Lessons from 10,000+ Cold Calls

All right, welcome back to another episode of CRE – The Unspoken Truth. I am Charlie Coppola and we got a very special guest today, our very own Brock Baker. Welcome, Brock. You are filling in for Craig and on a very exciting topic today. One, you know, like very, very near and dear.

You have made how many? I mean, the topic is this: takeaways from X amount of cold calls, X thousand, you know, of cold calls. How many, what’s the number? How many cold calls have you made?

Yeah. So I did a post last year, over 10,000. I mean, that’s since thousands blown that out of the water. And so yeah, been with the company for some time and I think it’s fitting, Charlie. I want to say thanks for having me on today. I think I’m your third guest, for the people that know the culture at OneSource. BB3 is one of my nicknames, so it only feels right. Excited to dive into it today.

BB3. I love it. So, okay, you did a post on this. Is that the one that, like, blew up? We kind of were laughing all last year. Every now and then this post, I think it’s this one that you’re talking about, would go viral. And you have, like, so many, like hundreds of thousands of impressions on that post, and like every month or two it’d go reviral again. Is that the post we’re talking about?

Yeah, that’s the post. And I would get comments, like every couple of weeks something would go by. I had the Inter Miami, I’m a huge soccer fan, the Inter Miami sales associate, the guy that leads that organization, reach out to me: “Brock, I need to know your script. These stats are insane.” So it was just kind of this thing that rippled across the year. And it’s kind of a cool story because it’s what I’ve been living, right, every day for the last four years almost. And to see what that’s turned into is pretty cool.

There’s a reason this is our topic today, is because you are uniquely qualified to talk about it. So that’s probably pretty cool for you, to have people reaching out asking you about it. But early plug in the episode here: go check out Brock’s post. You’ll see the one that went viral. I don’t know if it’s pinned on your LinkedIn profile, but it should be. If it’s not, follow Brock. Has great content on LinkedIn and, who knows, maybe you’ll have another viral post this year. So that was a fun one.

So, okay, 10,000 cold calls, now it’s more. Yeah. What have you learned? Like, I’ve gotten to watch you do it and, you know, you’ve approached it really professionally. Yeah. But, you know, you started in college making these calls. Now, obviously, you’re a few years out of college. What would you say you’ve learned from doing the reps?

Ground zero, right? So when we started making cold calls, I was the first intern hired at the company. And so I remember walking in, it was the wild west. It was the frontier. And so to watch us as a company take this and actually build this almost system of cold calling, culture that’s surrounded by it. I sat down, and as I was getting ready for this call, I thought, like, what were three things that really stuck with me across that time?

And I’ve been blessed to sit under you, and obviously Craig, who’s made a career off of cold calling, to sit there every day and listen to him. One of the things that he really drove into me early on was, “I don’t need you to think about individual calls. I need you to think about relationships.” And that really stood with me, because when I started walking into the office I would be thinking about, this person might say yes, they might say no, but I’m going to make this an enjoyable experience. That took a lot of the pressure off right away.

And so I try and teach our guys all the time. I saw this quote and I’ve really been trying to ingrain it into our team, our culture. Relationships are like a Crock-Pot. In this day and age, we’re, like, always looking for the microwave. Turn it on. Let’s let it be quick hit. I want the meeting right now. But when you change that horizon, you start thinking about the relationship. Your cold call comes off a lot different.

It’s good. And I’ve gotten, you, like, I know you well. You live this. I mean, you from day one, you’ve been about the relationship, and you’ve really taken Craig’s teachings, if you will, on relationships to heart. Yeah. You know, when Brock was in school as an intern, he would handwrite thank-you cards without us even coaching him. Like, that was something you naturally did well.

And, you know, for those of us, you know, those of you who have been listening to this for a while and following Craig’s content, you know, he preaches and teaches relationship building. And, you know, we could link it, I’m sure, to this post, but there’s a lot of content we’ve done out there on relationship driven, you know, building relationships, how to build relationships, why it’s so valuable. And so that’s a great one to start with, because it is part of our culture. It’s part of Craig’s, you know, career, something we teach often, and you’ve lived from day one.

And then the other one that I would add to it, Charlie: we had a guy step into the office for the first time, interviewing with our company, and I sat down with him and I showed that post that you’re referencing, and you watch my numbers change over time. The biggest, I would look back and say, one of the cheat codes for me is I fell in love with the process. Because you watch, early on my numbers weren’t fantastic, right? We were learning. There was a lot that I had to develop and grow in, but I fell in love with the process of getting better and better every rep.

And you look at what happens. The growth is exponential. The numbers that I started getting were exponential. Not because I was obsessed with one call and would get swayed by how good that one went or how bad it went, but I started to love the process, and that really helped me continue to grow. And I’m still growing. I’m still making cold calls.

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s been fun. You mentioned it too, watching our company, you know, build our own processes and systems and culture around this. Yeah. We’ve really upped our level, to where you and Sam early on, you guys were carving the path, and now we have this infrastructure in place for the guys who come in now. And people are able to learn the skill, get good numbers, all of that really quickly, because we’ve figured out that process. So yeah.

Yeah, it’s fun. 10,000 cold calls. Throw the plus on there, too. 10,000 plus, whatever. 12,000, 20,000, I don’t know what it is. There. Is there one or two that stick out? Whether it’s a funny one, a good one, a bad one, anything that, like, first thing comes to mind. “Man, that was a unique call there.”

I’ll share two that I think will resonate with, like, even brokers that are listening to this, that they’re on the phones, are making calls. I’ll never forget, the first year we were making cold calls, we were hand dialing. These technologies changed, systems. We’ve improved all of that. But early on we were picking up the phone and calling people, and there was a particular brokerage, this managing broker at a brokerage, that we were calling all of his brokers trying to get in front of him, and they would all say the same thing: “You need to go call this guy.”

And so we’re hearing this all the time. We’re calling him, never picking up the phone. We’re emailing him, never responding to emails. And it got to this point, Charlie, we thought he was a made-up. We thought this was this persona that they created to divert cold callers. Probably six months of just, every time I needed a little bit of courage to just get back into dialing, I’d go call that guy. Because I didn’t know if he was going to pick up or not, but it was me proving to myself that I would go dial.

Six months into it: “Hello.” And I’m like, he’s real. This is a real guy. I end up going through the whole pitch. I schedule a demo with him. And it was like a really cool story to just think, I don’t even know if this guy’s real, but I’m going to just keep calling him. One day he picks up the phone and he got to demo the product, and it was a pretty cool story.

Yeah, I remember that. What was his name? Do you remember? It was Chris Winters. The legend of Chris Winters. He’s out on the East Coast. Yeah. Chris Winters, if you’re listening to this. Yeah. Like, you have become a legend in our office, because for years, you know, at least months, we were calling. And we did get to the point we thought you were some cardboard cutout in the side of the office that everyone was directing, you know, cold callers to, which is funny.

And then the other one I would share. I think early on cold calling, like, this relationship mindset: when you get people telling you, “Hey, I’m busy. I’m doing these things. I’m traveling,” that’s like a gold nugget. Latch on to that, share, like, that little moment with them, and then understand when you go back to them, it’s going to be a much warmer call. So I carried that mindset. I was talking to a broker, they’re in Europe. My mind goes right to, okay, “Hey, you have a great rest of your trip, man. I’d love to hear about it when you get back.” “It’s a funeral, man.” And it was like the one time you never say, “Hey, have a great trip.” You’re like, okay, that learning right there. But it was pretty funny in the moment.

Yeah. It’s like I always say, if you’re out there enough, if you’re calling enough people, if you’re meeting with enough people, like, you’re going to see it all. You’re going to see awkward stuff, you’re going to see sad stuff, you’re going to see happy and exciting stuff, funny stuff. So, you know, that’s, it happens. So yeah, man. The legend of Chris Winters. And then, yeah, the, what’s that? We call that one, like, the European funeral or something. The European funeral. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. You talked, these are mindset. Any other, like, tangible systems? You said you were hand dialing before. I’ve seen our infrastructure grow. We have lists. What else? What else do you feel like is a best practice, if I’m a broker and I’m like, how do I just make it easier? How do I build some infrastructure for myself to be cold calling more regularly?

If you know me, I’ll take any chance I can get to hype up James Clear, and I love his books. If you’re not on his newsletter, you absolutely should. The 3-2-1 newsletter. But he has this famous quote: “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” And so when I think about, even, like, specific to cold calling systems, I break it into two buckets. I look at the operational systems, like what you mentioned: the dialer, the way that we set up tasks to follow up with people more effectively, our headsets, right? Like, we’ve built scripts so that when we have somebody come into the office, we can help make them great by training them up, handing them scripts. So we’ve got this operational systems.

The other part of that is the culture. The, you, Craig, now me, Sam, as we’re stepping into this and growing the team, we’ve done a fantastic job building a system of culture that helps support our demos. Non-negotiable. We’re going to hit 50 meetings every week. We’re going to hit that as a team. We’re going to get to. So I don’t go eat my lunch until I’ve gone and made two cold calls. That’s a way that I keep myself accountable. It’s a system that I built.

Regimes. We track. We call these regimes. It’s kind of this ridiculous idea that we track the first person that schedules a meeting any given day. So it’s kind of creating this system around, hey, we’re going to get into the office and we’re going to get after it, and we want to be the first to go. And that over time really makes a difference. So I would, the systems, right? It’s the operational, and then it’s also the culture.

The culture. The regimes have been such a fun addition, I feel like. And I can’t tell you how much I love, like, I’ll walk into the office 7:58 a.m., four guys are calling and they’re competing, and, like, we’ve got it on the whiteboard, like, who won today. And, like, we have fun with it. And we call it, you know, every month or so we have a new regime is what we call, and we see who wins that month. And so it just is a way, like you said, to get after it first thing in the morning.

And, you know, the truth is, right, like, our company, right, every day matters. And that’s true for brokers, too. Every day matters. Every hour matters. Like, you know, go make the most of it. And, you know, getting in and dialing at 8 a.m. and having the people next to you do it is a total motivating, because you’re not going to feel like dialing every day. You’re not going to feel like you’ve got all this energy, but when three or four people next to you are, it’s a lot easier to bring the energy. You know, it’s fun.

Okay. Is there a relationship? Right, you preach relationships at the beginning of this. Craig preaches relationships. Is there a relationship that started with a cold call that turned into something much bigger, that comes to mind?

Yeah, I would have two stories I’d share on this one. On the professional side, there’s a broker out of, I’m originally from the Midwest, Wichita, Kansas. Probably 10% of the people that are going to listen to this will even know where that is. But I grew up in Wichita, and I cold called a broker very early into my time at OneSource who was doing commercial real estate deals. But I just saw on a whim she was actually running for councilwoman of the county that I used to live in growing up. And I’m like, I’m going to just go cold call this person.

Fast forward three years in the future, she won councilwoman. So she’s crushing it on that side of things. She started her own brokerage, and we’re now working with her, implementing OneSource into her business as she’s growing her brokerage business. And so it started with a cold call, and then it started with follow-up, checking in. “Hey, congrats. I saw you won that election. I saw that you started your own brokerage.” And when the timing was right, we built the relationship to know, yeah, Brock is serious about this and he believes in what he’s doing, and I think he can help me.

That’s a great one, and I’ll add, because you won’t say this, a little brag for yourself: that’s one of your bigger deals that you’ve closed, right? And it started small, and it may have even started, I don’t know the full story of the deal, but yeah. Started with a call and a three-year relationship, and then it’s turned into, over time, a bigger deal, which is fantastic, you know.

And then the other one I’d add on to that. We have a lot of college students that will step in, people that are making dials for the first time, and a story that I’ll often share: cold calling is so much bigger than just, like, your nine-to-five showing up in the office. I think back, I was involved in a soccer ministry at my time in college. And so we were putting on soccer clinics, sharing the gospel with these students throughout the week. And we were working in Phoenix, Arizona, in kind of a neighborhood where they didn’t have access to a lot of resources.

And so at the time, I’m making cold calls all the time. My logical mind goes to, well, why don’t I just go try and call and see if we can make that happen? So we didn’t have the resources to go pay for cleats and equipment for these kids. But I just started cold calling all of the soccer shops in the Valley and saying, “Hey, this is what I’m trying to do.” None of them were really doing anything, but I got intro’d to this organization. It’s a mother and a son that run it together, and they supply equipment. So we were able to get cleats and all this stuff for the kids. And it was a really cool thing where, yeah, I’m building this skill set of cold calling, but it’s helping me in every part of my life, which was really a pretty cool reflection for me, too.

Yeah, it’s a great story, because, you know, it is, and we say this too. Not just about making calls and hitting your numbers, blah blah blah. It’s about so much more. And I love teaching guys to call because you get, you know, immediate feedback. You got to improve every day. You get reps and feedback from the market. You test your commitment. You get hung up on. You get told no. Yeah. You can build great relationships if you have the long-term perspective.

So it’s such a, you know, you know, if you use it this way, it can be a great metaphor for so many other great lessons in business and in life. And, you know, that’s a great one right there. Using the skill to go actually make a real impact for other, you know, kids and people on the soccer side, or on that organization, which is great. Yeah.

Okay, 10,000 plus cold calls, right? Got to add the plus. It’s an amazing number, great achievement, viral post, blah blah blah. What’s next? I mean, is there another number? Is it 20,000, or is it a different area of the company, or a different area of your, you know, personal skill set that you’re aiming for? Is there another big number that you’re aiming for?

That’s the beauty of OneSource. What we do matters. And so, like, that journey is being unraveled. I look back and I look at that number and, without you saying it, cold calling is a foundational skill. So it has been the launching pad that I’ve used into all the other things that I’ve done at our company. Now closing accounts, helping onboard new clients, as I’m training up new callers at our company.

And so, two ways that I’m, like, even if I just look at the next 18 months at this company, where am I really excited to kind of launch pad into? We’ve launched an enterprise product. We’re now selling back offices to brokerages. And I’m, like, sitting here thinking about, as we roll into this year, that’s deeper relationships. It’s larger deals, and it’s a new strategic skill set. I think it’s going to grow me a lot. So I’m really excited for that kind of shift, that iteration that I’ll be doing at the company.

And then you and Craig have done a really good job of really pushing the company to also grow. So I get excited about the things that I’m doing, helping train up our next generation as well. I want somebody else posting 10,000 cold calls, and I want to help them get there faster and better. And so I’m sitting here thinking about how do I put my arm around other people and help them get there faster, because I’ve done the reps, right? I’ve made the calls, and if I can help somebody get there that much faster. That’s another place that I’m really excited to grow in.

Cool. Training next generation, growing your sales skill set on the enterprise side, and leaning into the relationships, like you said, right? Like longer term, bigger relationships, make them win-win. The other one we talked to at the beginning, and I don’t know if you have a number on this: your LinkedIn. I know you’re putting more effort into that. Do you have a number that you’re aiming for? Posts, impressions, any of that, or is it just be consistent, or what?

The impressions will come. I want to hit 50. I fell three short last year. I want to hit 50 posts this year. Yeah, I believe in you. 47, man. I know. Right there. Right. Right there.

And it’s just forcing me to think a lot more. It’s fun. It’s like, I have brokers that I communicate with and we’ve built real relationships just by being on LinkedIn. Like, I’m going to shoot him a note and say, “Dude, I saw you close that deal. Congrats.” And he’s going to ask, “How are your wife doing?” Like, it’s another place that I’ve seen an opportunity to build. We could talk about Crock-Pot relationships. Go build those Crock-Pot relationships.

Yeah. Well, Brock, congratulations on the 10,000 plus calls and all the learnings. You know, of course, I say this all the time about our company, right? The numbers are the numbers. They’re great. We’re proud of them. But there’s so much more. You know, there’s emotion, there’s failures, there’s major successes in the numbers. And so, you know, you obviously know those. You shared some of them with us today.

I’ve gotten to watch you go through this journey and learn and grow as a person. And so I’ve gotten to experience a lot of that with it. The numbers are the numbers, and it’s something to be proud of, but there’s a lot of learnings, a lot of growth along the way. And yeah, I personally am excited for you to hit your 50 this year. I know you’ll get it, you know, and grow in these other areas: training the next generation, diving into the relationship side, enterprise sales stuff, and beyond. You know, the world is your oyster, I guess, is what I would say. And I know you’re on the right path here. So, any final words or final message? Anything you want to add before we wrap up here?

I would just encourage, right? It’s like, you got Camelback Mountain behind me. That’s a weird view for a Kansas kid. Cold calling is just like that. So stay on the climb, enjoy the highs and lows, and just enjoy the journey that you’re on. Thanks so much for the time today, Charlie. I love it. Thanks, Brock. Bye.