Are Your Words Costing You Listings? - Caleb Venneri

We talk with Caleb Venneri about why words, tone, and tempo create trust in real estate, and how agents can sharpen their delivery faster than traditional roleplay allows. Caleb shares how he and his brother built an Australian AI roleplay simulator to help teams practise objections on demand and get measurable feedback. 
• using simple, clear language to help clients understand and trust you 
• learning words through mentorship, repetition, and deliberate reps 
• why roleplay often fails: awkwardness, time pressure, inconsistent feedback 
• treating real estate like sport: training for performance, not highlights 
• how Rollio simulates listing and prospecting scenarios with Australian voices 
• measurable feedback on rapport, control, objection handling, goals, and tonality 
• privacy, on-demand practice, recordings, and gamified scoring for consistency 
• using short daily practice to become “match fit” for presentations 
I’m gonna put the link in the show notes 

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Transcript

Caleb’s Market Update And Leadership

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome back to the podcast We Are Selling. My name is Lee Woodward, your coach and host, and the author of the Complete Sales Person Course. Today's programme is brought to you by the Agency Portal, Australia's first listed to settled execution platform. This incredible digital platform allows us to use agency design, agency AML, the sale funding process, commission funder, agency supplier pay, and agency settlement. Agency settlement is the Pixar partner that allows the real estate digital transaction to exist. Let's get started with today's podcast. Joining us now on the program for the second time is Caleb Veney. Caleb, welcome aboard. Thank you for having me yet again, Elite. Yeah, your great story from last time. Effective business unit, Barry Plant, over a hundred deals a year. How's the marketplace going for you now?

SPEAKER_02 1:02

Yeah, look, been traveling uh quite well actually. So we'll do more than uh what we did last year. So it's always positive signs, despite uh many other people's takes or outlooks on the market, but uh really happy at the moment.

Why Words And Tone Create Trust

SPEAKER_00 1:14

And Caleb, just for our young agents out there who don't know your age, how old are you? Oh I've turned 26. 26 years of age, leading an effective business unit, which means you've had to learn leadership pretty quick. And when I use the word leadership, training others to do things, teaching. You and I have spent many times discussing words. And words are the most important module in real estate training, even for yourself, you know, getting that listing presentation, agenda right, the phone call, the tempo. What have you learned about words through your time? And then we'll discuss this very exciting project that you've been working on.

SPEAKER_02 1:55

Oh, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And um, the delivery of words is one thing, the tonality, how you can get a message across far more effectively, and just helping a range of different personalities, a range of different people understand the same message. But uh, the simpler it is, I believe they they find a bit more trust, they can understand you quicker. I I found that that has really helped me by way of presenting, especially in listings, of course, but also talking to buyers. But getting that message across and helping them understand it as well as possible, I feel generates this level of trust, if that makes sense.

The Limits Of Traditional Roleplay

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Yeah, very much so. And I remember we had the entire Barry Plant team come through the complete salesperson course privately. And one thing that really was a standout there is the use of fresh words, different words. And it wasn't that long ago that the only way you could learn words is if you could find a Caleb great and team up and role play every single morning, but that's not available for everyone. And people actually get their words a bit wrong in role play because they're looking at the other person in the eyes and they know them really well, they're feeling judged. When you were coming through the ranks, how did you learn words?

SPEAKER_02 3:03

Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, listening, and I was very fortunate to uh be partnered along Bill Carp, who's been in the game a very, very long time. So I managed to get 40 years of experience uh squished and squashed down into about four years when I was on side here. But role play was definitely a part of learning and growing, where we would go to training sessions on try and implement them. At the same time, naturally speaking, as you say, there's only so many hours in a day that you can actually spend with a senior agent trying to encourage them to role play with you. But uh again, a lot of it was just putting the practice in and doing the reps as a way of learning.

Building An AI Roleplay Simulator

SPEAKER_00 3:39

Now, Bill runs an amazing Barry Plant real estate business. I've seen him at training for the last 30 years, which is just incredible how these wonderful people in real estate play it down the line and seeing you come through the ranks and hearing where you were doing, you know, just amazing. And and I think playing it down the line is important. And I mean what I mean by that is I was taught by a great leader, and then I get to go out and teach thousands of people, and then somebody else is playing it down the line. But you took a very, very serious interest in this. Hence, I've got you on the program today. Tell me what you and your brother have been up to.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Absolutely, yeah. So we've created something that hopefully is going to help the real estate industry in general, but it's absolutely helped us, and we're rolling it out through Barry Plan offices as well. It is uh essentially a role play simulator. So we found, as I just mentioned earlier, how role play was so important in the early stages of your journey, progressing your learning, and more importantly, singing in reps. So real estate is a performance industry, it's like a sport. So you don't get better by just watching highlights, you get better by doing your reps. And what we found is there was quite a large gap, especially myself in um training uh my two team members. And I've had quite a few over the journey. So just finding a way to really speed up that training to get them ready to go in the lounge room rather than having their practice in front of a client. And the timing was probably the biggest thing that we came across. My way of role-playing is you know, a black belt needs to help a white belt rather than a white belt working with another white belt. So getting time with senior agents and also just taking it serious, asking the right questions, the awkwardness, a lot of the time role-playing with someone senior, it made them quite nervous or self-conscious as well. And also the progress wasn't measurable because you might do one in a month, you might do one in a week, and it's whenever they're free. So the feedback was also slightly consistent. Uh so my brother is a bit of a tech guru and we came up with roleo.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Roleo. So the and I was just thinking then, if we put pilots in the simulator, we should put agents in one just so they don't offend the actual community and lose business. So take us into the product, how does it work?

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Absolutely.

Feedback Scores Recording And Gamification

SPEAKER_02 5:53

So essentially what we've built is an AI role-play simulator where we have included all the objections or scenarios that we would like our agents to be able to handle extremely well and practice prior to going out in the real world, essentially. So we've got over 20 plus scenarios in the listing world. So you know, commission objection, age objection, market share objection. We have vendor difficulties, so adjusting price points and improving price points, pre-auction calls, uh obviously prospecting calls. All of these are built in with an AI who is Australian. So we have multiple voices, but it is Australian driven, Australian built. So it sounds extremely real. And more importantly, as you role play, it is dynamic. So it will go with your conversation, it's absolutely amazing. We've tied it in through all Australian training where this is really just for the rep. So it won't tell you what to say, it will just have a conversation as if you're speaking to someone else on the other phone. Their quality is unbelievable and the accent is absolutely perfect. And because it's learnt from Australian real estate, all the terms are perfect for role-playing and what we're learning in the industry. The most important part to this is once it's finished, it's measurable. So progress is measurable, but more importantly, it gives you feedback on the calls. It will break down every single thing that you said by way of the feedback. It will find out did the agent build rapport well? Did they maintain control of the conversation? Did they address the objection properly? Did they achieve the goal? How was the tonality? And it gives you a rating. So it would gamify that as well.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

That is just fantastic. And you've given me a demonstration of this, and it was like, wow. There's a lot of talk about AI, but not a lot of it is working as it should. If it lived up to the brochure, it would be amazing. But I I was really attracted to what you've done because you had a real reason to do this. And the best tech is when you need it yourself. And you've got all these salespeople coming through the business until we get them right with their words. But I absolutely love we're using AI to perfect the human performance versus the other way around. What's been some of the feedback from the team?

Where To Get Rollio And Closing

SPEAKER_02 8:00

I loved it just by way of the privacy and when they can practice on demand. So at any given time, if they're about to go into an appointment or they're about to go into an appraisal, they can practice it straight away. They can get their detailed feedback straight away and really take an understanding of how they sound because it does have the recording there for you to play and listen back as well. And it's just given them more opportunity to practice what they've learned. So quite simply, if they do one a day, five-minute call on any situation, just to stay fresh on those topics or objections, what we find is let's say over a week, there's five, and over a month you're talking upwards of 20 situations that you've put yourself in that you would not have been in otherwise unless you got the opportunity to go into a real appraisal. So it's just giving them the opportunity to accelerate their learning significantly quicker.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Yeah, I love this. I know myself when I was coming through the ranks, I assisted with the onboarding process of new agents coming in, and they'd all throw objections at me and I'd answer them, they'd take their notes down, which is all good. But I'd go out that afternoon to presentations and you're like so match fit. No one could you're ninja level because you've been warming up all morning. And it's amazing. If you can't explain it, you don't understand it. And in voice, everyone I ever record says to me, I can't stand the sound of my own voice. That's because you're not used to the sound of your own voice. So for everyone listening, it's not your voice, it's you listening to your voice is a technical issue that people don't understand because you're trying to hear it through your own ears. Whereas I hear my voice the same because I have to listen to it so often, and it's just that repetition of doing something. But with the feedback, I think that's given the prompter and it is neutral. No one can get angry at a system. You haven't had anyone headbutted or anything like that.

SPEAKER_02 9:45

Absolutely not. However, the rating system, once you get into that gamified world, of course, and you hit a certain score and you don't get there, you might get a bit frustrated. But we've made sure that the feedback is extremely detailed. And as I said, it's not telling you what to do because the absolute last thing we want to do is replace a trainer. It is purely to give you just ideas on those smaller things on how you could improve or clarify that message to make sure that we're still going to get the excellent training from people like yourself. And then, as you mentioned, is putting the practice in, putting the reps in to make sure you're really clear and confident with what you've learned.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

And Caleb, is it a platform or is it an app? What is it and where do you get hold of it?

SPEAKER_02 10:24

Absolutely. So it is a platform, so it's rollio.com.au on the internet, of course. We suggest using it on your laptop because what we do is we've set our team up where they may be in your office, throw in their AirPods, throw in a laptop. It's a really user-friendly interface there. So very easy to go through. You can sign up at any given time with whatever package you choose to do. Uh and of course, from there, it's just quite straightforward on how you follow through, you have levels, you have ranking systems, we create offices and teams within them. So from the manager's perspective, there was a lot of detail uh that we have included on the platform. We've just included your, as I think I might just mention there, the challenge system where you can do one and challenge a colleague to do the same situation. So we've tried to make role play as as clean and simple as it may be, as fun as it can be, also at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

So Caleb, you're brewing at words, but you've done a lot of study on it, but you've also had to you put thousands of hours into this thing to when I say thousands of hours, you've had to get this right for your own people. And how did your brother get involved? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

So I more or less had this idea because it was a problem that uh we were facing that needed to be fixed. And my brother is a tech guru, so that just happened to go tech hand in hand.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

Check and technique. Absolutely. And we're able to put it together perfectly. Absolutely. So he developed it.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Yeah, that it's so good. And I know people have spoken about these things for video, but it seems to me a lot of people are trying to not be in front of the camera and you can clone your face, type the words, and it does it. Yeah, wouldn't advise that. Learn to speak in front of the camera. And what you've built here is learn to speak better. Know you're pausing. That one word makes such a difference, and I love words, and hence the recording and podcasting worlds of interest. But you you listen to someone with the right tone and tonality. Uh John McGrath's voice from The Real Estate Hot Topics Recordings is some of the best recordings ever in this country because of his tone and tonality. And I think some people do rush things, which means the owners even sometimes like thinking, I like you, just slow down a second and let's hold this together because we can get edgy and that tempo is so important.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Oh, absolutely, especially in in high stakes situation, in a listing presentation, even when we're creating this, uh, my my dad actually is a real estate agent, funny enough, for Barry Plant as well. When I had him trialling it, and uh he's been in the industry over 20 years. And when I put him in front of this system, we're asked the objection for the jump straight to it, you know, for example, commission. And when we put him in, he didn't realise himself how many ums and ahs and how many unnecessary pauses he had to think. So when you're really confronted with it, it's great to know and quickly learn, okay, well, here we go. I've got a I've got quite an improvement that is able to be made when I thought I was at the top of my game. So as I said, even for me, as we were perfecting it, it's dramatically helped me just really acknowledge where I can get better.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

Now, your dad didn't swear in Italian at the uh at the platform, did he? He was all learning.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

At some point he may have interest, but definitely not now.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Now, Caleb, I was watching uh a video reel the other day, you on the Big Barry Plant Kickstart on the big stage. So it's actually assisted you yourself to feel comfortable in public speaking.

SPEAKER_02 13:42

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. It's really helped to round off absolutely everything from, as you said, using words and how I speak or the tone or the pauses, but also just being really confident in those situations, quite importantly.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

Very good. Well, I'm gonna put the link in the show notes. Congratulations on fixing that challenge. And words is always something I want to hear about. And actually, Caleb, at the end of the year, we've got the complete public speaking course on in Sydney. Would love to see you at that, as we've got many different people coming in from trainers, leaders, and again, it's about words, communication, and clarity. But congratulations on the platform and thank you for joining us on We Are Selling.

SPEAKER_02 14:22

Sounds amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.