How to Double Your Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ) Productivity ?

No matter how well your ISA is producing, there’s always a way to get more and better results.

Improving production could come as a result of having your ISA work harder or smarter or it could be combination of both tactics.

The important thing in getting improved results is that you must first identify what your ISA is doing on a daily basis and how those efforts are leading to specific results.

Here’s a list of what you need to be looking at as part of your plan to double your Inside Sales Agent’s ( ISA ) production are:

If you’re not currently tracking at least this basic set of metrics, you need to start doing that as your ability to double your business is 100% predicated on knowing where your ISA performs currently in each of these areas.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Peter Drucker

Once you’ve established your baseline for these markers, you can start working at optimizing your inside sales department and working towards doubling your ISAs production.

Here are some things you can do to double the results your ISA is currently producing:

• Dials - This is where it all starts. If you’re not making enough dials, you’ll never get in contact with enough people. A high number of dials with not a lot of contacts indicates that you either have a bad data set or that you’re ISA is not calling at the optimal times of the day.

Always seek to put good data in your ISA’s hands and make sure that calls are being made, at a minimum, from 8am to 10am and from 4pm to 6pm on Monday through Friday. As a rule, shooting for 300 to 500 dials per day is a good target with which to start to get clear on a sufficient number made for your ISA to reach their goals and then work at doubling their production.

• Contacts - All of this said, the number of contacts is what matters. If your ISA is talking with enough people, the number of dials is a secondary consideration. Contacts are a great leading indicator for how successful or unsuccessful your ISA is going to be at setting a good enough number of appointments.

Be sure to distinguish between total contacts made and contacts made with legitimate real estate consumers. Legitimate contacts are conversations with homeowners or potential buyers who are the actual contact you were looking to speak to.

Conversations with mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors, wrong numbers, etc. are not a contact in most cases. When your ISA reaches the person they intended to call and either uncovered an opportunity or determined it’s not a good opportunity...that’s a contact.

• Appointments set - A good benchmark for contacts is 10 to 12 to secure a buyer appointment and roughly 40 to 45 to set a listing appointment. The best way to improve conversions from contacts to appointments is skills mastery. The better job that your ISA does when on the phone to identify opportunities and then convert them to an appointment, the fewer contacts they’ll have to make. Again, good data is where it all starts. If your ISA has poor contact info, then it will require way more contacts to set an appointment.

• Nurtures - Nurtures are a valuable aspect of lead generation and conversion. At a conversion rate to a sale of 8%, nurtures represent one of the best opportunities you’ll have to get a sale from the leads you generate. And, with inventory in such high demand today, creating nurtures is the key way for you to get in front of the wave of listings that come in your marketplace so that you’re the agent of choice for sellers when they’re ready to sell. That way, you don’t have to hunt and chase business with the hope of getting a listing that you’re competing with three other agents for.

A good rule of thumb for nurtures is to get 2 to 3 of them a day for each day your ISA calls. The goal is to get to a rolling total of 600 nurtures. That way, you know roughly 50 listing sales will be available from that number of nurtures.

• Appointments set - The easiest way that I’ve seen agents improve the number and quality of appointments they set is through having the ISA qualify the appointment. By asking good qualifying questions, your ISA is only putting you in front of listing opportunities where the seller has the highest probability of selling. In addition to that, instead of wasting time going on appointments that will result in nothing more than wasted time, you can work with your ISA to improve their skill set to generate a larger number of qualified appointments.

• Speed of response - This metric is well documented in the sales industry. The faster you get in touch with your leads, the better chance you have of doing business with them.

If you have a speed-of-response strategy in place, then look at where you might be able to decrease the time it takes to get in touch with your leads.

If you don’t have one in place, get one set up immediately. You’ll be well on your way to doubling your ISAs production with a solid speed-of-response program in place.

• Hours of talk time - One of the biggest areas of improvement for virtually every ISA is in the amount of time they actually talk to prospects on the phone. Sure, the job is a grind, but it’s time on the phone that counts.

Ideally, you should be shooting for your ISA to have 6 to 6.5 hours of talk time per day. That amount of time is significant enough for them to talk to a decent number of people, but not so arduous that it burns them out completely. Granted, some days are better than others and there will be days when there won’t be 6 to 6.5 hours of talk time. The goal is to come as close to that as possible each day to guarantee the best results.

When it comes to optimizing what your ISA does on a daily basis to help them double their production, these are the areas where you can have the most impact.

As you can see, all of these aspects of what your ISA does are all interrelated. A decline in one area can lead to a decline in other areas as well.

Be sure to stay on top of what your ISAs results are and then work at making improvements in each area, as necessary. Doing so will put you the path to doubling your ISA’s production.