This week on The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast, Sebastian Jimenez of Rilla joins Greg and Kevin to discuss how sales managers can use AI to transcribe and analyze conversations between new home sales consultants and prospective home buyers and provide feedback that will improve dialogue and increase sales.
Speech analytics software can help new home sales managers understand how much salespeople are talking to versus listening to potential home buyers. Sebastian says, “So much about sales is people think sales is about talking. A lot of sales is actually not about talking; it's about listening. One of the studies that we published as well, and this is based on again, more than a million conversations that were processed and analyzed at the time, we realized that 1% of top performers in the country that are generating millions and millions and millions of dollars in revenue for their businesses, they are talking between 45 and 65% of the time versus the customer. The average salespeople, they're talking between 75 and 85% of the time. Because they're talking so much, they're actually not paying attention to what the customer is saying, and that's why they miss a lot of details.”
AI technology can also analyze the speed at which salespeople are speaking to customers. Sebastian explains, “Another thing that's super critical, the talk speed of salespeople. We figured out that the average talk speed of top performers of salespeople when they're closing sales is about 184 words per minute, which is a little bit faster than the average human talk speed, which is about 156 words per minute. For that to make sense to people like, imagine listening to a podcast at 1.2x speed. That's how a salesperson talks who's a top performer. A little bit faster, but not too fast, but not too fast. Not too fast, because if you go too fast, then you're actually going to start dropping.”
When speech analytics software tools are used, it’s important for sales managers not to bombard salespeople with everything they need to improve at all at once. Sebastian says, “My number one recommendation is it takes 21 days to build a habit, and you cannot build a hundred habits at the same time. So, what I would recommend to sales managers is every time you're coaching somebody, focus on one thing. Just focus on one thing. If they're talking too much, just focus on the talk ratio. Let's lower that and let's just focus on that for this month with this person. And then once they get that right and it becomes a habit and second nature, then move on to something else. And that's what I tell managers like, Hey, don't get feedback on everything because you're going to overwhelm your salespeople with too much data, too many things to do. So, it's one thing at a time. Great coaching is all about building great habits and helping your team build great habits. So, one at a time, not all at once, but one at a time.”
Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about how speech analytics software can help new home salespeople learn how to communicate with prospective home buyers more effectively.
About the Guest:
Sebastian Jimenez is the founder and CEO of Rilla, the leading speech analytics platform for in-person sales. Rilla allows home builders to record their conversations with customers, use AI to transcribe and analyze them, and deliver more feedback and coach faster.
Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.
Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Wetzel with OutHouse.
Greg Bray: And we are excited today to have joining us, Sebastian Jimenez. Sebastian is the CEO of Rilla. Welcome, Sebastian. Thanks for being with us.
Sebastian Jimenez: Thank you guys for having me on here. Super excited.
Greg Bray: Well, Sebastian, for those who haven't met you yet, why don't we start off with that quick kind of background and overview about yourself.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. So great to meet everybody who's never heard of me or Rilla. So, I'm Sebastian. I'm the founder and CEO of Rilla. Rilla, very [00:01:00] succinctly, we are the leading speech analytics software for onsite sales. So, for home builders, what that means is when your community managers, when your design consultants, when they're out there talking to prospective homeowners, home buyers in the model homes and the design studios, wherever they're talking to them, they will be recording their conversations with our mobile app through their phones or tablets or Apple watches.
And we will be using AI to automatically transcribe, analyze, and give them feedback to help them improve their conversations, to help them improve their sales, to automate a lot of their follow up and their CRM entry, and to help their managers do what we call virtual mystery shops that are a hundred times faster, better, and more productive than the traditional mystery shops, which take quarters to set up and you only get very little data. Think about this like a 24/7 mystery shop that you're running, and all of your salespeople can improve every single day instead of every quarter.
Kevin Weitzel: So, before we jump into all that nerdiness, I foresee that we're gonna into some solid nerd factor. Before we get into that, I need one factoid about you that has nothing to do with work, the home building industry, or your family. Something about you that our listeners can learn [00:02:00] today.
Sebastian Jimenez: I used to do standup comedy, and I learned everything I know about business from standup comedy.
Kevin Weitzel: You know the secrets to comedy, right? Timing. Oh, wait, I did it wrong. I'm supposed to wait until somebody answers, and then I come in with timing.
Sebastian Jimenez: One is timing. Timing's like everybody knows about, but the one that's, I would say, like an overlooked asset in comedy is the sound of your voice. The best comedians, if you look at Chris Rock or Jerry Seinfeld, they're really great examples. Like, Chris Rock, when he started out, he wasn't that popular. And then he started leaning into it like, ah, yeah, like, it's like and Seinfeld like, like, you know. So, the voice is super important in comedy as well, like the sound of your voice.
Kevin Weitzel: You know, it's funny that you say that because the circle back also comes from comedy too, and you want to circle back to the original thing. You come out, and you know, my wife and I got a divorce, and you know, then it circles back to the end, and here's why we got a divorce. Same thing happens when you're selling is that you find out that pain point, and you circle back to that pain point. You know this solution takes care of all the things in your problem. So, the circle back does apply. So, maybe you're onto something. Maybe our salespeople [00:03:00] need to get more into comedy and stand up and go to mic nights.
Sebastian Jimenez: This was not the actual idea for Rilla, but the precursor to the idea of Rilla. So, I used to do standup comedy from 2014 to 2018. It says that my degree, I got a degree in business economics, all that crap. But I never went to class. That's just like, so my parents didn't get too pissed off at me. So, I was always doing standup comedy, skipping class. Comedians, one thing that they do if you're really serious about it is you're always recording your sets. You put your phone there, you record your set, and then you review the set. It's game film, and then you take notes about what you could have done better.
The original idea for Rilla, I still have my little joke notebook in. I used to write my joke ideas and my ideas for general things. I remember like writing, I was like, oh, what if we could have a recorder, but get some light layers of analytics on top of the recorder so you could review it a little bit faster. So, it told you like, here's where the punchlines are at, just by analyzing the language. Here's the laughter, you know, noise tool, laughter ratio kind of thing. So, you could see how well you did and gives you like a little score. So, there's a lot of parallels between standup [00:04:00] comedy and sales, and the original idea came from there.
And the other thing is, comedians, if you look at comedians, they make it sound so natural. When you go and watch a comedian on a stage, it almost feels like they're improvising. News slash, they're not. They're not improvising. In order to prepare an hour of material when you see somebody on Netflix, that's taking that comedian at least a year to prepare that hour of material, and every week they're just trying to come up with three new minutes of material. It's highly scripted, highly trained, highly coached, and they're reviewing game film constantly to improve.
So, the same with sales. People think, I don't want to sound scripted, I don't want to sound scripted. Yeah. The point is, if you get really, really good at following processes and following specific words or word tracks, you actually sound supernatural because you sound like a pro. Just like an actor does in a movie. We like to think of sales as a sport, and the sport of sales is all about how you can actually fine-tune that craftsmanship with your words to sound really like a pro that sounds like supernatural.
Kevin Weitzel: And my last question before we truly dive in. Regardless of how popular they are, give me your two favorite comedians that are out there living or in the [00:05:00] past.
Sebastian Jimenez: I'll tell you two living. One is Dave Chappelle. The other one is Shane Gillis. And then, in the past, I would say, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and the entire crew of the Monty Python crowd. Yeah.
Kevin Weitzel: Those are all correct answers.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah.
Greg Bray: Alright. Well, Sebastian, let's dive in a little deeper because I think it's fascinating that you use this idea of how can I have technology help me improve, and then branch out into, okay, who else can use technology to help them improve and things there. Isn't that though a little weird to know you're being recorded? Does the act of monitoring change the behavior in such a way that it's no longer accurate? Or do we forget enough that we're being recorded that that doesn't happen?
Sebastian Jimenez: That's an amazing question. So, Greg, what you just described there is the actual Hawthorne effect. And the Hawthorne effect is an effect in psychology that people figured out when they were trying to do experiments, and you're recording people when they're doing experiments to study their behavior, they realize that when people realize [00:06:00] they were being recorded, they would change their behavior. And that's called the Hawthorne Effect. When people know that they're being reviewed or they're being watched, their fight or flight senses get triggered.
That's why people fear public speaking because they know they're being watched by other people. That's why you see people in reality TVs, they're acting up because they know they're being recorded in a camera. What's really fun about the Hawthorne effect is that your brain cannot stay in fight or flight for long. So, your brain literally gets tired of being in fight or flight. So, after about a few hours of being exposed to the fact that you're being recorded, your brain completely forgets about the fact that you're being recorded, and it kind of goes back to its natural habitat.
So, to answer your question more directly, absolutely. When salespeople are being recorded for the first time senses get heightened. I need to be on my toes, and you actually see an uptick in performance, by the way, when you see that salespeople getting recorded. Just the fact that they know they're being recorded, boom, it goes up, right? Because they know they're being watched. It's like an actor being like, oh, we're filming now. Like, oh wow. I need to be on my game. This is not practice anymore.
Then the effect goes down and you see the numbers go back down. It's like the natural habitat. And then after a quarter or so, it [00:07:00] takes about 21 days to build a habit. So, think of all the little habits that you want to build as a professional salesperson. It takes about a quarter to build all the little habits that you need in order to actually improve and make the coaching actually second nature. So, every single salesperson that we launch with at first, they're a little bit fearful, like I'm going to be recorded, they forget about the fear after a couple hours and then they start improving and they become quite addicted to the tool.
Greg Bray: But the same thing happens when the boss walks in and you say, I'm going to sit in the office today and watch you work, right?
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the exact same concept. So, what we've seen is, for instance, in home building, the effect is not as powerful because usually your managers are already there and they're already kind of used to the whole like, oh, a mystery shop could come anytime, any second. And they kind of know when it's a mystery shop most of the time. The thing you don't get with the mystery shop is the mystery shop you never get so much exposure that you actually get that true behavior because you're only doing it like once every quarter. With this, you're literally, it's like you're burning that out pretty quickly.
Kevin Weitzel: So, question for you. When you have AI that's recording the conversation, does the computer understand the nuances [00:08:00] of just casual conversation to underlying subjects? To give you an example, somebody walks into a motorcycle shop, we look at their footwear. Are they wearing flip-flops? Guess what? You can't ride a motorcycle home when you're wearing flip flops.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yep.
Kevin Weitzel: So, are you looking at that, or are they wearing a fancy watch? Can they afford what they're looking at?
Sebastian Jimenez: Yep.
Kevin Weitzel: Is AI discrediting that, or are they just kind of taking into note that Kevin complimented a client on their watch or noticed that they're wearing a BYU shirt and that you're glad that they lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament this year? Something along those lines. Is AI picking up those nuances and then just ignoring it and placing it aside and looking only at the sales items? Or is it saying, Hey, they're wasting time talking about sports things when all reality, that's how you get into the psyche of that buyer?
Sebastian Jimenez: Great question. So, two things there. So, AI for Rilla only works on actual spoken language. So, we're not recording any video, it's just audio. So, something like noticing that the customer is wearing flip flops, unless the customer calls it out, the salesperson calls it out, it's not gonna be processed by the AI. So, there is a component of the human being actually being able to see what's going on. Eighty percent of [00:09:00] language is body language, so we're not capturing the body language. The actual language that's being spoken, that's what we're capturing.
When it comes to the language that's being spoken, let's geek out here for a little bit. Everybody's heard the term; these calls are being recorded for quality and training purposes. This has been happening since the 1990s. And since the 1990s, businesses from every single industry have been very interested in how do they actually improve the language of their service people or their salespeople to actually improve their conversations. We've had rudimentary statistical analysis on phone calls, like how long and, like the, you know, the durations.
Then, in 2012, people started getting a little bit fancier with AI doing like basic keyword tracking. And we basically had, like, basic keyword tracking for about a decade where you could actually see if they said the right words or the right phrases. But that's very limited because, like you said, Kevin, human language is so much more flexible than basic keywords. Right? When ChatGPT came out in 2022, that's when you actually started getting really close to actual natural language understanding.
So, now the answer to your [00:10:00] question is absolutely. Yes, the AI understands the natural language of the conversation. It understands sarcasm. It's like having an assistant sales manager. The way we think about it is, you have a head coach who's a sales manager, sales director, and what Rilla does, very simply, is we're kind of like an assistant coach who's out on the field every single day when the game is happening and we're just taking all the footage and capturing everything there is to capture. And any question that the head coach has about the conversation, they can just ask their assistant AI.
And you could literally ask the question like, Hey, how did the salesperson build rapport in the conversation? And the AI will tell you, they noticed that the customer was wearing a particular shirt from a particular sport, and that helped navigate the conversation. It'll actually notice if you missed building rapport. It'll say like, Hey, the customer mentioned something about their dog, and the salesperson completely disregarded it.
Rilla, we have the largest data set of sales conversations that's ever been recorded or transcribed, or analyzed ever. We have millions of face-to-face sales conversations captured between customers and salespeople. And we run these analysis like, what [00:11:00] are the top performers doing differently than everybody else? One of the things that we just published is that when the customer walks in with a pet and the salesperson acknowledges the pet, and it kind of plays with the dog, it's like, oh, what's their name, how old is she? When the salesperson does this, it gives you like five percentage points of increase in conversion rate. Yes. Building rapport is super important. The AI will actually understand all the nuances of the actual spoken conversation.
Kevin Weitzel: We did something similar, but with using a human factor where we would be with an earshot of listening to a salesperson talk on the floor. And then when they were done and we did the recap, they would always like come in nervous, you know, like, how did I do? My questions were always real simple. You know, what was the wife's name? What were the kids' names? If you can't tell me that stuff, then you weren't listening to that client because they said it. I remembered what they were, so.
Sebastian Jimenez: So much about sales is people think sales is about talking. A lot of sales is actually not about talking; it's about listening. One of the studies that we published as well, and this is based on again, more than a million conversations that were processed and analyzed at the time, we realized that 1% of top performers in the country that are generating millions and millions and [00:12:00] millions of dollars in revenue for their businesses, they are talking between 45 and 65% of the time versus the customer. The average salespeople, they're talking between 75 and 85% of the time. Because they're talking so much, they're actually not paying attention to what the customer is saying, and that's why they miss a lot of details.
Greg Bray: Sebastian, just for clarity for our listeners, you guys are in multiple industries beyond just new construction. So, when you talk about these millions, you're not talking about just new construction sales; you're talking about other industries as well, just for context.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, so, we're very big in home remodeling and home improvement, other kind of in-home sales, kind of retail sales as well. So, yeah, that's including a lot of different industries.
Kevin Weitzel: I gotta call you out on something. You don't come across your typical pot-smoking high school burnout to standup comedian. You obviously have some sort of education here. Where'd you go to school?
Sebastian Jimenez: New York University. Like I said, my degree says I got a degree in business, but you ask my professors, they beg to disagree.
Greg Bray: So, Sebastian, you mentioned something that I hadn't considered when you were doing [00:13:00] your quick intro and you talked about actually taking these recordings, not just from a coaching standpoint, but being able to then use them to update the CRM and the notes and keep some of that data. So, Kevin just gave the example of the salesperson, forgot the name of the kids. But if it's in the recording, it'll be there in the CRM for later. Am I understanding correctly the opportunity there?
Sebastian Jimenez: That is exactly correct. So, for instance, in home building, salespeople need to be very good at following up with their leads, their A leads or B leads or C leads, and you want to make sure that you're actually following up with value, right? Not just like, Hey, I'm checking in and wanted to see what you guys are thinking. And everybody knows that every sales manager, sales director knows the notes that the salespeople are pulling in the CRM are probably not as comprehensive as they could be. It's kind of annoying, right? It's like human beings, we don't like sitting down and taking notes and stuff. It's kind of annoying. You just want to do your job as a salesperson.
So, what Rilla does is you can prompt our AI. We call him Rick AI, You can say, Hey Rick, every time of a conversation processes, I want you to make sure that you capture the homeowner's name. I want you to [00:14:00] make sure that you tell me if they have dogs. What are they looking for? Why are they looking for a new home? Why are they looking to move from their existing place? And he'll give you like super detailed, be general. You could have it rate your leads automatically from an A to a C to B based on some parameters that you set. So, you could have a lot of automation for the CRM. The salesperson still needs to go in there to make sure that everything's being updated properly. But I think, you know, in the near future we're going to have it such that a salesperson won't need to worry about it. It's just going to happen automatically.
Greg Bray: So, Sebastian, in home building, of course, we've got the onsite salesperson that's in like the model home, touring the community, and then we've got the online salesperson that's dealing with the chatting and the phone calls and some of those things. Do you guys help with that side of it as well, or is it more just the onsite?
Sebastian Jimenez: We help with the calls, you know, anything that's an online sales, like a Zoom meeting or a phone call. We don't market that that much because there's so many different providers. Like, again, the call center and anything that's on a phone call, that's a very well-studied kind of space where people have been using speech analytics software forever. We're [00:15:00] really pioneers when it comes to, like, in-person onsite sales where the most fun sales happen. Where you get to actually walk around, it's an hour-long meeting. You get to discover a lot about that prospective customer. And so, yes, it does work, the short answer is, but there's plenty other solutions that also work for the call center. And Rilla it's just reigning supreme on the onsite sales front.
Greg Bray: As you guys have been analyzing some of this data, you mentioned some of the things that top salespeople are doing a little bit different. What are some of like the common mistakes that new home salespeople that you see, and you're going, oh my gosh, we gotta fix this now, or these people are toast?
Sebastian Jimenez: Talk ratios, number one. Talk ratio is salespeople talk way too much. Number two is, well, now that you know that you need to figure out how to make it a conversation and not just a monologue. You have to figure out how to do it. There's a Jedi mind trick that the top performers use, which is like something that an average salespeople miss all the time, which is just asking open-ended questions.
Top performers they ask 25 open-ended questions per conversation. Average salespeople only ask five. They think that discovery happens at the beginning. You just talk about discovery, and then you kind of check the box. Okay? I asked [00:16:00] five questions. Like, what brings you here today? What seems to be wrong with your home today? What are you looking for? Like, and then they just do the discovery and then proceed. Top performers, what they do is they understand that sales is ongoing discovery. You're getting to meet this other human being, and then the story unfolds proactively. It's always discovery. When they come in, you're discovering. When you're presenting the homes, you're discovering what they like, what they don't like. When you're presenting prices and you're presenting financing options, you are also discovering. And so, they ask five times more open-ended questions than average salespeople because they just keep discovery ongoing.
Another thing that's super critical, the talk speed of salespeople. We figured out that the average talk speed of top performers of salespeople when they're closing sales is about 184 words per minute, which is a little bit faster than the average human talk speed, which is about 156 words per minute. For that to make sense to people like, imagine listening to a podcast at 1.2x speed. That's how a salesperson talks who's a top performer. A little bit faster, but not too fast, but not too fast. Not too fast, because if you go too fast, then you're actually going to start [00:17:00] dropping.
What I'm talking now is about 214 words per minute. That's my average talk speed. When I'm in an actual sales conversation, I have to remind myself to slow down because I talk a little bit too fast. But if you talk a little bit too slow, you have to speed up a little bit to kinda of get the uptake of the conversation. And usually top performers, average performers, that's an easy thing for them to do.
What's really hard for salespeople, and this is like something that they miss all the time. What we saw, which was really interesting, was the talk speed of salespeople generally starts at around the same. But once you get into the final third of the conversation, which is typically when objections start coming up, because that's when you present price and you present how much it's going to cost, and that's when objections start piling up, that's when you actually get into the meat and potatoes of the sales conversation.
What happens is average salespeople their talk speed goes up. They actually raise their talk speed in the final third of the conversation. Top performers they keep it. They keep it super steady. And the reason for that is fight or flight. Present price, objections come, well, I don't know if we're going to be able to do this. Well, I want to move into a home today, and this was not going to be ready for like another [00:18:00] 12 months. Well, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Average performance, they tend to speed up because they get nervous, and they start, well, this is really the home of your dreams, we could get you financing options. Like, what do we got to do?
Top performers, they go like, okay, so this price isn't going to work for you. What do you mean by that? And they start going back to open-ended questions, and they don't try to debate the objection. They try to discover what's wrong, what's not working about this. Objections are normal. Top performers, objections are like breathing. It's like you have to find where the customer is in their heads, and you have to discover your way through it. So, the top performers, they keep their talk feet steady over the course of the conversation. Average performers, they kind of tend to spike up because they get nervous at the final third. So, we have a whole blog of insights that we're constantly publishing.
Kevin Weitzel: Does your solution provide any kind of feedback? And I know this is kind of a weird question, but on the recall? Talking about how you go to a 214 average talk speed in your normal speech, is the recall of the recipient of that speech pattern, are they recalling less because you speed up past that 1.5 or whatever that number would be? If you hit the 2.0 button, are you losing some [00:19:00] of the recall information and missing out on the opportunity to have this stuff really nail home?
Sebastian Jimenez: It's that and also, the customer starts getting nervous. They're like this person's talking too fast. And yes, one is, I don't understand what they're saying. But imagine if I'm talking at a certain talk speed, like I talk fast so people know, like I'm not nervous when I'm talking fast. But imagine I was talking slow and then I start talking fast. It's like when you find your kids doing something wrong, and you're like, ask them what happened? They start talking faster because they're nervous.
So, when you start talking faster than your regular speed, the customer, it's like in their chimp brain. The lizard brain of the human being knows this other person's nervous, and then they start getting nervous. And when you get them nervous because you're nervous, then there's not a great pathway to getting somebody to make a buying decision. Because fear is the killer of all buying sales emotion. You don't want to appoint people in a fight or flight state. So, that's the main concern here when you start raising your talk speed because you start making the buyer nervous.
Greg Bray: Sebastian, we've got potentially a sales manager, a sales trainer, someone who's responsible for helping the sales team [00:20:00] improve. There's already so much data out there, and I can see somebody going, oh wow, this would be really interesting, and then all of a sudden, they've got a hundred conversations to review and just almost overwhelmed with new data to be able to do that. What are some ways that this can be useful without total just avalanche of new data to work with?
Sebastian Jimenez: That's a great question. So, one of the things we realized when we built this product, so we call it a speech analytics product. What we realize is salespeople, sales managers are not mathematical people. They're verbal people by nature. They're linguistic. If you were to measure their IQ, they would be indexing super high on linguistic intelligence because that's their job, that's their sport. They have to be really good at spoken language. But in math, that's just not a part of their job. People use calculators like that's just not your job.
And so, when you give them an analytics product, it's very annoying. Verbal linguistic versus what do these numbers mean? And it was very annoying when we started this product for our users. You give me all these numbers. What do I do with these numbers? And this is actually super helpful after ChatGPT came out because you can actually now have an AI [00:21:00] assistant. Rick AI, he can interpret the numbers for you.
So, instead of you just like giving analytics, you just have Rick AI; imagine having like a ChatGPT, literally, and you're asking questions not about the internet, but things about all of your conversations. And you're a manager, you're going to be like, Hey, what are the top objections that happened last week because I'm about to prepare for my sales training meeting. And Rick AI looks at all your conversations from the last week and says, here are the top objections. It's about mortgage rates, you know. Interest rates are really high right now, so people are, you know, more afraid. It's about wait times because the homes are not ready, whatever is.
And so then you just ask that question, and you get answers. Because analytics are about getting you answers. So, our product is no longer an analytics product; it's a verbal interface where you can interact with the computer, and the computer just gives you the answers that you need. Kind of like an assistant. The assistant goes and checks all the conversations and gives a result of all the conversations, and it's all verbal.
The other thing is what we found that managers absolutely love doing, they become addicted to this, they love going in and reviewing the actual conversations. We call them Rillas. So, a conversation that's recorded on Rilla, salespeople, managers, they don't call them conversations, they call them Rillas because it's a conversation plus this analytics layer. It's almost like you're a bionic, [00:22:00] kind of like Iron Man, and you could see a tech layer upon the world because we tell you all these statistics on the conversation. Like, how fast did they talk? How much did they talk? And so, you can review a conversation very quickly.
An hour, two hour long sales conversation takes about a three minutes to review when you turn it into a Rilla because you have your AI assist and you can say like what happened here. So, what you find is managers are able to review a hundred percent of the sales conversations that their team is having every day. Let's say you manage a team of like 10 salespeople, they're each going to have maybe like one conversation a day. That's just 10 conversations. It would take 10 hours to review the whole thing, but with Rilla, it takes about three minutes to review each one. It just takes 30 minutes to review every single one of the conversations.
We've made a lot of improvements over the years. I love working out, and I love being productive, and I love kind of going out in the world, but I saw that Rilla was like very static. You have to be on your computer to use Rilla. So, most recently, we launched a hands-free we call it hands-free Rillas, where you could now put your headphones on, you're driving to and from work 15 minutes, and you could talk to our AI friend Rick, and Rick will respond back. You could [00:23:00] perform the review of the conversation completely without touching your phone.
So, we have a lot of customers who are now playing golf. They're working out while they're doing their Rillas because it's quite an addictive game. If you're a sales manager? You're like, this is so cool. I could be doing my reviews while I'm playing golf or while I'm driving, or while I'm working out. Just this morning, I was doing my laundry because I'm traveling today, and I was just doing a bunch of reviews of all my sales calls from the last week.
Greg Bray: So, Sebastian, this has been fascinating. You've obviously given this a lot of thought, a lot of work. I'm tempted to ask you for one last joke before we go, but I don't know if that's too much of a callback to the beginning. See what I did there, Kevin?
Sebastian Jimenez: The biggest joke I've ever told is when I told my parents that I was dropping out of my job to start a company, and they were not very happy about it. And you know how funny that joke is when you realize I'm Dominican, so I have Hispanic parents and a Hispanic mom, and they took the chocolate and just started writing me with that crap. So, yeah.
Greg Bray: Well, Sebastian, do you have like one last piece of advice for salespeople and maybe their managers today, whether they use a tool like this or not, just some things that could help them be [00:24:00] better at sales?
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, so it goes back to one of the questions that you asked me about what do you do with all this data. So, what I would recommend with managers is that when you are coaching people, one of the things that we saw is that the best managers, when they use our product or when they're coaching people in general, there's a lot of things, a lot of things that managers discover that their salespeople are not doing right when they start using a tool like Rilla to review every single one of the conversations. You start noticing all the little fine, little details that they're missing. They didn't mention that you didn't talk to the dog. They talked too much. They raised their voice, all these little things.
My number one recommendation is it takes 21 days to build a habit, and you cannot build a hundred habits at the same time. So, what I would recommend to sales managers is every time you're coaching somebody, focus on one thing. Just focus on one thing. If they're talking too much, just focus on the talk ratio. Let's lower that and let's just focus on that for this month with this person. And then once they get that right and it becomes a habit and second nature, then move on to something else. And that's what I tell managers like, Hey, don't get feedback on everything because you're going to overwhelm your salespeople [00:25:00] with too much data, too much things to do. So, it's one thing at a time. Great coaching is all about building great habits and helping your team build great habits. So, one at a time, not all at once, but one at a time.
Greg Bray: Awesome. Great advice, regardless of what we're trying to do as we try to improve.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah.
Greg Bray: Well, Sebastian, if somebody wants to learn more and get in touch or connect with you, what's the best way for them to reach out?
Sebastian Jimenez: Go to rilla.com, that's R I L L A dot com, and book a demo with one of our highly trained sales consultants who will show you how Rilla could potentially help your business. Every single call's reviewed on Rilla by me. So I will probably see you on that call when I'm doing my laundry.
Greg Bray: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Sebastian, for sharing with us today, and thank you, everybody, for listening to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine. [00:26:00]
Kevin Weitzel: And I’m Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you.
When it comes to thought leaders in the home builder industry, Bassam Salem, CEO, and Founder of AtlasRTX is on the top of the list. We were grateful to sit down with Bassam and discuss communicating with customers on their terms. Bassam discusses how technology can solve business problems, assist with customer service, and boost your ROI. We dive into artificial intelligence (AI), metrics for response time, surprising stats for when home buyers are searching online and so much more.
The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast enjoyed having Ben Keal of Private Communities on the show. Ben has excellent knowledge of the home builder industry and digital marketing, especially when it comes to lead generation. He explains the benefits of understanding your lead attribution to achieve better ROI.
This week on The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast, Kirsten Nease of Cornerstone Homes joins Greg and Kevin to discuss how finding a unique selling proposition can help home builders strengthen and focus digital marketing strategies.
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