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Real estate ISA companies have really taken off recently. This makes it a little difficult to see why you would choose one company over another when there are so many options out there.
But hiring a real estate ISA company isn’t one of those decisions where you can just trust any provider. These are your leads we’re talking about here.
The lifeblood of your business.
We recognize the importance of treating leads like a precious resource and take pride in seeing them as the human beings they really are.
This unique perspective was forged through tens of thousands of real estate appointments (Editor’s Note: Hassan Riggs, Smart Alto Founder actually set over 10,000 real estate appointments himself before founding Smart Alto).
That understanding is why we have designed Smart Alto as the No-Brainer for teams and top agents. We know that lead conversion is not the place to cut corners.
In this chapter we’re going to toot our own horn a bit. Not because we’re conceited but because we genuinely believe that we offer a better service than any of our competitors. And in light of that knowledge we’d be doing you a disservice by not explaining how we’re different. Just like when you explain to prospects why you’re different, not because you’re salesy but because you know they’d get worse service if they went with another Realtor.
It’s no secret that if you want to close a lot of deals in Real Estate, you’re going to have to pick up the phone pretty often.
Smart Alto knows that!
We see it as climbing a staircase and every step is a more engaging form of communication.
That's why Smart Alto always starts by asking easy-to-answer questions via text with the goal of simply getting a response.
That simple response is all we need to build momentum, find the ‘right-now’ leads, and get them to agree to a 15-minute phone appointment more than 20% of the time!
Thus moving them to a phone call all while qualifying them and warming them up to your brand.
Another perk to Smart Alto texting real estate leads is that when you are preparing for an appointment with a lead you can skim the text conversation and learn a lot about their needs.
SMS has a higher deliverability rate than any other method of communication, leading to a direct increase that affects the rest of your funnel.
For a lot of Real Estate ISA companies, you give them all of your leads, they text every one of them and find out which ones responded and are showing some level of interest.
Once they get a response they tell you that the person who responded is a hot lead you should call.
Why on Earth would anyone pay for a service like that?
Even more annoying are the companies that try to trick you into thinking that live transfers are any better.
All they do is call your leads until they answer and then once they get one on the line, they transfer it to you for you to qualify and convert.
That’s not an ISA service. That’s an auto-dialer.
Think about it, if an agent has the availability to answer these live transfers wouldn’t they also have the availability to text the lead themselves. Live transfers don’t actually solve a problem.
Smart Alto sets 15-minute phone appointments with the leads we qualify at a time that actually works for you.
Not only do you have enough time before the call to actually prepare for the conversation but the lead will actually be expecting your call at the time when you’re available.
(If you haven’t already, steal our 13 Step Real Estate ISA Appointment Setting Template).
We tee it up and you can drive it home.
At Smart Alto, we know that lead conversion calls for a personal touch that only humans can deliver.
Your leads are too smart for chatbots and autoresponders, they know when they’re talking to a real person.
Not only that, data has shown that they prefer talking to a real person.Image: Robots vs human
People feel so alone in the digital world that they subconsciously get more excited when they speak to a real person.
Our ISAs have the emotional intelligence and empathy to know what to say, when to say it, and how to say it. They can have difficult conversations in a delicate way.
Robots can’t do that. And it’s impossible to teach a robot how to be human.
In a large-scale test we ran, we saw a 15% increase in response rate just by proving that the leads were being texted by a real person.
A double-digit increase in conversion rates in the lead conversion process often results in thousands of more dollars to your bottom line.
Still some agents, fooled by the marketing hype, think the newest tech is all their business needs.
Their mistake is your opportunity to really get ahead.
Our real estate ISAs are the most persistent in the industry.
We use a follow-up sequence that not only reaches your lead within the first 5 minutes after they register (kind of a huge deal) but also continues to reach out to that lead several times in the first week alone.
It doesn’t stop there either. If we still haven’t heard back from your leads, we’ll keep texting them multiple times in the first 30 days.
And when most other companies would give up and call it a dead lead, we persist with periodic texts over the next couple of months.
This persistence combined with the fact that the leads know there’s a real person texting them can lead to some phone appointments being set from an ad you stopped running several months ago.
The best part is once we finally get a hold of the lead, we’ll use the best script in real estate sales to qualify your lead for you. Read on to see what we mean by that!
Some cockier agents believe they have the best scripts in real estate and insist that our real estate ISA’s use their scripts, but we’ve learned that part of that is due to a lack of transparency.
So here’s an in-depth look at the battle-tested script we use.
Here’s the TL:DR version of the BANTAR principle, for more depth, check out Chapter 3.
BUDGET
You need to know a client’s budget if you’re going to recommend homes.
AUTHORITY
Our ISAs verify that you’ll be speaking with the real decision-maker before you waste any time on someone who doesn’t have the authority to make the decision (like their concerned mom who really thinks they should stop renting).
NEEDS, WANTS, AND EXPECTATIONS
This is their motivation for moving forward, aka everything you need to know to help coach them to a smooth closing.
TIMELINE
Your conversation with someone selling in a year is a lot different than your conversation with someone selling in a week.
AREA
Sometimes a lead registers for an ad targeting one zip code but is actually searching a few towns over, you need to know that as early as possible.
RELATIONSHIP TO AN AGENT & LENDER
We’ll save you from wasting time with someone who’s just going to turn around and use a different agent but leverage the knowledge you gave them.
Look, we have spent years perfecting the craft of following up with leads, qualifying them, and setting appointments.
We know what works and what doesn’t.
We can tell the gimmicks and fads apart from true innovation and we’ve built a tried and true system for converting Real Estate leads.
It’s not sexy but it’s effective beyond belief.
I often tell the team “We’re selling Spinach in a world that just wants Candy”, it can be hard to pitch the value of our real human ISAs in a world that favors the latest gizmos and gadgets.
But we know that by delivering the best results to our customers we’ll be able to stand the test of time.
Smart Alto is a no-brainer because we built it that way. We built it on the premise that your time is valuable and that you deserve a service that adds to the bottom line instead of just another expense!
The strategies you use to follow up with real estate leads will have a massive impact on your success with a real estate ISA.
The right ISA using the wrong practices is worse than a bad ISA using the right practices.
We arrived at this set of strategies by not only reading the literature and studying all of the available data on lead follow up, but also qualifying 100's of thousands of leads the past several years.
We’ve ultimately landed on 8 best practices that will each boost your conversion rate and when combined can have a massive impact on the quality of your business.
Learn all 8 practices and how to implement them to build a perfect follow up system.
The first goal of real estate lead follow up is to get a response. It’s not to set an appointment or to close a deal.
Those may be the ultimate end goal but they are not the first goal.
When first reaching out to a lead it’s important to remember the first goal of real estate lead follow up, getting a response.
We’ve found time and time again that text messaging is the best where to get a first response from your leads.
Learn all about why that’s true and where to take it from there.
A great script isn’t actually a script, it’s a series of reminders to your real estate ISA that remind them to ask important questions that not only build rapport but also qualify your leads in advance.
Through experience and experimentation we have developed the BANTAR principle, a framework for elegantly qualifying leads and converting them further down the funnel.
Learn the entire BANTAR principle complete with an example conversation between an ISA and a lead using the BANTAT method.
Live Transfers have become a hot topic of discussion over the past few years when talking about real estate ISAs.
However, through lots of trial and error we have been able to determine that 15 Minute Phone appointment is the best way for real estate agents to receive hot prospects from their real estate ISAs.
Unlike live transfers, 15 minute phone appointments actually solve the problem of limited agent availability and can help to increase conversion rates.
In fact the only reason they aren’t the norm is because 15 Minute phone appointments are hard to implement on the real estate ISA’s side of things.
Technology can sometimes seem like the key to all of business’ problems.
But through experimentation and testing we’ve found that chatbots are not the key to converting real estate leads. Instead, you need a human real estate ISA.
We review what happens when leads are met with real people. The effects human real estate ISAs have on your conversion rates, and most importantly the effects they have on your bottom line. People prefer talking to people and in this business, give people what they want.
Having your own real estate ISA is a big goal for many teams.
Real estate ISAs make it easier for you to manage your own time knowing that you can focus on going on appointments with prospective clients and providing service to your existing clients while someone else manages your incoming leads.
But hiring a real estate ISA is no small task.
Let this chapter act as your hiring guide when hiring your first real estate ISA.
Choosing the right Real Estate ISA Appointment Setting Service is not only a good alternative to but also a great upgrade over an in house ISA.
Still, it’s a difficult task so in this section we’ll review the primary questions you should be asking when qualifying the many different real estate ISA companies in the market.
Many companies offer to mark some leads as hot or pass the buck to you as soon as a lead responds, this simply won’t do.
But what should you look for instead?
Time Is Money.
Every minute matters so you want to focus on the highest revenue producing activities.
That means when you get ghosted or have appointments but can't seem to turn them into active customers and closings, you’re losing both time and money.
That’s why we’re going to give you a checklist of the exact 13 steps that we’ve found to get you a 90% appointment show up rate and maximize your conversions.
We’ll cover exactly what to do both before the appointment and during the appointment in order to improve both show up rate and conversion rate.
Find out why the smartest teams in real estate choose Smart Alto.
Hint, it’s not just because of our track record.
We integrate with their businesses like a software plug in that superchargers their CRM. Our biggest teams often say we solve some of their biggest problems.
We’ll layout everything that makes us such an obvious choice so you can make a smart decision about your ISA provider.
