So we can actually listen in and/or barge in once they have connected their call so we have to go in and click on those individually but so what, right? I mean, even if we’re not wanting to monitor these calls, the point is that somebody is reaching out to all these individuals in our market or any market that you want to do this in and basically just finding those people so we can connect with them. We are real estate investors guys, our goal is to find people that have interest in selling. Now, one of the cool things about this is you can make and receive calls from anywhere in the world, you know, using an online browser, maintain a local presence while working remotely by using local area codes and phone numbers, right? So, you know, Mike and I, we’re out of St. Louis, Missouri. I would think that you guys would know that at this point, but if you don’t, we’re right here in the Midwest. Our cold callers are all based out of the Philippines and the reason is because we can get you know, help in labor much cheaper in the Philippines than we can here locally in the United States and we pay them very handsomely, right? So it’s a win-win for us, but the cool thing is it doesn’t matter where in the world they are located. 

Mike: That’s a good point Dave and the thing is we don’t- Dave and I, we don’t have world domination ambitions either. 

David: No. 

Mike: Like we see a lot of people who are virtual wholesaling, we don’t really do much of that. We’re happy working in St. Louis, but again, you could use this like Dave was saying. Get local numbers anywhere, you can do it in three markets, four markets, so whatever you wanted to do. 

David: That’s right. 

Mike: So yeah, very very powerful tool. 

David: So here’s just some of the other stuff that the Batch Dialer has that I really like. For one, they integrate with like tons of different places, so you know we’re also using Batch Leads, which is great. If you’re using like Salesforce or HubSpot or let’s say Fusion Soft, it looks like Podio, Zillow, all these different things, Zapier which basically allows you to do anything on any site, right? It connects with that. It does have the option to just set up super fast simple campaigns where you can log into the platform, you can connect to a campaign and literally just click start dialing and you’ll be able to create, start, pause, edit, duplicate or delete campaigns directly from the dashboard. One thing I really like about the Batch Dialer is that the dashboard is really really intuitive. It’s really simple to understand and kinda help you understand you know, what’s going on? 

Mike: It’s funny because like a long time ago you had to have super super complicated software to make a user-friendly platform. 

David: That’s right. 

Mike: And you know I probably- I guess that’s still the case. Shoot man I don’t know, I haven’t done any development but again, so just behind the scenes, I know they do a ton of work building out these systems to make them easy to use which is a hugely helpful for us cuz yeah, it just saves you so much time when you’re in there playing around. 

David: So much time. It also has lead prioritization, right? So that’s basically, intelligently prioritize sales leads in real time and close more deals and that’s kind of what we were talking about earlier Mike with the predictive dialing, right? So it’s going to basically determine what phone numbers are going to have been marked, you know, as not necessarily good numbers, right? It’s pulling data from everywhere so it’s going to basically prioritize the numbers that it’s going to think we’re going to have the best chance of connecting. Also, this is one thing that we haven’t even mentioned yet, but it has dynamic call scripts so you can create fully customizable call scripts with dynamic lead data. Now each campaign can have its own call script or each caller can have its own call script so you can set this up a lot of different ways but the call scripts are built right in. Webhooks and API, seamless two way integrations, you know, of course with the third party platforms and apps. Smart call routing which means you can transfer calls to the right person or the right number every time and in real time so if you have somebody that’s just you know, dedicated to you know, answer those inbound calls, or maybe you want to push those into a voicemail. Again, you have all of those options and then last but not least, all of the Batch Services have a built-in CRM, right? Now this CRM is a basic CRM but that’s what I love about it Mike is that you don’t need to have all this complicated stuff, right? It’s basically built to track, organize and manage those leads, alright? Super super simple but again, it does have the built in CRM. So guys, do not wait, go check this out. Literally they are going to give you unlimited outbound dialing for free for 7 days guys. You got to act now cuz this offer may not be around for a long time. The owners told me that they were just going to be testing this out so I’m hoping that they’re going to let this go for a couple weeks but depending on you know, the volume. 

Mike: They’re going to get so much volume, they’re going to have to turn it off. 

David: They may have- they made turn it off guys so definitely go check it out, Batch Dialer, B-A-T-C-H D-I-A-L-E-R .com and if you want that 7-Day free trial, you got to use /Dave, D-A-V-E and that will put up a landing page that will actually give you guys access to a 7-Day free trial and in that trial you get unlimited outbound dialing guys. This is a game-changer so get on over there, check it out. Mike let’s jump in and listen to some of our callers here and let’s go do some deals. 

Mike: That’s what we got to do man. Let’s do it. 

David: Awesome. Alright guys, signing off. 

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