ISA Group Roleplay Video: “I don’t feel like going through it again”

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Today’s roleplay group deals with expired sellers who are just tired of the process and don’t feel like going through everything again. Maybe their house was on the market for a long time or a few different times and they are done with it.

These leads still have their goals and still have their process. The problem is, all they see is a huge distance between where they are at and the outcome they want to achieve. Your mission as an ISA is to get them back on the horse and convince them you can get them results.

Have You Heard About The Amazing 3-Step Strategy That Revives “Dead Leads”? Grab your seat to Smart Inside Sales Masterclass to discover more, plus the steps you need to revive, reconnect and convert more leads.

Click here now to get the FREE training.

 

4 Reasons Real Estate ISAs Fail

real estate ISAs
real estate ISAs

4 Reasons Real Estate ISAs Fail

You’re going to reach a point with your real estate business when you’ll have to hire more people. This is just a fact. You’re going to be so busy actually running the business and your real estate team, that you will need people to take some of the tasks off of your plate.

And if you are intent on growing your business even more, then one of these critical tasks is consistent lead generation. You have to hire people who can consistently supply a steady stream of quality leads. These people are called inside sales agents (ISAs). A good inside sales agent is a highly effective and accountable salesperson who prospects, follows up with leads, nurtures leads, and sets appointments.

Building an Inside Sales Team Is Tough

Hiring and maintaining a successful inside sales team can be tough. Just like with outside agents, the real estate industry is tough and has a high attrition rate for inside sales agents as well.

To start, it can be hard to feel comfortable passing off some of the responsibility that you have been shouldering. This is your business or your team—something that you have poured hours of work, sweat and tears into. This produces a bit of reservation when it comes time to let someone else track down and follow up on leads in your name.

And then how do you hire the right people, and then properly set them up for success? Both of these aspects of building a successful real estate inside sales team can be stressful and intimidating if you do not have much experience doing it. And they are why many team leaders find it difficult to develop effective inside sales agents.

To help you build your real estate team, below are four common reasons why ISAs often fail.

#1 You Didn’t Hire an Actual ISA

As I mention in another post of mine, 7 Strategies To Build An Inside Sales Team, extensively evaluating your inside sales candidates during the hiring process is key. More important than hiring someone whose resume says they have a lot of real estate inside sales experience is hiring someone who can have effective sales conversations on the phone.

The most important skill your ISA needs is to be able to persuade people to take action through their conversations. If they can’t do that, if they aren’t motivated and energized by having sales conversations on the phone, then they are going to quickly lose confidence, have call reluctance, and most likely eventually fail.

#2 There Aren’t Clear Expectations or Accountability

Clear expectations and transparent means of measuring progress towards those expectations are both critically important. Inside sales agents and inside sales teams are relatively new phenomena in the real estate industry and so are the expectations and requirements that come along with them. And if you, as the team leader or business owner, don’t know what is expected of your ISA, it’s hard to think they will either.

Your ISA needs daily, weekly, and monthly goals and expectations. This means tracking things like number of dials made, number of contacts made, contact to appointment ratio, number of appointments set vs. appointments converted—and having benchmarks for where the ISA should be with each of them at each time mark.

If you can’t clearly express what is expected of your inside sales agents, then they will fail.

#3 Poor Lead Sources

Your ISA needs sources where they can find solid, quality leads. You can’t expect them to generate leads out thin air. All lead sources are the not the same and so should be worked in a specific order, depending on different factors like the size of your real estate team, and how much bandwidth your team has.

These lead sources should be worked in the following order, from top to bottom:

  • All inbound leads
  • Inbound referral leads
  • Expireds, withdrawns, FSBO leads
  • Past client sphere leads
  • Circle prospecting (If this is in support of a farming strategy or if the ISA has NO ONE ELSE to call)

The key is to correctly prioritize the lead sources and determine which ISAs should be cross-trained to work all lead sources. Start the less experienced on the lower end of the list and then progress their skills up to working the most valuable leads.

If you sufficiently train them on how to prioritize and work the different lead sources, your inside sales agent will be much less likely to fail.

#4 Lack of an Environment Conducive to Success

Many ISAs will fail because the company environment and culture is not encouraging their success. Many people have false ideas in their heads about what it means to do lead generation, make phone calls, and close sales. You need to replace these ideas and perceptions positive stories and inspiration.

If your sales person has good stories in their head—if doing those activities that lead to production have a positive connotation—they will be unstoppable. If they have negative stories in their head about lead generation, setting appointments, and what those things mean about them as a sales person, then no matter what you do or say, they won’t lead generate.

Emphasize that being productive, being creative, and connecting people with products that help them are how they create value for themselves and get them closer to the life they want to live, in addition to creating value for clients.

Set Your Team Up for Success

Hiring and maintaining a successful real estate inside sales team is not easy. But if you can avoid the pitfalls described above, you will develop a strong team that grows your business by leaps and bounds. The key is to make sure that, in every instance, you are working to set your ISAs up for success.

ISA Group Roleplay Video: “I heard there are no good houses until Spring”

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Have You Heard About The Amazing 3-Step Strategy That Revives “Dead Leads”? Grab your seat to Smart Inside Sales Masterclass to discover more, plus the steps you need to revive, reconnect and convert more leads.

Click here now to get the FREE training.

 

ISA Call Review: “The hardest part is getting them on the phone”

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How To Ethically Steal My “$200 Million Dollar” Lead Conversion System…

…And “copy and paste” it into your business to close more deals, land more appointments, and convert more leads – as soon as THIS WEEK.

You can get 100% FREE here.

Just click here now to see how you can cash in.

ISA Group Roleplay: Winter Is Coming!

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3 Easy Ways To Increase Your Lead Conversion, Appointments, and Closings

Want to make more sales? I’ve created a FREE masterclass to show you…

  • How to overcome any objection easily WITHOUT memorizing a single word.
  • A 3-step “foolproof” closing process to land the appointment and close the deal.
  • How to master the most crucial part of any sales conversation and set yourself up for success BEFORE you speak a single word.
  • And MUCH more…

Click here to watch it. (It’s 100% FREE).

How to Lead Your Real Estate Sales Team?

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How to Lead Your Real Estate Sales Team?

“If you want to build a ship,

don’t drum up the people to gather wood,

divide the work, and give orders.

Instead, teach them to yearn

for the vast and endless sea.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Take Your Sales Team Beyond Numbers

We spend so much time in coaching talking about accountability and tracking sales people’s numbers and making them report to us, but forget that the highest level of leadership is inspiration rather than oppression. One of the most important parts of leading a team is helping the people working for you put their role and their work into context.

Numbers and accountability are critical to cultivating a successful and productive real estate team, but it’s important to remember that those numbers don’t happen in a vacuum. They are the result of the level of drive and motivation that your ISAs and agents have on a daily basis. And their drive and motivation is largely the result of the company’s or team’s values and culture. This is where inspiration comes in.

What Drives People

So how do you inspire people to produce more value? I can definitely tell you what does not inspire people: fear. If the only thing driving your inside sales agent to pick up the phone and dial is fear of the consequences of not doing so, then they are not going to be successful on their calls and their numbers will likely fall even further. Fear of reprimand or termination if they don’t hit their numbers will increase stress and decrease confidence.

Instead of fear, offer your team opportunity and self-responsibility. What inspires people to work hard and consistently produce is the belief that their career and their life are in their own hands. That they are in control of their own advancement and have the real ability to improve their lives, set and meet personal goals, and be successful through working hard and constantly honing their skills.

Emphasize Value Creation and Productivity

In order to create a feeling of opportunity and self-responsibility on your team, you have to tie together them creating value for the company and creating value for themselves. One of the main things that can sap motivation of your employees and cause their confidence and numbers to drop is the feeling that they are working for the benefit of someone else instead of for the benefit of themselves.

By building a culture that emphasizes that when your employees are creating value for the company, they are also creating value and opportunity in their own lives, your team will be much more inspired and productive.

And how do you create value for the company and for yourself? Through productivity. Being productive, being creative, closing deals, bringing in new business—these are things to take deep pride in and are really nothing short of heroic acts. Your agents or ISAs are helping people sell their homes or get into a new home, but they are also improving their own skills, making a difference at the company, and taking charge in building the life they want to live. That’s inspiration.

Yearn for the Vast and Endless Sea

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Use numbers and accountability to measure progress and success, but to motivate your team teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. That is to say, teach them that they can build the life they want. They have that power and that ability. It just takes consistent and dedicated value creation.

Teach that being productive, being creative, and connecting people with products that help them are are things to strive for and take pride in. That the way they create value for themselves and improve their own lives is through creating value for the company and for the team. Their personal productivity and success is the way they get closer to the life they want to live, in addition to creating value for clients.

Help your agents and ISAs connect the dots between their work and their life and between the company and themselves. That’s how you’ll motivate them and make your team unstoppable.

Full Time Or Part Time Real Estate ISA?

full time ISA
full time ISA

Full Time Or Part Time Real Estate ISA?

Should you hire a part time or full time inside sales agent? That’s great if you have reached the point in your real estate business where it’s necessary to hire an ISA. That means your business is productive, growing, and that you are ready to take it to the next level.

But first things first. How do you know if you are actually ready to hire an inside sales agent? 

When to hire an Inside sales agent?

Inside sales agents are skilled real estate professionals who are highly trained, capable, and dedicated to their craft in the same degree as an outside agent.  The advantage of the ISA is that they specialize in the initial tasks of lead generation, lead nurturing, and setting listing and buyer consultation appointments.

You’re ready for an ISA when you are already bringing in around 150,000+ in annual GCI, and you already have a solid and well-trained assistant handling your transactions for you. If you’ve reached this point, then you are ready to scale and can leverage your lead generation while producing more appointments and contracts.

The other requirement is that you must have some type of lead generation platform or farm in place, or well-established online profiles where you can run advertising.  You will also need inbound lead sources for the ISA.  Once you get your ISA, and if they are effective, then you will quickly need to add additional agents to your team.  An effective and efficient ISA can easily serve 4-5 agents.

Full time or part time ISA?

Let’s say you’ve determined that you are ready to hire an inside sales agent. Now the question becomes, should you hire a full time or a part time one?

A lot of people may lean towards a part time. They might think that it would be a good way to “get their feet wet” and test out having an ISA to see if they bring value to their business. If they are on the fence about whether their business needs an inside sales agent or not, they may think that hiring one part time is a cost effective compromise.

The truth, however, is that this is not the case.

Successfully training an ISA takes time. In fact, it could take up to between four and six months to effectively coach and evaluate if your ISA is productive or profitable. And it takes a considerable amount of effort and mental investment both on your part and on the new inside sales agent’s part.

Because of this, you need to make sure that the person you hire is fully invested and motivated to learn your process, to start making calls, and to begin to bring in business. Full-time ISAs are more likely to:

  • Speak with enough contacts in order to build a good base of nurtures
  • Meet the desired mark of two listing appointments per day

Most importantly though, they are less likely to give up on the process than a part time ISA is. This is because full time inside sales agents have more time to dedicate towards learning the process and they are more willing to because you are their sole source of employment.  

Make sure you hire the right full time inside sales agent

In the question of full time ISAs vs part time ISAs, full time is clearly the right way to go. But it is understandable if you still have reservations because of the cost and the fact that it can be intimidating to hire a full-time employee. To mitigate this fear, you have to make sure you are hiring the right people and that you have a solid system in place to train and set expectations for them.

Like I discussed in my previous article, 7 Strategies To Build An Inside Sales Team, you need to be sure that you are extensively testing your inside sales agent candidates in the skills that are required for the job. This means that you are seeing how they sound on the phone, checking whether or not they can have effective sales conversations, and making sure they can persuade someone to take action.

Once you hire an all-star inside sales agent candidate, you need to have clear benchmarks and expectations for them, train the heck out of them in lead conversion (for that you can try this), and use numbers to track things like number of dials made, number of contacts made, contact to appointment ratio, number of appointments set vs. appointments converted.

Hire a full time inside sales agent   

Hire a full time ISA. You need the time and motivation to fully integrate them into your lead generation and conversion system. And you also need someone who is fully invested in helping you grow your business and their career. In other words, you need a full time agent.

If you are unsure about hiring and training an inside sales agent, check out our ISA Department In A Box training program. It will walk you through ISA team hiring and training step by step, until your inside sales team is unstoppable.

7 Strategies to Build An Inside Sales Team

real estate inside sales team
real estate inside sales team

7 Strategies To Build An Inside Sales Team

Building a successful inside sales team is how you will take your real estate business to the next level. It’s how you build a steady and consistent stream of leads coming in, so your real estate agents can focus on what they do best, buying and selling houses, and you can focus on improving the business as a whole.

But building a real estate inside sales team is not always easy. For one, it involves hiring good people and then properly setting them up for success. Both of which can be stressful and intimidating if you do not have much experience doing it. And on top of that, it means handing off some of the reins of your business and trusting your team to successfully generate and nurture leads for your agents.

To make this process a little easier on you, I have compiled a list of seven strategies that will ensure you will build a productive, successful, and reliable inside sales team.

  1. Evaluate your Inside Sales Candidates

First on the list is to make sure you are extensively testing your inside sales agent (ISA) candidates in the skills that are required for the job. And for an ISA, the most important skill is being able to have effective sales conversations over the phone. At the end of the day, the ONLY thing that matters is if an ISA can make hundreds of calls per day, have good conversations, and persuade someone to take ACTION.

So the key thing to do is see how they sound on the phone. This means listening to them on voicemail, doing role plays, and having the candidate make actual calls and see how they do. If they can successfully make calls and they sound good on the phone, then you know that they are a very good potential candidate. Testing in this way before you make the hire will cut down on wasted time, money and tears.

  1. Set Clear Expectations for Your ISAs

Next, it is essential that you clearly set out your 30/60/90 day expectations for your ISA in their role. That way, if they turn out not to be right for the job you will know MUCH sooner than waiting the 6 months it typically takes for them to ramp up. This means tracking things like number of dials made, number of contacts made, contact to appointment ratio, number of appointments set vs. appointments converted—and having benchmarks for where the ISA should be with each of them at each time mark.

  1. Use a Lead Conversion Training Program

So once you evaluate, hire, and lay out a benchmark plan for your ISA, now you have to effectively train them. And since you are busy running your business, the best way to train them is to use an awesome lead conversion training program. This will keep you out of the trenches using time you don’t have, and take the burden of making sure your inside sales team is getting consistent, uniform training.

With a training like Smart Inside Sales’ Conversion University (excuse the shameless plug), you can be sure that your ISAs are learning much more than scripts. They will master overcoming objections and learn how to have enjoyable, successful sales calls.

4. Use Numbers to Maintain Accountability

The fourth strategy tip for building an effective inside sales team is to have weekly accountability meetings with them, tell them what they need to do, then measure them CONSISTENTLY and CONSTANTLY. Developing experienced, productive ISAs is a cumulative process. You will find that they will progress from struggling to get contacts, to struggling to set appointments, struggling to get set appointments to actually meet, then get met appointments that turn into contracts. You need to work with them through these different stages.

5. Get in the Pit

The fifth strategy is closely related to the fourth. Just measuring their progress is not enough, it is critical that you get in the pit with them, listen to calls, review numbers, and actually hear what they are doing.

It’s one thing to roleplay, practice, and talk about theory, but you really have to hear how they are interacting with live humans. So in this part of the process you have to get more hands on and make sure that all the training is effective, as well as make sure your benchmarks and expectations are all being properly met. 

  1. Give your ISAs a Variety of Leads

Next, in order to make sure that your ISAs are getting tons of valuable experience and becoming more and more effective, ensure that they are going on different types of calls. Mix up their lead types, giving them some hard and some easy.

Harder is outbound cold, easier is inbound asking for assistance. Conversations are different depending on which type of lead you are speaking with, and building a successful inside sales team means that your ISAs can successfully convert in all types of conversations.

  1. Leverage the Different Strengths of Your ISAs

And lastly, remember that each ISA or agent on your team has a unique psychology. They all will have different strengths and weaknesses and will struggle with certain types of leads and people. Your job is to coach each of your inside sales agents based on that unique psychology. To have a truly successful team means leveraging each of their strengths and weaknesses in a way so that the different team members complement one another.

Implementing these strategies consistently will allow you to build a successful and profitable inside sales team and catapult your business to the next level. But this doesn’t have to be a daunting task and you don’t have to do it all yourself. At Smart Inside Sales we have a training program called ISA Department In A Box that will walk you through all the processes of successfully setting up and training your ISA team.

It has everything you need to establish an inside sales team and set up your ISAs, and your business, for success. Seamlessly implement all these strategies we discussed, and start doing it today! 

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