If you want to sell more listings and add consistency to your business, hiring an Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ) is easily the best decision you could make.
An ISA increases contacts and conversions, putting you in front of more qualified listing opportunities than you could yourself while you’re trying to run your business.
More importantly, an ISA helps you build a solid pool of legitimate seller leads that does two things:
1. Creates a predictable pipeline of seller leads from which you can count on consistent sales opportunities on a month-over-month basis.
2. Helps you build relationships with a large number of seller leads, giving you the ability to create seller opportunities no matter what the market environment is at the time.
In fact, implemented properly, an ISA can help you sell 55 more homes, on average.
And that’s nothing to shake a stick at...for sure.
Here’s how the numbers shake out:
3 Appointments Per Week
Once your ISA makes it through their first 90 days with you and it appears they’re going to make it, you will see that they will set somewhere between three and five listing appointments per week.
Each of these appointments will be legitimate and qualified opportunities for you to work.
Future pacing your ISAs efforts and assuming you work 50 weeks in a year, you should see an output of approximately 150 listing appointments per year.
Now, your ISA could set more appointments, for sure, but for the purposes of this post, I want to be conservative and use 150 as the number.
65% Show Rate
Now, even though these appointments will be with sellers whose timing and motivation are in line with what you’re wanting to see from a prospect - selling within 90 days as the result of a life event - not everyone is going to show up.
Some will cancel, some will reschedule and some will simply “ghost” the appointment altogether.
Knowing this, you always have to figure into your numbers the fact that a little more than a third of the appointments you set will never happen.
And that’s okay.
It’s okay because we don’t want to work with everyone and not everyone is going to want to work with us.
Now, your show rate, or met rate as we call it, might spike or shrink based upon the time of year, the data set you’re using or from some other factors.
In the end, however, it will usually end up right around 65% and that’s a good number for which to shoot.
A 65% show rate on a 150 listing appointments is approximately 98 kept appointments.
55% Conversion Rate
Normally, having a 50/50 shot at something doesn’t make for a whole lot of excitement, but in the world of listing appointments while sitting at someone’s kitchen table...those are some great odds.
The reason we base our numbers at 55% is because as your ISA matures in their position and talks to more people, the more nurtures they’re going to generate.
With more nurtures come better, stronger relationships that make you a more solid choice in the eyes of your seller prospects.
The impact of multiple contacts from your ISA, combined with the variety of contact strategies you use - phone, email, text, slydial voicemail, direct mail, etc.- presells the prospect on you, make the job of securing the listing easier.
Again, just like show rates, your conversion rate at the kitchen table will ebb and flow based upon a variety of factors.
Your job is to make sure you know your presentation inside out, backwards and upside down so that no matter what happens at the listing appointment, you have the best chance of succeeding.
A 55% conversion rate (listings taken rate) on 98 kept appointments is 54 listings taken.
85% Sell Rate
Once you have the listing, the sale of the home rests on your ability to expose the home to the largest number of buyer prospects out there...including the Multiple Listing Service (MLS).
As you know, lots of variables - especially the price of the home and the shape the home is in - will impact sale time, sales price and whether it will sell at all.
To that end, managing these variables proactively will help you achieve a solid sales rate for your listings in just about every market environment.
The important thing, though, is to make sure you price the home properly and stay on top of the sales process.
Putting the listing out on the MLS and hanging it out there like a piece of bait on a hook will not get you or your sellers the result you are seeking.
Do the right things in the right order, stand up for the price at which you think the home will sell and market it for all it’s worth.
Doing that will get you the best results and put the home in the best position to sell.
An 85% sell rate on 54 listings taken is 46 listings sold.
Don’t forget about the buyer deals.
What we’ve learned over the years from selling thousands of homes is that a certain percentage of the sellers whose homes you’ve sold will also buy a home from you, too.
Ideally 20% of the people whose homes you sell will also become buyers for you, too.
To ensure that you get your share of this buyer business, it’s important that you not only maintain a great relationship with your seller prospects, but also that you sign them to a buyer agency agreement at some point prior to their home selling.
The good news is that it should be fairly easy for you to accomplish...especially if you do a great job with the sale of their home.
Unless the circumstances are extremely extenuating, you should be able to secure the buyer business of every seller that looks to purchase another home in your market.
When 20% of your 46 sellers purchase a home from you, that equals 55 home sales.
The numbers I’ve shared with you here are very conservative and absolutely attainable.
That said, it takes a good ISA to help you sell 55 more homes per year.
Done right, hiring and implementing an ISA can change how you do business forever.