Steve Olson
• 5 min
Ep 004 - Do ISAs work in a 2025 market?
Steve's Private Podcast
Play
Welcome to episode number four, number question, number one question I'm answering today with a lot of our personal clients is, do ISAs work? And for those of you that don't know, an ISA is an inside sales agent, the only job of an inside sales agent, and you can take this to a level 10 or level one or somewhere in between.
The only job of an inside sales agent is to work all of the leads in your database and tee up the people that are worthy of an appointment so that you could be more focused in your conversations.
ISAs job is not to overqualify and do all of the work so that you can just show up for an appointment and say, Hey, my name's agent, I understand you. Talk to my team.
You're ready to buy a home sign here. Too many agents think that the job of an ISA is to do all of the qualification. If you only looked at an ISA for their one job of going through your entire CRM of 5,000 people and saying, Hey, of the 5,000 people, these are the 20 people that are closest to buying a home right now, this is who I'd follow up with, then you can print money with ISAs.
The instant that you bring somebody on the team, whether that's local, whether it's maybe in your state, maybe they're not local, but they're not overseas, or if they're overseas and you give them the responsibility of fully qualifying the lead and doing all of the work and then setting the appointment for you.
Not that they can't do that. It's that it's in a lot of cases, not very sustainable. Let me give you a totally different perspective. Let's say that you, your minimum requirement for an ISA to work with you would be to make 300 outbound dials every single day.
The question you might be asking yourself is, would that be profitable? Well, let's take that to the extreme. What if you had 200 people every single day making 300 outbound calls five days a week?
Do you think you'd be going on more appointments right now than you're going without them or more with them? And the obvious answer would be, be going on way more appointments. If you had 200 people calling for 300 times a day, five days a week, like it's obvious, right?
Cause just by the law of numbers, the law of averages, they're going to accidentally come across somebody that's like, yeah, you know what I'm thinking about buying a home right now and I don't have a real estate agent, right?
So the, the answer is not the magic script. The answer is not the compensation. The answer is not the script. The answer to ISA success has more to do with, can you get them on the phone for more minutes, more hours, get them focused on the right script.
And can you do it so many times to where you can start to see the data of success and then pivot accordingly, almost every single team I've ever coached with an ISA that would say on this podcast, oh, I tried ISA didn't work.
They all have a couple of things in common. Number one, they started virtual, which again, isn't bad, but you have to understand how virtual works.
Number two, they only had one ISA. Number three, they didn't run a system that tracked their metrics every single day in and out. And number four, when they looked at the metrics and the metrics weren't in favor of what they wanted out of the business, they weren't holding those metrics accountable fast enough and at a high enough cadence, or we'd get on a call and they'd say, oh yeah, the ISA is doing good.
Well, when's the last time you've coached them on what to say and how to use it? Oh, it's been about a week. I've been really busy. The only things that grow in your business is what you pay attention to. And an ISA could be a really, really, really, really good marketing person.
And a really good frontline ISA team will change your life. And it took us three minutes into this podcast to get to this point that I would probably write that down.
A really, really good ad person or a really, really good marketing person and a really, really good frontline ISA team will completely change your life. It's not a matter of if it works.
It's a matter of, are you going to make it work? Like you would never get on a call with me and say, well, I don't know Right? that advertising works in my market.
Like you would never say that. Even though there's a lot of times when you've invested money in advertising and it may not have worked out the best way that it was supposed to work, but you would never say that marketing doesn't work because you already know it works.
Phone sales is the same way. You can't ever say, well, phone sales doesn't work in my market. It works in every market with every type of client, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The challenge is not the modality of the communication, i.e.
the phone caller, the text message, or the email followup. The challenge is they're either not doing it enough. You're not paying attention to the metrics or you just flat out made the wrong hires.
It's not a question of do ISAs work or do they not? It's more of a question of, can you set up a system to make it easy for somebody to overperform in that platform?
So to think that is inevitable. All right. Hope that was valuable. Any questions? Let me know, share this if you did find value on it and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
