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: You just you just see Brandon be like, it's true. Super true. Ugh. Can you imagine? Collin Stewart: We'll cut that. And the what is it? The Napa auto parts commercial where they're like, it's true. Brandon Healey: Yeah, exactly. Collin Stewart: Welcome back to the predictable revenue podcast. I'm your host, Colin Stewart. And today I'm joined by Brandon Healy. He's the VP of sales and growth at Hemline. And we're going to talk about B2C outbound. That is something I never thought I'd say on this
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: Hey man, it's great to be here. Long time reader, long time listener, first time caller. So very excited. Collin Stewart: I've always talked to people that say, can you, does this work B2C? And I say, blanket, no, I've been lying to them my whole sales development life. Tell me why I'm such a liar. Like how are you doing this? It doesn't make sense. So Brandon Healey: first off, you're not wrong. It's very hard. And it has been a, it has been a grind of an iterative approach here since we started this motion just about a year ago. We're getting there. Now after. I would say six concerted months of iteration on leads on process, on script, on team, a very gracious team on willingness to change commission models and and
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: 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: email. Brandon Healey: Hey, you know what? We just had the four nations here last week and,, yours came front of mine and hockey star 2613 and, cool a slapshot 2024., we see all of these. And what's amazing is that, we also see people who are creating their second account or the third account, the typical duplication pain point, That they've got these small
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: 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: So the product's been around , for nine years. And it was, paid SAS platform the whole time. would have been about a year and a half ago the exec team, wanted to try saying, Hey, can we, can we widen the funnel, of total inbound by having a free tool and at least having a free subscription level. And, down in the United States, like we, we compete with tools Zillow or Avail or, RentReady or different tools like that. And so we're talking about a
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: 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: yet. Brandon Healey: Our actual monthly recurring revenue that we're closing has increased by 20%. So we're actually closing more out
of a third, the work and that efficiency improvement has been huge. And then meanwhile, building this cold outbound team alongside. Collin Stewart: Before we get to specifically the outbound, what do you think was the biggest driver of getting that cost down? Brandon Healey: I think that one of the things ,that happens when a company scales either too quick or too early Is that, I'd say there's a potential for mediocre content or mediocre clarity, to really slip through. So I listened to this amazing discussion by, I think it's Mark Roberge, who is the previous CRO at HubSpot. And he talks about, Hey, everybody focuses on product market fit, but to really scale, the first job is message market fit, right? Collin Stewart: Yeah, Brandon Healey: I love the awareness in your eyes because people who know this is the weapon. And the reality is that if it's the case that you see a massive injection of cash into a marketing system, and you do not see a
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 like this. 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: 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: 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: Yeah., and I think that I have to give a little bit of credit to our founder. She started down the path, towards,, B2C outbound before I had joined. Yeah. Yeah., a month before. Collin Stewart: And Brandon Healey: it was not going great. It was really not going great. And, I popped in and, very quickly was like, okay, gotta, added another staff member, trimmed the team a little bit, started reshaping things, and, Yeah, picked up the reins and was like, all right, let's give it a shot, it was one of those like, all right, let's give it a shot. And we had some really unique data sources that were providing,
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: 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: Yes. Exactly. There's data sources that are a little hush, but we can talk about the concept behind them and some of the unique things that these data providers are getting us, and it's pretty incredible. Collin Stewart: Tell me about what you can. Brandon Healey: Okay so first off, I think that what we've learned in B2C is that it's not so much who it's more important when are they experiencing pain. Now that is very hard in itself
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 many properties 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,
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 a tenant? 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: but Brandon Healey: part of the secret sauce is, are we able to get a live feed of these people? Based on this criteria, based on active pain because if you do not have active pain, you're just shooting, shooting blanks. It's really challenging. and that has been a bit of the secret sauce in terms of what is it that turned our lists from connecting us with the right people to actually connecting us with the right people who wanted to talk to us. So that we could actually scale the, the impact of it in a meaningful way. Even at a very low, cost of service. Our average cost of subscription varies between, 30 bucks and, 100 bucks a month. We if people are Yeah, a ton. If people have got 20 units or something like that on it, great, then, yeah maybe it'll cost a little bit more depending on the service that they need. But so as a result, our efficiency and our accuracy, on the cold motion has to be incredible. And as a result,
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: 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: Yeah. and, you know what? I think that, I think that, there's triggers for every SAS product that are
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 new partnerships 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: 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
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 connection rates 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: 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: Yeah. Honestly, unforgivable. In a cold calling tool, there's no way to drop your results by 75 percent as much as just a poor bridge time. Collin Stewart: Unforgivable might be the wrong word because one of those, like we started using Nooks a few years ago and it had challenges and so we moved off it to a different tool and so I'm super excited because it looked like a promising tool. I think we were in there like beta group, but we, and we had a ton of SDRs and maybe it was too much for next to the time I wasn't running the project, so I can't say, but I'm really excited to take a look at it again. Because like I said, like that sub getting sub one second, I don't
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: 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: And Brandon Healey: I don't know if it's new carrier policies. I've been working with nooks to try to see if we can get it back up. Our connector rate right now is hovering around like 12 which is, still about double from what it was. 12 is good, Collin Stewart: yeah, but it's not 30, Brandon Healey: it's not 30. No, it's not 30. But, we had a couple months there where it was, our connector rate was reliably over 20. It was unbelievable, and the guys were just on the phone absolutely all day. Collin Stewart: Just beasts. Brandon Healey: Yeah, it was just shocking. And they're just wouldn't stop talking to people all day, as a cold caller finishing the day hoarse, which is pretty rare. Collin Stewart: That's hard to do. Yeah. Now, if your connect rate's 30%, you must have had to slow down the number of lines. Cause if, for those that don't know, Nooks is a power dialer, parallel dialer. It dials multiple lines at a time. So instead of just sitting there dialing one phone number, imagine yourself sitting
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: 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: Wow. It was, Brandon Healey: it is unbelievable. Like we're talking, they're only sitting there for, 20 seconds between calls, just boom pickup. Pick up, voicemail drop behind you boom. So it was really impressive. And for us, for our first few months with Nooks anyway, it was wild to see. And we haven't been able to fully replicate it in 2025 yet, but we're working on that. We're working on trying to be able to enhance it. And their team has been actually just quite a joy to work with. Collin Stewart: Fantastic. Yeah. That's one of those relationships. I wish I spent more time working with them because, yeah, it seems promising, but we jumped tools quite a bit. Brandon Healey: Yeah. And I've, I haven't tried a bunch of other
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: 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: That's a phenomenal amount of calls. Brandon Healey: Yeah. That's what the parallel dialer lets you do. And we sometimes need that volume to be able to actually find somebody who's interested in having a meaningful conversation, which is challenging. Collin Stewart: Yeah. Out of those connects, can you share what percent? Typically we'll push through. Brandon Healey: I totally can. I just don't know if I've got that I don't know if I've got that front of mind. I'd have to think about this. How many of those would push through? You mean in terms of the actual demo booking? Yeah. Let me check. I would say it looks like in terms of our connects, it looks like it's probably somewhere between about 1 in 10 and maybe
1 in 15 of those connects that we actually schedule a meeting with. Collin Stewart: 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: The challenge that we have is a little bit further down pipe, which is trying to get a cold B2C person to actually engage, schedule, and have meaningful conversations. That's one reason why one of the key data points that I shared is we do this mass look at property data to be able to actually just target people who are a large enough account. So then it actually fits within an appropriate payback. Otherwise, if they're too small, even in our own subscription levels it actually can become very quickly not viable for cold outbound. We have to chase efficiency pretty hard. Collin Stewart: I remember we ran and it wasn't B2C, but it felt pretty close to B2C, but we were doing calling into the construction industry
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: 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: I remember it was, I'm pretty sure it was the client that suggested it. And I was like no.
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: Yeah. A text would have been Collin Stewart: so much easier. Brandon Healey: That scales pretty good too. Yeah, it scales pretty good. Yeah, no we've we've we haven't really dug in on it too much again, largely just because of largely because of tooling. And also just, I'd say a little bit of spam caution when you're in the B2C space, because these people are, this is their personal contact numbers. And typically, the way that you're actually like getting them through some of these sources is like, Oh, you're enriching the multiple times over. Getting it wrong can actually be incredibly punishing for deliverability. Yeah, Collin Stewart: we just Brandon Healey: hammered the dials, man, hammered the dials.
Collin Stewart: 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: Totally. And I touched on it a little bit earlier, where what we do is we try with our lead sourcing to be able to identify the most likely path that they're already using. And, we use the very common, famous, Hey, this is a cold call. I know I caught you at a bad time, but do you have a few seconds for me to let you know why we're reaching out? And for us, we're able to then leverage the fact we actually have a little bit of data on them. And it's Hey, we understand the on this property. And I'm assuming that you're actually managing it as a rental. Did you know, is that, does that ring a bell? It's great, I'm not interested in buying it. We're not interested in selling it, and we are not interested in, objection. And then immediately just go, this is how we differentiate ourselves. And we think for somebody
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 this is 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
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 and people 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
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 them lucky 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
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 got like 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
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 that say, 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.
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 so for 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
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: it's a belt, not a boot. Oh, Brandon Healey: no. That for sure. Cost us some connects. Yeah. Collin Stewart: So the, so scripting, this is a. It's more of a fastball. You're doing a bit of an accusation on it. You're doing a catch it with a cold call accusation audit value prop question. Is that a fair summary of this, of the messaging? Brandon Healey: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Collin Stewart: Gotcha. Okay. And so you're cranking 150 of those to 400. If you don't get the connects that day and then tooling, you're using nooks. Yeah. Brandon Healey: Nooks and HubSpot. And we're currently dialed in with air call. And I would love. To find a way to get away from air call, but currently we're a little bit stuck. So
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: Gotcha. All right. And so how many SDRs are you do you have that are going do it, doing this outbound motion? Brandon Healey: We just have two, three. Yeah. Like we're like just a small team. And what we're doing is we're primarily limited by lead flow because these lead sources that we have are challenging and we're very much lead constrained on it. And so as we get new sources and as we get new stable sources and testing them out, that's when we're starting to add to the team. Initially, when I joined, I think that we had a cold outbound team of five. We dialed it back down to go into a bit more of an iterative process. So we brought it back up and now we're starting to creep it up at the beginning of this year. Now that we've got enough data, now that we've got enough enough proof of concept to really show, hey, this is working. And we're actually bringing in
meaningful revenue. So we'll slowly scale. To be able to try to maintain it again. Collin Stewart: 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: Yeah, totally. And it's a new lever. It's the intent is that it is predictable. Consistent. And I know and something that hopefully, it's also hopefully scalable, which thus far scalability of it is that's the challenge because it's a data limitation right now and the data is expensive, like that's expensive to be able to get data like this. So it's It's pulling all the levers at once, man. Collin Stewart: Right on. Yeah. If anybody's listening and they happen to be a property owner that doesn't want to do the property management dance anymore, what's the best way for them to find out more about Hemlane? Oh Brandon Healey: man. Come to Hemlane. com. Holy smokes, let us show you the way
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 impressive thing 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: 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: Bring the maple syrup. Bring the hockey stick. All right. Okay. Now frame up. Let's go. Brandon. Collin Stewart: It's been amazing having you on the show. If people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach out? Brandon Healey: LinkedIn is the best. Yeah, find me Brandon Healy at the on