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Time Is Money.
Your time is incredibly valuable, every minute matters and when you’re organizing your day-to-day activities. So you want to maintain focus on the most dollar productive tasks.
This means doing the things that either generate new leads, get more contracts signed, or salvage a shaky transaction.
That’s why it makes so much sense that the best agents tend to partner with Smart Alto. We handle all the menial tasks to engage new leads and get you in dialogue with the highest value prospects.
A 15 minute phone appointment means a new prospect that you can begin working with to sign a contract and close a deal; that's obviously a high-dollar activity.
But the problem arises when you get ghosted or you have the appointments but can't seem to turn them into active customers and closings.
That’s why we’re going to give you the exact 13 steps that we’ve found to get you a 90% appointment show up rate and maximize your conversions.
In this checklist, we will cover exactly what to do and when to do it in order to maximize your appointment show-up rates both before the appointment and during the appointment.
Arguably the best part of our 15 minute phone appointments is that you get enough notice to prepare for the call, unlike live transfers or diy-lead-follow-up where you have to just wing it at a moment’s notice.
We see our agents and teams with the most success use this time to prepare, so they can showcase their expertise and win the client.
They also use this time before the call to remind the lead of the call and maximize their kept appointment rate.
All Smart Alto agents get a great tool called Calendly. With Calendly you’ll be able to set up automatic text reminders. After lots of trial and error we’ve found that 3 reminders timed just right is the best way to guarantee the lead will show up on the call.
24 Hours Before the Appointment
30 Minutes Before the Appointment
5 Minutes Before the Appointment
You want to at least familiarize your preferred loan officer(s) with your 15 minute phone appointment program. And text them the names of your appointments ahead of time and see if you can get them to open their calendar around the time of your appointment.
That way if your lead is ready to talk to a lender, you can add the lender to the call and have them pre approved before you even hang up. This creates a seamless experience for your new client and solidifies you as the person who get things done.
We teach the BANTAR Principle to all of our ISAs. Take a second to read the text thread between Smart Alto’s ISA and your lead, you’ll see that a lot of the questions you usually ask have already been answered. So you can get right into the conversation with less time spent qualifying.
If you’re a good agent you’ll probably already know the area, but a lot of agents don’t actually take the time to become experts in their markets.
Working on this will not only help on these calls but the rest of your business as well.
If you really want to knock it out of the park, pick two homes ahead of time for the lead to review. Then it feels natural to set the next appointment while on the phone.
Might seem obvious.
A few minutes before the call, find a quiet place to talk, it will help make sure you sound crisp, clear, and professional.
Don’t skip this step. It’s so easy, it’s mostly ignored. The consequences can be devastating.
I wish I didn’t have to say this!
It’s crazy how often we hear from leads who were expecting their phone appointment that their agent never called. If you want to maximize your conversions from these appointments you’ll actually have to call your appointments.
Call them at the scheduled time. Not 5 minutes before or after, but at the scheduled time.
If your appointment doesn’t answer the first time you call, you should take a screenshot of the appointment in your calendar and text them that screenshot asking if now was still a good time.
This gives them a little motivation to act in consistency with their prior commitment, making them twice as likely to answer on the next call.
You want to humanize yourself. That’s why you shouldn’t double or triple tap (call them 2x or 3x). They may think you’re a robot or SPAM caller.
It’s important to remember that at this point these leads have already been qualified by trained ISA and agreed to talk with you.
These are not cold leads, they’re hot pre-qualified prospects so you don’t have to dive right into the usual qualifying questions.
You can take some time to build rapport, engage them emotionally and set up a successful working relationship that will actually result in a closed deal.
A best practice is to know you’re working towards, so be sure to set a goal for your appointment show-up rate.
We tell our customers to aim for at least a 90% show-up rate.
We only set quality appointments so each missed appointment is potentially worth thousands.
Get them back into the frame of mind that they were in while they were searching online.
Try something like “You had a conversation with my assistant, Alex, about a 4 bedroom home in Mapleton”, it’s a simple way to anchor them back into their online search.
Landing means asking questions or making suggestions until you find something that resonates with your lead.
“Do you have a preferred city?”
To expand is to go a little deeper and get them to share a little more about themselves.
“Why is that city a good fit for you? What do you like to do in your free time that this city offers?”
Just like a good director, you need to know the motivations that drive each and every one of your clients.
Ask why!
Why are they moving?
Why now?
Why not somewhere else?
Why go through all the hassle of moving?
After you’ve spent some time on the phone, start planning the next steps, whether that's transferring them to your lender who is on standby, or scheduling a showing for the homes you mentioned.
Whatever it is, don’t leave this call without having a clearly defined next action step.
Don’t let the momentum die, you need to get the next appointment set before you end this one.
If they need to get their pre-approval back, set up a time that you’ll call again to discuss it.
Very few agents do all 13 of these checklist items and that’s exactly why you should.
If you’re willing to follow this simple checklist you can easily get your appointment show-up rate all the way to 90% (compared to an average of 70%) and begin closing 20% more deals from your leads.
Now, if you’re on the fence about Smart Alto then this next chapter is for you.We wanted to build this whole guide in a way that it would also help agents who ultimately decide to go with a competitor or do it themselves but if you want to know why we feel confident that they’ll ultimately come back to us even if they start with a competitor read Chapter 9.
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.
