Aiva
Qualifying Leads
What is LPMAMA in Real Estate?
Why do a majority of real estate agents fail with their ISAs? This post gives 6 solid reasons and their respective solutions.
Scaling your real estate business is largely dependant on how well you manage your Inside Sales Agents or ISAs. It is because generating sales ready leads from an ocean of contacts is a tedious task and as a result your ability to speedily generate sales qualified leads is directly related to conversion rate and revenues.
In essence, if you want a high conversion rate you should make sure that your ISAs are working at their full efficiency. In order to achieve that, you need to do a number of things correctly such as hiring the right person, defining meaningful KPIs, having a preexisting lead base, and a lot more.
A lot of agents do not do their homework on these parameters and end up failing with their ISAs. For example, it is not uncommon to see ISAs in real estate companies doing admin work instead of calling leads.
If you are about to hire ISA or facing some of these issues, this post is for you. In this post, we will give you 6 reasons and their solutions so that you can avoid failing with your ISAs.
So let’s dive into it.
Focusing Only on Generating Real Estate Leads
A majority of agents correlate success with the number of leads they generate. In fact, if you look at Google Trends, there are far more searches from agents looking for ways to generate new leads compared to search from agents looking for ways to follow up with them.
Even though the fortune is in the follow up, agents are less enthusiastic about following up with leads than generating new ones.
Frankly, this is worrisome. It clearly shows that agents just want leads who are ready to buy within a few days or weeks.
Hence, when a majority of agents hire ISAs, they are basically thinking about having their ISAs call new leads that are being generated from multiple sources. It is not incorrect to say they are looking to hire more of a contact specialist than an ISA.
Agents do not understand that getting business from leads is about building relationships, and calling them is just the first step to a long journey.
If you hired someone as an ISA, but are making them work as a contact specialist, you might be setting yourself up for failure.
Solution
Instead of focusing on real estate lead volume, develop a mentality of having your ISAs work on contacting and qualifying your unqualified leads from the past.
Understand the complexities of the real estate conversion timeline and the respective phases, the home buyer goes through before pulling the trigger to buy.
Accordingly, prepare a lead qualification checklist and script your ISAs can follow when contacting these leads so they can identify and transfer sales ready leads to you.
If you do not understand the value of lead qualification, nurturing and follow up, you won’t be able to draw meaningful KPIs for your ISAs and set yourself up for failure. This brings us to the second point.
Undefined KPIs for your ISAs
We already know that a lot of agents just hire ISAs as a contact specialist with no emphasis on for lead qualification and follow up. This happens because agents do not understand what to expect from their ISAs.
In other words, they are not aware of the Key Performance Indicators or KPIs their ISAs should be evaluated against.
Solution
You should set meaningful evaluation parameters or KPIs for your ISAs. You can evaluate them on the basis of:
- Call-to-appointment ratio
- Number of times they followed up with each lead
- Average lead response time
Personality and Skills mismatch
When you are unsure about the roles and responsibilities of an ISA, you are also likely to be unaware of the type of person you should hire.
An ISA’s role requires a mix of personality traits and often these traits and characters can be quite opposing to each other. This is why It is difficult to find one person with all the desirable traits.
However, if you are to succeed with your team of ISAs, you must find the right people with the required personality traits and get this right.
How do you do that?
Solution
In order to assess the personality of the person being hired, you can employ the DISC model of personality assessment to find out their personality types.
If you want your ISA to do a lot of prospecting and closing, then you must look into the D and I character types on the DISC model. On the other hand, if you want your ISA to focus on the sales pipeline or perform secondary market research, then S and C personalities will fit better.
In addition, if you can afford it, you should also hire two ISAs instead of one so that you experiment with different personalities and create some healthy competition to derive better results.
Not having enough leads for ISAs
A lot of agents think that their ISA will magically generate new leads once they are hired. This is not at all the case because expecting your ISA to perform during the first few days without adequate lead volume to support their training is impossible.
As a result, you might end up wasting the initial months of your ISAs tenure.
Also, if your ISA is training only during business hours, there is a strong chance they are missing real opportunities to add value. According to our research, up to 80% of real estate leads come in outside of typical business hours when there’s no one working to contact and qualify them.
Solution
Agents should build specialized teams of ISAs to cover morning and evening leads. If you hire two ISAs, one can work from 8 am to 4 pm while the other can work from 1 pm to 9 pm.
You can also employ a lead conversion platform such as Aiva to qualify your leads irrespective of the time they come in the system. That way your ISAs can focus on past lead during business hours.
Too much dependence on calling
There a general consensus among agents and brokers that calling leads right away is the best way to convert them. In fact, a lot of agents relate to this as a positive personality trait.
From our research, we found that calling leads is not an effective way to qualify leads all the time. It is because nearly 2 out of 3 calls often end up in a voicemail inbox.
If you are expecting your ISA to spend all their time on the phone calling new leads, they are unlikely to deliver meaningful results.
Solution
Train your ISAs to be comfortable texting leads, emailing them, and even messaging via Facebook. Once your ISAs make contact, they should work on identifying the lead’s situation and place them on the conversion timeline. In fact, in our company, we exclusively contact and qualify leads by text and email only.
Poor Sales Pitch
While the other pitfalls are not as obvious, this one is pretty simple but easy to skip over. Agents do not place emphasis on training their ISAs with the right sales pitch and a proper lead follow up plan both of which are necessary for ISAs to perform well.
Solution
An ISA’s participation in the sales process is a lot about tonality and paralanguage. You should train your ISAs on these aspects. You should also teach them on how to phrase qualifying questions in the right way and monitor their communication and activity periodically with a CRM.
Conclusion:
ISAs can be a valuable asset to your real estate business. However, hiring an ISA without a clear list of expectations or adequate training them could end up in failure. We hope that these issues and their respective solutions resonate with you and help you create an efficient ISA team for your real estate business!
