March 20, 2025 • 41 mins
For years, conventional wisdom has said that outbound sales works in B2B but not B2C. The reason? Email. In business sales, you can source and validate work emails. In consumer sales, personal emails are difficult to find and even harder to verify, often leading to spam filters.
Brandon Healy, VP of Sales & Growth at Hemlane, took on this challenge head-on.
Highlights include: How and Why B2C Cold Outbound? (04:15), The Biggest Driver to Cut CAC in Half (07:08), Data Sources for B2C Outbound (10:56), Crushing Dials and Closing Deals (16:58), And more…
Stay updated with our podcast and the latest insights in Outbound Sales and Go-to-Market Strategies!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Oh man. I wrote the note to myself, Brent, Brandon has the smallest CAC you'll ever see as the sub, as the title. I'm like, you can't say that out loud. What kind of barbarian are you? Brandon Healey (00:00):
You just you just see Brandon be like, it's true. Super true. Ugh. Can you imagine? Collin Stewart
podcast. This is going to be strange. It's going to be informative. It's going to be fun. Brandon, welcome to the show, man. Brandon Healey (01:00):
Hey man, it's great to be here. Long time reader, long time listener, first time caller. So very excited. Collin Stewart
(02:00):
different incentive structures. Now we're sourcing about 10 percent of our monthly closed revenue from cold outbound which has been wild and just cold calling. Not what we're not doing, cold calling 2. 0 with outbound emails, because, as emails in B2C are notoriously impossible to get and incredibly challenging to validate. So we've been able to find phone number sources that have been excellent. And that's been that's been a bit of the secret sauce.It's been a process. I've led B2B teams running cold outbound teams there. It is much easier. It is much easier. And sometimes I, I'm like, oof that would be the dream. But. Collin Stewart: I'm with you, man. The, I would say B2C emails have gotten a lot easier to get in the last couple of years, especially with tools like clay and things coming out. But , I've always emailing in a B2B context. And so it's never made sense for me to say, Hey, let's go
email these personal emails. Usually it's not going to go well, but I think maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I guess maybe if you're going pure B2C and you've got somebody's Gmail, that might be pretty valuable. Totally. Brandon Healey (03:00):
And for us, Hemlane's a rental property management company where we rent, we manage nearly 30, 000 units across the United States. so everybody who uses our software is using a personal account. maybe they're a property investor who has a corporation. And they may have a corporate gmail or something like that, but we see a lot of, hockey star 2623 at gmail. com that I can't share my Collin Stewart
iterations of their own Gmails that are actually legitimate and it's super exhausting to manage, but but that, that email piece is actually incredibly challenging for us for sure. Collin Stewart (04:00):
I bet. Yeah. So I want to get into how B2C and why, because it still doesn't quite make sense to me. I want to start with an interesting stat you shared, which was you you started with free, right? You started, this was a freemium product. How did that go? Brandon Healey
(05:00):
massive market where, it's a massive amount of the United States that, that rents properties. I think that, our addressable market's about 40 million units, in the United States. and so competing at that scale with some of these massive platforms is how can you reduce the barrier to entry to be able to get people in? And so when I initially got started here this last summer, a lot of our marketing, a lot of our, a lot of our revenue engine and everything was like wide open,trying to attract this massive amount of audience at scale, trying to be able to primarily focus towards. Free free. Let's get in here, use the software for free, place a tenant for free, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, yeah, and over the last six, eight months, it's been a big shift working to iterate and create a lot more efficiencies out of that and back towards a bit more of a traditional SAS model. Collin Stewart: And part of this, you dramatically reduced your cost to
acquire a customer. Yeah. Brandon Healey (06:00):
so when I get started, our CAC was something like 26, 2700, bucks, to acquire a customer. And, wind forward now through a lot of pain. Reshaping our messaging towards our premium paid features are clear, unique differentiators in the market and, also just, really honing on who is it that we're trying to serve and who would we try to attract 1000 of and just boom, laser focused on that ICP, we've dropped our CAC down to about 1300. So about 50 percent drop Which is huge., and, we've also, actually, believe it or not, our actual lead flow, because we're not trying to attract this massive top of funnel free, has dropped, from, something like 300 account signups per week. To roughly a hundred Collin Stewart
of a third, the work and that efficiency improvement has been huge. And then meanwhile, building this cold outbound team alongside. Collin Stewart (07:00):
Before we get to specifically the outbound, what do you think was the biggest driver of getting that cost down? Brandon Healey
(08:00):
similar ratio rate closing behind it of qualified customers. What it means is that your messaging that you're pushing at scale is not ready to scale. So you do not have message market fit with those pieces. And so this became very clear. I joined in July. There was some massive marketing campaigns that had started, April, May, June into July. And I took a look at it. I was like, Okay., yeah, we got a lot of leads, but this is a lot of smoke. No fire likethis. We are not closing anything. This is garbage. This is people with low buyer intent, people with low willingness to pay people who are interested in a free product because it's a free product., this is not sustainable in any meaningful way. And so as a result, I pump up our CEO's tires quite regularly, Dana Dunford. She is just, very willing to listen to sharp analysis and be, Hey, this is what the data says. We need to stop this now. And we just shut the
ad spend off. We just rethought it out, rewrote all of our marketing campaigns, rewrote all of our ads, changed our targeting, remapped it to our highest paid customers, you name it. And then just started feeding it back into the engine. And slowly creeping it up and doing, you're doing thorough iterative testing. And as a result, all of a sudden it was like, Hey, all the leads are good. What's going on? Collin Stewart (09:00):
Wow. When you attract your best customers, everything's easier. Brandon Healey: Isn't that amazing? Wow. And, I think that especially in the B2C play, because the competition is huge and the platform movement is so massive in terms of the competitors. If you think about like a company like Zillow. That we, regularly have to rub shoulders with. They don't do any of the actual property management that we do., but, the scale of some of these unicorn size companies, and if you're the, the up and comer, whoo, you gotta, you better have your message at one point. Anyhow, that, that was,
I'd say that'd be a quick review of what is it that we did? It's like we rethought and rewrote everything and things have gotten. I shouldn't say immeasurably better. Yeah. Collin Stewart (10:00):
And then you're like, you know what? I want you to cut all the ads. We're going to redo everything. And then we're going to do outbound for B2C and your founder went, you're gonna do what? Brandon Healey
property owner info, in some unique ways and. Now we've actually just really enhanced our data sources so that, we've just got some very compelling data and very compelling messaging that is working, which is, which has been, really incredible to start seeing, especially as we stepped into the fall and into the winter here, Collin Stewart (11:00):
I imagine some of those are. Data sources we can talk about, and some of those are data sources we can't talk about. Brandon Healey
(12:00):
and what we find, especially because we're targeting people who are property owners, and ideally we're trying to find people who are, running their own rental properties and managing them themselves. What we can rely on is things like public record of who owns this property, what is their contact information? Can we enrich that? And then we're also looking at very large data models to compare the entire United States property ownership. Database to be able to say, how manyproperties does this person own? Collin Stewart: Okay, so a small amount of data, Brandon Healey: just a small amount of data. Collin Stewart: It Brandon Healey: works really good if you can figure that out. There is, there are data providers out there that are able to actually start querying at that scale to be able to say who owns six properties or more. Or who owns four properties or more and things like that. And that's an interesting data point. Now, the second side of it,
(13:00):
which is part of what I can't quite talk about some of the trigger points. So at Hemline, we help people who own rental properties find better tenants quickly. we help them automate their rental property tasks and, thirdly, we help them with 24 7 repair coordination and service teams. Okay? So those are our three big value props. So as a result, our pain points that we need to find need to align with one of those. One, are they currently struggling to find atenant? Two, are they currently struggling to manage and maintain their property? And three, are they currently having, damage or active problems at their property or maybe evictions? Things like that are actually reportable in databases and things like that too. And yeah, you wouldn't think so. And so What we've tried is we've tried not only using this large data to be able to ask big questions to be able to say who owns the rental properties in the United
States, Collin Stewart (14:00):
but Brandon Healey
our average pass in terms of how many times do we call a number before we move on is only 1. 2. So we move through leads very fast. and in B2B, you'd hit it four to six times or something you've got multi channel, your emails, automated texts, whatever it is that you want. We're not doing that. We're just moving super fast through leads. Collin Stewart (15:00):
Interesting. Okay. So I feel like everybody who's listening is get them to tell you the secret sauce. But I know we talked about, he can't tell me the secret sauce. But my brain, I can't stop looking at playbook and secrets or data source and secret sauce and going Oh, how can I drug him and get this good information out of him? Because obviously if you could only ever email or call somebody who's in pain. That'd be incredible. This is like minority report level stuff. Brandon Healey
(16:00):
associated with data that, that are easier or harder. And if you're trying to be able to connect with that North star metric, I would say that there are unscalable ways to access that data. Yeah. And then. There is hopefully a scalable way, but the scalable is a lot of iteration to be able to get there. But I will say, even the ways that we access our data is fragile. So we're constantly looking for new models. We're constantly looking for new sources and developing newpartnerships and things like that for more conventional access to lists. So, we don't just we didn't just hit a home run on this one model and oh, thank God this is it. We are constantly trying new lists and and we have to because what if the way that we're doing it breaks, and it has broken. It has broken. We've had to switch lists. We've had to switch sources and things like that. So it's very challenging. Yeah. Very challenging. Collin Stewart: Totally. Yep. Let's get
into the playbook, I wrote a couple of notes to follow up with you afterwards. but I'd love to understand it. It sounds like it's a very call heavy playbook. So are they sending any emails or is it just folks crushing dials? Brandon Healey (17:00):
Literally we are just crushing dials. That's all that it is. And we've. Iterated or approach and our messaging to try to be able to again, differentiate ourselves from the conventional options that are out there. It's to an extent now, after a while of digging into it, it's fairly simple. The people that we reach out to with property with properties that they own and rent, they're really doing I'd say one of three things. One, they've got a traditional property manager in which there's barriers to get them to get out of a contract and agreement, things like that. Two, they may be using a competitor of ours, another software, Zillow, Avail, they're using Buildium, something like that. Some of these really big products or
(18:00):
three, they're just self managing it and doing it on their own. They got Excel spreadsheets and that's all they're doing. And depending on the source, we actually have to change our approach just very quickly to be able to be like, how is it that we actually win on each of these? I know that we haven't talked about tech stack or anything like that yet, but we transitioned into Nooks Nooks. ai here this October. It's wicked. We have just loved working through Nooks. We saw our connectionrates double just by switching tools. And so What were you using before? Collin Stewart: Where did you switch from? Brandon Healey: We were using a tool called Flash Intel. Collin Stewart: Okay, Brandon Healey: not my call. It is not a tool that I would recommend. They're fine, but their ability to to really rotate in clean, non spammy numbers to regularly just connect and have that bridge time down to sub one second. It was just not a thing. They had two second, two and a half second
bridge time. It was disgusting. Collin Stewart (19:00):
I've used a ton of these tools and I won't out them here, but man, like a one and a half second bridge time is awful and it's useless. I, and I've talked to folks and they're like no. Ours is sub one second. I'm like, all right, let's go listen to some of my calls. Yeah. Here's four seconds. Here's two seconds. Brandon Healey
know any. Parallel dialer or power parallel dialer that like nooks is connecting folks that quickly. There's all these companies that say they are, but when you actually look at your recordings, they're not. Brandon Healey (20:00):
So this was one of the wild differences in terms of our stats. On our previous dialer, we were connecting at about 7 percent connect rate. Sometimes we would get up to nine. When we started with Nooks and our first our first month with them, our connect rate jumped to 20%. What yeah, and now Get this there were weeks where we saw it get over 30. It was disgusting our team I'm going to getting they weren't getting off the phone. They like we were talking one in three connector. It was unbelievable So we saw this incredible spike in terms of connect rates from like late October into the beginning of December and then when Christmas came around And
then when the new year came around, we actually just saw our connection rates just overall, just dropped down a notch. Collin Stewart (21:00):
And Brandon Healey
there with five or 10 phones in front of you. So if your connect rates 30 percent and you're dialing three lines, you're getting a pickup three, four lines. You'd get to pick up instantaneously. Yes. So did you have to scale down the number of lines? Oh Brandon Healey (22:00):
yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. We had a period of time where we were using our parallel dialer one call at a time. Collin Stewart
(23:00):
dialers. My previous company, our cold call teams we actually just ran off of close and close the CRM is just so phenomenal for sales and outbound and their connection their dialer through Twilio is like great. Like it's really great. So we were able to, especially on the inbound or kind of the semi cold leads, we actually were able to find that to be super effective. And we ran it there previously, but now we do need way more volume because we are just moving through these lists again.We're just almost barely calling anybody a second time. Collin Stewart: I'm almost afraid to ask. But how many dials a day are these monsters hitting? Brandon Healey: So what's wild is when we saw connect rates up to 30%, they're only getting through 100, 150 dials a day. They're on the phone all day. Yeah. It wasn't that much, which was crazy. But we're talking Yeah, like on a normal big, on normal big, yeah. 50 day, hundred $50 Collin Stewart: a day at a 30% connect rate. That's 50
conversations. That's a lot bonkers. That's a lot of conversations. Brandon Healey (24:00):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so like on a normal day, they're probably getting between. I don't know, depending on the connect rate, honestly, it's probably between 150 and 400 dials, something like that. So it's a big range, but they are crushing a lot of calls. Collin Stewart
1 in 15 of those connects that we actually schedule a meeting with. Collin Stewart (25:00):
Wow. I thought it'd be a lot worse. That's pretty standard numbers for 1 in 10, 1 in 5, it'd be pretty good for B2B, but you're going to get, you're not going to get 50 connects a day B2B that, maybe you could, but that's a lot of calls. Brandon Healey
and, you're calling owners of small construction companies and everybody was text based there. Yeah. Like you get a connect and they're like, yeah, okay, text me, like text me the offer, text me to this, text me to that, text me to y'all texted much? Brandon Healey (26:00):
We're finding that after we've made the initial connect everything is fair game. We text, we email, we sequence, we everything. Of course we find texting more and more effective as we move forward. Nooks doesn't do anything super effective for texting. So we do transition into our HubSpot world for that. It's okay. HubSpot doesn't really do a lot of good stuff for automated text, which kind of kills me. But but yeah, it's okay. Ironically, my previous sales team, we were a B2B sales team that sold into the construction space and we used text an insane amount and it was incredibly effective. Collin Stewart
You can't do that. And they're like, Oh no, it's fair game here. Okay. That's wild. It, it beats walking onto job sites. Like I, one of my first sales jobs, I was selling diesel generators, like selling rental diesel generators. And like you had to go walk onto the job site and be like, Hey, can I see the plans? Do you guys need any temporary power? And like the number of sites I got chased off of, kicked off of, or yeah. Brandon Healey (27:00):
Yeah. A text would have been Collin Stewart
Collin Stewart (28:00):
Makes sense. Talk to me about the messaging, talking about the scripts. So how, yeah, how do you go about doing that with such a high volume of calls? The script is the most important thing or must be. Brandon Healey
(29:00):
like you, it's just been amazing fit. And we've found that what's interesting is usually. Like I come from a very consultative sales background where it's like, Hey how are things going with your rental property? How are things working? And we've actually found that causes a lot of pain, where if we listen to our objections effectively, where they're like no, I'm not interested in a property manager. No, I'm not interested in this. And we immediately make sure that our scripting is just diffusing those things out of the gate. And then Just saying thisis who we are based on what our customers have told us that they're actually Interested in having a conversation about we actually start by diffusing which is wild Previously it was like that would be not great sales practice But we diffuse because of how saturated the market is and because of how hammered these people are by calls generally Collin Stewart: I don't know if that's, I think that's a perfectly valid cold call strategy, B2C or B2B. You're leading with the like, congratulations, you picked up a cold call. Brandon Healey: Can Collin Stewart: I
(30:00):
ask for permission? Do you have a couple seconds I could like, I love that, especially if you're a little bit cheeky, and the other person's a little bit cheeky on the other end. You're like, we can have a little fun here, but then you're leading. If they say yes, you're leading with an accusation audit, which, you're like, Hey, you're going to think we're X, Y, and Z. We're not that. This is the, it helps clarify because I've called B2C for an investment advisor and you can get caught up in objection handling andpeople are going on stories and telling you this and telling you that. You're like, this is a six minute long objection. Brandon Healey: Totally. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I was like, Oh man, I was like Chris Voss would be proud of that. That call out there from you. I was like, Man, the accusation on it. Like we, we absolutely try to be able to lean in with a little bit of that charm. One thing that we actually do, which is a little fun. So I run the office in Calgary up in Canada. Yeah. However, we are a San Francisco based
(31:00):
tech company, and my entire sales team is up here in Calgary. So we really tell them to lean on the Canadian sauce. We tell them, hey bud, just make sure you're using that Canadian accent hard. And sometimes those Americans just find it way too charming. They might as well think that we're an Irishman. They might as well think, Hey, how are you now? Did I catch you at a bad time? And they and sometimes I think they clap. Sometimes I think that they get, excited and think we're going to offer themlucky charms or something like that. Let me ship you some maple syrup, Collin Stewart: eh? Brandon Healey: How about we send you a hockey puck, some maple syrup and a goose? I can hear it coming out. I can feel like I'm Collin Stewart: on this hour is 22 minutes. Brandon Healey: Yeah, exactly. And so honestly, like sometimes we just like lace into the accent hard just so that we can be able to be a little bit different, a little bit, a little bit easier to connect and just get those extra few
(32:00):
seconds. Cause sometimes it just takes that to get them to think, to be able to say, Hey, we're not doing this. We do this. Is that something that like, you got a little bit of time to talk about, boom. And then from there, our team just pours on the value to be like, we do this. And they'll like a spray, some of it is like borderline spray and pray at times, but it's trying to be able to communicate that. It's Hey, we've got this massive suite of functionality and features and service that is unlike anything else on the market. And they're just like, it's you gotlike boots on the ground everywhere in the United States. They're like, how do you manage 24 seven repair coordination from the phone? Like, how do you guys, how do you guys do that? And it's boom, then you start having these really fast and they've got you, Collin Stewart: yeah. Which is really, this is one of those cases where this is, you want to get to why this call is relevant so quickly that you're almost like, I normally don't like a fastball sales pitch where you're just like, guy, a couple of seconds, cool. Accusation audit, value prop question, and that's
(33:00):
your script goes like probably 60, 90 seconds. And then normally I want to get a little more back and forth, but I think with this, because you're almost using that initial accusation audit and that value prop to filter you're doing the other person a favor because You're not going to go ask them and try and build pain and try and find this and try and find that you're like, Hey, is this something that is relevant to you right now? I think it is. Yes. Great. And consumers have a lot less patients thatsay, I don't know, somebody B2B, Brandon Healey: absolutely. And what's interesting is so for me, I'm, I'm a Canadian, no surprise. And, but I also am a landlord. I know. So I actually own, I own some rental properties in Calgary. And I very much am our ICP if we were in Canada, I'd be using the product, but we're not. So one of, one of the things that is interesting is that for me as a Canadian, my pain points as a landlord are relatable, but not entirely the same as what they are with Americans.
(34:00):
So for example, the banking system in Canada is so concentrated that we have interact key transfer, free way that everybody gets paid and things like that. Down in the United States they've got, this sort of a, bank to bank payment system, ACH. But it isn't as ubiquitous and it hasn't been around as long. And so one of the big differentiators that we do is we allow landlords to be able to collect rent for zero fees. And if you think about them using Venmo or things like that, zero fees, true zero fees is actually a new concept in the United States. And sofor us to be able to Collin Stewart: It's pretty expensive or not pretty expensive compared to free. Put it that way. 100%. It's great. Brandon Healey: Expensive compared to free, but it's still you're going to be talking half a point or something like that. And when somebody has got 10 rental properties and they're, it's two, 3000 bucks per, you're talking about real money on a monthly basis. So that concept is interesting. It would never resonate with Canadians would never work in the Canadian market being able to say, Hey, how about you get automated rent
(35:00):
collection for free in Canada? They'd be like, we get a transfer, man. What are you talking about? Do you just set up an automated transfer? And the answer is. Yes, but down in the United States, they don't have Interac e transfer, they've got actually ACH. So as a result, it's actually been taking some learning to be able to make sure that we're not putting our own cultural bias on things. Because the ways that they run properties and even the legality around how many properties they can run and how is wildly different. Like in Canada,pretty hard to own more than six mortgages. Down in the United States, 15, no big deal. Depending on the state, there's some people who have 40, and they're just like, they are just crushing it. Being able to have these amazing portfolios of rentals that us Canadians would drool over and wish that we could have. It's interesting. It's a different context and these people are very serious about what they do. And our messaging and the way that we try to connect, we always have to almost do a bit of a cultural back check to be like, hey,
With our San Francisco office and be, Hey, how does this sound? How does this connect? How does this land? And they'll be like no, we don't do that at all. And we'll be like, Oh, Collin Stewart (36:00):
it's a belt, not a boot. Oh, Brandon Healey
get, give me another few months or something. We'll move to a better calling system with with HubSpot and we'll be off to the races. Collin Stewart (37:00):
Gotcha. All right. And so how many SDRs are you do you have that are going do it, doing this outbound motion? Brandon Healey
meaningful revenue. So we'll slowly scale. To be able to try to maintain it again. Collin Stewart (38:00):
I love that. And I love how not only have you brought the cost to acquire a customer down, but with a small team of two or three folks, you're contributing 10 percent of the close of the monthly revenue, which is incredible. Brandon Healey
(39:00):
that we are the first software company out of San Francisco who also has an amazing service team. So we've got an amazing service offering where we do all of the tenant communication, even things like lease signing, dealing with all the emergency repair calls, all of that on people's behalf. It's an incredible product, incredible team, and we're growing, just doing phenomenal work, and everything I talked about is all the nerdy sales stuff, but the the real impressivething that Hemline does is that we offer tremendous service. And tremendous a support team nationwide managing. Yeah. Again, nearly 30, 000 rental units every day. Collin Stewart: Wow. And the most goofy Canuck sounding cold callers in the, in San Francisco, not in San Brandon Healey: Francisco. And all of our numbers are of course, San Francisco numbers. And they say, Hey bud, how are you doing there? Tell me about how your rental properties are being Collin Stewart:
handled. Brandon Healey (40:00):
Heavens to Gretzky. I think you should try out the software. It's a real chicklet rattler. You got to get in there and you got to get in there and give her a go, bud, you got to give her a go. Okay. And if we get any, if we get any grief back from people, we're just like, you're a hoser. Boom, click, take off. This is how I'm trying to train the team, but they they, they don't take too quick as I want. Collin Stewart: You need some more. Cool. Call trading in there. Yeah. Guys, we're doing a role play right now. Bring the maple syrup. Brandon Healey
You just you just see Brandon be like, it's true. Super true. Ugh. Can you imagine? Collin Stewart
podcast. This is going to be strange. It's going to be informative. It's going to be fun. Brandon, welcome to the show, man. Brandon Healey (01:00):
Hey man, it's great to be here. Long time reader, long time listener, first time caller. So very excited. Collin Stewart
(02:00):
different incentive structures. Now we're sourcing about 10 percent of our monthly closed revenue from cold outbound which has been wild and just cold calling. Not what we're not doing, cold calling 2. 0 with outbound emails, because, as emails in B2C are notoriously impossible to get and incredibly challenging to validate. So we've been able to find phone number sources that have been excellent. And that's been that's been a bit of the secret sauce.It's been a process. I've led B2B teams running cold outbound teams there. It is much easier. It is much easier. And sometimes I, I'm like, oof that would be the dream. But. Collin Stewart: I'm with you, man. The, I would say B2C emails have gotten a lot easier to get in the last couple of years, especially with tools like clay and things coming out. But , I've always emailing in a B2B context. And so it's never made sense for me to say, Hey, let's go
email these personal emails. Usually it's not going to go well, but I think maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I guess maybe if you're going pure B2C and you've got somebody's Gmail, that might be pretty valuable. Totally. Brandon Healey (03:00):
And for us, Hemlane's a rental property management company where we rent, we manage nearly 30, 000 units across the United States. so everybody who uses our software is using a personal account. maybe they're a property investor who has a corporation. And they may have a corporate gmail or something like that, but we see a lot of, hockey star 2623 at gmail. com that I can't share my Collin Stewart
iterations of their own Gmails that are actually legitimate and it's super exhausting to manage, but but that, that email piece is actually incredibly challenging for us for sure. Collin Stewart (04:00):
I bet. Yeah. So I want to get into how B2C and why, because it still doesn't quite make sense to me. I want to start with an interesting stat you shared, which was you you started with free, right? You started, this was a freemium product. How did that go? Brandon Healey
(05:00):
massive market where, it's a massive amount of the United States that, that rents properties. I think that, our addressable market's about 40 million units, in the United States. and so competing at that scale with some of these massive platforms is how can you reduce the barrier to entry to be able to get people in? And so when I initially got started here this last summer, a lot of our marketing, a lot of our, a lot of our revenue engine and everything was like wide open,trying to attract this massive amount of audience at scale, trying to be able to primarily focus towards. Free free. Let's get in here, use the software for free, place a tenant for free, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, yeah, and over the last six, eight months, it's been a big shift working to iterate and create a lot more efficiencies out of that and back towards a bit more of a traditional SAS model. Collin Stewart: And part of this, you dramatically reduced your cost to
acquire a customer. Yeah. Brandon Healey (06:00):
so when I get started, our CAC was something like 26, 2700, bucks, to acquire a customer. And, wind forward now through a lot of pain. Reshaping our messaging towards our premium paid features are clear, unique differentiators in the market and, also just, really honing on who is it that we're trying to serve and who would we try to attract 1000 of and just boom, laser focused on that ICP, we've dropped our CAC down to about 1300. So about 50 percent drop Which is huge., and, we've also, actually, believe it or not, our actual lead flow, because we're not trying to attract this massive top of funnel free, has dropped, from, something like 300 account signups per week. To roughly a hundred Collin Stewart
of a third, the work and that efficiency improvement has been huge. And then meanwhile, building this cold outbound team alongside. Collin Stewart (07:00):
Before we get to specifically the outbound, what do you think was the biggest driver of getting that cost down? Brandon Healey
(08:00):
similar ratio rate closing behind it of qualified customers. What it means is that your messaging that you're pushing at scale is not ready to scale. So you do not have message market fit with those pieces. And so this became very clear. I joined in July. There was some massive marketing campaigns that had started, April, May, June into July. And I took a look at it. I was like, Okay., yeah, we got a lot of leads, but this is a lot of smoke. No fire likethis. We are not closing anything. This is garbage. This is people with low buyer intent, people with low willingness to pay people who are interested in a free product because it's a free product., this is not sustainable in any meaningful way. And so as a result, I pump up our CEO's tires quite regularly, Dana Dunford. She is just, very willing to listen to sharp analysis and be, Hey, this is what the data says. We need to stop this now. And we just shut the
ad spend off. We just rethought it out, rewrote all of our marketing campaigns, rewrote all of our ads, changed our targeting, remapped it to our highest paid customers, you name it. And then just started feeding it back into the engine. And slowly creeping it up and doing, you're doing thorough iterative testing. And as a result, all of a sudden it was like, Hey, all the leads are good. What's going on? Collin Stewart (09:00):
Wow. When you attract your best customers, everything's easier. Brandon Healey: Isn't that amazing? Wow. And, I think that especially in the B2C play, because the competition is huge and the platform movement is so massive in terms of the competitors. If you think about like a company like Zillow. That we, regularly have to rub shoulders with. They don't do any of the actual property management that we do., but, the scale of some of these unicorn size companies, and if you're the, the up and comer, whoo, you gotta, you better have your message at one point. Anyhow, that, that was,
I'd say that'd be a quick review of what is it that we did? It's like we rethought and rewrote everything and things have gotten. I shouldn't say immeasurably better. Yeah. Collin Stewart (10:00):
And then you're like, you know what? I want you to cut all the ads. We're going to redo everything. And then we're going to do outbound for B2C and your founder went, you're gonna do what? Brandon Healey
property owner info, in some unique ways and. Now we've actually just really enhanced our data sources so that, we've just got some very compelling data and very compelling messaging that is working, which is, which has been, really incredible to start seeing, especially as we stepped into the fall and into the winter here, Collin Stewart (11:00):
I imagine some of those are. Data sources we can talk about, and some of those are data sources we can't talk about. Brandon Healey
(12:00):
and what we find, especially because we're targeting people who are property owners, and ideally we're trying to find people who are, running their own rental properties and managing them themselves. What we can rely on is things like public record of who owns this property, what is their contact information? Can we enrich that? And then we're also looking at very large data models to compare the entire United States property ownership. Database to be able to say, how manyproperties does this person own? Collin Stewart: Okay, so a small amount of data, Brandon Healey: just a small amount of data. Collin Stewart: It Brandon Healey: works really good if you can figure that out. There is, there are data providers out there that are able to actually start querying at that scale to be able to say who owns six properties or more. Or who owns four properties or more and things like that. And that's an interesting data point. Now, the second side of it,
(13:00):
which is part of what I can't quite talk about some of the trigger points. So at Hemline, we help people who own rental properties find better tenants quickly. we help them automate their rental property tasks and, thirdly, we help them with 24 7 repair coordination and service teams. Okay? So those are our three big value props. So as a result, our pain points that we need to find need to align with one of those. One, are they currently struggling to find atenant? Two, are they currently struggling to manage and maintain their property? And three, are they currently having, damage or active problems at their property or maybe evictions? Things like that are actually reportable in databases and things like that too. And yeah, you wouldn't think so. And so What we've tried is we've tried not only using this large data to be able to ask big questions to be able to say who owns the rental properties in the United
States, Collin Stewart (14:00):
but Brandon Healey
our average pass in terms of how many times do we call a number before we move on is only 1. 2. So we move through leads very fast. and in B2B, you'd hit it four to six times or something you've got multi channel, your emails, automated texts, whatever it is that you want. We're not doing that. We're just moving super fast through leads. Collin Stewart (15:00):
Interesting. Okay. So I feel like everybody who's listening is get them to tell you the secret sauce. But I know we talked about, he can't tell me the secret sauce. But my brain, I can't stop looking at playbook and secrets or data source and secret sauce and going Oh, how can I drug him and get this good information out of him? Because obviously if you could only ever email or call somebody who's in pain. That'd be incredible. This is like minority report level stuff. Brandon Healey
(16:00):
associated with data that, that are easier or harder. And if you're trying to be able to connect with that North star metric, I would say that there are unscalable ways to access that data. Yeah. And then. There is hopefully a scalable way, but the scalable is a lot of iteration to be able to get there. But I will say, even the ways that we access our data is fragile. So we're constantly looking for new models. We're constantly looking for new sources and developing newpartnerships and things like that for more conventional access to lists. So, we don't just we didn't just hit a home run on this one model and oh, thank God this is it. We are constantly trying new lists and and we have to because what if the way that we're doing it breaks, and it has broken. It has broken. We've had to switch lists. We've had to switch sources and things like that. So it's very challenging. Yeah. Very challenging. Collin Stewart: Totally. Yep. Let's get
into the playbook, I wrote a couple of notes to follow up with you afterwards. but I'd love to understand it. It sounds like it's a very call heavy playbook. So are they sending any emails or is it just folks crushing dials? Brandon Healey (17:00):
Literally we are just crushing dials. That's all that it is. And we've. Iterated or approach and our messaging to try to be able to again, differentiate ourselves from the conventional options that are out there. It's to an extent now, after a while of digging into it, it's fairly simple. The people that we reach out to with property with properties that they own and rent, they're really doing I'd say one of three things. One, they've got a traditional property manager in which there's barriers to get them to get out of a contract and agreement, things like that. Two, they may be using a competitor of ours, another software, Zillow, Avail, they're using Buildium, something like that. Some of these really big products or
(18:00):
three, they're just self managing it and doing it on their own. They got Excel spreadsheets and that's all they're doing. And depending on the source, we actually have to change our approach just very quickly to be able to be like, how is it that we actually win on each of these? I know that we haven't talked about tech stack or anything like that yet, but we transitioned into Nooks Nooks. ai here this October. It's wicked. We have just loved working through Nooks. We saw our connectionrates double just by switching tools. And so What were you using before? Collin Stewart: Where did you switch from? Brandon Healey: We were using a tool called Flash Intel. Collin Stewart: Okay, Brandon Healey: not my call. It is not a tool that I would recommend. They're fine, but their ability to to really rotate in clean, non spammy numbers to regularly just connect and have that bridge time down to sub one second. It was just not a thing. They had two second, two and a half second
bridge time. It was disgusting. Collin Stewart (19:00):
I've used a ton of these tools and I won't out them here, but man, like a one and a half second bridge time is awful and it's useless. I, and I've talked to folks and they're like no. Ours is sub one second. I'm like, all right, let's go listen to some of my calls. Yeah. Here's four seconds. Here's two seconds. Brandon Healey
know any. Parallel dialer or power parallel dialer that like nooks is connecting folks that quickly. There's all these companies that say they are, but when you actually look at your recordings, they're not. Brandon Healey (20:00):
So this was one of the wild differences in terms of our stats. On our previous dialer, we were connecting at about 7 percent connect rate. Sometimes we would get up to nine. When we started with Nooks and our first our first month with them, our connect rate jumped to 20%. What yeah, and now Get this there were weeks where we saw it get over 30. It was disgusting our team I'm going to getting they weren't getting off the phone. They like we were talking one in three connector. It was unbelievable So we saw this incredible spike in terms of connect rates from like late October into the beginning of December and then when Christmas came around And
then when the new year came around, we actually just saw our connection rates just overall, just dropped down a notch. Collin Stewart (21:00):
And Brandon Healey
there with five or 10 phones in front of you. So if your connect rates 30 percent and you're dialing three lines, you're getting a pickup three, four lines. You'd get to pick up instantaneously. Yes. So did you have to scale down the number of lines? Oh Brandon Healey (22:00):
yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. We had a period of time where we were using our parallel dialer one call at a time. Collin Stewart
(23:00):
dialers. My previous company, our cold call teams we actually just ran off of close and close the CRM is just so phenomenal for sales and outbound and their connection their dialer through Twilio is like great. Like it's really great. So we were able to, especially on the inbound or kind of the semi cold leads, we actually were able to find that to be super effective. And we ran it there previously, but now we do need way more volume because we are just moving through these lists again.We're just almost barely calling anybody a second time. Collin Stewart: I'm almost afraid to ask. But how many dials a day are these monsters hitting? Brandon Healey: So what's wild is when we saw connect rates up to 30%, they're only getting through 100, 150 dials a day. They're on the phone all day. Yeah. It wasn't that much, which was crazy. But we're talking Yeah, like on a normal big, on normal big, yeah. 50 day, hundred $50 Collin Stewart: a day at a 30% connect rate. That's 50
conversations. That's a lot bonkers. That's a lot of conversations. Brandon Healey (24:00):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so like on a normal day, they're probably getting between. I don't know, depending on the connect rate, honestly, it's probably between 150 and 400 dials, something like that. So it's a big range, but they are crushing a lot of calls. Collin Stewart
1 in 15 of those connects that we actually schedule a meeting with. Collin Stewart (25:00):
Wow. I thought it'd be a lot worse. That's pretty standard numbers for 1 in 10, 1 in 5, it'd be pretty good for B2B, but you're going to get, you're not going to get 50 connects a day B2B that, maybe you could, but that's a lot of calls. Brandon Healey
and, you're calling owners of small construction companies and everybody was text based there. Yeah. Like you get a connect and they're like, yeah, okay, text me, like text me the offer, text me to this, text me to that, text me to y'all texted much? Brandon Healey (26:00):
We're finding that after we've made the initial connect everything is fair game. We text, we email, we sequence, we everything. Of course we find texting more and more effective as we move forward. Nooks doesn't do anything super effective for texting. So we do transition into our HubSpot world for that. It's okay. HubSpot doesn't really do a lot of good stuff for automated text, which kind of kills me. But but yeah, it's okay. Ironically, my previous sales team, we were a B2B sales team that sold into the construction space and we used text an insane amount and it was incredibly effective. Collin Stewart
You can't do that. And they're like, Oh no, it's fair game here. Okay. That's wild. It, it beats walking onto job sites. Like I, one of my first sales jobs, I was selling diesel generators, like selling rental diesel generators. And like you had to go walk onto the job site and be like, Hey, can I see the plans? Do you guys need any temporary power? And like the number of sites I got chased off of, kicked off of, or yeah. Brandon Healey (27:00):
Yeah. A text would have been Collin Stewart
Collin Stewart (28:00):
Makes sense. Talk to me about the messaging, talking about the scripts. So how, yeah, how do you go about doing that with such a high volume of calls? The script is the most important thing or must be. Brandon Healey
(29:00):
like you, it's just been amazing fit. And we've found that what's interesting is usually. Like I come from a very consultative sales background where it's like, Hey how are things going with your rental property? How are things working? And we've actually found that causes a lot of pain, where if we listen to our objections effectively, where they're like no, I'm not interested in a property manager. No, I'm not interested in this. And we immediately make sure that our scripting is just diffusing those things out of the gate. And then Just saying thisis who we are based on what our customers have told us that they're actually Interested in having a conversation about we actually start by diffusing which is wild Previously it was like that would be not great sales practice But we diffuse because of how saturated the market is and because of how hammered these people are by calls generally Collin Stewart: I don't know if that's, I think that's a perfectly valid cold call strategy, B2C or B2B. You're leading with the like, congratulations, you picked up a cold call. Brandon Healey: Can Collin Stewart: I
(30:00):
ask for permission? Do you have a couple seconds I could like, I love that, especially if you're a little bit cheeky, and the other person's a little bit cheeky on the other end. You're like, we can have a little fun here, but then you're leading. If they say yes, you're leading with an accusation audit, which, you're like, Hey, you're going to think we're X, Y, and Z. We're not that. This is the, it helps clarify because I've called B2C for an investment advisor and you can get caught up in objection handling andpeople are going on stories and telling you this and telling you that. You're like, this is a six minute long objection. Brandon Healey: Totally. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I was like, Oh man, I was like Chris Voss would be proud of that. That call out there from you. I was like, Man, the accusation on it. Like we, we absolutely try to be able to lean in with a little bit of that charm. One thing that we actually do, which is a little fun. So I run the office in Calgary up in Canada. Yeah. However, we are a San Francisco based
(31:00):
tech company, and my entire sales team is up here in Calgary. So we really tell them to lean on the Canadian sauce. We tell them, hey bud, just make sure you're using that Canadian accent hard. And sometimes those Americans just find it way too charming. They might as well think that we're an Irishman. They might as well think, Hey, how are you now? Did I catch you at a bad time? And they and sometimes I think they clap. Sometimes I think that they get, excited and think we're going to offer themlucky charms or something like that. Let me ship you some maple syrup, Collin Stewart: eh? Brandon Healey: How about we send you a hockey puck, some maple syrup and a goose? I can hear it coming out. I can feel like I'm Collin Stewart: on this hour is 22 minutes. Brandon Healey: Yeah, exactly. And so honestly, like sometimes we just like lace into the accent hard just so that we can be able to be a little bit different, a little bit, a little bit easier to connect and just get those extra few
(32:00):
seconds. Cause sometimes it just takes that to get them to think, to be able to say, Hey, we're not doing this. We do this. Is that something that like, you got a little bit of time to talk about, boom. And then from there, our team just pours on the value to be like, we do this. And they'll like a spray, some of it is like borderline spray and pray at times, but it's trying to be able to communicate that. It's Hey, we've got this massive suite of functionality and features and service that is unlike anything else on the market. And they're just like, it's you gotlike boots on the ground everywhere in the United States. They're like, how do you manage 24 seven repair coordination from the phone? Like, how do you guys, how do you guys do that? And it's boom, then you start having these really fast and they've got you, Collin Stewart: yeah. Which is really, this is one of those cases where this is, you want to get to why this call is relevant so quickly that you're almost like, I normally don't like a fastball sales pitch where you're just like, guy, a couple of seconds, cool. Accusation audit, value prop question, and that's
(33:00):
your script goes like probably 60, 90 seconds. And then normally I want to get a little more back and forth, but I think with this, because you're almost using that initial accusation audit and that value prop to filter you're doing the other person a favor because You're not going to go ask them and try and build pain and try and find this and try and find that you're like, Hey, is this something that is relevant to you right now? I think it is. Yes. Great. And consumers have a lot less patients thatsay, I don't know, somebody B2B, Brandon Healey: absolutely. And what's interesting is so for me, I'm, I'm a Canadian, no surprise. And, but I also am a landlord. I know. So I actually own, I own some rental properties in Calgary. And I very much am our ICP if we were in Canada, I'd be using the product, but we're not. So one of, one of the things that is interesting is that for me as a Canadian, my pain points as a landlord are relatable, but not entirely the same as what they are with Americans.
(34:00):
So for example, the banking system in Canada is so concentrated that we have interact key transfer, free way that everybody gets paid and things like that. Down in the United States they've got, this sort of a, bank to bank payment system, ACH. But it isn't as ubiquitous and it hasn't been around as long. And so one of the big differentiators that we do is we allow landlords to be able to collect rent for zero fees. And if you think about them using Venmo or things like that, zero fees, true zero fees is actually a new concept in the United States. And sofor us to be able to Collin Stewart: It's pretty expensive or not pretty expensive compared to free. Put it that way. 100%. It's great. Brandon Healey: Expensive compared to free, but it's still you're going to be talking half a point or something like that. And when somebody has got 10 rental properties and they're, it's two, 3000 bucks per, you're talking about real money on a monthly basis. So that concept is interesting. It would never resonate with Canadians would never work in the Canadian market being able to say, Hey, how about you get automated rent
(35:00):
collection for free in Canada? They'd be like, we get a transfer, man. What are you talking about? Do you just set up an automated transfer? And the answer is. Yes, but down in the United States, they don't have Interac e transfer, they've got actually ACH. So as a result, it's actually been taking some learning to be able to make sure that we're not putting our own cultural bias on things. Because the ways that they run properties and even the legality around how many properties they can run and how is wildly different. Like in Canada,pretty hard to own more than six mortgages. Down in the United States, 15, no big deal. Depending on the state, there's some people who have 40, and they're just like, they are just crushing it. Being able to have these amazing portfolios of rentals that us Canadians would drool over and wish that we could have. It's interesting. It's a different context and these people are very serious about what they do. And our messaging and the way that we try to connect, we always have to almost do a bit of a cultural back check to be like, hey,
With our San Francisco office and be, Hey, how does this sound? How does this connect? How does this land? And they'll be like no, we don't do that at all. And we'll be like, Oh, Collin Stewart (36:00):
it's a belt, not a boot. Oh, Brandon Healey
get, give me another few months or something. We'll move to a better calling system with with HubSpot and we'll be off to the races. Collin Stewart (37:00):
Gotcha. All right. And so how many SDRs are you do you have that are going do it, doing this outbound motion? Brandon Healey
meaningful revenue. So we'll slowly scale. To be able to try to maintain it again. Collin Stewart (38:00):
I love that. And I love how not only have you brought the cost to acquire a customer down, but with a small team of two or three folks, you're contributing 10 percent of the close of the monthly revenue, which is incredible. Brandon Healey
(39:00):
that we are the first software company out of San Francisco who also has an amazing service team. So we've got an amazing service offering where we do all of the tenant communication, even things like lease signing, dealing with all the emergency repair calls, all of that on people's behalf. It's an incredible product, incredible team, and we're growing, just doing phenomenal work, and everything I talked about is all the nerdy sales stuff, but the the real impressivething that Hemline does is that we offer tremendous service. And tremendous a support team nationwide managing. Yeah. Again, nearly 30, 000 rental units every day. Collin Stewart: Wow. And the most goofy Canuck sounding cold callers in the, in San Francisco, not in San Brandon Healey: Francisco. And all of our numbers are of course, San Francisco numbers. And they say, Hey bud, how are you doing there? Tell me about how your rental properties are being Collin Stewart:
handled. Brandon Healey (40:00):
Heavens to Gretzky. I think you should try out the software. It's a real chicklet rattler. You got to get in there and you got to get in there and give her a go, bud, you got to give her a go. Okay. And if we get any, if we get any grief back from people, we're just like, you're a hoser. Boom, click, take off. This is how I'm trying to train the team, but they they, they don't take too quick as I want. Collin Stewart: You need some more. Cool. Call trading in there. Yeah. Guys, we're doing a role play right now. Bring the maple syrup. Brandon Healey
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