The best way to scale your real estate business is to hire an inside sales agent. Not just any inside sales agent though. You need a real estate ISA who is a well trained, highly effective lead generating and converting machine. At the end of the day, a great ISA can make all the difference between success and growth or stagnation for your real estate team or business.

What Does a Real Estate ISA Do for Your Business?

Inside sales agents in real estate are a relatively new phenomenon. Before they became more widespread throughout the industry over the past decade, it basically fell on agents to generate and convert all of their own leads. But when you have a successful team that is growing and expanding, real estate agents start having less and less time to do that legwork. They are so focused on their existing clients that things like lead follow up go by the wayside, hurting the agent and the real estate team in the long run.

What a real estate ISA does is free up the time and bandwidth of your agents, so they can focus on buying and selling homes and servicing your existing clients. Having an effective inside sales agent means that they handle the initial part of the sales process and then pass off clients who are ready to work with you.

The result of specializing these different tasks is that you can scale to levels that would never have been possible without the ISA.

Should Every Real Estate Business Hire an ISA?

The short answer is no. Hiring a real estate ISA before your company is ready will turn out to be a colossal waste of time, money, and resources. We go over when you should hire an inside sales agent in this article here. Check out the linked article, but here are some of the more salient points:

• You are bringing in around 150,000+ in annual GCI
• You already have an established and well trained assistant who is handling your transactions and can handle the ones generated by your new ISA
• You have solid inbound lead sources for your ISA to begin working
• You have a plan to either train your ISA yourself or leverage a third party sales training company

Who to Hire for the Role

Once you determine that your business is ready for a real estate ISA, you have to hire the right one for your business. I’ve written a lot on this topic, but the two biggest mistakes that most team leaders or company owners make is not treating finding candidates like lead generation, and not screening the candidates before they hire.

Here’s what the process should look like at a high level: narrow down resumes, screen their performance by talking to them on the phone to see how they sound, interviewing them, then deciding whether or not to make the hire.

For more details on hiring a rockstar ISA, check out this article.

Real Estate ISA Training Is Key

Once you hire your inside sales agent, the question becomes, what do you do next? Training a newly hired ISA and giving them the attention they need is imperative to their success. Just throwing them a scripting manual, access to your CRM, and saying “good luck!” just will not cut it.

But knowing exactly how to train them, what methods to use, and how to judge when they are ready can be difficult. Especially because, as a real estate team leader or business owner, you have a million and one other things to do.

But not to worry; that’s where we come in!

We have a training program that will take your newly hired ISA and put them through an intense 2 week training. 1 hour a day, 5 days a week, for a total of 10 sessions. By the end of it, they will be a lead converting machine! We’ll take the burden off of your shoulders.

Click here to see how it we’ll train your real estate ISA.

Real estate cold calling is used to generate new leads, set up appointments with people who may want to buy or sell a home, and schedule meetings with interested clients. Like cold calling in any other industry, you have a brief or very brief time to convince this total stranger that you can actually benefit them and help them achieve their goals.

You have precious seconds to show them you are not the typical image of a sales person that they have in their head. It’s difficult. You face a lot of rejection. And it’s becoming harder and harder as people answer their phones less and less for unknown numbers.

The question is, is real estate cold calling still relevant in 2023? Let’s try to answer that question.

What Are the Stats of Real Estate Cold Calling?

The question of whether or not real estate cold calling is still relevant in 2023 really comes down to whether or not it is still effective. Let’s take a look at what the numbers say:

• 28% of cold calls are answered by their intended recipients
• 7% of real estate agents report that cold calling is one of their best lead generation strategies
• 68% of real estate agents and ISAs are able to successfully follow up with a lead after a cold call

The bottom line is that real estate cold calling can still work, even in 2023. You just have to learn the tools and strategies to do it the right way. If you can master it, then you have a cost effective, productive lead generation method that can connect you with a ton of new business.

But how can you do it the right way?

Be Successful at Real Estate Cold Calling

At Smart Coaching and Training, we talk a lot about objection handling and how that relates to closing on your calls and being a successful cold caller. After all, caller objections give you the ammunition you need to be able to prove your value to the lead and that you understand where they are coming from, from the lead’s perspective. This means it is very important to recognize and practice common real estate objectionsand have a consistent strategy for overcoming them.