Who to hire and when to hire them?
These are two of the biggest questions real estate agents have to answer when they run up against the limits of time and energy in their business.
The natural inclination is to run out an hire a buyer agent.
It makes sense, right? Hire a buyer agent and it’s a double win: no more chauffeuring buyers around town and half the commission on every deal a buyer agent brings in the door.
How could that be a bad thing?
Here’s how: any time you might be saving by not working with buyers is going to be invested in helping your buyer agent learn how to work independently of you to do the job you once did. Also, since you’re the best salesperson on your team, you will lose money - guaranteed - on the deals your buyer agent didn’t/couldn’t close that you would have been able to close.
If you really want to get leverage in your business and put yourself on track to sell 100 homes, there are the two key hires you must make: full-time administrative assistant and an Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ).
You’re at your best when you’re working on the highest-dollar-producing activities that fuel your business’ growth and profits.
The only way to do that is by handing off the activities that pay you less or not at all: administrative work and prospecting.
Here’s what you’re looking for in hiring both of these key individuals for your team:
Key Administrative Personnel
Hiring the right people so that you put them in the right seats on the bus can be a tough job.
Hire the wrong people or put the right people in the wrong position and you will experience significant dysfunction and a measurable reduction in productivity and job satisfaction.
To avoid making that mistake, your goal in filling this position is to find someone you can plug into your systems who can then take over about 85% of what happens in a listing or closing a transaction with little to no direction from you.
From a tactical standpoint, you’re looking for someone who can:
Ideally, this person will be able to handle the technical and administrative aspects of keep your machine running while being able to troubleshoot any challenges that come their way while providing front- and back-office support.
More specifically, though, you’re looking for someone who can take the ball and run with it without you lording over them.
You need someone who can be what the folks at www.predictablesuccess.com define as the Operator:
“Operators are the ‘do-ers’ in any enterprise – they’re the practically-minded folks that get stuff done...Because of their task-oriented disposition, Operators are often hard to spot in an office environment. Easily bored by meetings and unimpressed with simply putting in ‘facetime’, Operators don’t like to sit around idly, and can usually be found in jobs that keep them on the move.
You can recognize an Operator by certain behavioral traits:
Unless you’re working for a full-blown bureaucracy, no group or team, no organization or enterprise can ever achieve its goals without Operators.”
A good operator won’t just take care of the details, they’ll make sure that stuff gets done...plain and simple.
You’re ability to expand your organization will be heavily dependent on having someone in this seat whom you can rely upon to make good decisions in your absence without your input.
It’s like having a field general making sure that the troops are executing the battle plan while you’re working to find out ways to win the overall war.
The person you’re looking for here has project management experience, a strong attention to detail and is bold enough to be a leader without overstepping their boundaries.
Inside Sales Agent ( ISA )
ISAs are the hot topic in the real estate industry here in 2018.
Companies are popping up all over the world offering real estate agents the service of prospecting in their marketplace to uncover and then cultivate listing opportunities for them.
Some of them are really good, but many of them fall short.
If you truly want to get to 100 transactions, you need a highly-skilled salesperson who has a passion for selling over the phone and a willingness to help you build your pipeline of listing opportunities over the long haul.
A good ISA is a solid revenue driver who:
Hiring the right ISA will add somewhere from 50 to 55 sales to your business, with the majority of them coming from listings.
What’s even better is that you can realize a 5 to 6X return on your investment by hiring the right ISA for your team.
As with hiring key administrative personnel, you’re looking for the right person here. You’re not looking to simply put a check in the box saying you have someone making sales calls for you.
Using the DISC personality profile as a gauge, you’re going to want to hire an ISA with a High D and I personality.
That said, one caveat here is this: experience trumps personality profile.
We’ve hired dozens of ISAs in the past and what I’ve found is that if you can find someone who is a boss at selling over the phone, their personality is a secondary issue.
The ability to get the job done and done well is what’s important here, too.
There are a lot of hires you can make that will impact your company’s bottom line, but these two - key administrative assistant and inside sales agent - can and will have the biggest impact on your business on the way to 100 sales.
If you’d like more information to determine when and how to make these two key hires, click the button below to set up a call with one of our strategic business consultants.