Real Estate ISA Radio - When Should you Hire your First Real Estate Inside Sales Agent

When Should you Hire your First Real Estate Inside Sales Agent

10/08/18 • 44 min

Real Estate ISA Radio - When you Should Hire your First Real Estate Inside Sales Agent

Nate Joens: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. This is Nate with Structurely welcoming you to our second ever real estate ISA radio podcast where we give you an inside look into the science and setup of building a successful inside sales team for your real estate business. I'm here today with my co host Robbie Trefethren as well as special guest Erik Hatch with Hatch realty. Robby would you like to get us started.

Robby Trefethren: [00:00:39] Awesome yeah I'm really excited today because the focus of today's calls is going to shift. Last call we really focusing on the role of the inside sales agents in our businesses. And today we're going to go down the journey of when are we going to hire one should you hire your first real estate inside sales agent. And I think there's no better person to talk about this than than Erik Hatch because Erik, I think it's fair ISA that when you really were first exploring getting in ISA it wasn't anywhere near what it is now in terms of popularity. It was maybe like the new shiny thing. Is that fair ISA at that point Erik.

Erik Hatch: [00:01:20] Yeah I I hired an ISA because I listened to a bunch of people who were top teams that I never thought I would ever even get a smidge of their success the rise of the copy my way to the end. And sure enough I saw the people that were having great success and they were using an ISA. I didn't even know what it meant when I'm outside of having somebody simply answer the phone and respond to leads passion. That's the only thing I knew about it and we fumbled our way to the top here.

Robby Trefethren: [00:01:52] That's probably a good way to describe it fumbling way to the top. Love it.

Nate Joens: [00:01:57] There you go. So Erik sounds like you've got it figured out now but when you know you it sounded like you were starting to build up your team. If if you're a new team leader of looking to actually build your team today should an ISA be your first hire onto your team.

Erik Hatch: [00:02:16] Boy that is a heavy laden question. I'm going to say no I don't think it ISA is your first hire. I think that people want to jump to having and ISA. Well what we have to figure out here and this is something that I have studied in great depth to try to figure out who to hire and when to hire and and then certainly how to hire what we think about is this is if you were the rainmaker for me when I started 2011 it was my first year in real estate. I sold 52 homes in 2011 as an independent agent. I had in the summer months I had a part time college student helping me up but otherwise I was a slow operator and I was just burning the candle at both ends and really struggling to stay afloat and so I did what any reasonable person would do and that was I hired a bunch of people that were my friends and I never regretted that I just brought them aboard. And we grew our team in 2012 from from 4 people to 13 people by the end of the year and how we hired Nate Robbie as we went and I hired two buyer agents and one admin and we just jumped out and I think that's a that's the easy desire is people want to jump in right away and they want to find producers and they want people that can help bring them an income. That year we sold 192 homes and up 182 I did 113 of the transactions and as I coach and as I mentor people throughout this industry I find out that that's usually the case is that the rainmaker even as they're growing their team are still the main producers because were traditionally hiring folks that aren't necessarily trained well and that we don't we haven't done our due diligence to teach them how to do it exceedingly well us a rainmaker know how to crush it in real estate.

Erik Hatch: [00:04:12] We think that that's just the natural progression is when you crush it as an independent agent then you go and you build the team and so I bring all that up to get to the root of the question. Here are the roots of the question depending on where you live in the country. It comes down to this. I think that your first hire should be an assistant somebody to take the stuff off your plate. The second hire should be an assistance. The first assistance I think is again giving you life back in your day they're freeing you up from all that people work and all the added stuff that is so heavy laden in this real estate industry. The second hire then is a growth piece. The first one is really bew. And so now you have more time to prettiest and if you spend that time producing you continue to be sick with coal we'll right. And so this second admin ...

Real Estate ISA Radio - When you Should Hire your First Real Estate Inside Sales Agent

Robby Trefethren: [00:01:52] That's probably a good way to describe it fumbling way to the top. Love it.

Previous Episode

The Role of the Inside Sales Agent

On the first episode of Real Estate ISA Radio, your hosts, Nate Joens of Structurely and Robby Trefethren of Hatch Coaching, are joined by the one and only, Erik Hatch - Founder and CEO of Hatch Coaching and The Erik Hatch Team.

isaradio-podcast1-9-3-18.mp3

[00:00:00] Hello everyone. This is Nate with Structurely welcoming you to our first ever Real Estate ISA Radio podcasts where we give you an inside look into the science and setup of building a successful inside sales team for your real estate business. I'm here today with some special guest. Robbie T and Erik Hatch. Robby, I'll let you introduce Erik!

[00:00:38] Awesome. Yeah. So I got Erik here. Erik is literally right down my right hand man said it to my right said seated my right. But you know Erik is not just a co-worker he's one of my best friends and he's our partner in crime in believing in this ISA world. And honestly being the person that first dreamt somebody doing it at his highest level. I want introduce Erik a little bit. We're based here in Fargo. And Erik has built now a team that will do seven hundred-ish deals give or take some 700 or 750 depending on how things shape up. And he's got his hands and fingerprints all over Fargo here as well as real estate interests like our Hatch coaching and. Erik, you want to introduce yourself a little bit and tell people who you are.

[00:01:35] Well Nathan and Robby it's an honor to be here especially in the first episode of Real Estate ISA Radio this is this is great stuff. You guys are up to something that that's cracked the code for the ISA piece you're able to elevate your game your business your service and all the fun from maybe 60 or 70 percent functionality right up to the top 100 percent.

[00:02:00] And so it's been an honor to be on the ride with Robby and a fellow ISAs in Fargo as well and we weapons. So thanks for having

[00:02:08] Us Yeah. We're really excited for you to have to be on our very first episode today. So with that I do want to just give a quick background is this is our first episode on myself. My name is Nate I'm the CEO. Structurely we're an artificial intelligence based inside sales company for real estate out of Ames and my co host Robbie t who has a great deejay nickname at Deejay Robbie T. I'm sure that's going to stick. We're looking out right now by the way. I love it. Yeah and we're where we're the cohosts of real estate ISA radio moving forward. So without further ado we really want to jump into our first topic which is just simply the role of the inside sales agent. We're going to touch on describing the framework of a new lead journey from when they register on a Web site or portal to when they get to your ISA. And then when they're passed off to an agent we're then going to touch compensation structure of the ISA you know what makes them tick what a typical day in the life of an ISA is like. And I think that you two especially are going to be great with this topic so that further do Erik come to pass this question off to you. What exactly does an inside sales agent do in real estate.

[00:03:25] Hopefully everything.

[00:03:28] I mean I would say this is that you don't have an ISA you are the ISA. So whether you are somebody who is brand new to the business or you have a team of 90 people whomever is the lead converter is the ISA. ISA stands for inside sales agent but really I think it's inside service and inside sales that acronym is ISIS and we probably don't want to be calling these crewmembers ISIS. And so instead we're just trying to call them ISAs. The truth of the matter is when a leader signs out when they have raised their hand whether it be signing up through a Web site or party vendors Zillow or realtor.com that they call them to our office. We've structured our team so that our ISAs are the first touch for and have not met anybody who we don't have a relationship already established with. And so it's their job to nurture maintain massage listen to pursue. And basically they are the keepers of those relationships. Converting have not met into mats.

[00:04:35] Their job their goal is to of course protect them strategically design their action to protect the company's dollar so that it can go for may have not met from somebody who has signed up to a match which is it kept appointments and so that's the ISAF main role and function awesome.

[00:04:54] Yeah I think that's a great great introduction to start. So when when did it make sense for your team attached realty to actually add an inside sales agent.

[00:05:04] So that's realty functions only as a team. The air catching up had fidelity and an ou...

Next Episode

How to Hire the Right ISA for Your Real Estate Business

Nate: [00:00:00] Well welcome everybody to the Structurely and Hatch Coaching webinar. We're excited to be here. Hopefully you guys are excited to be here on a Friday afternoon as well. Here to talk about how to hire the right ISA for your real estate business.

Nate: [00:00:31] My name is Nate Jones. I'm the CEO co-founder of Structurely we're an artificial intelligence inside sales agent company. We love to be working closely with with the hatch coaching and Hatch Realty team which we've got to be the best on that team. I would say with us today Robby T and Erik had taken away guys.

Robby: [00:00:53] Awesome. Well yeah I'm really excited today because we're going to get talk about something that's really dear to our hearts. All about hiring the right ISA and what I'm going to do is I actually want to keep attached to Erik first because you're the one who did this right the first time. And our last call you coined the phrase we fumbled our way through it. But you know I'd love for you to really start things off. Erik How the heck do you hire the right ISA for the real estate business.

Erik: [00:01:27] Gosh I wish it was an easy answer and it is not a pride myself. I pride ourselves on being really good at hiring Hatch Realty and Hatch coaching are based out of Fargo North Dakota. Our communities are two hundred thousand people. We will sell 650 ish homes this year we were this last year that number 43 real estate in the country. And I give you those facts and those pieces of data because it's important that you understand that it hasn't always been this way and we've built it now on the backs of ISAs and I've gotten really good at hiring and that's still been the hardest position I've ever had to fill. It's exhausting. It's difficult this year. Question right now from Ryan asking how do you keep somebody in that department long term like. There's just so much meat and potatoes here so let me dive into your question with more specificity Robby. I want to take you back to 2013. I saw some big wigs some people who really knew what they were doing that they wanted. They had ISAs in their world and even the Red Book the millionaire real estate agent book talks about people like call centers and outbound callers and realistically we had a plethora of business. And with that plethora of business we were letting in a lot of leads go unattended to. We didn't get back to them at all or if we did it was like a 24 hour period. And so here it was the hiring trend, write this down. Really important hire your friend. After 20 minute interview and then I want you to take that piece of paper and tear it up and just disregard everything I just told you because that was how I hired the first one and I got lucky. I had somebody who just answered and responded to leads and we actually got lucky. He had no desire to be like this big producer and agents loved being kind of behind the scenes prides himself on being a number two. And it was a really good culture fit. He was fine at the job but he was a really good culture fit. What happened is we then got introduced to a guy named Robby and Robby was in his young 20s. A year or so out of college was working on political campaigns and Josh our first ISA vouch for him when he said Rob is a really good dude and so I brought in Robby to interview him and I at this point I started slowing down and the interview process I used to just hire people because I liked them because they were great. But I started to figure out who we were and who we didn't know our role. We now developed a nine step hiring process that I'm happy to go over here in a moment. But in this ISA world one I brought in Robby here is the biggest difference maker of him and anybody else is he was hungry like notch not just hungry saying I want to make 100 thousand dollars or whatever it is. Robby had a chip on his shoulder. He had some people to prove he had a life that he wanted. And the only way to get through that and to that was ridiculously hard work. And so I'll be honest Robby gave a very mediocre interview. He dropped the f bomb three times in the interview and yeah maybe was more I don't know.

Erik: [00:04:55] He he started off as very nervous and fidgety and like doesn't like people at the first place. So he's like all super awkward. And then as he got going and as he got talking I started to see his heart and his passion and that's what I liked what he was and he was so rough around the edges and I just know that he he he was hungry.

Erik: [00:05:16] And Josh rush for him that he will be a culture fit. So for me that was enough to take a chance on him. And a lot of times those of us who are looking to hire ISAs are looking for the perfect DISC profile. And we're looking for the perfect set ...