A good ISA will increase the number of listings you attain each year. Before hiring the first person you meet read up on the most important things agents should know about hiring an ISA.
You’ve handled everything on your own ever since you became a real estate agent.
The cold call marketing, neighborhood farming, closing negotiations, managing escrow transactions, and a plethora of other responsibilities!
And if you’re like the hundreds of real estate agents who work with Phone Animal, you’ve reached the classic pipeline bottleneck:
It’s time to hire an ISA (inside sales representative) to handle the homeowner mining, list building, and cold calling for you. Before you put a call out on Linkedin or ask a distant family friend about their bright-eyed and bushy-tailed college graduate, make sure you understand everything you’ll have to put in place ahead of time.
The more success you set yourself, and your future ISA up for, the more successful your real estate business will be overall. Read through this guide to get a clear idea of:
In the simplest terms an ISA is an inside sales representative.
Once a lead is warmed up, an ISA passes the homeowner to the agent to convert the homeowner into another satisfied seller.
An ISA is NOT your assistant or social media intern!
Now that you know what an ISA should be and how they can significantly increase your listings and close rate, you have to decide how to hire one.
You should put a job posting on your firm’s website and post the link on your LinkedIn and other social media networks. But create an application process that ensures you hire an ISA who fits your criteria and can handle the often monotonous tasks of cold calling and prospecting.
Decide on the front end if you want your real estate ISA to grow into a full-time agent or if you’d prefer somebody content with ripping dials day-in and day-out.
Then frame your interview questions along the path you want an ISA to take in your business.
Don’t use fancy fluff and make ISA responsibilities look sexier than they are.
Set every expectation imaginable. From what time your ISA should start working to the minimum amount of calls they should make throughout the day.
The goal of your ISA should be to uncover as many qualified seller leads as possible and transfer them to you once they have prospect, call, and follow up.
You can copy and paste this to an “ISA Responsibilities” Document to make it as easy as possible on your ISA’s first day in seat.
Letting your real estate ISA know what they’re supposed to do will save a ton of time and make you more money in the long run.
Different agents subscribe to different schools of thought when it comes to training their ISA.
You could throw them to the wolves and have them learn by doing on day one.
You could sit them in front of brokerage approved training videos.
Outside of role plays and training videos, there’s plenty of resources available on the internet to leverage as you train your ISA.
Adam Baily, popular real estate agent and ISA guru, shares helpful call scrips and tonal tips on his website.
Donald Miller and Ray Edwards make an MBA’s worth of email marketing material available through their email lists.
Your ISA can learn a ton of conversational and public speaking skills through Cardone University, or by joining a local Toastmasters group.
Whatever route you choose to go or training package you create, remember that you’re training somebody to sit homeowners in yoru lap, ready to sign the dotted line and sell!
Real estate ISAs are not unpaid interns, so you will have to pay them for their service to you and your clients. Make it worth it, so they feel incentivized to do an excellent job!
Most compensation plans will be a combination of fixed rates and commissions. As the agent, the final decision is yours.
Notice how we left 100% commission as a final option. While it may seem shiny during interviews, we guarantee most ISAs won’t feel motivated to do their job if cold calling does not come with weekly, or biweekly pay.
As you can tell, hiring an ISA comes with a laundry list of things to consider.
If you want to bypass the list, and the unavoidable hiring headaches schedule a call and a demo with Phone Animal today.
Our teams of trained ISAs can handle all of the prospecting and list building for you -- without any time taken off of your plate to define responsibilities, hire, train, and pay.
Schedule your call with Phone Animal today so you can watch your listing meeting increase by tomorrow!
