Key Takeaway
A comprehensive guide for real estate agents on how to effectively use an Inside Sales Agent (ISA) to generate leads and close deals. It explains what an ISA is, their role in the sales process, how to hire and train them, and how to measure their success. The article also provides tips on how to manage an ISA, create an effective ISA script, and integrate them into your overall sales strategy.
What is a Real Estate ISA?
A real estate ISA(inside sales agent) is often misunderstood as a receptionist or personal assistant. This is inaccurate and misleading, as a true RE ISA is so much more than that, in the hands of a successful brokerage. An ISA is similar to an outside sales agent, but they don’t attend buyer appointments or walk clients through the selling process. Instead, they focus on being highly trained and experienced salespeople, inside your organization. They can do many of the same things an outside agent does, like setting appointments and nurturing leads.
When leveraged successfully, an ISA can be an invaluable support to the rest of your real estate team. It’s all about having a dedicated and experienced professional to generate and cultivate leads. This will increase your transactions over time as they support your sales efforts.
What does a Real Estate ISA Do?
- Set daily and weekly goals for prospect dials, connect conversations & follow ups.
- Track and measure conversion ratios and meet performance benchmarks.
- Practice, memorize, internalize and role-play scripts.
- Be accountable for goals, results & benchmarks.
- Manage and answer all leads calling and registering on your website, making sure that all communications are being logged completely in CRM.
- Contact all leads through phone/text/email within 5 minutes of site registration during the VA’s shift.
- Monitor leads daily that have recently visited your website and follow up with them, especially those leads that have yet to be successfully contacted on the phone/text/email.
- Manage contact database system, cultivating and managing new leads each week & work existing leads to convert into Listing & Buying opportunities.
- Use systems such as Vulcan 7/RedX to locate expired and FSBOs, use MOJO Dialer with Cole Directory for Geographic farming and Just Listed/Just Sold/Circle Prospecting lead generation.
- Handoff HOT leads that need additional conversation to a team member/agent whenever possible.
- Submit daily reports on calls, conversations, and appointments set.
- Manage and answer all leads calling and registered on the website, ensuring that all communications are logged completely in CRM. If needed, transfer/assign leads to the right agent/person who can specifically assist the lead about their inquiries.
- Monitor daily all leads that have recently visited our website and try to follow up with them, most especially to those leads that we haven’t made any successful contact with from the start.
- Follow the 10 Days of Pain for our new leads and track them in a spreadsheet to be submitted every Friday.
- Measure the success rate of our lead generation efforts by submitting lead conversion reports
- Get info and look up properties in MLS to answer leads on the properties they are interested in.
- Add all listings to Realtor, Zillow, and Trulia.
- Create email drip plans in CRM that would generate more success in making contact with leads.
What Does a Real Estate ISA Need To Be Trained In?
Getting the most out of your real estate ISA requires proper and consistent training. You can’t expect to show them how to do everything in a day or a week and then set them free. That’s setting them up for failure. To properly leverage your ISA you need to ensure you share any knowledge of the role you already possess with them. The eventual goal is enabling them to do the job even better than you, after some adequate real-world experience.
There are certain skills and abilities that you should expect your ISA to already have upon hiring. Like good customer service and communication skills, familiarity with your target market, and basic administrative skills necessary for data input and scheduling.
Beyond that, you should expect to do some training on everything else necessary to be successful for your brand. Provide further education about your key demographics, the pain points, and related solutions your business offers. As well as more universal skills like active listening and how to be an expert at asking questions.
The path to closing the deal is paved with questions and answers, so every ISA should be trained in knowing what to listen for, what to ask about, and how to connect it all to the value you offer.
Below are some of the most important training tips for anyone wanting to get the most out of their real estate ISA hire.
- Provide tips and guidelines for acing phone conversations and tonality.
- How to fit an effective “reversing question” into the conversation organically.
- Train them on how to use a lead qualification checklist.
- Get them confident using your real estate CRM system.
- Provide them with thorough and effective scripts.
How To Train Your Real Estate ISA
To set yourself and your ISA up for success from the start, here are some training tips. These are proven, everyday practices that are guaranteed to get your ISA on the level you need them to be. A lot of experienced assistants will come to you with many of these skills and abilities. But some will always require a bit of focused training.
Weekly or Bi-Weekly Training Sessions
This doesn’t have to mean setting aside a bunch of time every week to continue training. As it’s expected that eventually, your ISA can mostly operate autonomously. But it’s important to check in regularly, anyway. Quick meetings every week or every other week, just to check in on performance, answer questions, provide guidance and feedback, and educate them on anything recent that needs addressing.
Role-playing With Your ISA
Consistent roleplaying with your assistant helps solidify the training they’ve undergone. This gives them the opportunity to practice without the consequence of failure. It’s perfect for helping them internalize the dialogue you’ve scripted for them, and remember the kinds of phrases and questions that should trigger specific responses. It also helps them get better at handling spontaneous situations that training didn’t cover.
Reviewing
Recording your ISA’s real-world phone calls with prospective clients is the best way to dig into their strengths and weaknesses, and reinforce their training. By listening to their performance with them, you can address missed opportunities as well as praise and support what they did well. It’s also valuable for anyone to hear how we sound from the 3rd-person perspective and adjust ourselves accordingly for next time.
6-factor Framework for Real Estate
LPMAMA is an acronym that stands for Location, Price, Motivation, Agent, Mortgage, and Appointment. It is a 6-factor framework that helps agents to understand how qualified a buyer is and gauge their true intentions about buying the property, using specific questions. This isn’t about scrutinizing or interrogating them but helping the salesperson get in the buyer’s mind. This allows the ISA to understand the buyer better, and develop trust that will eventually win you their business.
Conclusion
Hiring a real estate ISA may sound like an easy move to boost your sales prospects, but it can be a futile gesture if you don’t do it correctly. It’s imperative that proper time be dedicated to training upon hiring any ISA. A popular resource for a reliable and experienced real estate ISA are virtual assistant services. At MyOutDesk we have a large, diverse pool of experienced and proven virtual assistants, ready to be an ideal real estate ISA for any sized brokerage. You can start giving your outside sales agents better leads to work with, and more support to close them. And you can start doing so right now. Use the link below to request a free consultation and see if one of our virtual assistants is right for your real estate sales needs.
Frequently Asked Questions
The dislike of prospecting is also a driver for many marketing schemes & gimmicks that promise an alternative but never deliver results. How could it be otherwise? No amount of “tweets,” “likes,” or “follows” will replace genuine human interaction. Facebook does not equal “face time,” – and it hasn’t replaced the need to prospect.
So if it’s gotta be done, you might as well find a solution for prospecting that you can live with: that’s why you need to hire a trained, pre-screen Real Estate ISA! They’ve got the real estate experience you need, along with our proven scripts & your “secret sauce” for converting leads – and you only focus on the sales, not on lining up the leads.
Here are the basics for an ISA script:
1. CRM connected to the phone is most important, from the start.
2. Some semblance of numeric scorekeeping for leads – measure not only time frame but motivation
3. When do they wanna buy, and how motivated are they to follow through? Motivation and timeline.
4. How much education do they still need, prior to purchase?
5. An objection handler document and a position document.
6. A clear buyer’s journey, broken down so it’s clear to your team when somebody is ready to be handed off to a salesperson, versus being kept and nurtured more.
Once you have these things set up, you can start working in the lead space and start calling leads together.
For your reference, we have put together this table of different States and what the laws are for each. However, make sure to double-check your local laws as there may be updates and amendments. You can also check this article from REALTOR Magazine.
