It’s not uncommon for us to get gun shy when we hire the wrong person for a job the first - sometimes the second - time around.
There are a number of things you need to do in order to put your Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ) in position to succeed: skills mastery, provide the right data, give them the best technology, etc.
Set up properly, you can have your ISA doing some real damage within 90 days of hiring them.
One of the most important things you can do to get your ISA producing consistently is to set up a call rotation - a sales prospecting strategy, if you will - for them to follow.
By having them follow a prospecting strategy, you can help them accomplish some great results in their prospecting efforts.
The good news is that none of the call strategies you’ll implement to increase contact and conversion results for your ISA will cost you a penny.
In fact, quite the opposite...they’ll help you make more money.
Here’s a closer look at the ideal call strategy your ISA should follow for incredible success.
A five-pronged approach to strategic prospecting
Every aspect of your business needs a strategic plan and your ISA’s daily prospecting is no different.
The best plan has five distinct aspects to it that you can employ easily and effectively whether your ISA has been with you for a while or is brand new.
It breaks down this way:
1. Allocate your ISA’s time properly and give them a daily schedule to conduct their prospecting activities.
Your goal is to get six to seven hours of calling time from your ISA on a daily basis. Consistent call time of this magnitude gives your ISA enough time to make a significant number of contacts to yield both appointments and nurtures.
An ideal daily call rotation looks like this:
This rotation ensures that the hottest leads get the most attention at the best times of the day.
In addition to that, it provides your ISA with a system to follow to guarantee that all lead sources get the attention they need for optimal conversion opportunities.
Lastly, the repetitive nature of the schedule gives your ISAs brain the best chance to create some “muscle memory” in order to get into a prospecting grove not only during the day, but also on a day-over-day basis.
A rotation like this lends itself to extremely effective prospecting over time.
2. Keep records and track your ISA’s results from their prospecting efforts.
At a minimum, you and your ISA should be tracking the following results on a daily basis:
This is the basic set of data you want know the results for on a day-over-day basis.
As well, tracking this information needs to be mandatory for your ISA to do each day. Without this critical information, you’ll never be able to make necessary improvements to your ISA’s overall outcomes.
Once you can string together a month’s worth of calls (roughly 21 days of calling), you’ll be able to notice some trends that give you the opportunity to make adjustments in the data, skills, effort and technology that apply to your ISAs daily tasks.
3. Evaluate what is working for you and your ISA.
Being an effective sales organization comes as a result of understanding what you’re doing well and what you’re not doing well...and then coming up with a strategy to improve upon what’s not working.
As the owner of your company and the manager of your ISA and sales people, it’s key that you evaluate the variety of steps in the lead generation and conversion process and then identify where the choke points exist so you can get throughput (read: appointments and sales).
The better job you do tracking and evaluating what’s working, the more effective your entire sales process will be.
As part of your evaluation strategy, you can also look at other aspects that are influenced by your ISAs efforts. More specifically, you can review your ISAs results by:
There’s really no bit of data that you shouldn’t evaluate in an effort to improve upon the results you, your ISA and your sales team get.
In fact, success lies in knowing the details associated with this information.
4. Stay positive and develop confidence in your ISA and their knowledge of the product you deliver.
As mentioned earlier, it’s going to take your ISA about 90 days to hit their stride.
The good news is that during that 90-day period, your ISA will likely help you generate enough business to pay for themselves.
Once that period is over, your ISA should be producing roughly three listing appointments and generating roughly 5 to 10 nurtures per week.
At this point, it’s crucial that you keep the flames of ISA’s excitement stoked about setting appointments and getting nurtures.
You can do this in any number of ways on an ongoing basis:
Doing things like this keeps your ISA fresh, hungry and wanting to do a great job on a day-over-day basis.
It’s important to note here that being on the phone every day is a grind. Be sensitive to your ISA’s mood and emotional disposition. If you feel that they need some time away from the phone, make the executive decision to send them off for 30 minutes to recharge their batteries and hit the reset button.
5. Set goals for acquiring new prospects daily, weekly and monthly.
We’ve talked already about the targets you’re going to track on a daily basis and we’ve also discussed roughly what you’re looking for from your ISA each day.
Ideally, you’ll want your ISA to make enough contacts to get a five listing appointments and 10 nurtures per week.
Speaking generically, it takes about 45 to 50 contacts to set one listing appointment. To that end, your ISA will need to speak to roughly 250 people per week in order to set that many appointments.
The number of dials that is going to take will vary on a day-to-day basis.
What’s great is as your ISA generates more nurtures, the number of contacts to set a listing appointment will go down, making it easier for them to hit that mark.
As long as you provide your ISA good data from a variety of lead sources, they should be in good position to hit the marks you’ll lay out for them on a day-to-day basis.
When your ISA sets you even three listing appointments per week, you should be able to sell roughly 55 homes: 45 to 47 listings sold with the rest coming from roughly 20% of those sellers buying homes through you.
This is a great, but aggressive target to shoot for. In the end, though, it is one that is absolutely attainable.
Giving your ISA a calling strategy is a must if you’re going to hit your goals and get a great return on your investment.
It’s vital that you not only implement the strategy, but also that you monitor your ISA’s results as they employ the strategy with you.
In the end, you should be able to create some incredible results with this ideal call strategy for your ISA to follow.