Hiring a Sales Assistant?

[Mitch]

Gloria - We pay them a $1600 a month salary with the requirement that they contact a minimum of 15 contacts per Agent (5 Agents) which equals 300 calls per month.

They also receive 5% of the gross commission paid by the Agent out of their commission...which they have been happy to do! I posted a bunch of info on the position on the eHomes site.

[SCP]

My opinion is if you are going to have an assistant who is going to be following up on leads, they need to be licensed. If not, they are limited to what they can discuss with your customers...at least they are in Florida.

This is an interesting point about what the assistant can and can not do w/o a license. It comes down to what you are looking for with an unlicenses assistant. If you want someone to verify leads are ready to talk with you, leadqual is great. If you are looking for someone to do more, a true assistant may be the way to go.

My concern was that a lead qualifier would cross the line of what an unlicensed assistant can do. To be sure my assistant's questions would not cross the line, I gather my top 5 or so questions and called the real estate commission here in NC and asked their head attorney each question to be sure they were OK.

When in doubt, call your commission or governing body to find out if your assistant's questions or duties do require a license.

[Mitch]

I agree with the crossing the line issue with third party lead qualifier. However, from what I have seen from Lead Qual, they only ask the questions you supply and don't get into real estate conversation.

[Robert Worthington]

Mitch, you have wonderful ideas! What is your ROI for your LCA?

[Mitch]

Hey Robert! I won't have any real numbers on the LCA's until after the first quarter. However, the numbers make a lot of sense to me. For instance, currently, and this is an estimate this year as I haven't run my year end numbers yet, we closed a little over 3% of our raw leads this past year. This is down from a little more than 4% in 2008, but that's because we had to many leads this year and not enough agents therefore giving our agents to many leads. With our LCA's we are now contacting 900 or our buyer leads per month and leaving approximately 1800 messages per month. This does not include the first phone calls being done by our Agents as I have no concrete way to track that as of now.

If I look strictly at numbers, we closed right around 325 sales this year with an additional 40+ short sales waiting to close. If it werent for short sales I believe we would have had at least 100 additional sales. But let's look at what happens with the LCA's being added, according to the numbers. With the 900 buyers we talk to monthly and a close rate of only 5% (which I believe is very low for this program) that would increase our sales from averaging around 28-30 per month to 45 per month. Our cost per LCA is approximately 1 sale per month or less based on a $150k price range. So if I take the 45 - 30 = 15 additional sales, then subtract the 3 sales for their pay, that should net me an additional 12 sales per month or $1.8 million in sales which brings a gross revenue to the company of $25,650 after commissions are paid.

Of course this is all in theory but the short term analysis of the program looks very strong. I'm awaiting a 30 day update of the numbers from my LCA's on how many appointments they set for Agents for the month of January. We also know that December we missed several days and therefore calls because of the holidays. It should be interesting. Of course what happens if our conversion rates on people we actually talk to who are interested in buying (we only are calling leads who have logged in at least 10 times) is more than 5%. Then then numbers go crazy. I'm keeping my estimates and predictions at a 5% conversion because I like to predict conservatively and hope for more!

I hope that answers your question in a very long winded way!

[Jonathan Long Brea]

I don't know if I would have the assistant answer all the calls. Also, I would probably prefer an assistant that could come in the office and work specific hours.

[gregharaksin]

dang Mitch, you sure know your numbers.

[Denver Realty Experts]

Mitch, I'm curious to know if LeadQual is calling leads that register on a site or leads that are actually asking a question. Calling them in such short time after registration can be weird if they aren't expecting a call or even wanting a call. I call all my leads and its usually within 24 hours - this seems to be fine. I'd love to outsource this but I have always felt having an expert make the first call would increase conversion

[BrandonD]

Yeah it would def be worth it because it could free up a lot of your time.