Full Time Or Part Time Real Estate ISA?

Should you hire a part time or full time inside sales agent? That’s great if you have reached the point in your real estate business where it’s necessary to hire an ISA. That means your business is productive, growing, and that you are ready to take it to the next level.

But first things first. How do you know if you are actually ready to hire an inside sales agent?

When to hire an Inside sales agent?

Inside sales agents are skilled real estate professionals who are highly trained, capable, and dedicated to their craft in the same degree as an outside agent.  The advantage of the ISA is that they specialize in the initial tasks of lead generation, lead nurturing, and setting listing and buyer consultation appointments.

You’re ready for an ISA when you are already bringing in around 150,000+ in annual GCI, and you already have a solid and well-trained assistant handling your transactions for you. If you’ve reached this point, then you are ready to scale and can leverage your lead generation while producing more appointments and contracts.

The other requirement is that you must have some type of lead generation platform or farm in place, or well-established online profiles where you can run advertising.  You will also need inbound lead sources for the ISA.  Once you get your ISA, and if they are effective, then you will quickly need to add additional agents to your team.  An effective and efficient ISA can easily serve 4-5 agents.

Full time or part time ISA?

Let’s say you’ve determined that you are ready to hire an inside sales agent. Now the question becomes, should you hire a full time or a part time one?

A lot of people may lean towards a part time. They might think that it would be a good way to “get their feet wet” and test out having an ISA to see if they bring value to their business. If they are on the fence about whether their business needs an inside sales agent or not, they may think that hiring one part time is a cost effective compromise.

The truth, however, is that this is not the case.

Successfully training an ISA takes time. In fact, it could take up to between four and six months to effectively coach and evaluate if your ISA is productive or profitable. And it takes a considerable amount of effort and mental investment both on your part and on the new inside sales agent’s part.

Because of this, you need to make sure that the person you hire is fully invested and motivated to learn your process, to start making calls, and to begin to bring in business. Full-time ISAs are more likely to:

• Speak with enough contacts in order to build a good base of nurtures
• Meet the desired mark of two listing appointments per day

Most importantly though, they are less likely to give up on the process than a part time ISA is. This is because full time inside sales agents have more time to dedicate towards learning the process and they are more willing to because you are their sole source of employment.

Make sure you hire the right full time inside sales agent

In the question of full time ISAs vs part time ISAs, full time is clearly the right way to go. But it is understandable if you still have reservations because of the cost and the fact that it can be intimidating to hire a full-time employee. To mitigate this fear, you have to make sure you are hiring the right people and that you have a solid system in place to train and set expectations for them.

Like I discussed in my previous article, 7 Strategies To Build An Inside Sales Team, you need to be sure that you are extensively testing your inside sales agent candidates in the skills that are required for the job. This means that you are seeing how they sound on the phone, checking whether or not they can have effective sales conversations, and making sure they can persuade someone to take action.

Once you hire an all-star inside sales agent candidate, you need to have clear benchmarks and expectations for them, train the heck out of them in lead conversion (for that you can try this), and use numbers to track things like number of dials made, number of contacts made, contact to appointment ratio, number of appointments set vs. appointments converted.

Hire a full time inside sales agent   

Hire a full time ISA. You need the time and motivation to fully integrate them into your lead generation and conversion system. And you also need someone who is fully invested in helping you grow your business and their career. In other words, you need a full time agent.

If you are unsure about hiring and training an inside sales agent, check out our ISA Department In A Box training program. It will walk you through ISA team hiring and training step by step, until your inside sales team is unstoppable.