Industry playbooks
Real Estate sales call playbooks
Principals are watching portal fees climb every renewal while Saturday's enquiries sit unanswered until Monday, and their top billers refuse to touch whatever system the agency bought last year. Practise against a buyer who's already been cold-called by three proptech startups this week and will test whether you understand appraisal pipelines and commission splits before they give you two more minutes.
Every call type for Real Estate
Scripts, sample dialogue, objection handling and a live AI buyer for each one.
Cold Call
You dialled someone who was mid-something-else — reviewing a P&L, walking between meetings, about to eat lunch — and they picked up without knowing your name, your company, or why their phone rang. There is no prior email, no referral, no webinar download to reference. The first three to five seconds decide whether you get thirty more, and the first thirty decide whether you get a meeting. Your job on this call is not to sell the product, qualify thoroughly, or run discovery — it's to earn a next conversation by naming a problem so specifically that the prospect thinks 'how do they know that about us?' You will be interrupted, you will hear a reflex brush-off before they've processed a word you said, and you have to stay conversational through it without sounding like you're reading. Success is a calendar hold, not a good chat.
Read the playbook →Demo Call
A scheduled demo with someone who has already had the pitch conversation and said yes to seeing it — which means they are not here to learn what it does, they're here to find out where it breaks. They arrive with a mental list: how it hooks into the systems they already run, who on their team owns it once you're gone, what happens at 2am when it falls over, and how long before it's actually doing something useful. They will interrupt. Every interruption is either a buying question or a disqualification test, and your job is to answer it in their environment, not in your sandbox. If you run the standard tour — click here, then here, notice this dashboard — they go quiet, you hear typing, and you've lost the room without them ever saying no. The demo you rehearsed is a resource, not a script; the call is won by how well you handle the detours.
Read the playbook →Discovery Call
A 25-minute scheduled discovery call with a prospect who took your first touch seriously, cleared time, and showed up expecting to be diagnosed — not sold to. They already know your one-liner, so repeating it burns credibility. They have a real, layered problem: a surface symptom they'll hand over in the first two minutes, a mechanism underneath it they'll explain if you ask a decent follow-up, and a cost or political consequence they'll only name once you've proven you can hold the conversation without reaching for a demo. Your job is to earn each layer with open questions, quantify what you find, understand how a decision like this actually gets made in their shop, and leave with a specific, dated next step that both sides agreed to out loud. Pitch early, monologue, or run a BANT checklist and they will answer politely, in short sentences, and never take the next meeting.
Read the playbook →Manager Coaching Call
This is the 1:1 nobody sleeps well before. You manage a rep who has missed two quarters in a row — not catastrophically, but consistently — and you've got 30 to 45 minutes to find out whether this is a fixable skill problem, a fixable effort problem, or the start of an exit. They walk in with the excuses pre-loaded: the leads are garbage, the territory got carved up, we're 20% over on price against the challenger. Some of that is even partly true, which is what makes it hard. Underneath it, they know their discovery calls are shallow and they stopped prospecting sometime around week three of last quarter when they got busy 'working' two deals that were never going to close. They will not volunteer that. They'll only get there if you stay curious longer than they expect, look at actual numbers instead of arguing about feelings, and make it clear that admitting the real problem is safer than defending the fake one. Your job is not to win the argument, deliver a motivational speech, or put them on a PIP by minute ten. It's to get to one true root cause and leave with one changed behaviour they actually agreed to.
Read the playbook →Pricing Negotiation Call
This is the call after the technical win. They've run the eval, they've told their VP your product is the pick, and the only thing left is the number. They are not trying to talk themselves out of buying — they're trying to buy the same thing for less, and they will use every lever they have to do it: a low anchor ("honestly, we budgeted about half that"), a competitor's quote they may or may not still be considering, a case study or logo trade dangled as if it's currency, a threat to push the PO into next quarter, and long, deliberate silence after they name a figure. The trap is that they're pleasant about all of it, so it doesn't feel like a fight — it feels like a friendly conversation in which you keep making small, reasonable-sounding concessions until you've given away 30 points and gotten nothing. Your job is not to win the negotiation; it's to hold price by trading, keep the relationship warm enough that they still want to sign with you, and leave the call with a dated path to signature.
Read the playbook →Renewal Call
This is a save call, not a renewal call — the paperwork is the last five minutes, not the first five. The contract ends in six weeks, the customer has already half-decided to leave, and they're taking the meeting partly to say out loud what went wrong this year. Adoption never got past the first team, support tickets went quiet for days in Q2 during their busiest stretch, and a competitor rep has been in their inbox with a number that's 20-30% lower. They still like one or two things — usually the thing their power user built a workflow around — but they need those failures acknowledged specifically and unflinchingly before they'll entertain another twelve months. Lead with the order form, the discount, or 'so what would it take to get this done,' and you confirm every suspicion they have that you only show up when money is due. Lead with the ticket numbers, the dates, what actually broke internally on your side, what changed, and a named-owner plan for the next 90 days, and the same person will start negotiating with you instead of against you.
Read the playbook →Upsell Call
You're calling a customer who is already paying you, already reasonably happy, and has no idea you're about to ask for more money. They picked up expecting a check-in. Your job is to convert an account review into an expansion conversation without burning the goodwill that made the account healthy in the first place. The buyer's default posture is defensive on three fronts: the budget for your category is already spent for the year, their team is underwater and can't absorb another rollout, and they suspect they aren't even getting full value from what they bought last time — a suspicion you must address before they'll hear anything new. This call is won or lost in the prep: if you can open with their actual usage numbers and the specific result they've already gotten, you get a real conversation. If you open with "I wanted to tell you about our new module," you get a polite ten minutes and a "send me something."
Read the playbook →Warm Call
A warm call is one where somebody else's credibility got you the answer. A peer downloaded your guide and said "you should call Dani", or a mutual contact fired off a three-line intro that the prospect skimmed on their phone and archived. They pick up expecting you, but expecting is not the same as knowing — they can usually name the referrer and almost never name what you sell. You start with maybe ninety seconds of borrowed goodwill and a very specific obligation: prove the referrer wasn't wasting their time. Warmth is a loan, not a grant. Two generic sentences — "So, just to give you a bit of background on us" — and you've converted a warm call into a cold call the prospect now feels mildly embarrassed to be on, which is worse than cold. The job is to cash the referral fast, convert it into one specific, testable reason you're relevant to *them* rather than to the referrer, and get out with a real second meeting.
Read the playbook →
Who you're calling
In Real Estate, the people who pick up are agency principals and sales leaders. The titles you will actually reach:
- Principal / Licensee in Charge
- Director of Sales
- Sales Manager
- General Manager
- Head of Marketing
- Operations Manager
- Franchise Owner / Business Owner
What keeps them up at night
Name one of these in your first thirty seconds and you have earned the rest of the call.
Enquiries rot over the weekend
Portal enquiries land Saturday morning while every agent is running open homes back to back. By Monday the buyer has already inspected three other properties with an agent who called back in ten minutes. The principal sees the enquiry count in the portal dashboard, sees the inspection numbers, and knows the gap between them is money walking out the door — but can't prove which agent dropped which lead.
Vendor reporting is a Sunday-night chore nobody does properly
Every vendor on a 4-6 week campaign expects a report after each open: how many groups through, where the enquiry came from, what the feedback on price was. Agents write them at 9pm, copy-paste last week's, or skip them until the vendor rings the principal complaining they've heard nothing. Then the price conversation at week four is ten times harder because there's no documented evidence trail of buyer feedback.
Portal fees climb every renewal and can't be passed on cleanly
The annual subscription goes up, premiere and highlight upgrades get pushed harder, and depth pricing varies by postcode. Some of it goes into VPA and the vendor wears it — but the base spend comes straight off the agency's bottom line. Principals are paying more each year for the same enquiry volume and have no leverage, because delisting isn't an option when that's where every buyer searches.
Top agents run their own tech stack and won't be told
The two or three agents writing a third of the GCI have their own CRM habits, their own database in a spreadsheet, their own copywriter for listing blurbs. A principal who mandates a new system risks the conversation that ends with that agent taking their rent roll of relationships across the road. So agency-wide tools get adopted by the juniors and ignored by the people whose numbers actually matter.
Agent churn resets the pipeline
An agent leaves and their appraisal pipeline, their farm area contacts and half their pending listings walk with them. Recruiting a replacement takes months, onboarding takes more, and in the meantime the agency's market share in that postcode drops visibly in the portal stats — which competitors use in their own listing presentations.
Proptech fatigue
Principals get cold-called by three or four proptech startups a week — AI copywriting, AI callbacks, digital appraisal tools, video walkthroughs. Most were bought, half-rolled-out and abandoned. The reflex now is 'send me something' before you've finished your first sentence, and the real objection isn't cost, it's the memory of the last integration that never talked to the CRM.
What they'll push back with
The objections that come up on nearly every call, and a response that keeps the conversation alive.
- “Our top agents have their own systems — they won't change.”
- Don't ask them to. Name the agent: 'Who's your number one writer?' Then position it as something that runs underneath what they already do — their leads still land in their inbox, the difference is nothing sits unanswered while they're at an open. Ask to pilot with two mid-tier agents who want to write more, not the top biller. When those two lift their enquiry-to-inspection numbers, the top agent will ask what they're doing. Mandates fail in agencies; envy works.
- “We already pay the portals a fortune; there's no budget left.”
- Agree with it, then reframe the spend. 'You're paying for enquiry. What percentage of Saturday's enquiries got a call back before Monday?' If they don't know, that's the sale. This isn't new spend on top of the portals — it's making the spend they've already committed actually convert. Frame the cost per listing per month against a single extra sale at their average commission.
- “We've tried something like this and nobody used it.”
- Ask what it was and what killed it — you'll almost always hear 'it didn't talk to our CRM' or 'nobody was made accountable for it.' Then be specific about which CRM you integrate with and who owns adoption in the first 30 days. Offer a rollout where the agency doesn't pay until a named number of listings are live on it.
- “Our vendors want a person, not a bot, calling their buyers.”
- Vendors want their property sold and want to know what's happening. Nobody's replacing the agent at the open home or the price conversation — this handles the first response and the inspection booking so the agent walks into a warm buyer instead of chasing a cold one. Ask what the vendor would rather have: a personal call three days later, or a booked inspection in eight minutes.
- “Send me some information and I'll look at it.”
- The information isn't what decides it. 'Happy to — but so I send the right thing, how many listings are you carrying right now and how many of those vendors are asking why numbers are down?' Get one real number before you agree to email anything, and book the follow-up while you're on the phone, not 'sometime next week.'
- “We're in a stock shortage — the problem is winning listings, not selling them.”
- Fair, and that's the better conversation. Ask their appraisal-to-listing conversion. Vendors choose the agent who shows up to the listing presentation with evidence — buyer numbers, enquiry data, comparable campaign results. If your product produces that reporting automatically, you're a listing-winning tool, not a lead-nurture tool. Sell the pitch, not the follow-up.
- “This is a franchise decision, I can't buy at office level.”
- Ask what they can do at office level — most licensees can run a pilot on their own P&L. Get the pilot, get the numbers, then ask them to introduce you to the state or group office with their own results in hand. A principal advocating internally beats a cold call to head office every time.
Their language
Use these the way they do. Getting one wrong costs more credibility than getting none of them right.
Jargon
- VPA (vendor paid advertising)
- appraisal-to-listing conversion
- exclusive agency agreement / sale authority
- listing presentation (the 'listo')
- CMA / comparable market analysis
- depth products and premiere upgrades
- days on market (DOM)
- auction clearance rate
- conjunctional sale
- farm area
- GCI (gross commission income)
- commission split / desk fee
- rent roll
- off-market / pre-market
- cooling-off period
- groups through the open
Metrics they are measured on
Listings won per agent per month, Appraisal-to-listing conversion rate, Average days on market, Auction clearance rate, Average commission rate (%) and GCI per agent, Lead response time on portal enquiries (minutes to first contact), Enquiry-to-inspection conversion rate, Market share of listings by postcode, Agent retention / churn over 12 months, VPA recouped vs. written off
Related industries
Buyers with adjacent pressures, and the same call types against them.
Practise against a Real Estate buyer
A live AI prospect with Real Estate context — their pressures, their jargon, their objections. They talk back, they interrupt, and they can hang up on you. You get a scored breakdown when the call ends.
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