KGCI: Real Estate on Air - The Future of Follow Up with Sara Delansig Part 1- Ask the ISA Expert Anything

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Yes, welcome, everyone. Thank you for being here. My name is Sarah DeLansig, and I am a realtor, and I also own an ISA company, which is called the Inside Sales Agency. So today is part one of a series that I'm calling the future of follow-up. And we're going to be talking about all things, real estate ISA. So if you guys have questions, please jump in. I love it when cameras are on so I can see if, you know, what I'm saying is connecting. with you guys. So please, you know, if you can, turn your cameras on. Sometimes you can't, but if you can, that'd be awesome. And feel free to jump in. So I'm going to share my screen and here we go. So like I said, we're going to be talking about today, when should you hire an ISA? And we're going to just jump right into it. So first of all, though, I want to tell you guys why you should even listen to me. I mentioned just a minute ago. I'm the owner and CEO of the inside sales agency and I'm also realtor with the XPD Realty. I didn't really enjoy being a real estate agent. And so that's, I saw a huge need for ISAs that actually know the business and

are in the United States when I first got into this. So that's kind of where I carved out my little niche and decided to, you know, help people do this and do it at a high level. So some of the things that I'm doing currently. I'm helping some of the top coaches and real estate agents in the business train their own ISAs, which is really exciting for me. I was formally an ISA team leader and trainer

for a real estate coaching and consulting company, and I really love that job because I had KPIs and goals that I had to meet every day and I knew exactly what my target was and I'm very competitive and that is also something you want to look for in an ISA if you guys

are thinking of hiring them. So I also was a real estate assistant to Linnea Carver, who is amazing. She's a digital marketing guru. And you should check out her Friday Power Tips on Agent PowerHaddle at the same time. So that is my background. So let's first talk about what is in ISA. So ISA stands for Inside Sales Agent. It's not the same as a virtual assistant.

Okay, because they work exclusively on lead, follow-up to convert leads to appointments. So virtual assistance are usually in your database. They're, you know, like more of an admin type. They're, you know, tagging things, creating campaigns, things of that nature. And the ISA is actually the one that picks up the phone and makes the calls and tries to get you connected with the people that are ready to buy yourself. So the way we do this is we nurture your leads through, you know, calls and text while building a relationship with them so that we can ascertain their readiness to buy yourself, right? And the one thing I want to say about this is their conversion is your conversion.

So when you are looking for an ISA, there's some things that you want to have in place. But before that, I want to talk about the things that you don't want to do. Reasons, you know, you're not ready to hire an ISA. And just as a side note, I'll be going more in depth on what to look for in IA say next Tuesday at the same time. Okay, so you should not hire an ISA because you hate making the calls yourself. So when I was doing the research for this last night, I found this article by the conversion queen, which I thought was very fitting name. And she had this quote, if you can't conquer your own fears of the phone or get your own appointments, how can you expect someone else to do it for you? So this is very

true. Okay. This is something that if you're not comfortable on the phone, a lot of people come to me and they're like, I just hate making the calls. And if you have time for it, you should be doing it because you need to be able to help the people on your team and your ISA understand, you know, exactly how to get on those phones, exactly how to handle objections and all of those kinds of things. You don't want to hire an ISA to help you get organized. Like I said, they are not an admin type. I mean, they can be, but that's a different presentation. right that's more of an assistant so um you don't want to hire an isa if you want them to push you to like create more content or something like that those are things that you know you should you

should have dialed in yourself already and you should definitely not hire any iSA because you think you're going to make more money but you can't afford leads as it is right now so i say that because um it's really expensive lead conversion which we'll we'll get into uh you know is on average two point five percent of online leads convert. So that means you're going to need a lot of leads to see a return on investment for your ISA. So when are you ready to hire an ISA? Well, first of all, when you are too busy with listings or showings to follow up with these leads yourself. Okay. So that is that's key. And like we can just wrap a bow, tie it up and say that's pretty much, that's pretty much like the main thing that that is the reason why you would hire an I.

say. But also, there's a lot of benefits to it. So once you're at that point, you know, you want to establish a better work-life balance. And ISA can help with that because when you are busy, you know, out at listings and showings and on the road and everything, you're not necessarily going to have a lot of time to be on the phone with people. So this is something that your ISA can help with give you a better work-life balance. So you should also hire an I-SA when you want to grow your business while increasing your profitability. So I don't know if you guys have seen Jesse do the, I think it's like some kind of math equation to figure out how much you cost per hour. Does anybody know what I'm talking about, like how to figure out what your hourly rate is?

I'm not exactly sure how Jesse does it, but like just nod your head if you know what I'm talking about or come off mute or like to figure out what you're worth. Yeah, somebody's, do you know your commission and then he breaks it down by kind of like the average amount of time that you would spend lead generating negotiating the deal so on and so forth and then you divide it by um what was it those hours so you take that or whatever your commission was and then your average amount of hours um and then divide it there and it should work out like it's insane there's some people that did it and they were like there are five $500 an hour. When I did it, I was like $1,000 an hour. And when you get it from that perspective, you're like, holy crap. Exactly. When you blow an hour watching, you know, browsing online, you don't think,

holy crap, I just blew $1,000. So true, so true. So that is something that every agent should be thinking about. Thank you for that, Jess. That was very hopeful. I wasn't exactly sure how he did it, but I know I've done it. So you're welcome. Your time, so did somebody else have something?

No, it was just me saying you're welcome. Oh, thank you. Okay. So if your time is worth more than $50 per hour, then an ISA is probably going to be a good move for you too, because obviously you're going to want to, you know, spend less than that for them to be converted or helping you convert them to appointments and stuff. So like I said earlier, if you have the money to feed them leads, This is huge, like I said, two and a half percent of all online leads. And I think that's a little bit generous. When I was at EXPCon earlier this year, someone on stage, I think it was John Cheppleck, said that it was like 1%.

1% of online needs convert to, you know, actual closing. So keep that in mind because, you know, you really need to, you need to have an ISA that's at a very high level, but that you also need to have all of the resources and things that can. can help them stay at that peak level so that you are seeing an ROI. Okay, so all other areas of your follow-up should also be dialed in, except the calls. Like I said, when you are too busy with the listings and the showings and everything, then we need to look at, okay, is an ISA a really good option? And at Build, Tina Carl was actually talking about your first hire should be an ISA and not an assistant.

So I thought that was really interesting key because this is becoming more of a buzzword in the industry right now. So I'm glad you guys are here. It's not like a big thing, but it's like gaining steam. And a lot of people are now talking a lot more about this. So what should you have in place first? So I'm going to go over these things that I ask our clients before they sign up with us to have in place. And, you know, it's helpful. It's very helpful.

I highly recommend you have these things in place first. So number one, I guess you guys could all guess it's going to be a YouTube channel. It's going to be video. What we see is that the agents that have a YouTube channel that has consistent videos on it, especially community-based videos or community-focused, they have a much higher conversion rate, like eight to ten times more than the people that don't. I mean, it might be even more than that. But this is just from our numbers and what we've seen.

So something that I would recommend is having like a 50-50 rule of community focus content and then real estate videos. So one of the things that my team is doing right now, we're doing kind of like a holiday thing. And it is not to sit there and go, hey, happy holidays. Are you looking to buy ourselves? We're actually one of my ISA's musician. And so he's like singing a happy holiday song. We didn't want to do Merry Christmas or anything like that because, you know, not everybody celebrates Christmas, but we decided to do like a happy holidays and just leave like a voicemail drop of that from the Lanaya Carver home team, right? And then we send a text that just says, hey, happy holidays.

I thought you might enjoy this video about the, you know, the pros and cons of these. No, sorry, not the pros and cons. I thought you might enjoy this video about the five best restaurants to check out in Casper Wile or something like that. It's not real estate related. So it's something that is just kind of, here's, you know, happy holidays and here's something you might enjoy. A lot of people, a lot, a lot of people like to check out videos of neighborhoods and communities

on YouTube. It's very, I don't know, it's like one of the best things that you can do. One of the top, you know, things that I would say is helping with conversion for our clients is definitely the videos and not just real estate videos. Okay. So if you're like, what the heck can I do a community video about? There's so many things. So here are some examples. Obviously, pet of the week is super easy.

You just go down to your local shelter. You know, you pick a pet. You do a little Facebook live video of it and put it out there. And a lot of people like to share that. So if you're doing it like through your business page or something like that, then you should be able to gain some steam. Another thing that's not on this list that I'm just going to mention, Google reviews, if you go out and like out into the community

and you're at a little mom-and-pop shop, maybe a coffee shop or something like that, and you just take a quick video review and you post it on Google from your business page, that will actually give you a little bit more traction as well with the algorithms that help you boost your rating on Google. So the more that you can, you know, rate and review people in the community and other businesses and things like that, that's going to help you too.

So my neighborhood is Lakeland Hills. And so best restaurants, best parks, like best all of these, right, tour, you can do a drive-by tour. Some people aren't super comfortable on video. You don't necessarily have to sit there and be on camera the whole time. You can turn the camera around

and do a drive-by-tour- walk through a drive-through or whatever and just talk through it, right? So, and the more, you don't have to be scripted too. I want to point this out. The more authentic you are, even if you mess up or sneeze in the middle of it or, you know, your dog is walking behind you in the camera shot or whatever the case may be, just leave it in there because it makes you human and it makes it so that people will connect with you, right? Okay, so small business spotlights. This is, This is another thing that I was talking about, like the Google reviews. So a lot of people are doing the 12 days of Christmas that Chris Peschick and

Lenaa Carver talked about on a previous Agent Power Heddle. And by doing this, you're going to get a lot of, that is my pop-up. You're going to get a lot of people jumping in and commenting and sharing that stuff because you're talking about their business. So just like where you're reviewing their business, they're going to share that too. So if you're like, hey, I'm just, you know, doing a tour of downtown Sumner. I saw your coffee shop. Do you have five minutes to get on a Facebook live and talk about this or what, you know,

maybe just film it really quick and just ask them questions like, you know, how long have you been in business, you know, things like that. So any questions about any of that stuff so far? No. Just like put your, raise your hand because I can only see like three of you right now. But if you guys have a question, let me or come off mute. Okay, so holiday recipes are insanely, insanely popular. Actually, recipes I think I heard was the number one watch thing that people will watch online.

So this time last year when I was trying to be a real estate agent, I was so uncomfortable on camera. And I shared this before. But I did a black and white video with a Snapchat filter on it. And it was less than a minute long. And it was about the best way to make bacon. It got 5,000 views. Like, right? That's insane.

But it would, and it like gained a bunch of steam. 5,000 views in less than a month. So, and it's still, it's still out there. So you can pretty much make a video about anything. Less than a minute to explain how to cook bacon in an oven instead of, you know, in a pan that, you know, I never thought that people would really care about that. But they do.

So you should try it. real estate videos. Okay, so there are a bunch of companies out there that will help you create your YouTube and tell you what videos to post and I'm going to save you guys a bunch of money right here. Okay. These are the ones. These are the main videos that will gain traction on YouTube. Okay.

And a video works for you 24-7-365 and it keeps working for you. So what is like to live in Lakeland Hills? Pros and cons of living in your neighborhood, right? Those are like probably the top ones that people see or like why you shouldn't move to Tacoma, Washington or, you know, and you got to kind of use some good, like play with the title and with the subtitle. Right. So it's like what I wish I knew before I moved to Lakeland Hills, right? And then down at the bottom, I can't believe I didn't know this and like a mind blown emoji or something like that. Those are some other tips that I've heard from other people and that I have seen work really, really well to get some steam. You also want to make sure that, you know, you have the SEO stuff dialed in. So if you don't know how to do that, there's actually a lot of YouTube videos about it.

So go check out somebody's channel. Google it. Find a YouTube video and you'll find it. Okay. Okay. So a question. Yeah, go for it. So are you saying that we should be posting this only?

on our YouTube channel and sharing it to our social media or should we be doing this on our Facebook channels? So you want to do it everywhere, but YouTube is really important because the way that you follow up with them, you can take that link and put it in a text and it's going to pop up with a preview of the video. So like, you know what I'm saying? So like, especially on an iPhone or whatever, if you put the link in there, it'll preview the video so they can see and then they'll get a little bit, you know, to know like and trust

and get familiar with your face. But you want to, you want to plaster that everywhere. When you do a video, I highly recommend it and go everywhere. But YouTube should be like your main, you know, domain for where you hold all that stuff so that you can just share the link. And the link can be shared in all kinds of ways. I'm sure you guys have seen. Now what about like community events, like holiday community events? Like, and there's already flyers. Do you recommend, like, sharing those flyers or do you recommend not doing that? Like hand, like paper flyers?

Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Like, I'll see, like, in the community, there's flyers that have already been made. Let's say through, like, the community center or something like that, in an event that's happening. Is that something that you think is good to share or? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah, I would do a quick video on it. I'd be like, hey, you know, this is Debra. I just wanted to tell you guys about this really exciting event coming up and then hold up the flyer and talk about it and meet me here. And I'd love to have a drink with you, you know, have some coffee or whatever, right? Yeah. Okay. So definitely, definitely.

This is good. Thanks. You're welcome. Okay. So depending on where you're at here where I live, you can't really find a home from under 600K, but not like a very nice one anyway. But, you know, there's ways that you can play with whatever is your market looks like. So, you know, best neighborhoods in Auburn for under, you know, whatever your median is or whatever and over, right?

Because you want to attract both. So you can do it that way. So these are some ideas that I highly recommend. And they're not just, I didn't just pull them out of thin air. Like these are the ones that like all of the, you know, really brilliant people that get paid a whole lot of money to do this are saying work. So and it's what we see works with the agents that we have, the clients that we have that do this as follow up. Okay, dokey. All right.

The other thing is calendar. Now I say calendarly, but it can be really any calendar that you have. Okay. So the reason for this is you need to have a scheduling system. in case your ISA cannot reach you. So let's just say you're out of closing or you're at a listing or wherever you are and you cannot answer the phone.

Well, if they have to text you and be like, hey, you know, can you go see this house you know, on Saturday at 5 p.m., well, now you're losing your window of opportunity with that person. So when you can schedule it on something as a backup plan, that's what you want to do. I would always, always, always recommend you live transfer first because a lot of times the

perspective, you know, buyer-seller has connected with the ISA and they're comfortable talking to the ISA and then they no-show on the agent because they don't feel any type of connection with them, right? Like they don't feel obligated or like it's easy to just not show up to that. So live transfer first always because that's going to give you the opportunity to, you know, take the ball out of the ISA's hand and put it in your hand so that you're the one that is now essentially, you know, nurturing that relationship moving forward. So when your ISA hands you something like live transfer something to you and you make the connection, then from that point forward, it should really be on you to make sure that that

relationship continues because if it goes back to the ISA, then they're going to, you know, they're going to keep connecting with the ISA and lose, you know, the relationship they could have with you. So it's really important that once they do connect with you, you make sure that you put that on your calendar to follow up to, to continue that relationship, even if they don't show up for a while. But keep going. If they ghost you for a long period of time, maybe you can send it back to the ISA, but I really recommend when you make the connection with them, you talk to them, then it's in your court at that point. Makes sense? Okay, dokey.

I have a question. Yeah, go for. Yeah. So two slides ago, you were just talking about, you know, having enough leads for the ISA. What is considered enough leads? Well, I would say it depends on the kind of leads. It depends on how many hours you want the ISA to work. But for an example, I expect my ISA is to make a minimum of 20 calls per hour. okay so 20 calls per hour so if they're working eight hours it's 160 calls a day now they don't really typically hit 160 calls a day because there's other things that they're doing throughout the day so i would say that an isa should make around um a hundred calls a day if they're

working full time and that is that is at a pretty high level now if you're having them skip trace and do a bunch of other stuff that may not happen but i would say so if you do the math on that Now, they're not just going to follow up with the same leads, right? So I would say you want at least five new leads coming in a day, maybe three to five new leads coming in a day, and then you want to have at least 200 old leads that they can follow up. Does that answer your question? Yes, it does, yeah. Thank you. All right.

Yeah. And, and, you know, the newer stuff prioritize, right? You want it to go from hot to cold. So when you get a new lead, speed to lead is a real thing. and you want to follow up with it is you want your I say to make that connection as soon as possible when it's still fresh in their mind. And then, you know, there's other tactics that I actually, I talked about this, I think, on my last agent power huddle, which is on November 15th, if you want to check out the recording.

So, Cal and Lee, I'm a big fan of it, obviously. It's free for one event, so you can literally just put, you know, real estate appointment in there. It doesn't have to be a listing or showing. You can put the notes in there, but it will not automatically put in, you know, ask for their phone number, ask for their address. So make sure you have those fields because otherwise your ISA is going to need to put in thorough notes. And then you need to make sure you link it to every single calendar you have.

And it's not super hard to do. It's actually pretty easy with Callenly, but I have like five different email addresses, like two. personal. I have one for my real estate business. I have a Gmail. I have one for EXP. I have, I have, like, I have so many email addresses. And every single one is linked to my calendar leaves so that it, you know, when I'm on the agent power huddle, nobody's scheduling a call to talk to me, right? So we can make sure that we have that all clear. So, so calendar is huge, big deal. Email campaigns. I'm going to try to blow through this. I talked a lot longer. I thought I was going to be done in

10 minutes. That always happens. Okay. So email campaigns. Every agent, you should all have a CRM. If you don't have a CRM, come talk to me. I will help you find one. And every CRM has a way to audit. It should. Okay, I haven't seen a CRM yet that does not have a way to automate campaigns based on what the prospect clicked on.

So essentially based on tags. So your CRM should be tagging them with buyer or seller. You know, if you have like past clients, fear of influence, whatever. Whatever the case may be, make sure you tag them properly. Remember kiss, which is keep it simple, stupid. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't put like buyer from August 29, 22, or something like that, right? Just buyer, seller, buyer and seller, stuff like that.

Okay, so that you guys can keep it clear. And then that way your CRM will do a lot of the work for you. So, but what you want to do is if you can, every, like a lot of CRMs like KVore, Mayshore method, follow boss. A lot of these have built-in campaigns. I know KV. Cordas. And you can actually go in and customize those campaigns and add some of the videos from your YouTube pages

and stuff like that. And when you do that, you're going to get a lot more, a lot higher open rates, especially if you're doing community-based and focus content. So like, if you send an email that's just like, hey, how's it going? Something like that, you know,

which is another point. want to do it really non-professional, non-salesy, third grade level is what I just heard on an ISA training I did with John Shep Black on Saturday. So like really super not, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect. A lot of us come from different backgrounds where we want it to be perfect punctuation and perfectness and, and you know, best regards, you know, and stuff like that. Just do it the way you talk. Like when you, when you write an email, type it out the way that you speak. And, you know, don't try to make it all crazy. So now I lost my train and thought what I was trying to say.

Oh, right, customizing the campaigns. So when you send the email, do something that is not real estate related. Like I was saying earlier, that's just like, hey, check out this event that we have coming up. And then put a little video in there. So if you can do that, customize these campaigns. And that's daunting. I understand. And you're like, whoa, this is a lot.

But take it one step at a time. Say this week, I'm going to look at the first email that goes out. And then next week I'm going to look at the second email and just try to make it in your voice. Put it in your voice and make it sound the way that you talk and then try to add some different community-based videos. So that's that. Okay, last one is digital marketing materials.

You guys all should have these already. but the key to this is that you want them to be sent through email and text easily. So there are ways to even make like a landing page. It's like, you know, Sarah's seller's guide. www. Sarah's seller's guide. This is not a real thing. But I have seen it.

Some of my clients have it. And so you can have a link to that. And those are really cool to be able to send out. So if you don't have the videos yet, or are you working on that or whatever the case may be, these are other options. So, CMA's, marketing plans, testimonials, anything that you can send digitally as, like, a link. You know, that's a thumbs up.

So to recap, don't hire an ISA because you hate making calls. All right? Definitely hire an ISA when you are too busy, listing and showing homes to make the calls yourself. Set up YouTube calendar, email, and text campaigns and digital marketing materials first. for the best conversion rates. These are things that are definitely going to help you up.

And that is that, wow, I ended right on time. Any questions about anything that I went out anymore? You wouldn't have anything? Was this helpful? I hope so. Do you guys get something out of it? Yes, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you. So thank you very much. And I hope to see you. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, one more question before you go. know, I just, it just really seems to me, or tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the, that it's really how the agents interacting with the CRM, right? And then I would probably think that the way that the CRM is set up is going to be helpful to the agent. Is that correct? Is that correct?

Absolutely. So then if say like, you know, we hire where, you know, I call you later, I'm hiring you you then do you show us how to set up the CRM so there's most optimal then um no most sizes will not do that and don't uh don't know how to do that however um every every it depends what CRM are you using okay b4 kb core okay okay so what i do for my clients that aren't really sure what to do i send them links to videos on hey why don't you try this or you know i can't like get in there and do it all because that's more of like a you know that's more of like an admin position now there are iSAs that can also double as a VA and do that so that is an option but but realistically like you it usually with kv4 it has it really already set up in there you know from

my experience as an expe agent that uses kb core as well um there's a lot of it already set up in there and as long as you're just tagging it properly, then you should have it pretty much on autopilot, but then you can start to edit the actual emails that go out. Because KVCorp does a pretty good job of making it, you know, like interactive and like interesting and stuff for the emails that go out. So have you ever taken a look at those campaigns that go out? You know what? That's like on the top of my number one thing to do.

is just to understand KV Core better. It's just like it seems like such a beast that it seems like I really need to take time to just like sit down and like figure out like all the stuff that is all the options that it's giving me. You know, but just with it being so much, you know, it's like to answer my question so that it would give me guidance into how I'm looking at it and what would be the almost optimal for the agent. Yeah.

So what I recommend is, well, don't, don't like don't feel overwhelmed. pick one thing at a time to focus on and and there's lots of training videos are you with the expe yeah okay so they're um in exp there are a bunch of kvore help you know self-help stuff um if that's not your speed there's youtube videos and then if if one of my clients just didn't have time for that then i would i would refer them out to i think it's sylvia dana i've never even talked to her but i hear she's a beast with kbikor so you might want to look her up, Sylvia Dana. And then there's always people out there that, you know,

post in the workplace. Oh, by the way, I have a workplace group called ISA General in ESP, if you guys want to check it out. So, but yeah, there's there's a KV Corps actual group in workplace too where you can ask questions and find there's people posting all the time. Do you need help with KVCorp and they, you know, obviously they come out of price, but that might be an option for you too. I would check that out.

Okay. And then my last question is, you know, because like sometimes I do that property boost and then that lead would come into KB Corby. Corby, that that would lead would only be considered like hot at that moment that it's coming in, right? So do those VAs like interact with them? I'm sorry, do the sales agents, do they act interact with those leads as soon as they come in when they see them then? They should. They should.

Yeah. So that's what we tried to do. It's not like we're trying to. trying to perfect that because obviously it has to come in through the ad, then it has to go to the CRM and the CRM to the ISA right now. It's the way it's working. But I have my clients tell me immediately when they see something that's hot and they want us to call it. I'm like, just text me, just let me know. So yes, they should be reaching out as soon as possible.

And it really, like, no matter what they click on, the sooner you call them, the better. But how you follow up after that is dependent on what they're. requested and all this other stuff. So, you know, because somebody that was just scrolling through and wanted to know how much their home was worth and they thought they were going to enter their address and get an immediate value, that's different than somebody that is, you know, just, you know, like on looking at homes on your website and actually enters their information to call them, right? So there's two different things. So the way that you would handle those, the follow-up process after that is a little different. But yes, I would.

what I as they should always call and interact. Some people only interact over text. That's okay. Video text is your friend. Use it. I'll watch the videos, you know, but also still text if you have to. But that's all right.

Yeah, thank. Great. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much for all the good questions and joining me today. And I hope to see you guys next week.