Andre Cvijovic explains the operating system behind a high-volume cold-calling business: recruit exceptional callers, set clear role expectations, improve lead quality, build repeatable channels, and train teams to persist through rejection.
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Building an internal calling system
“to everybody's like stop everything you're doing we gotta start start calling all my Engineers that you're developing product forget about that we're now developing Salesforce internal system for calling getting things out and my Revenue was five thousand dollars a month before that and I'm telling you that story because it went from almost nowhere and by the way that hundred four thousand in 2015 include a piece of that uptake at the last month and then we went boom to 140 000 in a”
“interview and the thing is hire Superstars only you don't want to hire amateurs and start working with them right higher Superstars only this is in this presentation you guys can take a screenshots I hope this is on a PDF and you can download it where did I hire them Craigslist indeed blocked me seven times I created seven different companies that they just wiped me out we don't accept commission sales jobs there Craigslist look at that simple ad what I”
“him a product we showed him a culture we showed them team buildings we sell them on a company then we sell them hey company can be awesome but if your job sucks who cares so we show them exactly what their job looked like on a daily basis how many rejections they'll get what products they need to use what equipment how they're going to talk who's going to meet who are the people in the company they see immediately how the job look like real expectation and then I says all these two things are crap unless”
“purchased the leads for the call center to the dial holy smoke they says oh it's not 85 accuracy verify data and that 15 quote 15 is churches and police stations and publics inside and holy smoke so do not buy so what we did we I'll show you we scraped the leader there's a cool website sorry for Zoom info and uh lead providers but did you know guys that uh you can get free leads to pretty much”
“honestly he is like and the funny thing is when I listen to these guys you know you can kind of purge and call and listen them sometimes I'm asking myself like damn man the person is saying over the phone like sorry I I really don't need what you're saying polite and this like they don't understand English they just says okay I understand but let me show you this they take seven eight rejections over the phone call and just people give up”
please welcome Andre swievich to the stage [Applause] thank you so much wow so first let's give a round of applause for Nathan guys how many of you have incredible conversations here outside on a coffee right in the inner rooms let's give a big round of applause for Nathan so uh revenue is now 3.8 million since they are up to updated slide so last
month we did 355 freaking thousand dollars I love it I can't believe it every day I'm looking at stripers like is this real number like 10 better than last month so just to give you a quick Story how how many of you are doing cold calling now one two three people holy smoke you're awesome so how did we got forced to do cold calling early stage you know there's a period of Hell going in a startup
and that hell means like you're trying to figure out anything year later I'm almost bankrupt my creditors are calling me I'm behind on the bills my wife is paying my car like it's on a bottom line and I heard a story I listened to story from Elon Musk when he got on the edge and when they were bankrupt he is signing a deal with Google to take over Tesla sign off everything to sell for
five billion dollars right and Larry Page is delaying the deal he wants him to bankrupt he's pissed off Friday comes Monday There's no money on a bank account to pay the be the people and he sends an email out to everybody in the company saying you're laid off and you're hired again and your new job is a sales job so if your engineer your salesman now if you're a manufacturer on the floor you're salesman now
if your customer success you're a salesperson he immediately get a force of over 1500 sales people overnight says call your friends call your parents call your brothers call your neighbors call everybody yourself deposits for Tesla in a day they sold 15 000 cars true story they pulled back from the deal they get funding and now the Tesla is where it is because of that story I was like holy smoke I'm doing the same [ __ ] right literally Friday night I sent an email
to everybody's like stop everything you're doing we gotta start start calling all my Engineers that you're developing product forget about that we're now developing Salesforce internal system for calling getting things out and my Revenue was five thousand dollars a month before that and I'm telling you that story because it went from almost nowhere and by the way that hundred four thousand in 2015 include a piece of that uptake at the last month and then we went boom to 140 000 in a
month guys from five thousand in like six seven months it was like a roller coaster ride every month you're getting like we were doubling every two months every three months and what happens you see the flight between 2017-19 almost is that big I get relaxed my CFO says Andre we're paying this call center sales people a lot of money like how much is your appointment set up from Philippines making like 45 dollars an
hour oh holy [ __ ] can we do this in-house hiring full-time hourly rate and I was against it was like yeah maybe we could save some money and I listen advice and we flat it and you'll see we almost went down so commissioned sales process is what works just to prove my point is this is for July before between uh before August 314 000 what we did is see the expense
on sales commission ninety seven thousand dollars third of my money is going out on a salespeople everybody's super happy but how much is costing you up front to make a sale big ball Zero right so how much could you go grow the business if you pay zero to acquire client so this is what I want to teach you guys first starts with the hiring how many of you
watch the movie wolf of the Wall Street right really cool movie do you know that movies uh based on a true story and the guy from the movie an art actor but in the real story is the guy who's working with me now Penny stockbroker who was selling deals of million dollars over the phone or the cold call he was the one first one that I hired but how I do it I'm going to teach you about job ads job placement Five Minutes
interview and the thing is hire Superstars only you don't want to hire amateurs and start working with them right higher Superstars only this is in this presentation you guys can take a screenshots I hope this is on a PDF and you can download it where did I hire them Craigslist indeed blocked me seven times I created seven different companies that they just wiped me out we don't accept commission sales jobs there Craigslist look at that simple ad what I
said there is Superstars only in a headline my sales job position says make 350 000 a year as a salesperson I calculated what's the maximum amount somebody can make and I put that as a headline you get people who wants to make 350 000. but in my job ad says do not apply unless you're Superstar you can perform it and you can prove it and you can copy this I did this little amount to go with some of the partners that says Hey I want to do what you did
says don't invent don't change my ad I change it 20 times and it works just keep doing same thing she get 300 people apply for the job same day so all of that's inside taking screenshot and what I want to show you guys is the the process from A to Z I know this is very short 13 minutes on a minute how we generate 100 demos of the 355k now and mrr
I don't have digital ads budget I wasted probably 20 000 got two clients on it this is the only way we grow and this is the calendar look at this 300 spots I opened for Colin 289 application people registered for the job do you have time to interview 300 people who has the time to 3300 people I didn't right so what we did was like okay let's let's change the approach let's let's figure out now how we're going to
interview 300 people who wants this 300 000 job we put them all into one orientation we spoke about three things so imagine all of you who are looking for the job and you can choose any company so it says let's let's turn the table let these guys interview me first what about if they ask me questions instead of me asking them but they'll all ask questions based on three categories what's the company doing what's the culture what's the leadership and I start presentation says describe your dream job on the chat 100 people
start asking and telling like oh it's it's a salary it's challenge it's opportunities grow it's people it's leadership like it's all of that so I want you guys to today to look at this as you're interviewing me ask any questions be direct and transparent and they were totally confused like we never attended interview like this they were shocked so we talked about three things company first we told them what's the product what's what's our mission where we are going we we showed
him a product we showed him a culture we showed them team buildings we sell them on a company then we sell them hey company can be awesome but if your job sucks who cares so we show them exactly what their job looked like on a daily basis how many rejections they'll get what products they need to use what equipment how they're going to talk who's going to meet who are the people in the company they see immediately how the job look like real expectation and then I says all these two things are crap unless
you can make money show me the money and then we show them a career path you will get to 350 000 you're not going to start there so I don't want to set expectations I'm not taking money home first day and we showed in career progression and residual how it's piling up and what's happening including turn of the accounts and who is doing the same thing and showing the screenshots of the payroll it was like holy smoke this is real and then at the end of that I was saying do not apply unless you're Superstar this is Superstars only there's 100 people on
this call out of 300 people register 100 attended that's the number and I was hoping that I get five applications so I can do nice interviews and I says do not please do not apply I was rejecting them after that 30 minute sales pitch guess what 35 people apply for the job and I have to hire them today and tomorrow says there's no freaking 35 hours to do 35 interviews so I gotta reinvent again it says how are you going to do it we'll do five
minutes interviews and this chart shows you see this beginning of the chart growing growing growing and there's like whoo then a little dip called covet between that dip and the growth is something called hourly rate oh right you get people out late you destroy their creativity you destroy their ambitions who works hourly who likes to work hourly you guys don't work hourly
we'll look for the big payout and the hourly is safety net that slows down everything so I turned offer them hourly rate instead of scheduling six eight ten appointments a day they went back to two why two because that was the minimum expectations and after two years of struggling to get hourly rate and management and micromanaging quotas in place I says that's enough I have to call it would change back to our old model same people who scheduled two appointments a day went back in performance they scheduled eight and ten
next day do not do early on sales time then what I want to talk about is elites the leads are super critical when it comes to uh this performance if you give them crappy leads they're not going to work where do you guys get the leads couple shout outs internet okay a little bit more specific Facebook so what we did make big mistake we
purchased the leads for the call center to the dial holy smoke they says oh it's not 85 accuracy verify data and that 15 quote 15 is churches and police stations and publics inside and holy smoke so do not buy so what we did we I'll show you we scraped the leader there's a cool website sorry for Zoom info and uh lead providers but did you know guys that uh you can get free leads to pretty much
the same leads that Zoom info and info USA references selling to you if you go to library you know there's such a thing as a library in every city it's kind of government thing you go in and you get free books that you don't pay to learn and read but they have resources online where you can sign up for zero dollars to get the library card number and go to their resources something called
reference USA it's powered by info USA group and you log into your library card that you don't pay five thousand dollars to zoom in for membership and you get access to check this out 78 million businesses names phone numbers sometimes emails location Revenue number of employees credit rating scores like 65 data points same data as Dan and Bradstreet this is like 78 million dollars of data
value right here how crazy is that use it for retargeting if you want to so you can put this is like filters from the screenshots really cool accurate data I use it every day the only caveat is you can download 200 at a time to get it do little micros to repeat the process for you so you can download all the data you need little hack free leads how many of you like this no matter what you're doing cool right
I pay 400 for this hack one guy to show me was like damn should know this tools like uh I hate spending money on expensive software me being one uh that's why I use cubicles for dialer if you want to dial people uh the problem with this is you gotta paper seats with the cubicles previous call of an arrow you pay per minute of dialing two cents a minute to dialing so you only pay when you're pretty much hot on a
conversation with the client there's a bunch of leads here take a picture of this where I'm getting leads one of the major sources are scraping so we we call let's say Mind Body is a big provider in scheduling booking system will scrape 60 000 of their clients and call them with highly relevant script we'll scrape Groupon 300 000 businesses from Groupon will call all Groupon customers so again I see you have a Groupon deal right would you like to get the same results without having to pay that group on fee people are open we scrape Google
we scrape Yelp it's super cheap for 300 bucks you can scrape whole platforms super easy super fun then uh where do where do we hire LinkedIn Craigslist Facebook as well referral program we paid the 500 when they refer a friend and then when the person comes from the call center they freaking bring you the whole call center back we recruit one and they bring others one cool book that I would highly recommend guys I read this book nine
times nine times it's called chat Holmes Ultimate Sales Machine so book change my business change businesses of my clients it's a Bible of marketing it's the guy who holds the business Master with Tony Robbins you gotta pay twenty thousand dollars to attend that seminar it's a freaking crazy good stuff take it then a couple more things dialer we created this custom dialer that's where my Dev comes in where they have whole flow anybody who is hired as appointment center in my
company can start operating tomorrow they have screen script on the screen this software also gives you same thing you copy paste the script and they start dialing it's very personalized you can personalize the script for every person so when they're reading it it's everything in a place so what also we do is we make incentive programming inside a team to compete so we show everybody how they're doing
you know if if we are in a call center in office you would know who is killing it by hearing them who's scheduling most appointments who's making most money but in a remote world we don't so we created the charts where we see hey this person makes 1600 phone calls this week it sets up the new stage what's possible we have incentive programs this is my team sales Dave director he's doing now everything I invested zero hours a week on this program now and keeps making us hundred sales a month is that our
awesome team of sales people this is our call center team with Master appointment Setters this is our senior appointment Setters we have this like from our presentation we give them MVP awards right you got to do incentive rewards we did daily bonuses like oh first three people who break three deployments get you know 30 bucks person who reach first person who reach uh 10 appointments get hundred dollars right and they'll go like like Alliance and why we do this is
they set the stage for everybody because sometimes you're calling you're getting so many rejections and you think all the leads are bad and I'm but just not happy and then you're here on the chat holy smoke they made three they made four they made five they're getting bonus it gets encouragement so this guy is a killer he if I have accent he's like a Russian mob like boom you talk to him I think that's why he's scheduling so much because people get afraid like holy smoke
honestly he is like and the funny thing is when I listen to these guys you know you can kind of purge and call and listen them sometimes I'm asking myself like damn man the person is saying over the phone like sorry I I really don't need what you're saying polite and this like they don't understand English they just says okay I understand but let me show you this they take seven eight rejections over the phone call and just people give up
and I'm impressed how people and he makes hell of a money he's back in Serbia uh he's making probably about five thousand dollars a month now that's compared to 25 000 here in a monthly rate he lives like a king over there so we are sending him to vacations of course a bunch of team but the cool thing is you know once you create a system you create coaching system self-coaching everything they need to know is written down somewhere so they can go in this library and you can go to this website called
team support Dot team Dash support at referralizer copy hell of our content for yourself if you want to it's open doesn't require login and we have everything from coaching from scripts to objections handling name it everything is part of the USB I hope so so review what we covered today is is posting jobs on a Craigslist group hiring and by the way one thing I didn't tell you is this five minutes interviews
so when I get these 35 people on the call to want to get a job how do you interview 35 people to find a good person so I opened a spreadsheet immediately while this is this is uh completing put five minutes slot in a Google sheet and just says guys just go there fill up your five minutes it's going to be five minutes quick interview so one cool thing I learned from chat Holmes he says you gotta reject people we clearly stated we are hiring only
Superstars Superstars only nobody else first question is why are you Superstar people start saying selling your net I was this I was that I was top of my class and then you got to do something that's not easy you gotta say sorry but I don't hear it and shut up because what sales people do every day they face rejections and I and I give them rejection right away sorry but I don't hear it so if
they come back he's like yeah listen thank you it was a good time appreciate it they're out you don't need more than five minutes two questions guys if they come back like I don't know if you hear me properly I was the top leader I created company of 300 people I was creating 70 million dollars Revenue right and they keep banging you know you have Superstar right so follow that advice you'll save yourself so much time from the headache of the people who have no clue how to sell bonuses there's slides here uh with the links that you
can totally knock off my job at don't think don't think oh my God this is super simple or I'm gonna delete this paragraph this thing works right he is making 64 appointments a week legally for two Platinum sales seven sales he's killing it all the demos cool thing is in this and I'm gonna wrap up with this we combined five people per demo for the sales people so they can make more money we're doing 30 000 calls a week 400 demos 100 attended about 30 to 35 sales
this is how it looks calendar see the one slot in the calendar is the one that fills up with the most and um I was able to keep my stocks and equity most of the equity is of my employees we share Equity with the team my team is my my investors right last 20 minutes I cover a lot of cool things thank you guys appreciate your attention foreign
