5 Ways an Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ) Makes You More Money

Hiring an Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ) can be one of the best decisions you make for your business as a real estate agent.

Many top producing real estate agents and teams point to their hiring of and ISA as the catalyst for the incredible sales they experience on a year-over-year basis.

In addition to freeing up significant time for you by taking the job of prospecting out of your hands, bringing on an ISA will help your bottom line more than just about any other decision can make to grow your business.

Sure, hiring an ISA is not a decision you make on a whim, but it’s one that can have a decidedly positive impact on the bottom line of your business.

Here are 5 ways an ISA makes you more money:

1. Doubles your efforts

In speaking and working with thousands of real estate agents each year, one of the things I hear quite often is that they would like to do more repeat and referral business.

Not surprisingly, the longer you’re in the business, the more opportunity you have to bring in referral business.

The challenge is that they don’t have time to do a thorough job with that opportunity because they have to continually prospect and bring in new business.

By hiring an ISA to uncover new sales opportunities for you on a daily basis, you free up several hours a week to:

• Build a monthly past-client and sphere contact campaign
• Make daily outbound calls to your database
• Meet with people you know for coffee and meals
• Send out two handwritten notes per day
• Grow your sphere by asking the people you know to introduce you to people they know on a regular basis

These are all proven activities to growing your sphere and generating tons of referral business, but most agents don’t have the time to invest in doing it.

With a highly-skilled ISA calling and building the new-business vertical of your real estate enterprise, you’re not only getting more time to double your efforts and make more sales, you’re also bringing in more clients who can be great referral sources for you in the future.

2. Make more contacts

Even in the smoking hot real estate market we have now, it still takes a number of contacts to get in the door to generate a qualified opportunity.

Historically, a significant number of the sales opportunities you get come after the 5th contact attempt with the sweet spot somewhere between 6 and 8.

Most salespeople give up after the 2nd or 3rd call.

And whether it’s due to being to busy, unskilled, unmotivated or any other reason, the fact of the matter is that enough contacts just aren’t being made and as a result, neither are a sufficient number of sales.

This problem goes away when you have a trained phone sales person making and taking sales calls six to six and a half hours a day.

Their main job is to make contacts - lots of contacts - on a day-over-day basis.

To that end, the prospects that need multiple contacts will get the professional, persistent and consistent attention they need to be converted into legitimate sales opportunities for you to convert at a high level.

3. Nurture More Leads

With only 3 to 5% of the real estate selling opportunities you come across likely converting to a sale in the next 90 days, you MUST take the time to establish relationships and nurture your leads until they are ready to sell.

As you know, consumers in any industry want to do business with those that they know, like and trust.

Knowing, liking and trusting someone doesn’t happen in a day; it takes time.

And as a result of that, you need to be proactive in fostering and strengthening relationships with real estate consumers who aren’t ready to sell now (almost all of them) so that when they are ready to sell you’re the one they’ll turn to because you’re the one with whom they feel most comfortable doing business.

Unfortunately, because you have to so many of the other activities associate with running your business - not the least of which is being out in the field selling and helping people buy homes - it’s virtually impossible for you to effectively nurture leads.

An ISA that is properly trained to build relationships with nurtures can make all the calls, send out emails, text and handwritten notes and even leave messages for the people they believe are legitimate sales prospects even a year down the road.

When this happens, you get in front of way more sales opportunities that you likely would have missed had you not had an ISA calling on your behalf and edifying you in the mind of real estate consumers in your area.

This part of the ISAs job is easily the most valuable to you as a real estate agent. Being able to get in front of - and stay in front of - sales opportunities is a game changer for your bottom line.

4. Increase Your Average Sales Price

Increasing your average sales price is one of the best ways to make more money without having to do more work or spend more money.

The challenge is that it can take several months and lots of contacts to “move the needle”, if you will, on a permanent basis.

This is due to the fact that you need to generate new relationships in an area of your market where consumers might not be as familiar with you...and that takes time.

This is a scenario where an ISA can be uber valuable to you.

Once you identify the neighborhood(s) where the sales prices are higher, but are still selling at a fairly reasonable clip, you can have your ISA call every lead opportunity that exists there:

• Expireds/Withdrawns
• FSBOs
• Circle Prospecting
• New leads
• Open Houses
• Just listed/Just sold (even if they’re not your own)
• Home Value Leads

This is a strategy that very few agents put into place and work with the consistency and vigor required to see it through to completion.

With an ISA who’s directive it is to spend several hours a week making inroads into new areas of higher-priced homes, you can see increased in your average home sold in a very short period of time.

As well, you can help make yourself a permanent part of the landscape in higher-priced neighborhoods by having your ISA continue to identify new opportunities on an ongoing basis.

5. Helps you build a team

Most of the agents that come to us for guidance are looking to build a team that will give them the opportunity to make enough money to become the true CEO of their organization.

As the CEO, they can come to work if they want to or not if they don’t...it’s up to them.

Being able to do be in this position requires having enough people to produce sales and run the team so that they don’t have to.

And to get to that point, they need enough free time to hire, onboard and train the members of their team while they still make sales.

The only way to accomplish this feat is to hire an ISA that can continue to generate new opportunities and free them up to work on team building.

Otherwise, it will take a long, long time to happen and it might not ever happen at all. Having an ISA in place virtually ensures that an agent will have enough business coming in to keep making money needed to pay the bills and invest in growing the business.

If this is your dream, too, then you’re going to need an ISA to do the same thing for you.

The good news is that when implemented correctly, you can create a business that will take care of you and your family for life.

Like I said earlier, hiring an ISA is a big decision.

Not only is it a big decision because you’re now responsible for someone else’s life and well being, but also because it can change the trajectory of your business and your financial future forever.

Executed properly, an ISA can truly have a major impact on your bottom line, for good.