You can build your real estate business with outbound prospecting, but you need to hire the right person for the job. Unfortunately, without some significant time spent prospecting or managing outbound sales agents, selecting the right hire for this type of position can be a challenge. Luckily, recent guests Sam Monreal and Dale Archdekin, both experts on real estate sales, joined Pat to share their top tips on growing a profitable real estate business, including tips on hiring a new outbound prospector.
In this blog article, we cover the traits and abilities Sam and Dale look for when hiring for outbound prospecting positions, but they covered so much more over the course of their interview. To learn more about building your sales team, managing sales agents for top performance, and improving your ROI for inbound leads, listen to the podcast below.
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Dominant Personalities Are Great for Outbound Prospecting
Working an outbound sales position successfully requires persistence and directness, traits that dominant personalities tend to have. Also, many contacts made by outbound prospectors are cold, and people with dominant characteristics are typically more successful converting them because they’re often better when it comes to handling objections and pushing to close. While passive personalities can work in outbound prospecting successfully, they often require more training and are more likely to dislike the work; this makes hiring a passive person to make outbound sales calls somewhat risky.
Empathy Is Still an Important Trait in Sales
While you do want your salespeople to have dominant character traits, you don’t want them to steamroll potential clients; it won’t work. The best salespeople are aggressive, yes, but they’re also able to see things from the perspective of potential clients. This allows them to push just the right amount for the services that potential clients are most likely to need. Not only does this result in more appointments for agents, it results in appointments agents are more likely to close.
The Ability to Nurture and Follow Up with Clients Is Vital
Outbound prospecting isn’t as easy as managing inbound leads. It’s harder to generate decent leads, and it also takes more time and more effort to convert these leads into appointments. If your outbound prospector isn’t able to follow up with leads reliably, your team is going to be missing out on a lot of excellent listing opportunities. With the right training and an effective CRM solution, most outbound prospectors should be able to handle follow-up reasonably well.
People in Outbound Prospecting Need to Take Rejection Well
Outbound prospecting is a hard job. For some people, the hardest part about this job is the constant rejection. Outbound prospectors who take each “no” personally never last long. Before you hire someone for an outbound prospecting position, you should be certain that they are able to handle rejection well. If not, you may sink time and money into training them only to have them quit within a few months.
If you want to learn more about hiring people for outbound prospecting, or if you want to learn more about the best lead-conversion practices, be sure to listen to the complete podcast interview with Sam Monreal and Dale Archdekin.