Your ISA team could be hurting your conversion rates

If your ISA team is not structured properly they could be hurting your real estate lead conversion rates. Learn about different ways you can go about structuring your real estate ISA team to set them up for success!

If you already have a team of Inside Sales Agents (ISAs) in your real estate business, first of all, congratulations!

You have successfully taken the first step toward growing your real estate business and successfully figured out how to convert online leads and taught someone else how to do the same. It’s not easy!

Now that you are not a solo agent anymore, your next challenge is to nail team management and get the best out of your ISAs. A lot of agents struggle to get their team structure right, and if you are reading this post, you might be in the same camp.

The first step to positioning your ISA team for success is specialization.

Non Specialized ISAs are set up to Fail

According to industry expert Mitch Ribak, you should assign high value leads to more experienced ISAs and low value leads to ISAs with lesser experience.

From experience, like Mitch, you know that converting real estate leads is all about meeting each lead’s unique requirements. A lead looking for a $500,000 home requires a different sales and qualification approach than a lead looking to buy a $150,000 home.

While it makes sense that an ISA with more experience should be handling higher end leads, a lot of agents make the mistake of not specializing their ISAs based on experience level.

Irrespective of their experience, ISAs are required to follow up with both high value and low value leads at the same time. This results in a mismatch between the ISAs skill set and the approach or follow up strategy required by the lead.

Another common mistake we see agents make is that that they require their ISAs to qualify new leads, and follow up with past leads. If all your ISAs are responsible for both tasks instead of specializing on one, you might be setting them up for failure. Consequently, your ISA team could be hurting your conversion rate and you are unlikely to meet your conversion goals.

So let’s talk about how to go about building a team of specialized ISAs so you can scale your business while keeping your conversation rates high.

How to form an effective sales workflow and structure your team?

Forming effective workflows is rooted in the simple idea of having the right person do the right job at the right time.

Contacting all new inbound leads to filter out sales ready leads is much more straightforward than following up with past unqualified leads. On the other hand, lead follow up needs more competence and demands skills such as email marketing, educating clients on the home buying or selling process, helping clients navigate the financing process, and so on.

The first step to effectively structuring your ISA team to determine whether your ISAs are equally experienced or if have varying degrees of experience or competence.

Workflow 1: Hire a Junior and a Senior ISA

Assuming you have two people on your ISA team and you found that one is less experienced than the other, the simplest model is to have the junior ISA qualify new leads and the senior ISA follow up with past unqualified leads.

Your junior ISA effectively takes on the responsibilities of a First Response Agent (FRA) and manages lead qualification since it requires less experience.

The three entities in this workflow will accomplish the following tasks:

Junior ISA or FRA

1. Contacting all inbound leads to determine if they are sales ready or not
2. Transferring sales ready leads to the Agent (you)
3. Transferring unqualified lead to the senior ISA for weekly or monthly follow up

Senior ISA

1. Follow up with unqualified leads by calling, email drip campaigns, setting up meetings with lenders or credit repair agencies etc. to get them to be qualified
2. Transferring qualified sales ready leads to the Agent (you)

Agent (you)

1. Convert qualified leads into customers

In this model, your junior ISA or FRA is focused on qualifying leads which is a much simpler job to hire and train for, whereas your senior ISA is focused on following up with past leads and doing whatever it takes to convert them into sales ready buyers and sellers. While you have the right person doing the right job in this workflow, they may not necessarily be doing the job at the right time.

Research shows that most real estate leads actually come in before 9am or after 5pm, outside of typical business hours.

Research also shows that if your team is not qualifying your leads outside of business hours or weekends, your ISAs may miss upto 80% of leads in many cases.

So, how do you build a workflow that is specialized and ensures the right person is doing the right job at the right time?

Workflow 2: Hire two ISAs to cover morning and evening leads

In this model, you need to hire two ISAs with one doing an 8am to 4pm shift, while other does a 1pm to 9pm shift.

The morning ISA could be the junior ISA and the one for the evening could be the senior. While each ISAs is responsible for qualifying incoming leads during their shift, they should transfer leads to each other based on the lead value.

The three entities in this workflow will accomplish the following tasks

Junior ISA

1. Contacting inbound leads in the morning to determine if they are sales ready or not
2. Following up with past low-value unqualified leads in the afternoon
3. Transferring sales ready leads to the Agent (You)
4. Transferring high value leads to the Senior ISA

Senior ISA

1. Contacting inbound leads in the late evening
2. Following up with past high-value unqualified leads in the afternoon
3. Transferring sales ready leads to the Agent (You)
4. Transferring low value leads to the Junior ISA

Agent (you)

1. Convert qualified leads into customers

A viable alternative to hiring two separate ISAs for two different shifts is to use a lead qualification platform like Aiva qualifies leads for you 24/7 effectively acting like your team’s Junior ISA or FRA.

In this model, Aiva will filter the sales ready leads and transfer them to your agents while the unqualified ones are transferred to the ISAs. The ISAs then work on following up with the unqualified leads and convert them to be sales ready in the future.

Conclusion

Building a successful ISA team is about having the right person doing the right job at the right time. If you have not thought about specializing your ISAs, you could be setting them up for failure and ultimately hurting your conversion rates.