A speaker advises against outsourcing inside sales too early. Build your own team first: focus on personal production, hire an admin, develop 3-4 buyer agents, and close 30-40 deals before adding inside sales. Offshore firms like OutDesk exist, but premature outsourcing often hurts client experience.
All right, so Andrew asked the question. He is definitely newer to the group because this is one of those things that I am passionate about. Ask the question, have you had good experience with VA ISAs? If so, what VA locator service would you recommend? So here's the thing with just inside sales in general, and I'll explain. Let me bring this up here. Okay? So it really does come down to structure. So I'm going to answer the question again because this is going to be a good one worth repeating on even our weekly newsletter. So, Mark, you can pay attention to this one. So Andrew asked the question, have you had good experience with VA ISAs? If so, what VA locator service would you recommend? So for fundamentally the first contact you ever have with a client, on a scale of 1 to 10, how important do you think that is? Not asking you how much of a grind Internet buyer leads are or just the importance of the first impression that a potential client of your team or your company has of you. How important do you think that is? It's like a 11 or 12 out of 10 in my opinion. So that being said, do you think you can hire out either domestically or offshore? Do you think you could hire that out effectively? The answer is yes, maybe. I know one or two out of ten people that are, that are offshoring inside sales. So they're going to the Philippines mostly. My outdesk has a huge push for this, a huge push for this. Commissions Inc. They have Appointments Inc. Started as a separate company that's getting a lot of people that are doing it. I don't believe if you really sat down with, with those people. Jason Secor knows someone and I won't mention her name, but who's, who's who I've heard him say, and we've since talked about it, and he sort of says, yeah, I guess she isn't crushing it. But he said, yeah, she's crushing it with, you know, offshore inside sales. The challenge is, I mean, she was selling about 100, 110 homes a year. She's fully in production, right? So she's doing about 50 or 60 deals. She's got like three or four agents. She had like three or four inside salespeople to sell whatever. You know, even if it was all 100 homes, it wasn't because some business just came, came to her and mostly listing side stuff was, was coming to her in referrals. So Maybe it was 60 to 80 sides that four or five inside sales and three or four buyer agents like it. It's Such a diluted effort. The way that I built the team and, and the way that I recommend most of you build your team is that you get really busy. First yourself, hire an admin, then you're building your buyer agent team and then you're getting out of the buy side. And your buyer agents are their own inside salespeople. To start, yes, it requires you being in their stuff and leading them and holding them accountable. But your ability to develop yourself, there's less risk in that than you offshoring inside sales. So I know you didn't ask this question thinking I was going to unleash this, this type of answer on you, but unless you're at the point, I believe, where you have three or four productive buyer agents, a kick ass admin, and you're doing 30 to 40 deals minimum yourself, that inside sales really belongs in your business. It is an essential part of your business. So I don't, I don't want you to think that it's not so these are the three models that I worked against and I even more so stand behind these. Now I think if you skip to having inside sales and not doing listings yourself and going showing agents like you're, you're going to take on too much overhead. The scorecard is cash in the bank. So your ability to do that, it's way less risky to do it this way than to do it any other way. So very opinionated about it and I just don't believe it's the best experience for clients either. Having someone on the phone that is just, just looking to shuffle through leads. Yeah, I don't, I don't see it. So.
