When you bring your Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ) onboard, you’ll want this person to be a beast on the phone as soon as humanly possible.
Certainly, there are a lot of moving parts involved in the process and being derailed by the details about what to do and when could easily hamper your results.
The good news is that if you do what we recommend here, your ISA can hit the ground running in no time and start producing qualified listing appointments virtually immediately.
When done properly, you’ll be able to change what your business looks like forever.
Get your Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ) Hired and Producing Results Fast
When it comes to hiring and onboarding an ISA, here’s what you need to do to ensure great results:
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Hire the right person
As much as this advice seems like common sense, it’s not as obvious a decision as you might think.
From our experience in working with real estate agents over the last 20 years, we’ve noticed when many of them hire for the ISA position, they usually choose one or more of the following options as the solution:
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A friend or someone they know that they think can do the job
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The first person that “seems to be” the right person for the job
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A company that says it has ISAs, but really can’t deliver on the promise
As you can imagine, this is almost always the wrong approach and it usually yields catastrophic results.
Gosselin/Martin and Associates - 2015
If you want to get great results when you get your ISA, hired, onboarded and producing fast, you must hire the right person.
The definition of the right person means that the best candidate must have prior phone sales experience setting appointments/selling for someone else, setting appointments/selling for themselves or have sold products door to door and know how to close a sale.
In short, you need someone who knows how to sell, especially over the phone.
More importantly, the right person must exhibit resilience, openness, empathy and ambition in doing their job.
Naturally, you want every salesperson you hire to possess these attributes, but they are a must for the person you hire to be your ISA.
One last thing, you’re not a babysitter.
The right person must be willing to do the job you ask of them. If they aren’t willing to do the job at hand, then they don’t make the squad.
No more, no less.
In the end, hiring an ISA who doesn’t meet at least these minimum criteria can prevent you from employing the absolute best candidate for the job.
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Start training them before their first day on the job
The person you bring on to be your ISA is likely going to need to give some kind of notice at their prior job...probably two week’s notice.
Your goal is to maximize the use of this “free” time to get your ISA ahead of the curve - so to speak - by training them prior to day one on the job.
To accomplish this, you need to give your new ISA the scripts and dialogues you want them to learn as well as any accompanying audios to listen to and videos to watch so they can begin the process of internalizing what to say, how to say it and when to say it.
Additionally, you should get them access to any online training for the CRM, Dialer and technology they’re going to use in doing their job.
Time is of the essence.
The faster they get started learning what they know to do their job, the faster they can get started on the job of setting appointments for you.
You want your ISA to make calls the first week they start working for you. Getting them started with training prior to them starting on the phones with you is a key ingredient in making that happen.
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Have your leads set up and ready to be called
The longer you wait to contact a prospect, the less likely it is that you’ll be able to do business with that person.
To that end, you want nothing more than to have your ISA get to leads quickly and efficiently and that all starts setting the right precedent on the first day they start making calls for you.
Make sure your leads are set up properly and ready to be called in your CRM. As well, there needs to be a clear course of action for your ISA to follow in contacting these leads.
It’s imperative you communicate to your ISA the importance of quick response times and how it will lead to better response rates in order to get great results.
The ancillary benefit of having your leads on standby is that your ISA can start generating nurtures and setting appointments as soon as they hit the phones.
No doubt, there will be additional ramp time necessary for your ISA to become effective and efficient at their job, but there’s nothing saying your ISA can’t catch lightning in a bottle and get some appointments right out of the gate.
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Make sure the metrics and goals are clear
Lack of clarity kills momentum.
Your ISA is already going to be fairly overwhelmed by having to learn how to speak a new language and use some technology with which they’re not familiar.
To make sure that you don’t crush their spirit completely - and put them in position to produce qualified appointments in the first 90 days on the job - you’ll want to provide clear direction on what’s expected for daily activities and goals.
Your ISA should have an end-of-day tracking strategy that allows you the to detail the metrics you’re looking to track, including, but not limited to, how many dials, contacts, nurtures and appointments are expected each day.
You should also give them a tracking sheet that lets them track how they did in each of these areas on a daily basis.
By doing this, you give them clear expectations on what’s required of them, freeing their mind up to learn the skills they need to master to be a great ISA and more importantly, to produce effectively on the phone.
What’s also important to note here is tracking these numbers allows you to make adjustments to, and do training on, their skills and activities so that you can fix problems before they sabotage your ISA’s efforts.
Taking this approach helps put your ISA in position to be more productive, sooner.
These strategies are easy to implement.
At the same time, they’re extremely effective in getting your Inside Sales Agent making calls and setting qualified appointments quickly. As with all sales efforts, time is of the essence.
The better job you do in setting your ISA up for success, the sooner they can start cranking out legit listing appointments for you.
This post was originally published by Market Maker Leads.
Posted by Mike Oddo
