Episode 648
Is Cold Calling DEAD for Realtors in 2025?
Is cold calling dead in 2025? Let's tackle this question! Learn if cold calling is outdated, explore other smart ways to attract warm leads, and get SIX (plus a bonus!) reasons to ditch it for good. If you want a scalable, sustainable business... this is a great place to start!
Thanks for Listening!
Don't forget to:
Doing less than $250K GCI and want to scale to $1M+ as a real estate agent? Feeling underpaid, overworked, and overwhelmed? Let's have a quick chat, and we'll develop a plan for you.
Network with growth-oriented real estate agents and top-producing team leaders ready to shift from agent to business owner, just like you.
Learn real-world solutions to the challenges we face as entrepreneurs navigating the changing landscape in the real estate industry. Free, actionable advice. No gimmicks.
Impact-driven coaching, training, and implementation support to help you scale your business while working fewer hours. No risk. 100% results guaranteed!
Scale your business, expand your wealth, and build massive residual income by partnering with REBS and eXp Realty.
Follow Along!
Transcript
is cold calling dead in 2025.
Speaker:I sold a lot of homes without cold calling.
Speaker:So does cold calling work?
Speaker:I'll get it out of the way.
Speaker:Yes, it does work.
Speaker:it is soul sucking in my opinion.
Speaker:And, um, 5, 000 plus families served in my journey in real estate sales,
Speaker:helped a couple thousand, maybe even close to 3, 000 agents at this point,
Speaker:grow and scale their businesses.
Speaker:predominantly without cold calling.
Speaker:So none of what we teach a million dollar agent method is based on any cold
Speaker:calling, any paid leads, any referral fees at closing, any of that stuff,
Speaker:all of our stuff is.
Speaker:generating warm, inbound, organic, leads.
Speaker:And my philosophy is this, and I'm going to go through kind of six thoughts I have
Speaker:here that hopefully will convince you that there's a better way than cold calling.
Speaker:my philosophy is that if I'm going to put effort into, my business, it's going to be
Speaker:put into something that allows me to scale and scaling is different than growing.
Speaker:So could you grow your real estate sales by getting good enough cold calling
Speaker:where you can set listing appointments, go on those listing appointments, take
Speaker:those listings, rinse and repeat, right?
Speaker:Yes, you can.
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:There are entire coaching programs.
Speaker:Based on this fact, a quick story.
Speaker:And this is no disrespect to the OG Mike Ferry.
Speaker:here's a funny story when I first got into coaching.
Speaker:So I ran a webinar.
Speaker:This was my first webinar like, and I think the title was how I sold.
Speaker:300, how I closed 312 homes working one day a week, and it was the year.
Speaker:So the year I did that was 2013 and I just got into real estate.
Speaker:My first full year was 2008, so by 2013, five years into the business I
Speaker:was down to working one day a week.
Speaker:And that next year we went from three 12 to 453 and I was still working
Speaker:one day a week, 10 producing agents.
Speaker:So obviously I went down the path of leverage, I built out lead
Speaker:generation levers that brought in.
Speaker:leads consistently.
Speaker:So this was not a bunch of agents cold calling.
Speaker:None of it was based on cold calling.
Speaker:I send out this invitation to a webinar.
Speaker:Come find out on this webinar, how I sold 312 homes working one day per week.
Speaker:Mike Ferry gets a hold of this email, turns it around.
Speaker:I guess he like, and paste the email like as an image into an email that
Speaker:he sent out to his, uh, his list.
Speaker:And apparently it went to thousands of agents because they all, not all
Speaker:of them, but a lot of them reached out to me and say, Hey, listen, just
Speaker:so you know, got that email from you also got it from Mike Ferry.
Speaker:So he basically said, if you believe that this is possible, if you believe
Speaker:that somebody can build a business to sell hundreds of homes per year,
Speaker:working one day a week, I have some like land to sell you in some, some swamp
Speaker:land in Florida or some funny comment.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So his, worldview is such that the only way to succeed in real
Speaker:estate is to cold call like his whole program is based on that.
Speaker:Does it work a hundred percent?
Speaker:It works.
Speaker:Do I know agents that sold over a hundred homes per year?
Speaker:Cold calling?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Are those agents?
Speaker:a slave to their business decades into their business.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:So I knew when I saw that path, because I kind of evaluated the different
Speaker:ways I wanted to build my business.
Speaker:When I saw cold calling as a way to do business, I actually tried
Speaker:it once and I remember I talked to one expired and he was just ugly.
Speaker:And I was like, there's no way.
Speaker:I don't know if he hung up on me or said some mean words or, you know,
Speaker:maybe my, my skin is not that thick.
Speaker:And if you're a cold caller, you can argue that, you know,
Speaker:I'm just a wimp or whatever.
Speaker:But I knew that I wanted to detach the time I put into my business
Speaker:from the money that I made.
Speaker:And so a true business owner is not tied into their business.
Speaker:And I didn't know if what I wanted to build was possible, If I was going
Speaker:to be the, the only one that could generate opportunity in my business
Speaker:via cold calling, I knew that it wasn't possible for me to scale.
Speaker:And cause now I've seen teams that have tried to scale beyond like
Speaker:the, the Rainmaker, the primary cold caller trying to teach others.
Speaker:And it's very hard to replicate that skill set, right?
Speaker:You can have like 15, 20, 30, 000 calls in and the level of skill
Speaker:you can get lethal on the phone.
Speaker:But I didn't want to do that.
Speaker:Like I just, I knew I didn't want to do that.
Speaker:So my only option was to build a marketing systems.
Speaker:We call them lead gen levers now.
Speaker:That generate inbound organic opportunities, right?
Speaker:So here are the reasons, six of them, why cold calling is dead.
Speaker:According to me in 2025 and beyond.
Speaker:And it, and I just think it's something that if you want to have a business
Speaker:that truly serves you, truly gives you a life of freedom and helps you
Speaker:make an unreasonable amount of money in a reasonable amount of time.
Speaker:these are the six reasons.
Speaker:So first of all, it's a low conversion rate.
Speaker:We've got a cold caller, uh, that I know he actually came into our world.
Speaker:He's a cold caller and we're trying to teach him this, uh, you know, inbound
Speaker:organic and building marketing systems.
Speaker:And he's like used to cold calling for like six to seven hours a day
Speaker:to set one listing appointment.
Speaker:He's like, yeah, it's totally fine.
Speaker:I just cold call for six to seven hours a day.
Speaker:I get all the rejection and I just booked my one listing appointment.
Speaker:Sometimes I can get it in four or five hours.
Speaker:Sometimes it takes me six or seven hours, but somewhere in there
Speaker:and I'm just like, that sounds.
Speaker:It's awful.
Speaker:So it's, it's maybe one, 2 percent of the conversations you'll have on a cold call
Speaker:situation, you'll, you'll book into either a nurture or, a listing appointment.
Speaker:So does it work?
Speaker:Yeah, it works.
Speaker:But also door knocking works and who wants to door knock?
Speaker:Like I don't want to door knock.
Speaker:Does it work?
Speaker:Yeah, it works.
Speaker:But I don't want to like, it was 27 degrees today in
Speaker:Charlotte, North Carolina.
Speaker:You know, I don't want to be out in 27 degrees or if it's raining,
Speaker:like what you don't do business.
Speaker:If you're a doorknocker, like you're not gonna, you know what I mean?
Speaker:So, so those methods are just not anything that is viable in my opinion.
Speaker:So number one, low conversion rate.
Speaker:Number two, who really likes a cold caller?
Speaker:Like raise your hand.
Speaker:And there are a few of you out there that are just sort of weird.
Speaker:and I'll do this.
Speaker:From time to time.
Speaker:Very rarely though.
Speaker:you'll kind of get a cold call and you'll, you'll have a conversation,
Speaker:conversation with them and sort of push them a little bit.
Speaker:but consumers hate cold callers.
Speaker:So why would you want to do something that people don't like anyway, you
Speaker:know, even if you were like resilient and you're thick skinned and like, I'm
Speaker:going to do it, it's going to be fine.
Speaker:There's nobody that like gets a cold call.
Speaker:Oh man, my home did expire and oh, you're the, you're, you're the 17th agent.
Speaker:Let me entertain this conversation with you.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Why would you want to put yourself in a position where the person
Speaker:on the other side is not going to have an affinity towards you.
Speaker:They're just not going to like the whole situation.
Speaker:So that's just another thing.
Speaker:Number three, it's not a great first impression.
Speaker:how do you generate business for, for as a real estate agent?
Speaker:I call complete strangers, I don't know how to market at all.
Speaker:So the only thing I know how to do is.
Speaker:Put a headset on and I just call complete strangers.
Speaker:we have this expression, you know, a blood and guts approach to
Speaker:business or more elegance and ease.
Speaker:I just choose not that my ways are easier because in a lot of ways,
Speaker:they're harder to build the systems and slow down and do that work.
Speaker:but the blood and guts like this, I just think it's a horrible first impression.
Speaker:It's like you get into someone's house and like, uh, you know, you met them.
Speaker:Just like banging the phone over the head via a cold call and it's like
Speaker:well, how do you market my home?
Speaker:It's like clearly you don't know how to market yourself because you're cold
Speaker:calling, if you were a good marketer, you wouldn't have to cold call people,
Speaker:So I just think it's a bad first impression number four there's way better.
Speaker:And this is where my brain goes.
Speaker:I just think there's way better things to spend your time on.
Speaker:And that's what million dollar agent method, if there is a plug ever, if
Speaker:there was a plug for million dollar agent method, it's on this one point.
Speaker:Time is better spent on building scalable marketing systems.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Whether it's our database touch blueprint or our brand authority builder, or
Speaker:we've got eight or nine other lead gen levers that take some work to implement,
Speaker:but leads are coming to you, right?
Speaker:For sale by owners.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Do we, have a for sale by owner system?
Speaker:Yes, but they call us.
Speaker:Or we follow up with them because we provided some valuable bit of information.
Speaker:Same thing with our expired direct response system.
Speaker:Do we work expires?
Speaker:Yes, we work expires, but they call us because we mailed them something.
Speaker:Is there more effort involved?
Speaker:Yes, but it's a 20 X return on investment and it takes some time
Speaker:to set up, but you can outsource it to an, an administrator or high
Speaker:school kid to do your mailers, right?
Speaker:So I just think there's time better spent on a whole bunch of systems build outs.
Speaker:You know, building out systems versus just picking up the phone and cold calling.
Speaker:number five, your time is worth more than rejection, So just
Speaker:because you could grin and bear it and smile and dial, why would you?
Speaker:if you are a cold caller and this rubs you the wrong way.
Speaker:But don't you think you are worth more than just getting rejected all day long?
Speaker:But yeah, but the numbers, you know, I, I know that I've gotten good
Speaker:enough at it where I can say this one liner and, you know, I can basically
Speaker:get through, you know, X number I started out as this and like, okay,
Speaker:great, but your time is worth more.
Speaker:There are way more efficient ways to generate business, And there's
Speaker:gotta be better things that you can spend your time on than just
Speaker:getting rejected all day long, right?
Speaker:Three, four, five hours of cold calling and getting rejected to find that one or
Speaker:two that are going to allow you to come and present to them That's number five.
Speaker:Number six is, once you figure out the inbound lead generation, You
Speaker:know, building out those systems, they convert at a massively,
Speaker:massively higher rate, like four to five times higher conversion rates.
Speaker:Well, way more than that.
Speaker:I mean, these are like people that are in your network.
Speaker:You're expanding.
Speaker:Basically, there are people that either know you or don't know you.
Speaker:The goal in our world is to generate inbound leads, organic inbound leads.
Speaker:That go into your, now they're sort of in your world and you're just
Speaker:following up with them with valuable information and they're raising their
Speaker:hands when they're ready, right?
Speaker:That's our lead generation, lead conversion system build out.
Speaker:We do that within 90 days at Million Dollar Agent Method.
Speaker:and if there's a bonus one, a number seven, is that cold
Speaker:calling is not scalable, right?
Speaker:So there's no way that you could scale cold calling.
Speaker:what are you going to do it for five years to get good enough at it?
Speaker:And then teach another way less motivated agent how to do it.
Speaker:Like there's no way it doesn't work.
Speaker:It does not scale.
Speaker:But you spend 90 days building out systems in milliondollaragentmethod.
Speaker:com.
Speaker:Go check out the seven minute video.
Speaker:You spend 90 days building out systems.
Speaker:You have what it takes to generate one, two, three closings per month.
Speaker:Without cold calling, right?
Speaker:So cold calling works for all you cold callers.
Speaker:Go to million dollar agent method.
Speaker:com suspend disbelief.
Speaker:There is an easier way to do this.
Speaker:I'm living proof that you do not to be, you do not need to be a cold caller.
Speaker:And the only true way to scale your business sustainably without it relying
Speaker:a hundred percent on your efforts is to figure out a way to build lead generation
Speaker:systems that do the heavy lifting for you.
Speaker:if that is you and you want to figure out how to build out those systems
Speaker:together, go to milliondollaragentmethod.
Speaker:com but we'll see you in the next, uh, training.
Speaker:Be good.
Speaker:Bye bye.
