Inside Sales Agents: How To Make Them Effective

Effectively training Inside Sales Agents is the key to success with your real estate business. Once you’ve built up enough sales and new business to warrant hiring additional agents or ISAs (inside sales agents), and are ready to hand off some of the responsibility of running your business, you need to learn how to train.

Even if you hire the best people, you still need to know how to train them effectively on the ins and outs of your particular business or market so they can achieve success for themselves and for you. They need to understand your sales model, your sales funnel, your philosophy and your values.

But on a practical level, the most important thing that your Inside Sales Agents have to do effectively, is being able to successfully make calls to set appointments. And the two biggest barriers to this are call reluctance and effective objection handling.

Overcoming Call Reluctance

Both call reluctance and successful objection handling have to do with mindset. This is your inside sales agent’s or real estate agent’s overall perception of their work, and how their perception of themselves, their role, and the business affects how they pursue leads.

Critical to this is the story that your new hires tell themselves in their head. Regrettably, most people have a lot of trash in their minds with regards to calling leads, what it means to pursue leads, and about sales in general. You need to put all that to rest.

The biggest determining factor for whether a sales person will or will not be aggressive with generating leads, setting appointments, asking for contracts, and closing deals is the story they build in their heads.

Emphasize the fact that their careers and lives are in their own hands. When they are busting butt making calls and following up on leads, they are building the lives they want to live. In doing so, they are creating value for the client, for the business, and for themselves. Selling and productivity are noble endeavors.

This is where the business philosophy and company values come into play.

If your sales person has good stories in their head—if doing those activities that lead to productivity have a positive connotation—they will be unstoppable. If they have negative stories in their heads about lead generation, setting appointments, etc. and what those things mean about them as a sales person, then no matter what you do or say, they won’t lead generate.

Objection Handling And Closing Skills

After self-perception and head stories, this is the area that holds most real estate agents and inside sales agents back from crushing their goals. If the agent/ISA doesn’t know what to say, or how to convert a lead from a “no” to a “yes”, they will not feel comfortable or confident lead generating. At that point, they will make all sorts of excuses for why they can’t or won’t bring in new business.

Objection handling often stops inside sales agents in their tracks. They are afraid that they won’t know exactly what to say when the lead objects to them or objects to an appointment. The old school way of handling objections with snarky scripts is so 1990.

These days we handle objections in a much more sophisticated and conversational way. Teach your agents to ask questions to get to the bottom of a lead’s objection. Offering leads a different solution to reach an even bigger and better outcome is the best way to handle a negative response.

Circumvent the natural fear of objections with a comprehensive training on what to say and when to say it. Focus on training them to ask powerful questions that compel the lead to almost ask the sales person for the appointment.

Let Your Inside Sales Agent Grow Your Business

Alright, so let’s bring this all back home. Even if you are killing it, if you are the best person at your business or too critical to the daily grind, you are going to hit a ceiling. You can only do so much! And as the owner and leader of the company, you need to have time to look at and consider the big picture. That’s how you will grow your business.

But in order to be able to grow your business, make more money, and create more time for yourself, is if you can effectively hire and train awesome people. And of those two things, training is the most critical. You don’t need to hire sales experts, hire people who are ready to work and then build a consistent and effective training system.

Train your inside sales agents to be masters of your sales process and masters of their craft. They will bring in the leads, nurture the leads, and set appointments with the leads. You will be amazed at how much awesome ISAs will be able to grow your company without you in the trenches each day. They will flourish and your business will begin growing to a degree you hadn’t thought possible. Hire go-getters, and concentrate their training in these areas to make them unstoppable.