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The Real Estate UNLOCKED Podcast
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The Real Estate UNLOCKED Podcast
The #1 Tool Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Close More Deals | Episode 23
The #1 Tool Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Close More Deals!
If you're not using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) in your real estate investing business, you're missing out on closing more deals and scaling your business. A CRM is a game-changer for real estate investors, helping you organize leads, automate follow-ups, manage deals, and boost profits fast!
In this episode of the Real Estate UNLOCKED Podcast, we dive into:
✅ What a CRM is and why it's essential for real estate investors
✅ How top investors use CRMs to close more deals
✅ Automation tricks to save time and follow up like a pro
✅ Key features to look for in a CRM (Dialers, Text Bots, KPI Tracking & More!)
✅ How to use a CRM to scale your real estate business to the next level!
💡 Want to start using the CRM I recommend? Sign up for Open Dispo here 👉 [Joseph.opendispo.com](https://Joseph.opendispo.com)
What up everyone and welcome back to the Real Estate Unlocked podcast. I am your host, Joseph Marohn, and today we're going to be diving into one of the most essential tools for scaling and staying efficient in your real estate business. I'm talking about a game changing strategy to automate your workflow, track every lead and keep your business firing on all cylinders One of the smartest ways to keep your pipeline full and your business on autopilot. Today, we're going to be breaking down one of my favorite tools CRMs. Crms, or Customer Relationship Management Systems, are the backbone of any successful real estate business. They're designed to help you manage leads, track interactions and stay organized so no opportunity slips through the cracks. Whether you're following up with sellers, scheduling appointments or analyzing your team's performance, a good CRM keeps your business running like a well-oiled machine. As the real estate market grows more competitive, crms have become an essential tool for investors looking to scale, streamline their operations and close more deals. It's not just about managing data. It's about leveraging the right systems to work smarter, not harder, and take your business to a whole nother level. Now, if CRM sounds like the missing tool in your real estate business, then stay tuned, because we're going to be breaking it all down, step by step, so you can start scaling your real estate empire today estate empire today.
Joseph Marohn:Now you know how we do it on the Real Estate Unlocked podcast. If we're going to do it, we got to do it right. We can't just bring on anyone to speak about CRMs, we got to bring on one of the creators of CRMs. Today, our special guest on the podcast is Rick Sheldon. Rick is a real estate investor and SaaS entrepreneur, as well as the founder of Open Dispo, a CRM designed to empower professionals by streamlining operations and helping close more deals. With a specialization in creative finance and land acquisitions, rick has integrated AI and innovative strategies to help investors scale their businesses a lot more efficiently. Rick joins us today to share how leveraging a powerful CRM like OpenDISPO can transform the way you manage your real estate business, making it more efficient, organized and, most importantly, a lot more profitable. So, without further ado I've been talking long enough Everyone if you will, please allow me to formally introduce to you Rick Sheldon. Rick, what's up, brother? How are you doing today?
Rick Sheldon:Hey, what's up, joseph, Thanks for having me on and a good introduction there. Appreciate that. Just to clarify one thing land is what we're currently developing, but our roots are back in the single family residential world, so I'm sure most of your audience may be more familiar with that side of things. So don't worry, we're not only working on the land side of things. We're actually even stronger for those of you doing residential buying and wholesaling.
Joseph Marohn:I appreciate you clarifying that real quick. Now, rick, welcome to the Real Estate Unlocked podcast, a place where we bring value to new and intermediate investors by bringing on guests who are extremely knowledgeable, such as yourself, and covering real estate topics on a very basic level. Now, my CRM is an absolute, critical component to my business. There's absolutely no way I'd be on top of my leads, my follow-ups or my team's performance without it, so I love that we're here today talking about this topic. We're now hitting 2025, and I still have friends out here using Google Sheets or sticky notes or Google Docs, believe it or not. So thank you, rick, for dropping in to hang out with us, to share what CRMs are and what they could do for your business. So thank you, brother.
Rick Sheldon:Yeah, no problem. I know a lot of people that who are using those Google sheets and things like that as well, so we'll try to, you know, get them out of the stone age and, heading into 2025, set them up with something right.
Joseph Marohn:Absolutely, and it's not to knock you if you are, because I know a lot of people that are getting deals done with them. But imagine if you're doing deals with doing sticky notes. Imagine what having a good CRM can do for your business man.
Rick Sheldon:Yeah, exactly.
Joseph Marohn:Cool. Well, rick, we're not going to waste any time, we're just going to dive right in. So what exactly is a CRM, and why do you feel it's a must-have tool for not only real estate investors, but also business owners as well?
Rick Sheldon:not only real estate investors but also business owners as well. So CRM, you gave a very good summary. Customer Relationship Management is the acronym. So really just a way to group your contacts together for your business, segment them based on certain things maybe sellers versus buyers versus lenders, or maybe you want to get even more niche and have your buy and hold buyers segmented away from your flipper buyers so that, as you're trying to go into your contact database and send a message to a group of people, you can send the right message to the right person at the right time. That's really what sales boils down to is sending the right message to the right person at the right time, and a CRM just makes that very possible.
Joseph Marohn:Makes it more simplified, if you will. Yeah, okay, so now you know. What, would you say, are the biggest differences between using a CRM like OpenDISPO versus just something like a Google Sheets or keeping track of leads manually?
Rick Sheldon:I think automation is the key there, because, if you really boil it down to a CRM being a customer relationship management tool, a Google Sheet does fall under that category if you're using it properly, but the thing that it lacks really comes down to the automated nature of the follow-ups and some of the other important components that all good CRMs have, which are just ways of helping you send the right message to the right person at the right time, meaning like tasks and good follow-up systems and follow-up due dates and reminders to your team internally, as well as those automated messages to the contacts themselves.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, because I know firsthand man. I used to when I do follow-ups maybe you've done this in the past, rick, but I used to write them down or I'd put it on my Google calendar to follow up with somebody so inefficient man. And then when I actually use a CRM, I was like man, this is game changing man. Like now, it's like I get these automation, I get email updates, you know, I get notifications to my calendar. It's like a constant reminder, like to follow up with this person. Then I can go on the notes, refer back to the notes on the conversation I've had with them and it just makes your life just a whole lot easier.
Rick Sheldon:You know what one core feature is that has been around in most CRMs for a while, but a lot of them have been making advances forward recently. When it comes to AI is the call transcription actually so not only can you refer back to the call, meaning the notes that you took on the call, but you can actually listen to the call, and the call can be transcribed and summarized using AI nowadays. So so not only are you not able to kind of remember what you're talking about, but if you're using CRMs properly, you can even have it help you craft your follow-up messaging based on how the last call went.
Joseph Marohn:Yep, absolutely. And you, and like me, when I'm on the calls with sellers, sometimes you're listening to the call, right, but then you're also thinking about your next conversation or what you're going to say next, and so sometimes you may miss those gems that they drop or those pain motivation, those pain points on the call. And being able to go back to that recorded call, listen to it and or even, like you said, use AI to pinpoint those things that you missed on the call and refer back to, is golden. Not only that, we also use and I'm pretty sure you do the same thing we use our calls for training purposes, right? So when we're training our team, we have our weekly team meetings, we're going over calls and we're seeing hey, you know what can we improve on? What did we say here that we could have said differently? You know how do we approach this, and that's kind of been like our bread and butter for like improving on our calls. So absolutely you can't do that with Google Sheets.
Rick Sheldon:Yeah, absolutely. We refer to those as call calibrations and those, along with role plays. Those are two of the best tools you can have to train up your sales staff.
Joseph Marohn:Now you know. For someone who has never used a CRM, how would you describe what its main primary purpose is in simple terms?
Rick Sheldon:Bucketing, so I think of it as a bucketing system. Okay, elaborate on that.
Joseph Marohn:What do you mean by bucketing? Okay, elaborate on that. What do you mean by bucketing?
Rick Sheldon:Yeah. So it comes back to sending the right message to the right person at the right time, meaning if I want to automate the messaging to a degree, as I have a lot of leads coming into the system and I know that I want to take them through this same streamlined journey each time basically having a discovery call or a process call where we collect enough information to get them an offer. We schedule the offer call for the same day or next day. If, from the process call, we determine that they're not interested, we may not want to schedule that offer call, we may want to put them into a different bucket.
Rick Sheldon:So having a system where everybody comes in in an organized, systematic way and then having a checkpoint where you decide where to put them from here and then, based on where you put them, having that relationship nurtured through automation if it's a colder opportunity and then through manual outreach if it's a hotter opportunity.
Rick Sheldon:Outreach if it's a hotter opportunity, that allows you to free up all that time that you were spending sending those messages that you ultimately are just sending to prospects who may not even respond to them anyway. So the bucketing system helps you send the right message to the right person at the right time, and that's really. It lines up with this concept throughout CRMs that people really rely on, which is a pipeline view, or you look at your opportunities in a board view, a Kanban, if you're familiar with that term where it shows you visually from left to right how far away from the end goal they are. So they come in on the left as a new lead and over on the far right they're an executed contract, and then the different buckets in between are for those different scenarios that that contact may fall within.
Joseph Marohn:Right, okay, good point on that. Now I know there's like a million CRMs out there right now and I'm just curious, you know, I know you CRMs out there right now and I'm just curious, you know, I know you. You are the founder of Open Dispo. What need did you feel like was missing from these other CRMs that you feel like you had to create your own CRM to tackle those needs?
Rick Sheldon:I think, really the bucketing system itself, because most CRMs are a bit of a blank canvas where you sign up for it and cool. Now you have a cool tool that gives you the ability to go create your own bucketing system and create your own messaging for each bucket that you determined. But our system is built for real estate investing and real estate wholesaling specifically to some degree. So our clients come in knowing that there's already proven processes that they can rely on. They don't have to reinvent the wheel and come up with their bucketing system and the messaging to send to the cold prospects, because we've already done that for them and we can show them how to edit them. But now it's a complete system that they can step into, instead of having to step into a blank canvas and have to build it from scratch.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, and you've pretty much built out all those automations inside of the platform, inside of the CRM. Now you were talking about bucketing. Now does other CRMs not offer that? Is that kind of like something unique to OpenDISPO?
Rick Sheldon:not offer. That Is that kind of like something unique to OpenDISPO. It's unique in the sense of a lot of CRMs that I've signed up with in the past. They have the ability to create pipelines and create your stages, but you don't come into it with those stages pre-built for you and especially pre-built for your exact business model, and that's what we offer. We don't really give the blank canvas. We have a pre-built system that we try to pull people through and guide them on how we, how we expect them to use the system. So it's just a lot less guesswork.
Joseph Marohn:Okay, got it. Now. Can you explain how a CRM can help people with follow-ups and outreach? How exactly does it help people do that? I know we talked a little bit about the follow-ups and how it's kind of helped me. But as far as outreach and stuff, how does the CRM necessarily help you with that?
Rick Sheldon:phone system integrated in. You can send emails. You can even send WhatsApp messages. You can do Facebook business, Instagram DMs there's a lot of channels that you can connect into the CRM and manage. You can actually have your conversations using the platform. So not only does it help you put the contacts in and segment them, but it actually sends the messaging by tapping into Twilio and other service providers like that.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, and you know what I like about you know and I'm pretty sure there's other CRMs that do this but what I like about OpenDISPO, because I use OpenDISPO firsthand man, I've tried other CRMs and not to knock them, but they were missing some components that we were looking for that OpenDISPO provided for us. But you know reaching out to you know sellers, you know my text bot, right, it will book appointments for me and then when it books that appointment, it will send a reminder an hour before the call, right, and then it will also send an email on top of that. So if you miss the text message, you also get the email, and so you can create, like these, drip campaigns right with text messaging or email. And it's just been great for my outreach man. It changed the game for me, so it does help out a lot. I'm not cold calling all day long, I'm not constantly missing appointments, because the system is automatically reminding my client hey, we got to got a call in an hour.
Joseph Marohn:So that does help out a lot.
Rick Sheldon:Yeah, no, I love it because that's the main point I was trying to make in the last comment is, most CRMs out there will give you the ability to create a calendar, create booking reminders and maybe even tap into using AI in the form of an AI chatbot. But what we've done is we've taken all those and put it together so that, when you come in, our onboarding process is to show you how to use it without you having to build it, because there were several things that tie together to allow you to be able to use that system smoothly like that. We've got, you know, several tools that come together and tie together, and we're not going to get into it and overwhelm anybody, but, as far as you're concerned as a user, it just works, which is what's important to us.
Joseph Marohn:Yes, absolutely, man, Because you know there are, like you mentioned, you can get a you know another CRM. That's just a blank canvas. Now you either have to buy, like a automation package that someone's already put together and they're charging arm and leg for, or you need to find yourself a good integrator that can understand what your, your needs are and they can build out your their own automations inside of your system. So with open dispo it's kind of like you get all the bells and whistles already built into it and now you can just adjust it accordingly to what you need for your business.
Rick Sheldon:Yep exactly.
Joseph Marohn:Cool Now. I know we kind of talked a little about calendars and emails, but talk to me a little bit about, like the messaging platforms you just mentioned that you can integrate into the CRM. I know you mentioned WhatsApp. Can you also integrate other messaging platforms like Slack?
Rick Sheldon:So Slack does integrate with the platform in the sense that you can use Slack in the workflow builder. So we didn't really talk about this, but the platform has a workflow builder, meaning if this happens, then I want that to happen. So the previous example if an appointment gets booked, then I want to send these messages to the seller and I want to send these messages to my internal team member. That's a workflow that consists of a calendar booking for the if part and several messaging components for the then part. I don't know if that made sense, but if this, then that.
Rick Sheldon:Yeah, that's basically how you can summarize the Workflow Builder, and the Workflow Builder is so powerful that we can customize the messaging and we can send messages into Slack when something happens. So when I add a tag, when I fill out a form, when a client signs up, any of these things can cause a notification to go into our Slack channel, which is where my team communicates very heavily. Okay, perfect, oh, and if I can just hop in. Sorry, no, you're good.
Rick Sheldon:Slack is kind of like it works with the workflow builder to send notifications, but some of the more native conversation components are WhatsApp, like you mentioned, calling and texting. A big piece that some people forget about is the social channels. So you can integrate a Facebook page and an Instagram page and then any message that goes into those channels can come into your inbox. So, moving into 2025, a lot of business and a lot of transactions happen from social media. Personally, most of my business comes from social media and a lot of sellers reach out to property buyers that they find on social media as well, and if your business is on social media and you get a message in there that flows right into your CRM and then you can just message them as if they were already a lead in your system. That really removes a lot of friction.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, I love that because we do do some outreach through social media. We work foreclosures. Sometimes we don't have the best look right. Friction yeah, I love that because we do do some outreach through social media. You know, we work foreclosures. Sometimes we don't have the best look right. Skip tracing them, get them on the phones or text message email. Sometimes those are hit or miss and you know, for these more difficult ones, we'll actually reach out on a Facebook messenger or Instagram and reach out that way and we found success like that.
Joseph Marohn:And so I think it's really important for a CRM to really be like an all-in-one right, because there's so many different platforms and softwares and I don't want to go through 20 different things to get one thing done right. Like I want everything to be like a hub. I want everything to be inside of my CRM where I can limit as many softwares and subscriptions I have to pay for, and so I think that you've, guys done a really great job on that. You know it's really helped out a lot for what we do in our business.
Rick Sheldon:Nice, you want to know. The one I've had the most fun eliminating for my clients recently is DocuSign.
Joseph Marohn:DocuSign Okay talk about it.
Rick Sheldon:You have no need for any e-signature platform outside of the CRM now, because we can now create templates, use them with the contacts within the platform and actually get them fully executed. That you can replace the subscription with DocuSign. But it's even better than it was to use DocuSign because as soon as those contacts now view and sign the agreement, it's already linked into their contact record. So we no longer have to get a seller to agree to a verbal offer and then go to DocuSign and send out a template, then monitor our emails for it to be signed and then download it and go handle it. Now we send it through our CRM, we monitor it through the CRM, it's attached to the record when it's executed and we can send it from there.
Joseph Marohn:Man, that is gold man. So you're saving people on DocuSign subscriptions, absolutely. Oh man, I love it. Yeah, there you go. Now let me ask you this, rick. Now I know you mentioned OpenDISPO is kind of like a hands-off approach. Now, other CRMs in general let's say you're just starting out CRMs is brand new to you how difficult is it to really set up a CRM on your own and get going?
Rick Sheldon:It's very easy at the beginning because you're blissfully ignorant about how much it's going to take. So you're really happy that you've got a system that will let you call your leads. So you know it can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be, but I like to think about it with the curve that Alex Hermosi and a lot of others talk about. It's really easy to get started building a CRM if you don't need it to do anything complicated, if you want it to do some advanced things and be pre-built for your industry and have proven workflows and calendars and all these things that are already pre-built for you. It does take a lot of time to build those things. Me, I actually just crossed over my four-year mark in the industry.
Rick Sheldon:And I started building this very soon. You know, almost four years ago I built it for my own business for about two years and then I've started selling it as a CRM and I've continued using it for my own business and for that of my clients now, and I've developed it further over the last couple of years. But truly we're about three and a half years into development here, so you know it takes a while to get it to the point that you're ultimately going to be able to rely on it.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, congrats on the four-year anniversary. But, yeah, I think what you were talking about right now and it really hit home for me, because you don't know what you don't know, right. So I started off with something simple called Podio. Right, it's a freer CRM. A lot of people know about it. I didn't know what I needed at the time. All I know is, like, I'm trying to track calls, I'm trying to take notes.
Joseph Marohn:It wasn't until I started meeting these other CRMs, like GoHighLevel, rei, reply and stuff like that, and OpenDISPO. When I started seeing all the bills and whistles that you can really use. Then I started thinking, okay, man, this is a lot more complicated than I thought, but it also, once I figure it out, like it's gonna make my business a lot more easier, because I didn't know I had all these tools to my advantage. Right, I was using outside dialers. Right, I was using outside email marketing campaigns, and now you've integrated all that into one platform. And now it's like, okay, how do I take full advantage of this software, right? So I think it's like, okay, how do I take full advantage of this software, right? So I think it's a good point. But I guess for me it's a little more easier because I have an integrator. But if you don't have an integrator, do you feel like someone just starting out they would need to hire someone to manage the CRM, or is it simple enough to pretty much handle on your own, in your opinion?
Rick Sheldon:I think most of our clients are the visionary who need a bit of help on the integration side my company in particular we take more of that hand-holding approach and kind of pull you through the process that we've got, I hope, well-defined, and we'll kind of show it to you and show you how to use what we've got pre-built for you.
Rick Sheldon:If you have an integrator, it's even better. But we try to cater for people who don't want to build this stuff on their own, which mostly comes down to visionaries. And the question really becomes what are you going to do to make sure that you're successful Without single like, without all the labels of integrator and visionary, one dedicated individual with time and energy to devote to their business? If you're empowered with a good platform for your technology, then you're going to succeed as long as you, you know, have the drive for it. So you know it's really if you're, if you're going to succeed as long as you have the drive for it. So you know it's really if you're, if you're going to kind of get your hands dirty, get in there, make the calls, do the follow ups, then you're going to have a lot of success.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more, because I'm a visionary myself, right, and I know where my time is best spent, and it's not doing integration work. It's me getting on the calls, talking to sellers and closing deals, right, and if I could have somebody else that can assist me do all the integration work, then it just makes my job a lot more easier, allows me to put my best foot forward on the calls and not have to worry about the other other stuff, because in the beginning, right, you may not have all the money to do it, but you're pretty much wearing all the hats, and so it's working with somebody or working with a team that can help grab these different tasks and stuff like that. So I think you hit on a good point on that. Now I want to ask you so OpenDISPO, how does it help investors track their numbers and analyze their team's performance? Does it have a section for that?
Rick Sheldon:Yes. So there is a couple of different ways that it can help you with that. The first that jumps out to me is the agent reporting, or the call reporting. So, as a single person, you can think about it as holding yourself accountable. We all probably heard the story about the. You know the person who thinks that they're making a hundred calls a day and truly believes it. But if you look at the numbers and it's like you made 12 calls before lunch and then you never came back to it after lunch. So you know, like seeing the metrics for yourself on how many calls you've been able to make that day, that's already amazing, but it's even more relevant as your team is growing and you need to hold your team members accountable.
Rick Sheldon:Maybe you've got a few different people calling for you and you've got an acquisitions person who's supposed to follow up on those leads that get set for them. Now you can have a platform that shows you exactly how many calls each of your dialers made and your acquisitions person and you can see who fed the acquisitions person more opportunities. So having these types of calling metrics and pipeline stage change metrics or the bucketing system that we talked about, so which of our cold callers moved it from the new lead bucket to the qualified lead bucket more times. Today you know that's really what it comes down to and having a bucketing system that they're coming into now, we can understand how many came into the system and how many moved forward. And now, when we layer that on top of the calling metrics, you have a very clear understanding of your business operations metrics, you have a very clear understanding of your business operations.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, I love that feature, man, because you know, like you said, you bring in people on your team and you know people might tell you, hey, I could put in 100 calls a day, rick. But when you actually go to the agent report, you can actually see how many calls are actually making on a daily or weekly basis and you're like, oh, rick, what happened to those 100 calls you were making? But not even that. Another key feature I like is that it not only shows you how many calls they made, but the average talk time.
Rick Sheldon:Right, because, yeah, calls are important, but would I rather have someone making 100 calls a day with only 30 seconds of average talk time, or would I rather have someone doing 10, 15 calls a day, and their average talk time is 20, 30 minutes right, yeah, yeah, because not to give any ideas to these professional VAs who may be watching, but you know you could all hang up right away and that still counts as a call. So you're spot on with the average. Call duration is very important for a few things not only your business, but also your phone number's health. The longer duration impacts your phone number's health, so we don't want to get too deep into that. But there's a lot of reporting features, and one of the ones that I really like is the ability to filter by calls that lasted more than 60 seconds or three minutes. So now we can filter out all the calls and see only those ones that were likely to be good calls and then hone in on those and listen to those directly.
Joseph Marohn:Yep Couldn't agree more. Now, what are the most important metrics or KPIs that investors should monitor within a CRM?
Rick Sheldon:I like to track two types of metrics, the first being what we've just spoken about, which I refer to as activity metrics how many calls, texts, emails those things are activity metrics.
Rick Sheldon:And then the more important one, in my opinion, is conversion metrics, and this will help a little bit. You can use it to identify your more impactful team members, but not only that, but you can also use it to understand which lead sources to double down into. So what I mean by this is how many new leads did we get, how many of them did we complete our process call with, where we were able to collect all the information that we needed in order to be able to make them an offer, how many of them actually received an offer, how many offers led to a contract and how many contracts got assigned, and how many of those were closed on. And then, of the deals that closed, how much revenue was generated. If we understand those metrics, along with how much we spent on each lead source, now we can tell the ROI per lead source. So I spoke slowly there. You guys can no a perfect sense.
Rick Sheldon:Yeah, okay cool, because that is getting into the advanced side of. If you can track the numbers to that degree, then you can always double down into the winning lead sources and that's how you optimize your business in the long run.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, because you know we're always taught not to put all of our eggs in one basket Right. So you want to have multiple different channels or pipelines Right. And so we do agent outreach. We also do foreclosures. We do a lot of different outreach right. And, like you said, if you can niche down and track down exactly which ones are getting the best conversion rates, then you know, okay, well, maybe we shouldn't be spending all of our time on agents. We're having better success with sellers on foreclosures. Let's double down on this, Right. And understanding your metrics and your KPIs is really going to allow you to pivot, Right. So if you need a pivot, you can pivot. If you don't know your numbers, you don't know what you don't know Right.
Rick Sheldon:So exactly, and I think all those metrics that I mentioned are really important, but I'll give, I'll break it down even to a smaller degree for those just getting started I think if you could track the number of offers you're making and how many offers it takes to get a contract and how many of those contracts close, I think those three numbers will give you a really good story just by themselves, and then you can advance into the other metrics.
Joseph Marohn:You can advance into the other metrics? Absolutely. Now, how can a CRM help teams work better together?
Rick Sheldon:especially when managing tasks or assigning leads. Well, I guess let's look at the alternative. Going back to the Google Sheets side, what is that going to look like? If we're trying to assign leads and ask my acquisition manager to follow up with? You know, 50 leads a day and these are the ones I want you to follow up with that process would be a nightmare.
Rick Sheldon:Whereas if you have a CRM you know, I know I can speak to what ours would allow you to do, which is you can assign each contact to a user. Assign each contact to a user. You could even assign different opportunities to users, meaning if one seller had a couple of different properties, or if you're doing agent outreach and you're working on a couple of different deals with one agent, you could have each contact or each property assigned to somebody else on the team, and each team member is able to set their own follow-up due date. So imagine having a list. You just log into your CRM and you click one button and it shows you my follow-ups that are due today or before. That's it, I love that.
Joseph Marohn:I love that feature, by the way. Thank you, yeah, no, it's a great feature, right, because I would set tasks or I would book an appointment and it would go on my calendar or whatnot. But sometimes they still kind of get slipped through the cracks, right. And so now that you've created an open dispo, this follow-up tab, where you just click one button follow-up that's pretty much kind of the first thing I check now thing I check now. When I get inside the system, I click on follow-up and I'm like, oh shoot, I got to get back to Maritza, I got to call her today, right. So, and it, and it only pops up when the task is actually due. You could set the due date when you want the the follow-up to be set. I love that feature.
Rick Sheldon:That's exactly how I do my follow-ups for the for the CRM.
Joseph Marohn:Absolutely Great stuff. So, um, now I now I think a good question would be is like how does someone know they're getting the most out of their CRM and know they chose the right CM for their business needs? How do they know that?
Rick Sheldon:Yeah, that's a tough one. I guess the first thing is like, does it pass your baseline of profitability? You know it's like I don't want it to cost me money. If it takes time and energy to learn and set up and it's costing my business money, then it's absolutely not a good investment. If we're getting into the realm of it takes time and energy to learn and I'm feeling like it's making a difference, but maybe it's not making a massive difference yet. But if I keep doing it I can only improve it.
Rick Sheldon:You know, I think even at that low of a barrier to entry it's already going to be worth it for you to invest that time and energy. But what we've tried to do is skip over all that and when somebody joins they've already got the bucketing system and the follow-up tab and all these things calendars and phone system and all that. So we basically try to shortcut that and make it so from day one. It's obvious that it's going to make a great impact on their business because they don't have to put much time and sacrifice into getting it up to speed. There's a 30 day money back guarantee. So if they want to try it and get out of it, you know they only wasted a little bit of time. But yeah, I think if it's making your business money, it's. Then it comes down to how much energy is it taking from you, and if it's not taking very much and it's making you money, then it's a no-brainer.
Joseph Marohn:I think that's a great response. What are some common mistakes people make when using CRMs and how can they avoid them?
Rick Sheldon:Well, I think the phrase is creative avoidance. Creative avoidance means you are working on things, you're tinkering around in the CRM, you're building processes and funnels and workflows and things when you should be calling your leads. So this is, unfortunately, one of the downsides that you may experience with OpenDISPO, because we've got all these tools for you you can build your websites, you can set up your calendars, you can set up a review request system. That would be a great example. Why would we go and spend an hour building our review request system if we don't have any sellers that we've helped yet? So creative avoidance, I think, is the big one to avoid and the way to avoid it. The way to avoid the creative avoidance is to focus on money-making activities. Make sure your calendar in it. You know this is outside of CRM. This is just entrepreneurship. You need to have money-making activities in your calendar that you're sticking to.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, man, I always make sure I got at least five, you know, and I can live and die by my calendar, but that's a whole nother topic.
Joseph Marohn:What I love about OpenDISPO and I can't attest for other CRMs because I haven't seen this feature but Rick actually has like a team dedicated for you know requests if you're having issues inside of the platform, so you could submit a ticket and then somebody will set up a Zoom call with you and they'll walk you through the process or they'll get it going for you. And I think that's been a game changer, because for me, customer service is everything right and if I have a software, it could be as great as it wants to be, but if I start having an issue because all softwares do, no, I don't care how good your platform is, they all have issues, and once you run into that issue, if it takes me a week to get a response, I'm losing money. I got downtime, and so Rick's found a solution for that to get people that are very responsive. Sometimes it's within the day or 24 hours and you'll get somebody on there to actually help you through the issue. That that's been a great addition to you yeah, thank you.
Rick Sheldon:thank you and um, there's a, a tool in the industry where a lot of other crms. They rely on this tool and you know it's a third party chat widget up in the corner. We have this as a option for our members, but we don't rely on that and and that's the key A lot of companies they try to outsource their support and then you're only talking to this third-party chat widget that doesn't even understand your business model. But, like I mentioned, we are built for real estate investors by a real estate investor and the whole team is very technical and they like the stuff that most of our clients don't when it comes to setting up website, dns records and domain settings and all these things that most investors, most entrepreneurs, have very little interest in.
Rick Sheldon:The team's really great at all those things and they understand real estate and they understand and help build the workflows that you use. So when you guys have a question, you submit it directly to our team. We don't have to really guess as much or kind of you know, ask you probing questions about what your goals are, because we already know which workflow you're talking about, what issues have popped up for others in the past and how we fix those. You know we have hands on experience with the actual processes, so the support that you get is just much more tailored to that. You know that understanding of the system.
Joseph Marohn:Right, and if you do get like some type of chat, it's like you said. It's like an AI bot that's talking to you that doesn't even understand what you're looking for, so it's been crucial adding that in there. So I know that's one great component that separates you from you know, other CRMs, but what would you say is your bread and butter? Like, what separates OpenDISPO from all the rest of the other CRMs in the market and why should people choose OpenDISPO over other competitors?
Rick Sheldon:That's a good question as well. Let's see, I think we're just well positioned for people doing direct-to-seller marketing, direct-to-agent marketing, jv, direct-to-buyer or reverse wholesaling. Meaning we've seen it all, we've built it all, we've implemented it all and regardless of the business model that you're tackling in the real estate industry, we've almost certainly built it already and we could use templates that we have available to us to customize a flow for you. So we've just got so much experience like direct experience with these business models and the technical understanding and the support team. I just don't see any others with the full suite of features like that. They've got as much history in the industry and the team with as much knowledge about the exact systems that you're going to need to kind of, you know, get the stuff rolling. I think I kind of spiraled a little at the end there, but the real, the real, um, it really comes down to just having a complete system that you can trust. People have already been doing deals on that. Somebody can show you the ropes as you get up to speed on it.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, I really think which the bread and butter that you've done with open dispo, and what's great is that you're actually active in the business yourself and, like you said, you created this out of a necessity for you, right? And that's where the platform starts. Now there may be some other business people or whatnot that create these CRMs, but they're not in the business. They don't know what you need. And so, rick, he knows what he needs in his business, he knows what other investors are looking for, and all he's done is just take that info and put it in automations and built it out inside of the platform. So it's pretty much been.
Joseph Marohn:I haven't really found a need for anything outside of OpenDISC that I actually need. I mean, the only thing I would say is maybe having more of like a chat system inside of the platform. That way I don't have to use these other platforms. But who knows, maybe that's something that's coming in the future and I know you just actually integrated. So the trouble we were having is that we would have people calling in and we would miss the call, right, and then when we miss the call, we're trying to text back or we're trying to reach back and now the seller's ghosting us and you've pretty much created an AI, and I don't know if I'm speaking early on this, but I know you've created an AI onto the platform that actually will answer the calls for you, almost like an assistant or a receptionist, for which, like you said it really just replaces your voicemail, so it still gives our team an opportunity to answer live.
Rick Sheldon:That's always going to be best, but instead of getting a voicemail, they're going to get greeted by an AI voice receptionist whose objectives are basically get their name, get their contact info, get their address. Get their name, get their contact info, get their address and see what they need help with, and then it'll prompt. It'll tell them that a team member will get back to them soon. What we're going to be developing very soon is the ability for it to actually book a meeting into your calendar, which is going to be game changing, but for right now it'll just kind of collect that info, send them on their way and then send you an email summary with the transcript of the call and the action items.
Joseph Marohn:Nice. What's one overlooked feature in OpenDISPO that you think people should be using more?
Rick Sheldon:Funnels. I think we have the ability to build websites. You can build a website. You can set your domain up in there as well. You can have a funnel built that you run ads to. You can do all this with an open dispo and a lot of people they work with PPL companies, ppc companies or Facebook ad companies when they really could start taking that on themselves pretty easily.
Rick Sheldon:You just put together a very simple funnel and I say simple because you'll actually find when you start doing this that the uglier the page, the better it seems to convert, and spending all the time on making a very nice landing page sometimes doesn't convert as well as the quick form that just landed on the top of a blank funnel, having an ad that somebody clicks on and they land on your funnel with a form on it and when they fill out the form, the workflow builder drops them into your pipeline or your bucketing system. So now if you could just create an ad and a landing page, then you'll know that they're going to land in our pre-built pipeline and you can run your ads from the platform as well. So just learning a couple basic things. You now have a whole entire lead flow system where you've got leads coming in and those leads are being nurtured properly.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, I tell you, man, something I was doing before is like I'm every day I'm working on building my buyers list, Right, because I do, do? I run a wholesale business and I'm always looking for active buyers. Now I was using these other third party you know softwares like Typeform, you know Google, google Sheet, google Docs, whatever. And then one day my partner, ash, was like dude, why are you using these other platforms when you they already have it built inside of OpenDISPO, and I was unaware of this.
Joseph Marohn:So since then, we've built out, you know, a buyer's form inside of OpenDISPO and, like you said, now when they fill out the form, they drop right into our pipeline and now it's like set it and done. Wow, I can, I can have an automated email text message set up. They're in the funnel system now and it's it's doing its outreach thing, and now it's just an easier way to keep track of everything in one place instead of using out out third-party software, right, so that's been one of the key features I've been loving too. Um, now the landing page is is crucial as well, right, because now. So someone buys the domain, the domain, do they have to still buy the platform, or they are, once they're in open dispo, they don't have to pay anything extra.
Rick Sheldon:They could just create a website on in open dispo yeah, you can create a website within open dispo without having a domain at all. The, the, the preview pages or the pages that you're kind of playing around with as you're building the funnel. They are live web pages so you can create one and share it If you want the domain to be nice and clean, like rickopendispocom or eventsopendispocom, which are a couple of the ones that I use. Those are built in my domain provider and then, pointing to the funnel, which don't want to get into the weeds of DNS records and that type of stuff. But to improve it or to get the most out of it, you should have a domain as well. But you don't really need one for the pages to actually function. But building a quick page, I think tying it back to your flow with the buyers.
Rick Sheldon:You're well-known in the industry. You got the podcast. People come across you. You don't need to run ads. But what if you did just create a quick landing page, throw the form on it and run 10 bucks a day towards that page? Now you've got buyers coming in and you could use the automations and the pipelines to segment them and nurture them, and that's what it really comes down to is having a full flow. That's kind of what you miss out on. Back to one of your earlier questions if you don't have a good CRM, you would never be able to get to the point where you've got leads coming in, landing somewhere, filling out their information, which is segmenting them into your pipeline. You know that whole system comes together if you have a good, effective CRM.
Joseph Marohn:And that's gold information right there, man, I'd even I'd even think about the ads. You know, I got to definitely start adding that in, so good point on that. Now, if someone has been watching all this and they're hearing all the gems get dropped on this episode and they're still hesitant about getting a CRM, what would you say to them?
Rick Sheldon:Book a call, I'll show you how easy it could be to give it a try. You know we follow I love Alex Hermosi, so his whole value equation. I've built my offer focused around this. So we try to maximize the value and decrease the risk. So the perceived likelihood of achievement. We're going to show you what you're stepping into. So you've got a contact, you drop it in here and then you'll see the automations kick in. You'll see how that lead is going to be nurtured. So you're going to trust that it's going to work when you sign up.
Rick Sheldon:And then we're really trying to decrease the risk or the energy and stress that it takes to get started. So a couple of things. There is we have a three call onboarding process, whereas most people have maybe one. We have three call where we're really walking you through the system, getting you up to speed and showing you what's prebuilt for you. And if you still don't like it within 30 days then you get all of your money back. So we're just trying to offer a lot and reduce your risk of giving it a try. So if you're unsure then I'd say you can just try it risk-free or hop on a call with us and we'll show you how it works.
Joseph Marohn:Yeah, I like the hand-holding approach, man, because you can get anybody to sign up to the software, but if they don't know how to use it or they feel like they're not getting the most out of it, they're just going to leave the platform and they're going to go find something else. It or they feel like they're not getting the most out of it, they're just going to leave the platform and they're going to go find something else. Now, walking them through the process, holding their hand and, like you just said, so you guys actually created a school platform, right? So if people have questions, they can jump in there and there's people helping them out. And I believe you guys also have a Facebook group page as well, right?
Rick Sheldon:We do have a Facebook page. I think the most active learning environment would be. The platform has a button in it called REI Campfire. It's a learning environment where it's got, like a forum, some pre-recorded course material as well as an events calendar. So we have office hours and a couple of other random impromptu trainings about important topics. So we do multiple trainings per week live. We have the forum and the pre-recorded content as well, so that ARIA campfire is, you know, really good as far as you know getting all your questions answered once you're inside.
Joseph Marohn:Awesome. Now, Rick, where can listeners learn more about CRMs or OpenDISP outside of these sources, including tips and tools for optimizing them? Where can they learn more about those?
Rick Sheldon:Yep, that's really what I try to make my Instagram page. So if you follow me on Instagram, ricksheldon, underscore REI, that's what you would get. I do reels and posts and stories and things about CRMs, mostly so how to make sure that you're handling your leads properly that come into your system, how to create your bucketing system. So I approach my Instagram page as if you're not a member and I'm teaching people who are not members what they can do to set themselves up for success. If you do decide to work with us, you'll have a lot more resources and access to us, but the Instagram is a great way to get just general CRM, sales, entrepreneurship type of advice.
Joseph Marohn:Awesome. Now I know we cover majority of the basics of what a CRM is right, and you can go on and on about CRMs. There's just a lot to them. But from a beginner standpoint or intermediate standpoint, do you feel like we covered the majority of everything? Is there anything that you feel like we kind of left out, that you feel is important to address on this podcast?
Rick Sheldon:I don't know about left out, but I think we should emphasize again. Back to the KPIs. I mentioned the simplified KPI set that I would recommend we start with, which is how many offers, how many contracts, how many closings. The first one is offers. So I think this is the best leading indicator for a successful business. If you're not making enough offers, it doesn't matter how many leads you have, you're not going to get enough deals. So offers are a leading indicator for how many deals you're going to be doing in the next several months. So I think, focus on the number of offers you're making and have a well-defined script or process that gets you to the offer call and one that you use on the offer call. So this is your process call, where you're collecting the information, and your offer call, where you're giving the offer. If you can just optimize these couple of things and maximize how many you're doing on a weekly basis, then you're going to win.
Joseph Marohn:Awesome. Now, as far as OpenDISPA goes, let's say someone's very interested in signing up. You have two different business models, right? You have like a pay annual approach or you have a subscription-based monthly cost. Is that correct?
Rick Sheldon:Yep, we do so. The monthly is $297 or $497. Annual is $2,970 or $4,970. We'll talk about the options if you want to book a call, and you can grab a call at josephopendispocom and we'd love to just show you what we've got going on in there and show you why it's basically no brainer to get started.
Joseph Marohn:Awesome. I appreciate the link, man. You guys heard it there. If you guys are interested, I highly recommend OpenDISPO Something I'm I'm very true to this platform Like I will never. I get a lot of affiliates reaching out all the time. They want me to shout them on podcast or videos and I'm a firm believer man. I'm not going to feed you guys anything that I don't personally use. I use Open Dispo in my business and it's been an excellent source for me. So I highly recommend you guys look more into that and get started with it. So I appreciate the plug. There you go, joseph. What is it? Josephopendispocom? Absolutely, yep, perfect, awesome. Well, rick, absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. Brother. You're extremely knowledgeable in this space. You brought a ton of value to us all here today. I'm a huge fan of what you've done with Open Dispo and I'm truly honored to call you a friend. So thank you, bro.
Rick Sheldon:Thank you, thank you.
Joseph Marohn:You as well. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the next time we can hang out. Absolutely, uh, probably be squad up summit you going dallas? Yep, absolutely nice. Yeah, we'll link up over there. I'll have to get you a drink awesome well rick, I know you plugged in your instagram tag. Uh, if people want to get a hold of you outside of, you know, instagram, is there any other places? Or they want to learn more about open dispo, how do they get a hold of you?
Rick Sheldon:Yeah, I think really, instagram is the best, followed by josephopendispocom. That's going to take. It's going to link you to Joseph. You're going to get just as great of a deal as anybody always would, but we're going to link it to Joseph and give him a little bit of a snack for it. So make sure you use his link and when you go there there's a calendar right at the top. So you know, it comes back to the thing about such a low barrier to entry, meaning money back guarantee. If it doesn't, if you don't really love it, then you don't have to stick with it. So you know, I'd love for you guys to hop on a call, be willing to give it a try and, you know, just let me know of any feedback if you, if it doesn't work for you, but I'm sure that it will because it's got all these great elements that we've laid out here on this call.
Joseph Marohn:Awesome. Now, if you guys are finding value from this podcast, don't forget to show your boys some love. If you like what we're bringing you, don't forget to subscribe. It helps us continue providing value to others by reaching a broader audience. We're out here to serve, learn together and help as many people as possible. Make sure to also smash that like button and drop a comment down below telling us what CRM you're currently using. Appreciate all the continued support and, guys, stay tuned because we're pumping these episodes out every two weeks. I got some awesome topics and guests coming up next that will change the entire way you do business. You definitely don't want to miss out. Best believe I'm going to keep bringing you that fire. Thank you, Rick Peace. Thanks for watching.