Our Inside Sales team booked 67 appointments last week. We have 4 ISAs, so the average ISA performance on our team was about 17 appointments in 5 weekdays of work.
If you have at least one ISA, these tips will help you get the most out of their efforts. If you don’t have an ISA, you are the ISA, and these tips will be crucial for making the most of your limited time.
In this post we’ll share 3 tips that have helped make our ISAs so productive.
One of the most effective things our ISAs do is respond to leads within 5 minutes, and sometimes within 1 minute. We read an MIT lead management study about 6 years ago that defined how we set up our team. The study showed that if you follow-up within the first 5 minutes, it’s something like 1,000 times as effective as following up in an hour.
Our ISAs rotate what they call the “money phone” so there’s always someone there to answer an incoming lead. Our maximum standard lead response time is five minutes; ideally we like to see lead response within 60 seconds.
Calling a lead within 60 seconds impresses prospects so much that they’re overwhelmed. If someone is submitting their number online, they’re probably what we call a “hyperactive” buyer. They’re going to move on quickly if a real estate team doesn’t respond quickly. We move fast to book those prospects into appointments.
If you don’t have an ISA to work your phones, do what you can with lead response time. Just know that until you hire an ISA to help you on the phones, response time is going to be a choke point for your business.
Our team uses just a few scripts, but our ISAs know those scripts cold; they practice these scripts frequently on one another. It’s essential to know whatever scripts you use inside and out.
Effective calling and door-knocking scripts can give you an advantage, but the one thing you can’t script is your prospect’s response, which brings us to our next point.
Stay flexible. A lot of people who teach, coach, write scripts or write real estate books act like there’s one method that’s going to work.
Even the best plans and procedures run into unexpected circumstances when it’s actually applied. Our team stays flexible with its methods and we train them to adapt to circumstances.
We want every buyer appointment that comes in, not just one idealized type of appointment. Our ideal scenario is that we book a prospect to come meet with a buyer’s agent for 45-60 minutes, with the goal of getting the buyer prospect to sign a buyer’s agreement.
But our ISA’s know: don’t lose any appointment just because you can’t get the ideal appointment.
If the prospect still insists on seeing just 1 property, we try to set up a meeting in a coffee shop near the house. If that doesn’t work either, we book the appointment at the house. We differentiate that type of appointment in our analytics; we call it a showing appointment. That’s one metric we use to monitor how well the ISAs are performing.
How Many Deals Does it Take to Pay for an ISA?
In our market, it only takes 2-3 extra deals to pay for an ISA for the year. In a lower-priced market, you could still pay for an ISA in 5-6 deals.
Our team is structured with a base salary of $24,000 and our ISAs get 5% commission on the deals that they book. If you don’t have an ISA, it’s going to be a choke point in your business.
Every time a lead comes in when you’re at an appointment and you don’t get back to them within an hour — or even within fifteen minutes — you’re probably losing more than the base salary of an ISA. A skilled ISA is a smart hire to make early on.
The question isn’t whether you should hire an ISA — yes, you almost definitely should — it’s who you should hire as your ISA and how you should train them. Train your ISAs regularly, get them operating in your CRM, and monitor their performance.
We’re creating a course that explores our Inside Sales methods in much more detail. Members of our Inner Circle membership program get deep discounts on all HyperFast courses, so if you’d like to dive more into these topics, try a free 30-day trial of the Inner Circle!