WS1898 Use These Cold - Calling Techniques to Scale Your Business | Stash Gelezinski

In this episode , we had the pleasure of speaking with Stash Gelezinski, a partner at Nedl and a managing director at Capstone Apartment Partners. Stash brings over 15 years of experience in commercial real estate and shares his insights on how AI and machine learning can revolutionize the industry.

Stash's firm, Nedl, is at the forefront of data analytics in commercial real estate, helping clients optimize their portfolios and maximize returns. He discusses how his brokerage experience has shaped the development of Needle's platform, which aims to assist brokers and operators in identifying targeted property opportunities.

One of the highlights of our conversation was Stash's self-proclaimed superpower: cold calling. He believes that cold calling is an essential skill for anyone in the real estate business, whether they're brokers, operators, or involved in capital raising. Stash shared his approach to cold calling, emphasizing the importance of getting to the point quickly to respect the recipient's time.

Stash also provided valuable tips on how to become proficient at cold calling, including the use of scripts and flowcharts, the importance of repetition and learning from each call, and the necessity of being honest and not making things up on the fly.

We delved into the practical aspects of managing contacts and leads, with Stash recommending the use of a CRM over Excel sheets for better efficiency. He mentioned HubSpot as a user-friendly option and Salesforce for more complex needs. Additionally, Stash introduced us to RingDNA, a dialer tool that integrates with browsers and helps streamline the calling process.

Overall, this episode offered a wealth of knowledge for anyone looking to improve their cold calling skills and leverage technology to succeed in the competitive field of commercial real estate.

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Transcript

Stash Gelezinski: Mine is I like to get to the point pretty quickly cuz if somebody calls me and they're dancing around I'm like get to the point why are you why are you calling me cuz I need to figure out if this is worth my time or if I need to hang up on you and so I try and give that same courtesy to the people that I'm calling.

Whitney Sewell: This is your daily real estate syndication show. I'm your host, Whitney Sewell. Today, our guest is Stash Gelezinski He's a partner at Needle, a data analytics firm focused on bringing AI and machine learning to the commercial real estate industry. Helps clients optimize their portfolios and maximize their returns. He's got 15 plus years of experience in this. He's part of Capstone Apartment Partners, and he's a managing director there. But he uses that brokerage experience to build this platform called Needle. that's going to help a lot of us in the industry, especially brokers, but I think operators as well, especially eventually, to use that AI platform to narrow down that targeted list of properties that you're interested in. He's going to dive into actually a superpower today as a broker that could help all of us in this industry that you need to be good at, right? And there's some specific skills that are going to help you to do that. He's going to dive into that today. Stacks, welcome to the show. I'm looking forward to this conversation. You are an expert in so many areas of this business. I know you can help the listeners and myself today in so many ways, as we are, we're attempting to have run and operate successful commercial real estate businesses. And you have many skills that we need. And so let's, let's jump in, but welcome to the show. Thanks Whitney. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. Honored to have you on. Well, Sasha, you know, let's jump into, you know, some of the, you're a little bit of your background and, and we will, uh, jump into some of your superpowers as well, which we talked about. Uh, but maybe give the listeners a little bit of an overview of, you know, what you've been doing in commercial real estate.

Stash Gelezinski: Yeah, so my name is Stash Gelezinski I'm the managing director for Capstone Company's Cincinnati office. We've been with Capstone since 2016. And when I was in college, I made up my mind that I was going to make my my fortune and career in commercial real estate. And so I've made the career, haven't gotten the fortune yet, but I figured out that my mom was a residential agent and fortunately she passed when I was younger, but I saw the success that she had and I was like, well, real estate sales is a thing, but I didn't want to cart people around on the weekends in my minivan. So I decided to to get into commercial real estate brokerage. And it took me a little while to break in. It's kind of a, it's a tough business to, to get into, especially with no contacts, uh, no experience, but yeah, I figured it out. And, um, you know, here I am today, so to speak.

Whitney Sewell: Yeah. Well, no doubt. It's neat that your mother had success in real estate as an agent and you wanted to follow in that same path. And one thing you mentioned to me before we got started was your superpower was cold calling people. I don't know if anybody's ever said that when I've asked that question. I have almost 2,000 people now. I love that because it's such an important skill set in our industry, I feel like in almost any business, but especially in ours. If you are looking for clients of any kind, it's a great skill to have. So I wanted to jump into that a little bit because I feel like it's a piece that when people are trying to find deals or trying to find clients of any kind, it's a It's a skill that they need, but it takes so many reps to get there, right? And they're nervous and just don't do it. You know, so I wanted to dive in there, you know, and maybe I'll let you elaborate on, you know, why that skill set so important, maybe for one, but, and then maybe how you became so good at that.

Stash Gelezinski: I moved here to Cincinnati in, in 2011 and I had no contacts and no connections. So I had to just. pick up the phone and, and start, I like to say, I've met all my friends through cold calling, so to speak. And it is super important because it's so easy to get lost in spreadsheets and emails or what have you. Like I have at any given day, at least a hundred emails in my inbox and it, you can spend a lot of time in the inbox and it's not necessarily, you feel like maybe it's productive because you've gotten down to zero or what have you. But the best way if you're in sales, and as an acquisitions person, a principal, raising capital, a broker, insurance, financial advisor, whatever it is, it's just picking up the phone. and not being afraid to, I guess, make a mistake. I don't know. It takes a lot of reps. And when I'm doing it, my default MO when I'm in the office, especially if there's a pile of emails or other things I've got to get to, my default is I'm just going to get on the phone and start, I've got a bunch of different lists that I'm working through for different clients, whether it's calling on prospective buyers or calling on prospective sellers on behalf of a client, or you could say fishing for listings or hunting, or just making a market. You've got a given set of people that you've got to be in touch with. So, you know, the, the keys to being successful at cold calling is like, you want to, what I have found is you want to have like one list that you're just calling through and you want to work through that. And so for instance, for me, a list could be calling on prospective buyers of a listing. And those are the easiest calls you could make. Um, Because these are people that have usually logged in to our document vault. They've given us their information. By logging in, they're at least high-level interested in the deal. And you're calling them to see if they have any questions or any further interest in the opportunity. And so those are the easiest ones to make. The maybe next easiest would be, and the script is simple. It's a, Hey Whitney, this is stash with capstone calling today. Cause I see you logged into clear point gardens. Um, 150 units that we have here in Cincinnati. Just want to see if that's something that you're interested in pursuing further. And then you stop and then you let them talk. And that's when the kind of back and forth comes into play. And then you have to be prepared and know the deal. You can have the OM up on your screen. I have three screens. You can't see it, but I usually have my call widget here. I've got my browser here, and I've got my email here, and then I have my iPad here. I'm surrounded, so I have plenty of opportunities to have the information right up in front of me. So you don't have to have it all in your mind. And it's okay to be like, you know what, that's a great question. Let me figure that out. Or let me look that up for you. Or that's a great question. Let me get back to you. Because I think that the worst thing that you can do when you're on the phone prospecting is to like make something up. Because people have a good, generally, a good BS detector. And if they know you're lying, they're going to fish you out pretty quickly. So just having a good list or script. And I don't really have a script. I used to work off a script. I built like a flowchart when I first got started of you know, here's what you say. And that, that walked me through it. And it took mapping out the conversation to, I literally, it was, I had it pinned up on my, my cubicle at the time, but it was a flow chart of the conversation. So I could just trace it. And now it's just memory. Right.

Whitney Sewell: I love the determination there, right. Even writing out a script or flow chart, you know, if necessary, at least to get started. Right. I feel like getting the reps in it's important, right. To build some confidence. Uh, even if you're, uh, even if you're told no, right. Many, many times, which you will be, uh, you know, it's, it's just building the repetition. You're going to learn. I feel like from every call. Uh, right. You're going to improve hopefully most of the, most of them.

Stash Gelezinski: Yeah you should and you know what i found is you know everybody has their own style but mine is i like to get to the point pretty quickly because if somebody calls me and they're dancing around i'm like get to the point why are you why are you calling me because i need to figure out if this is worth my time or if i need to hang up on you. and so i try and give that same courtesy to the people that i'm calling and some people like a little bit more um you know friendly conversation you might say but others are like what do you want especially if you don't know them and you're blindly cold calling which you know if you're starting off in sales or in a new role chances are the people you're calling aren't going to know you and so they're going to want to know why you're calling and to get to the point pretty quickly. I feel like that does everybody a favor because you could, you could go through your whole pitch only to find them to say no. And so it's like, if you get to it pretty quickly, um, it does everybody a favor.

Whitney Sewell: Yeah. Yeah. It does them a favor in there. And then they may be even more willing to pick up the phone again later. Yeah.

Stash Gelezinski: I think so. Yeah, and the thing is, in a sales role, ideally, so if you're farming for listings, you've got a set of prospects. It could be property owners in a given geographic market, property owners of A given size or type but anyway you wanna be calling these people over and over again over the year so sometimes you wanna be calling them four times a year sometimes you wanna be calling twelve times a year just depends on how hot of a prospect you think that they are it's ok to move people in and out of those lists. based on the conversations and the feedback they gave you. Some people are always just mad and angry and it's like, well, I don't need to talk to that guy every week or every month.

Whitney Sewell: I love that you talked about, you know, you, I mean, you've got different lists that you're managing, right. And, you know, you're, you know, depending on the conversation, you're going to move them around. Right. You know, what lists, how do you manage that? Excel sheets, you have a specific CRM you use. I get that question all the time. So again, obviously we're calling investors often, right. We're raising money often and, and often it's just to stay in front of them, see how we can serve them. You know, if we're, if we don't have a raise, but we still want to call, right. We still are. trying to stay in touch and be in front of them but for you how do you manage that.

Stash Gelezinski: You know the question about we do have a CRM and we augment that with a number of different tools you know other data providers that we use needle being one of them. But the best CRM, I think you should be using a CRM and not working off of Excel sheets because Excel's built for financial models. It's not built for contact management. I think HubSpot is pretty good because it's, it's sticky and you can build workflows out of it. I think Salesforce is good if you're, uh, I think it's built more for, I don't know. We use it in our day to day, but I'm not in love with it. The best one that I ever used, it was called real hound, but it's, I think it, it may still be around. Um, but. They moved it from the cloud or it was Microsoft access-based and then they moved it to the cloud and a lot of the functionality changed. And I just think that they can.

Whitney Sewell: I've never heard of that one. That's, that's interesting. Yeah. Salesforce. I have nightmares about just so the listeners know, but, but, uh, uh, HubSpot we've used for a long time and it's been, it's just very intuitive for the whole team. And I like that a lot. Uh, you mentioned a, a call widget, uh, that you use. What, what is that?

Stash Gelezinski: So we use a dialer called RingDNA. I've heard some guys use like, it'll call five numbers at once. And then whoever picks up first, that contact will pull up in front of you. I'm not that sophisticated yet, I guess. But we use one called RingDNA. It's from a firm out of San Diego called Revenue.io, I think. or maybe they're out of L.A. and it's cool. It basically it will it plugs into your browser and it will recognize any phone number that pops up. So if you have if you're using Excel spreadsheets and you're using them through your your browser, Ring DNA will recognize that this is a phone number and you can click it and it will it will dial the number. If you're swimming in colder waters, so to speak, and you're trying to find the correct contact information, and you're just on the prospect's website, it will see the website there on the browser and it's got a distinguishing characteristic, like it's got a little icon next to the phone number and you can click that and it'll call them. And then you can add the contact or if the contact's already in there or the company's already in there, it will pull it up. in that widget, in that calling widget. And so that's a really handy thing. Instead of just pecking at your cell phone all day, that would be terrible.

Whitney Sewell: Thank you for being with us again today. I hope that you have learned a lot from the show. Don't forget to like and subscribe. I hope you're telling your friends about the Real Estate Syndication Show and how they can also build wealth in real estate. You can also go to lifebridgecapital.com and start investing today.