Hire a skilled Inside Sales Person at the right time and solid growth can be yours.
As with any business, there are good times and bad times to make moves to expand your real estate enterprise. One of the moves that many agents want to make is to hire an ISA for their business to build relationships and set listing appointments.
While there is no such thing as the “perfect” time, there are some natural and smart times when you should hire an ISA and build leverage in your real estate business.
For some of you, it will be if you’re too busy to pick up the phone and prospect. For others, it’s going to be because you have more leads than you can handle yourself. And still, for some of you, it will be based simply on timing and where you are in your business growth cycle.
To help you determine when the optimal opportunities are to hire an ISA, we’ve identified these 7 best times to hire an ISA. There may be more than one, so as you read them, identify which one(s) match(es) you and your specific needs.
Top 7 Times to Hire an Inside Sales Associate
1. At the end of the calendar year: If you look at the universe of sellers in your area seeking to list their home for sale, you’ll come to realize that only 3% of those prospects represent now business. At least 20% of them are 90 days away and the rest are up to a year or longer out from making a decision.
This fact is extremely evident at the end of the year when the: “We want to wait until next year” chant starts to echo from home sellers across the country. In order to be the agent of choice for these folks in March, April, May and beyond of the next year, you’ll want to get in touch, and build relationships, with the remaining 97% of sellers who are making the decision to move starting in November and December.
Hiring an ISA in November or December and then getting them trained and making calls quickly puts you in position to start nurturing prospects who aren’t ready to sell so that you can have a relationship in place when they are ready the following year.
Rather than starting from ground zero on January 2nd, you’ve got a pipeline of sellers who are ready to roll who already know you way better than the other listing agents in your area.
2. You’re wasting money on leads: Good agents these days know that you need more than one pillar of leads in place in your business in order to build a consistent flow of listing opportunities. Expireds, withdrawns, FSBOs, neighborhood data and home evaluation leads are staples of a solid listing lead generation strategy and they are available in abundance right now.
The good news here is also the bad news: the leads can stack up quickly and getting a lot of leads can give way to having too many leads. When this happens, leads don’t get prospected and vetted properly, which can lead to lots of wasted money.
In order to get the best ROI on your lead gen efforts is to hire an ISA who can get in touch with - and stay in touch with - your leads. An Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ) can contact a larger number of leads in a shorter period of time and uncover opportunities that would be completely missed because they got lost in the shuffle. Ultimately, this means more sales and commission opportunities for you.
3. You don’t have enough time: Getting the best results with prospecting requires doing it on a consistent basis at the right times of the day to catch people. Unfortunately, if you’ve got a decent real estate business running - with or without employees - there’s likely not enough of you to go around, especially as it relates to moving the “ball down the field” with seller leads.
Hiring an ISA gives you the leverage you need to do the big-dollar producing activities you love to do, i.e., sitting knee to knee with sellers and showing buyers homes. While you’re out doing those things, your ISA is cultivating relationships and in right place at the right time when seller prospects need you to come list their homes.
4. You’re selling 4 to 5 homes per month: There are three main ways to grow your business: increase your sales price, increase your commission per transaction and sell more homes. The first two you can easily do and both will have a positive impact on your bottom line.
However, if you’re looking to grow your business exponentially and create a business where you can be the true CEO, working when you want and not when you don’t, you’ll need the kind of leverage only an ISA can give you.
A good ISA will should provide you with a enough listing appointments to bring in 40 to 50 more sales per year, which, if you’re at 4 to 5 homes per month, will double your production.
5. 90-days before the hottest times in the market: As you know, the sales you’re making today are the results of your prospecting efforts 90 days prior. If you’re looking to take advantage of the next best time of the year to sell, you’ll want to get an ISA in place to start cultivating opportunities in your market.
It’s going to take your ISA the same 90 days, so remember that it’s not an add-water-and-mix situation where you start getting results the day your ISA starts.
The thing to remember here is that home sales are also good in the winter. In fact, they’re better than you might expect, so don’t try to time the market and hit it big in the spring or summer as you might miss some amazing selling opportunities.
6. You’re expanding your operation: You’ve established yourself as the go-to agent in your marketplace and you’re hungry for more. The best thing to do once you’ve determined where you’re going to lay your claim is to hire an ISA and let them make inroads in the neighborhoods and subdivisions where you want to establish your presence.
Again, with the 90-day sales cycle in the mix, you’ll want to get your ISA calling for you before you actually make the move so that you have business percolating before you start spending a ton of money on setting up your office.
As well, your ISA can be calling different segments of your business and the new area where you are to give you the best chance at growing as wide and as deep as you’d like to go.
7. You want out of working with buyers: It’s the ultimate catch 22: you want to do more seller business, but you’re so busy working with buyers that you don’t have time enough to stop shuttling buyers around to prospect for listings. As well, you have a income coming in and you don’t want to mess that up.
We get it.
Hiring an ISA gives you the opportunity to have listing appointments set for you on a consistent basis while you continue to wean yourself off of buyer business. As well, having an ISA will give you the opportunity to contact past buyers you’ve worked with to see if they’re ready to sell the home you helped them buy and upgrade to some new digs. The opportunities to get you more listing business - and out of buyer business - are significant.
Remember, your goal is to do lead generating through lead nurturing. With such little now business, you need a to hire a competent ISA to establish and strengthen relationships until you are ready to sell.
There are great times to hire an ISA for your business to do this work for you and it should be apparent, once you read this article, when they are.
The important thing to remember is that you simple need to look at where you are with respect to lead generation and conversion. If you can do it all by yourself, then you’re good to go.
If you can’t, then you likely need an ISA
To find out if it’s the right time for you to hire an ISA, click here for a complimentary ISA Readiness Consultation. We’ll spend 30 minutes analyzing your business with you and help determine if you’re ready for an ISA.
To get more tips and to talk with other agents about hiring an ISA, check out our Inside Sales Predictability group on Facebook.
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