PRD Nationwide Ballarat has a new favourite team member called RiTA, with the robot generating pleasing results for the agency.
PRD Nationwide Ballarat Director and Sales Manager Jason Birch recently joined RiTA by AiRE Growth Specialist Tristan Lovell in a webinar dedicated to sharing ways to accelerate your leads and listings ahead of the spring season.
Mr Birch implemented RiTA into PRD Nationwide Ballarat early last year and said he has been happy with the value of the artificial intelligence-powered system.
RiTA is a robot that plugs into an agency’s CRM and uses AI to find the best people in the database to talk to and generate more leads.
The AI program aims to take the guesswork out of who to call and what to say in prospecting and engages with people through hyper-personalised, automated two-way SMS conversations.
“In our marketplace, we are a volume agent, so we need to make a high volume of calls, we need to contact a lot of people and get to a lot of appraisals, and RiTA just helps us do that so much better than what it was in the past,” Mr Birch said.
“The biggest success has been changing the agents’ attitude towards prospecting. The way that we used to do our prospecting, and I was the same way when I was doing prospecting, was I would think of reasons why not to do it. RiTA gives you every reason why you should ring them.”
PRD Nationwide Ballarat use RiTA’s call lists as part of their prospecting plan. Since June 2020, the sales team has made 10,000 calls out of RiTA. They connected 45 per cent of the time, while 26 per cent were left voicemail messages.
The agency turned on RiTA’s SMS automation feature a month ago and Mr Birch said the results were “mind-blowing”.
Within the first week, Mr Birch’s team received 173 appraisal requests and won three listings, with four more to come.
In the past two weeks, RiTA sent just under 1200 SMS on behalf of the agents, created 255 follow-ups and received 64 appraisal requests.
Those results came through without the agents having to pick up the phone at all.
Mr Birch used a fishing analogy to explain how powerful RiTA’s features are.
“The call lists are fishing up stream,” he said.
“People don’t walk into your agency anymore, and if you get called in you are usually up against two or three other agents. I want to use the call lists to get ahead of that,” he said.
“What the SMS automation is doing is not only fishing up stream, it is putting a big net even further up to people who aren’t even thinking about using us or haven’t even thought about selling at that stage, but this starts the process.
“We are actually putting in a dam and RiTA is just trawling through data that we would never have got to.”
Mr Birch also explained how important it was to understand your database.
He received a weekly win/loss report from RiTA, allowing him to look at how many of his contacts have listed with competitors.
“At the minimum, RiTA goes through your database and will tell you what is happening. It motivates me,” he said.
The webinar is now available for replay. For more information about RiTA and a private consultation with the RiTA by AiRE team, click here.
