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The 15 Minute Phone appointment has proven to be the best way for real estate agents to receive hot prospects from their real estate ISAs time and time again.
The reason they aren’t the norm is because 15 Minute phone appointments are hard to implement on the real estate ISA’s side but once implemented it can work miracles on your conversion rates.
Many real estate ISA companies insist that live transfers are better than 15 Minute Phone Appointments. But what they’re leaving out is that they mean it’s better for them.
As a real estate ISA company that does deliver prospects to our agents via 15 minute appointments, we know how hard it can be.
We also know how much easier it would be to just live transfer leads to agents as soon as we get a response but just because it’s easier for us doesn’t mean it’s better for the agents.
Live transfers are harder for agents to field and do very little to address the real reasons that agents hire a real estate ISA in the first place.
Odds are you want to hire a real estate ISA because you want to focus on growing your team, business or brokerage.
Meaning, you’re pretty busy and only getting busier as your business grows.
Live transfers don’t account for your availability like 15 Minute phone appointments do.
OR
You want to increase the conversion rate for agents on your team or at your brokerage.
But we’ve seen that live transfers tend to hurt conversions rather than help for one critical reason.
In this chapter we focus on the effectiveness of 15 Minute Appoints over the ineffectiveness of Live Transfers. Many agents find themselves fooled by the marketing hype of live transfers without exploring the reason they are really hiring a real estate ISA.
Agents are one of the hardest working groups of small business owners in America, most of whom take no vacation days and work virtually 24/7.
Yet so many real estate ISAs assume their job is just to do the grunt work associated with following up with online leads because they believe that agents don’t want to do the work.
This is why so many of them use live transfers, because in their eyes they've done their job by simply contacting the lead, and now they can give it back to the agent.
You see, all live-transfer services really do is call or text your leads and once the lead answers or responds they initiate a live transfer to the real estate agent.
But that doesn’t solve your problem because you’re busy and may not have time for the call when the live transfer comes in. That means you're throwing money into a leaky bucket.
The reason most top producers need a real estate ISA is because leads register at all hours of the day, but top producing agents are working at all hours of the day.
Once an agent gets to the point where they are selling several homes per month finding an available time slot on their calendar is actually a real struggle.
Listing appointments, buyer consultations, closings, photography appointments, inspections...it’s a lot to keep up with.
15 minute phone appointments solve the problem of agent availability because you actually give your real estate ISA visibility into your calendar.
This means that your ISA will only set 15 Minute phone appointments for you when you’re actually available.
15 minute phone appointments are a system that acknowledge that you’re busy and work in a way that makes the most of your limited availability.
The team I was on was still buying Zillow leads when Zillow rolled out their live transfer program.
We’d all save the number in our phones as “$ Zillow Lead $” to make sure we didn’t accidentally ignore them when we got the call.
To harken back to the idea of availability, they would always come at a terrible time,
I specifically remember my phone ringing on a showing, distracting me mid conversation because I looked down and saw $ Zillow Lead $ and I realized I had 2 basic options:
OR
It didn’t take a long time of dealing with those 5 second surprise panic attacks before we decided as a team to switch to a different lead provider.
We were unprepared, the buyer was confused with what was going on, and the Zillow caller felt out of place. It was just awkward.
We realized that it was better just to receive leads via email and call them when we could.
This is less than ideal in terms of conversion rates but with live transfers we still had to call them back later after we couldn’t answer the transfer live. And when we finally got them on the phone we’d have to explain that we were the agents that Zillow tried to connect them with.
It was just easier to reach out to leads as soon as we could than to have to start every conversation apologizing for starting the relationship so poorly.
Additionally, there’s something to be said about the level of polish you can bring to a call that you’re actually ready for.
Listen, if you’re a top producer then I’m sure you do pretty well even when you’re not prepared to talk to a potential client.
Still, when you’re unprepared you tend to forget a few key parts of your conversion process. And that’s the part that will actually cost you money.
The two most important parts of a high converting phone appointment that we often see missing when agents aren’t prepared are 2 relevant listings and next steps.
2 Relevant Listings
High converting 15 minute phone appointments with a buyer should always have at least 2 listings as a focal point of the conversation.
This will give you something tangible to focus on when speaking of the available homes on the market and you can even see if they have more insight for you on what they are and are not looking for in a home.
Next Steps
Next Steps are time slots you have available to either take the prospect out to tour homes or schedule a buyer consultation.
This will help save you from the last second shuffle when they actually agree to an appointment and keep them from using an excuse about your availability to get out of taking the next step with you.
The whole point here is that you can continue to drive people down the pipeline more effectively when you’re actually prepared for the call with them.
By showing up prepared on a 15 minute phone appointment you can dramatically impact your conversion rates.
15 Minute Phone Appointments are a foreign concept to most agents because very few real estate ISA companies offer them or even talk about them. Instead we are so used to hearing about live transfers but that’s mostly because it’s an easier system to deploy for real estate ISA companies.
On the agent side of things, 15 minute phone appointments make life infinitely easier and give you the opportunity to explode your conversion rates.
Now that you can see the value of 15 minute phone appointments let’s unravel the importance of choosing human ISAs over chatbots.
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.
