Podcast Episode 90 Transcript

Episode 90: Networking To Increase Your Net Worth With Pieter Limburg

We're joined today by Pieter Limburg. He's the CEO and founder of Mobilo. Pieter, how are we doing today? Excellent, James. Thanks for asking. I'm super pumped to be on the show. You know, the super pumped reference I just saw the first two episodes of the show reference to the Uber show. I don't know if you saw it, but I just came to mind. But I'm excited. Yes, I did catch a bit of it. And if we're going to host this podcast in that fashion, I think we're going to have a hell of a lot of fun because those boys seem to whip it up, man. Well, if you can handle a party of $25 million in 24 hours, I'm down. Yeah, absolutely. So you started off as an Internet hustler, right, with various shops on ebay. What does that mean? Well, this is a while back, and what's good about it is that we were leveraging the television shows where they sold a lot of stuff, junk it. I offered those online on marketplaces, and that paid for a very good vacation. And so there was a lot of buying and selling. The core business, at least, is real estate brokerage. That's the mothership that all of the other things that were involved in seem to funnel through one way or another. The origin is often found in real estate. So for us, our model, the whole pre rail model is predicated on the business has changed and it's changed very rapidly. Yet there are those that have had the most success. Traditionally in my industry, the season deal makers are just that. They're seasoned deal makers. They didn't grow up with an iPhone in their hand. They certainly did not grow up understanding algorithms and all of the different platforms and how to get 20 years ago, Pieter, you listed a property. Even ten years ago, certainly 15 years ago, you listed a property. There was one or two places that you would post it. Printmedia really is what won the day. It was a couple of publications, the local magazine and the local newspaper. And if you were a beast deal maker and you understood how to negotiate and read people, you were very successful in the business. Now, fast forward 20 years. Our business has, whether people realize it or not, profoundly changed. The battle is won and lost today in the digital world. And what we started to see was those seasoned deal makers didn't want to be burdened with learning. It's a job, man, to keep up with all of the things that are changing and the best place and the right time to post and the right SEO and the right images and beta testing. And there's so much that goes into winning that battle on the digital front. So we brought in a CMO, we built out a really strong digital team and we started to separate and take all of the job of getting the exposure out of the deal maker's hands and let the deal makers do what they do best, which is make deals. We find that when you start taking people out of their gift, they're not excited, right? They're not jazzed about what they're doing. They don't feel good about it. So your platform is based on technology. Can you talk to the audience a little bit about. Let's talk a little bit about the platform and then how we got there, if that's okay? Sure. Yeah. So I'm sure that your industry has changed in the sense that reach is very different now. You can reach a lot more people and you can cast a wider net. However, what hasn't changed is that if you don't follow up, you will not close deals. Absolutely. Good. I'm glad we agree on that. And that's something that technology can help with. It cannot replace your action. It cannot do everything for you. But I am a firm believer that technology should not make things more complicated, but it should be an assistant, a Butler. It should be service to you. And if that's how technology is used, it's used well. And that's what mobile does. It helps you not only exchange contact details, but also make sure you follow up, you follow through and you close the deal. I am not perfect at all, actually. I want to say I'm very bad at following up. That's why I use technology, to remind me of who to follow up with, what the status is, what the next step is. And so I kind of build this tool around my biggest weakness, which is how do I stay in touch with many people and still make it feel personal? Like I can send them all a mass email or a mass text message immediately you pick up on that like you feel it's not real. You see it, and that's what we're doing. And make sure that you are reminded to follow up to the right people at the right time and stay in touch and be top of mind when the time comes, you close that deal. So the platform we're talking about following up and closing deals, but there's an ocean of activity before we get there. And the agents, what we have found is don't hold me to this exact stat, Pieter, but it's something like 83% of complaints registered by Nar last year. Were agents never call back. 83%, I believe it don't even return that initial point of contact. So when you're in a busy office, we've been blessed that way. It's a very busy office. There is a tendency for the prospecting, what I call prospecting to fall off a bit. And I've now been through three full real estate cycles. I know what it looks like when you can get away with being an order taker. And I know what it looks like when you have the best goddamn deal in the last five years that your area has seen and you cannot get it financed, you cannot find a purchaser for it. It is just that there are those markets. Right. And I fear with some of the things that we're seeing now, we're approaching a headlong into those markets. And something else I've learned is once you're in the market, it's too late. You have to be set up and you have to be prospecting long in advance of you getting to that moment. Right. It has to feel genuine. It has to be consistent. As you had said, people are not looking for these mass interactions. So we're working very hard on a pretty comprehensive CRM. Now, the base is Zoho. That's the base platform. Right. And part of the challenge is every day, literally I'm exposed or pitched another platform that is going to handle this or it's going to handle that. It's going to take care of this. And many times they don't sync up. Right. So I'm sure you've contemplated how your platform is going to sync up or integrate or connect or does it operate entirely in a silo? How does that work? Yeah. So maybe let's just make it a little bit more tangible so that we don't lose everybody that has lost the CRM. And between all the technology, I need you, James, and I have a mobile card. And so I tap it on your phone and my contact details show. So you save it to your phone, say we shake hands and say goodbye. That was it. Now, what happens if I call you? You see my name instead of my phone number. So that's benefit number one, I want to make sure that you see my name and that's not in our spam number or call or whatever. So either you call me back or you sent me a text message that you're busy and say, hey, call me back in an hour, but at least there's a better connection. And when we started this company, that was the thing that I wanted to alleviate. I came home with 90 paper business cards and I had to put them all in my computer. And what happens is it doesn't happen. That's the problem, because now I have 90 paper business cards. I spoke to people the whole day and they are not being nurtured, they're not being contacted. They're not being kept warm. So friend of mine, real estate broker here in the city said, Pieter, that's nice. I can share my contact details, but what I really want is I want to exchange contact details, I want to stay in touch. I want to be in control of the conversation. So we build specifically for these situations, lead generation mode. So that way you flip the script. Now, I meet you, James. I tap my card on your phone and say, hey, can I send you my contact details? And you say, yes, put in your name and phone number here. And then you get a text message with my contact details. And the secret is that I also get yours immediately. So now it's sent to my phone as a text message. So I have your contact details as well. And I connected to Zoho to immediately send those contact details to Zoho as well. So the moment I go home, I have now 90 contacts sitting there that need to be assigned to status. So I'll put them in. Go ahead, pause there. Because I want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. Because we attend a number of conferences and exactly what you just described. We bought a card scanner, we have this program, that program and exactly what you just said. You're at a conference for three days. You meet 200 people, you're shot, right? You come home, you have the stack of cards, you have notes that you wrote on it. You feel great when you're coming out of the show, right? Did you have a good show? We always joke in the office about the line, good show. Yeah, good show. And then you don't do a damn thing with it because you're exhausted. You've been away for three days. By the time you catch up, the last thing on your mind is the business card. You're telling me that if I'm at the conference, I can take my card, tap somebody else's phone, they get my contact. How am I getting their contact? You also get a text message. So two ways. So you ask them, can I send you my contacts? So they're putting in their name and phone number. So you have everything from them. So we enriched that data. There are ways to scour around the Internet and we look at 250 sources. So we'll find that your title will find the location of your headquarters, we'll find the size of your business. And so I have an idea of seniority, I have an idea of location. And there's all kinds of information that will shape up that conversation. So we're turning all of that around into a super networking genius. Basically, that's what mobility is. And you have the ability to set the parameters up where it will go into my Zoho straight away, yes. So we integrate through Savior with 3000 apps, Zoho Salesforce HubSpot, follow up, Bus, Pipe Drive, Pipeline, Microsoft Dynamics, you name it, there's a CRM, and it's probably on Savior. And it's half an hour, drag and drop, click, click, click. And it's integrated. Wow. Okay, so we've gotten to the point and I assume that barring some obscure cover on a phone, this works with fair regularity. Yeah. Well, even if you would have, like, this thick phone case cover or whatever, there's not just a chip inside of the card, but there's also a QR code. So if you wanted to for the folks that are on video and they scan this QR code right now, they would see my information pop up right away. So there's always a backup. So this means it always works as long as there's Internet. Beautiful. Okay, so we tap, they enter info, you scour bunch of sites, which is brilliant. The contact is fairly well vetted. It goes into my CRM. We categorize our leads so that we're not sending a 3000 square foot space for lease. That's good for a dry cleaner to an investor that buys $100 million deals. Right. So we can categorize that, I assume in Zoho, just like we normally would. And now the contact is there. Exactly. So that's the stuff that you still have to do. You'll have to get this leader status. You'll have to assign any labels. It will have, of course, source being mobileo. But at least now you get home. Right. And the only thing you have to do is click categorize these leads. But they're already there for you. So we really make it super simple. We take the administration pay out of it, which is the input that step. You completely can ignore it. If you're clever and you set this up for a team that goes to a conference, you can also say if there's a lead coming in temporarily, this group of leads will immediately go into a campaign. Hey, great meeting you at the show. Here's the link to my calendar book, a meeting to follow up on whatever we've spoken about. And if you make that fully automated and at least you get back home two days later and there's a bunch of meetings in your calendar ready to go. Wow. And that customization is done inside your platform, not inside Zoho. Really? I would do that in Zoho for sure. Yeah, you can set that up. Wow. Okay. There are some other features to the card, from what I understand. So we've gotten to the point where and that's cool as hell. A simple tap. It's super easy. It's slick. Everybody is getting away from paper. Nobody wants to be bothered carrying these things home. Contacts go back and forth. You have the ability to deploy a text message or it sounds like an email as part of a campaign. What are some of the other features? This is the most important and really the only thing that I would add to this is that if you do not have a CRM and they're still depends on the size of your team. If you're alone or if you have a small team, maybe a CRM doesn't make too much sense. You can follow up on those leads, or at least you can have a status assigned to them in the mobile app so the leads will show up there as well. You can say I'm waiting for a response or I need to follow up or hide this lead for me because it wasn't a good fit. There's a mini status that you can add already to it. So some stuff there. And then I think you should know that these cars are fully customizable front and back. They can be completely own brand for your company, for your team. We also have them in wood, and we have them in metal modeled after the American Express platinum card. It's beautiful. It's a heavy card. You can get the black, silver and gold laser engraved. It really makes a strong impression. So pricing wise, can we get a baseline for the audience? And for myself, candidly, because I think this is absolutely slick. We have 25 or 30 team members that would require cards. What does pricing look like? Yeah. So there's two types of pricing. There's a personal card, as we call it. You'll get the card, you can design it yourself. You download the app, you can update your contact information. You can follow stats on how often the card is used. If people click on the links on your fee card when they saved your contact details. And that's $29. It's really a steal for your team. If you're 25, folks, I would go for the team's options. The cards are cheaper. It's $20 for a card, but you need to have an employee license with it. It's 29. So the first year it will be $49 per person, and after that, $29. But you get access to the team's admin Penal. This means that you can lock down fields. I can make sure that James cannot change his title into CEO, that he cannot put his personal Facebook on there, that there's some control measurements there. There's a team leaderboard. So you can see who is the one that use their card most often or where it's used. There's a little map where you can see, okay, the cards have been used over there and over there. And then there is that integration with CRM and automation. That's part of the team's plan, as well as an optional extra. I mean, that's literally cheaper than some of the fixed stock cards that we've used. Literally. Some of the fixed stock business cards that we use, we have a very heavy stock card. It cost us a couple of $100 per box. Oh, absolutely. People that switch to mobility often save up to 70%, sometimes even 80% of their cost on an annual basis. Wow. So how did you land here? This is a really interesting option. And as I'm thinking about it, as a business owner, you're sending people to different events and you're anticipating networking. Right. You want to make sure that the team is there doing what they should be doing. I can go in through the back end and see how many people at particular events actually went out, and you're shaking your head. So I'm assuming I'm on the right track, right? 100%. Absolutely. That's what you can do, yes. You're in control your visibility and data that was never there. Right. A paper business card. You paid $500. You paid $250 for it. You give it to your new employee, they go to a big conference, they throw them away, and you'll never know. Now here you have data on top of the data that closes. So you know exactly how many contacts you need to make to find a good deal. You need exactly what zip code or area those contacts have been found to find. Right prospects. So there's just a whole bunch of data that you're getting on top of the number when you see when you close the deal, that shows what your funnel looks like. And that helps you improve your marketing targeting. That helps you improve what networks you want to go to. Because three months later, you can see that one sale that you made or that new person that you found or whatever you're selling or buying that came from a certain event. So all of a sudden it makes more sense to focus on that type of event or the other type of event. So it's really helping you to learn if you're interested. And as we're using this product, let's say we just closed a $50 million deal, and there were certain events where the team members were out specifically addressing that task. Right. We were trying to get in front of the right folks for it. Is there a way that you can have a link inside what's being tapped over and they can go right to the landing page? Yeah. So this card can switch modes so you can switch it to. I just want to share my contact details and think about this in different scenarios. Right. If you're going to somebody that you already know, you have a meeting set up. You just want to make sure that they know that you're working with leading edge technology. So you just tap on their phone, share your contact details. That's it. If you know that you're going to an event where you're meeting multiple folks, you just want to get the efficiency. You put it to lead Gen mode so that you share your contact details, but they also immediately go to your Soho or whatever you want to use. It could also be as simple as a Google sheet. So use it for your open houses, use it for your events. Use it for whatever you want. If you're an online event as well. Right. If you're meeting 50 people, if you're giving a presentation, put your QR code on the last slide and you have everybody that's interested immediately flowing into your system. But you can also, if you have a temporary offer prospectus you want to share, or maybe a special sign up form, you can switch your card temporarily to any URL, so it could be whatever you create and show that the video. We have actors linking it straight to their real. We have DJs to link it to a certain set or maybe to a song that they produced. There's all kinds of ways that you could leverage this technology for sure. Yeah. So we can have links taking people right to our residential listings, right to our commercial listings. That's amazing. And from what I understand, the company was founded in 2019. Is that correct? Yeah. I came back from a trade show, I think also the last one I ever went to. And that's the true story. I came back with 90 paper business cards. It was 11:00 in the evening. I was staring at that stack in my hotel room on the desk. Right. To think, what am I going to do with this? And I knew that if I didn't follow up the next day, everybody would have forgotten about me. So you're facing an hour and a half of administrative tasks, and it's late in the day. You literally spoke to 100 folks. So I thought, this has to be solved. And I started looking and trying to find for a solution, and I found apps that really are built in a vacuum, don't connect to anything. They're bad. These scanner. Business card scanners don't work. Right. The L always is categorized as a one or capital I or the other way around. Like, even Apple has this function where you take a photo and supposed to take text or. I tried it last week on a shipping label. All the twos were Z's or the other way around. So if you can't trust it, it doesn't work. So that's the cool thing with mobile. It's seamless. When you meet somebody, it's frictionless. Right. Tap done. And then you can trust the data because the user has given you their name and phone number and email address. So you know that it is correct. This really does sound like it's business cards, but it's a groundbreaking way to contact and to prospect, which, again, by the time people think of it, it's typically too late. People don't wake up and have these ideas without background. Right. So what led you to this place? What were you doing in advance of this that gave you this background in technology? Yeah, it was a little bit of luck. Of course, the project before that was RFID related, so that's I knew about the chips and I knew how it works, and I just hadn't found the right application yet. What I first wanted to do was, if you look in your wallet, you'll find at least I found a card for the subway, one for the bath drain, one for the WeWork space, one for my building, one for the gym, and it's all NFC. And I couldn't understand why it had to be six different cards. Like it's all digital and it's all an NFC chip. So I started diving in, and I thought, maybe we can make a card with six chips that chips are super minuscule. They're one by 1 mm. That turns out to be not possible because of security reasons and 20 different standards. But it was good fun. I spent two months reading into the materials, and I bought some Chinese stuff to copy cards and was really trying to hack and copy these cards and find my way through the WeWork didn't work, by the way. Those cards are very hard to copy, but I did get to know everything about NFC. So when the time came that I was researching a solution for the business cards, I also knew from talking to my sales friends that there had to be something magical about it. There has to be something cool about the business card. That's part of the ritual. It's part of the culture. And if you don't have anything to talk about, if you want to pull up your phone and say, hey, let's link on LinkedIn again, nothing happens, right? I add you as a link on LinkedIn. And how do we stay in touch? We don't. Because there's nothing that reminds me to stay in touch. There's nothing that reminds me about how we met. There's just another one added to thousands of contacts that I have, and if I'm lucky, the algorithm and LinkedIn will show me post at some point. But there's nothing that makes me stay in control. So in between LinkedIn and Salesforce or Zoho or whatever it is, is a social version of a sales productivity tool. And that's when it hit me. I thought, okay, I got to try this out, showed it to a couple of friends. Everybody said, wow, this is pretty cool. And so then I knew, okay, let's put everything aside and focus on this right now. And so we went from an MVP to 30 people in two years time and an office here and in the Netherlands and in Australia. And our cards have been used over a million times in 190 countries. Wow. So networking versus advertising, there's a distinct advantage in Edge that I'm not sure people give enough credit to. And as we come out of this craziness with Coronavirus, there's a thirst almost. You could feel it. It's palpable for people to return to events. I attended an event the other night that we sponsor. There was 400 people. There never has been that packed. Can you talk a little bit about networking versus advertising and what that means? Yes. I always tell my marketing team here because go get one of those sandwich signs right aboard and go stand with a Mobilo thing on it here in Times Square. So 150,000 people a day of supposedly walking by. Right. What's going to happen? Nothing, because you're advertising in the wrong place. If you would go to a small business networking event, you meet ten people in 15 minutes. You're more likely to score a demo than anywhere else. So where do you advertise where your customers are and not where the mass is? Quality over quantity always rules. So think about networking as advertising, but in lower frequency and maybe lower quantity. But if you know exactly where you need to be, you'll find a much higher quality and a better fit for your business or your product. So how many people are actually using the product? Now? We can say how many people are using the product. We know that our cards have been used over a million times in 190 countries as it's kind of scouring for information. Is it looking at social channels? Yes, absolutely. And is there a way to pull those channels? Well, if you turn on our data enrichment, you'll get the LinkedIn URL. If it's known in the database, then you immediately get the link to somebody's LinkedIn. Again, we're focused on professional networking. Right. So I suppose you could. But do we really want to see somebody's Facebook or Instagram? Maybe in certain situations. But let's keep it professional for now. Amazing. Where is the best place for people to take a look and see a demo or find information on the product? Yeah, go to mobilocard.com. I would suggest order a $7 card. It has our logo on it, but at least you have an idea, like $7, right? One cappuccino less today and you make $7 available for yourself. Try it out. And then if you like it, you get a fully customized card with your logo on it or a wood card or a Mastercard. But yeah, that's the quickest way. mobilocard.com get a mobility card for $7 and try it out. I'm sure you're going to like it work, I can tell you now, folks, we're going to order them because having run the gamut in the trade shows and they're all starting back up again, ICSC kicks off again in May. This is a great way to not only circumvent the process and actually monetize the contacts, it will set you apart because not nobody, very few people actually take those cards, enter them, and even fewer people reach out. Right. They end up going into a dead database somewhere and maybe they get a newsletter at one point or another. But this is a fascinating piece of tech, and we love applying tech and real estate. What's the turnaround time, Pieter? So I'm available on the card. We would ship either the same day or the next. If you have a custom design, we will ship it within 24 to 48 hours after you approve your design. So it's quick. That's what people expect these days, right? Absolutely. One more time. The best way to contact you, Pieter, you can go to our website mobilocard.com or feel free to send me an email that's also fine so here's where my cards usually do well my first name is pieter@mobilocard.com so Pieter with an i pieter@mobilocard.com send me an email I'll make sure that you either get a demo schedule with me or I'll find the right person in the company to talk to you. But yeah whatever your listeners need I'm happy to assist this fascinating stuff Pieter Limburg best of luck Congratulations and everyone out there as always please stay safe.