Real Estate ISA Training: The Key to Overcoming the Market Downturn

Real Estate ISA Training: The Key to Overcoming the Market Downturn

As a real estate team leader, the success of your team or business ultimately rests on your shoulders. You have to put the right systems in place to ensure your ISAs are consistently producing results, and give them the tools they need to be successful. That means you need real estate ISA training. This is even more important now that we find ourselves in a shifting real estate market.

Real Estate ISAs Are Key

With the market slowing, you have to take advantage of every lead that you can get your hands on, which means real estate ISAs are a critical part of your operation. The fact that phone answer rates are lower today than they ever have been means that if an inside sales agent can get someone on the phone, they need the skills to actually set the appointment, because it’s tougher and tougher to get people on the phone.

What does that mean for you as a real estate team leader? You need effective real estate ISA training.

The Two Biggest Barriers for Real Estate ISAs

On a practical level, the most important thing that your real estate ISAs have to do effectively is successfully make calls to set appointments. And the two biggest barriers to this are call reluctance and effective objection handling. Overcoming both of these has to do with mindset. And real estate ISA training can help.

Call reluctance

Being a real estate ISA is a difficult job. You face a lot of rejection and hear “no” a lot more than you hear “yes”. That’s why mindset and mindset training are so important. Inside sales agents need to have the right perception of their work, themselves, and the business. The biggest determining factor for whether a sales person will or will not be aggressive with generating leads, setting appointments, asking for contracts, and closing deals is the story they build and tell themselves in their heads. That’s where your training and motivation comes in.

If your sales person has good stories in their head—if doing those activities that lead to productivity have a positive connotation—they will be unstoppable. Emphasize the fact that their careers and lives are in their own hands. When they are busting butt making calls and following up on leads, they are building the lives they want to live. In doing so, they are creating value for the client, for the business, and for themselves. Training and culture have to hammer home that selling and productivity are noble endeavors.

Objection handling

After self perception and head stories, objection handling is the area for real estate ISA training. If they don’t know what to say, or how to convert a lead from a “no” to a “yes”, they will not feel comfortable or confident when contacting leads. At that point, they will make all sorts of excuses for why they can’t or won’t bring in new business.

These days we handle objections in a much more sophisticated and conversational way than the older “hard sell” tactics and snarky scripts. Teach your agents to ask questions to get to the bottom of a lead’s objection. As we say at Smart Inside Sales, “follow the no” and get to the heart of lead’s desired outcome and how they think they will get there. Offering leads a different solution to reach an even bigger and better outcome is the best way to handle a negative response.

Circumvent the natural fear of objections with a comprehensive real estate ISA training on what to say and when to say it. Focus on teaching them to ask powerful questions that compel the lead to almost ask the sales person for the appointment.

Real Estate ISA Training: Create Valuable Assets for Your Company

There is a real estate storm that has arrived, and it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. Team leaders have to act now and act decisively if they are going keep their companies competitive and successful during the downturn. And that really starts with your real estate ISA training. Even the most promising candidate needs effective instruction to be successful.

That’s where we come in. We offer comprehensive training programs that focus on way more than just scripts. We teach your ISAs to have more effective and productive conversations that will greatly boost their conversion rate and help them set more appointments. From mindset to objection handling to closing—and everything in between—we’ll help your ISA become a master of lead conversion.

Learn more about our real estate ISA training.

SHARE THIS POST

September 13, 2022September 13, 2022

The Cure for the Fall Market: An Effective Real Estate Pipeline

The Cure for the Fall Market: An Effective Real Estate Pipeline

When the fall comes, many agents who haven’t worked on their real estate pipeline buckle down for slower, tougher months ahead. After all, the spring and summer real estate seasons are typically busier—with more buyers out looking in the nice weather and larger demand from people who are looking to purchase a home and settle down before the school year starts.

Although this trend might be true in a broad sense, the mistake that many real estate agents end up making is writing off the fall and winter completely. They think that as soon as Labor Day comes and goes, that there is no longer any business to be had.

But there is a way that agents can secure a steady stream of business, even into the fall and winter seasons. By building a fat, bursting real estate pipeline that is just pumping new clients out for your company.

The Mistake Many Agents Make

The sad truth is that if agents or companies are lacking business in the fall and winter, it’s because they did not put in the work during the time leading up to that time. In other words, they did not build an effective real estate pipeline. And I’m sorry to say that those agents have no one to blame but themselves.

Because, although it might be less than the spring or summer, there is A LOT of business to be had in the other seasons. You just have to put yourself in a position to capture as much of it as possible.

What Is a Real Estate Pipeline?

In simple terms a real estate pipeline is just the process or sequence of steps that your clients go through from when they were a prospect all the way until their home sale has closed. It’s basically a combination of lead generation, CRM management, lead conversion, the process of buying or selling a home for your client, and then staying in contact with them, so they come back to you for a future sale.

One of the most important parts of a real estate pipeline, and the one that often gets thrown by the wayside during the busy seasons, is lead generation and follow up. Those two activities are vital to consistently adding new people into your pipeline, so they can move through the process and you can make money. If you aren’t putting in the work to continuously add new people, then your pipeline will dry up and the slower months will be extremely slow indeed.

How to Conquer the Fall Real Estate Market

Years in real estate are often thought of as cyclical. Boom and bust, hot and cold. The most successful agents, however, don’t experience such severe ups and downs. Why? Because they are constantly adding leads to their real estate pipeline, so they have clients that are ready to buy or sell houses throughout the entire year.

The problem is that when you are killing it during the summer, or throughout all of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, for example, you aren’t thinking about adding new business to your pipeline. You aren’t focusing on identifying and generating leads, consistently following up, or going the extra mile to make the appointment.

But if you want to avoid the up and down roller coaster of the seasons, and reduce the stress, anxiety, worry, and scramble, then you should constantly be working on your real estate pipeline.

Our Build Your Pipeline Challenge

If you’re feeling the stress because you haven’t worked on your real estate pipeline during the craziness of the market over the past two years, then we’ve got a solution for you here at Smart Inside Sales. Our Build Your Pipeline Challenge is a 12 week program where you’ll learn all the skills, techniques, and strategies needed to build a predictable, reliable stream of new business.

Check out the Challenge here.

SHARE THIS POST

September 1, 2022September 1, 2022

How to Build an Effective Real Estate Pipeline

Building an effective real estate pipeline is a critical part of building an effective business. The problem is that over the past year and a half, maintaining a pipeline hasn’t been as necessary as it normally is. Afterall, 2021 and the first part of 2022 were hot times in the real estate industry. Houses were selling like hot cakes and you really didn’t have to do too much to get clients and make deals.

But those times have passed. Now we’re back to the real world, where you have work extra hard for every lead and every deal. And that starts with your real estate pipeline.

What Is a Real Estate Pipeline?

Any business that involves selling needs to have a pipeline. In simple terms, your pipeline is just the process or sequence of stages that your real estate clients go through from when they are just a lead all the way through until the deal has closed. A significant part of managing a real estate pipeline is maintaining the relationship you’ve built with prospects and customers. The goal is to stay in contact, so when they’re ready to buy or sell, you’re the agent they think of.

Here are the primary components of a basic real estate pipeline for a seller client:

Identify and generate your leads
Reach out and follow up until they make an appointment with you
Get the appointment and meet with them
Secure a written contract
Establish a listing
Begin to accept offers
Close the deal
Follow up with your client after the sale

Why You Need an Up to Date Pipeline

Your pipeline reflects your future business. If it dries up, then your business is going to dry up soon after. In the really good times like we’ve just left in the real estate industry, an effective pipeline doesn’t seem that important, because there is business everywhere to be found that seemingly just falls from heaven.

But when times are tougher, your pipeline is what you rely on to keep new business coming in and being able to pay the bills. When it gets down to it, what does it actually mean to maintain your real estate pipeline? It’s essentially the combination of prospecting, lead generation, CRM management, lead conversion, the actual process of buying or selling a home for your clients, and then staying in contact with them, so they come to you in the future.

Each part of your real estate pipeline is crucial to your success, but the first half is often thought of as the most difficult. The part where you actually find and convert new business. But make no mistake, if you neglect the second half, the continued nurture for a future sale, your pipeline will suffer.

How to Build a Successful Real Estate Pipeline

If you’ve let your pipeline lapse, then I have a new program that can help! At Smart Inside Sales, we recently launched our Build Your Pipeline Challenge. It’s a 12 week program where you’ll get all the goods for a successful pipeline.

You will be set up in small groups of 5 or 6 Agents or ISAs and you will have a dedicated trainer that supports you and your goals every day. Throughout the 12 weeks you will have access to our Prospecting Room, where you will execute your sales calls for at least 1 hour a day, Monday – Friday.

There will be 2 classes a day offered in a breakout room exclusive to this program in The Prospecting Room. You will finish off each week with an accountability meeting with your dedicated trainer.

By the end of this program you won’t only have a pipeline bursting with new business, but you will have learned the skills and techniques necessary to effectively manage it and continuously add to it.

Check out the Challenge here.

Month: September 2022