No ISAs? No Problem. Shanan Steere on High-Level Lead Conversion for Small Teams

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ISAs are a key piece of a successful follow-up system. They’re the masters of speed to lead. They free up agents to focus only on active buyers and sellers. But ISAs aren’t for everyone. Many small teams and solo agents don’t have or want ISAs, but still manage to compete and win the battle for online leads.

Today on The Walkthrough, Shanan Steere shares the follow-up system that powered her 3-agent team to 130 deals and $40 million volume last year in the Kansas City market. All without the help of ISAs.

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Links and Show Notes

• Shanan Steere – agent profile on HomeLight
• Shanan Steere Group – Shanan’s team’s website
• Propel RE Coaching – Shanan’s coaching program on Facebook
• Follow Up Boss – CRM mentioned in today’s show
• BombBomb – video email platform mentioned in today’s show
• Homebot – follow-up tool mentioned in today’s show
• The 12 Week Year – book mentioned in today’s show
• Join our Facebook mastermind for The Walkthrough listeners
• HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center
• Subscribe and listen to The Walkthrough: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTube

Full Transcript

(SPEAKER: Matt McGee, Host)

So often in real estate when you talk about scaling your business or scaling your team, how do we take it to the next level, the answer is ISAs.

You’ve heard several Walkthrough episodes where agents from mega teams share their systems. And if you listen closely, the unheralded heroes are the ISAs. They are the masters of speed to lead. They screen leads, so agents only spend time with active buyers or sellers. Heck, I’ve done episodes entirely dedicated to ISAs. They can be a key piece of growing your business.

But ISAs aren’t for everyone, and that’s okay.

Shanan: I’m the best ISA. And if not me, one of the team members is the best ISA because we’ve actually sold real estate.

Matt: That’s the voice of Shanan Steere. She has a small team in Kansas City that’s converting leads at a high level without the help of ISAs. How are they doing it? That’s what we’re going to discover today.

This is “The Walkthrough.”

(INTRO MUSIC)

Hi there. How are you? My name is Matt McGee. I’m the managing editor of HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center. Welcome to “The Walkthrough.” This is a weekly podcast, new episodes come out every Monday morning. This is the show where you learn what’s working right now from the best real estate agents and industry experts in the country. At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. We are on a journey to find out how great agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable.

You know, I’ve done several Walkthroughs featuring mega teams and mega agents, where they share their lead conversion systems just in incredible detail. The feedback I get on those episodes has been fantastic. But part of the feedback sounds like this, “Matt, that was great. I love what so-and-so is doing, but I don’t have ISAs. I don’t want ISAs. I have a super successful team, we’re crushing it, but we want to keep growing. So how are other teams or solo agents doing it without ISAs? That’s what I want to learn.”

I hear you loud and clear. Consider this episode part one of what I hope will be an occasional series. I’m calling it, “No ISAs? No Problem.” Going forward, what I want to do is find successful agents and teams who are willing to share your lead conversion systems to go deep on how you succeed without the help of ISAs. If that describes you, if you’re interested in walking us through your 25-touch system or your 20-touch system, 33-touch, whatever it looks like, please drop me a note. I’ll give contact info at the end of the show.

Shanan Steere and her team fit that description to a T. The team is Shanan, two other agents, an operations person, and a part-time marketing person. So you’re looking at three agents and about one and a half admins. And they are on pace for about 140 deals this year. Shanan actually hired a virtual ISA sometime ago, but she described it as a train wreck. You’ll hear a little bit more about that in a few moments.

She’s been in real estate for 24 years, but spent about a decade in leadership and coaching. Shanan is still coaching today, but five years ago, she got back into production and formed the Shanan Steere Group. They’ve already gone from zero to more than $40 million annual volume in a market where the average price runs in between $200,000 and $300,000.

Today, Shanan is going to walk us through how they convert leads. So listen for us to talk about several practical things they do to make up for not having ISAs. Shanan will share the emails that they send to new leads. You’ll also hear two BombBomb videos that are part of their follow-up system. You’ll hear about a few tech tools that help make all this possible. And maybe, maybe, the most important thing is the huge role that accountability plays in all of this.

After the conversation, please stay tuned, I have an email question that came in recently from a listener that I’m gonna share and ask you for some help with that. So all of that is straight ahead.

Now let’s get started, “No ISAs, No Problem.” Here’s my conversation with Shanan Steere.

(BEGIN CONVERSATION)

Matt: As the leader of a small team, it is your job to instill the right culture, instill the right mindset to make lead conversion a priority. How do you do that with your team?

Shanan: First of all, you know, it is possible that you convert. And I would tell you that 80% of our money in real estate is made in follow-up. Followup is the name of the game. So if you don’t get them right away, it is about your follow-up game. And this is a contact sport. So it can be challenging to convert leads, and it can be challenging, especially when you didn’t get ahold of them the first time. However, you’ve got to have a good back-end game because that’s when 80% of your money’s made. And that’s exactly where we focus as a team is if we don’t get it the first time that we get a HomeLight lead or whatever type of lead it is, then it then goes into our next game.

Matt: What do you do as far as training your agents to make follow-up the priority that it is?

Shanan: To me, it’s part of training as a team leader and as a rainmaker is if I’m gonna cause all of these leads, I have to spend time in training the people on my team to convert them. Because otherwise, it’s me who’s losing money. You know I’m an old coach and I still coach, and we coach every week and it is around follow-up, it’s around their pipeline. It’s about how they are going to…you know, what’s the next move on this one? What’s the next move on this one? Well, they didn’t respond to this. They didn’t respond to that. Okay, now let’s get creative. Now let’s add on Homebot. Now let’s add on whatever we need to to go convert the leads. Because my job as a rainmaker is to build wealth for the team members that are on my team that trust me with their careers and that’s my responsibility. So if I don’t train them, then they lose money, I lose money, and the team fails.

Matt: What would you say are the biggest challenges that your team has when it comes to converting leads?

Shanan: I think one of the biggest problems, Matt, is that when we get super busy in the market, then we forget to work on our business, which our business is that lead generation. And so we literally just have…you know, we’ve gone down to the daily accountability with each other that we have to have 10 contacts a day. We have a planner that we fill out that we can show each other. And we text each other at the end of every day and say, here are my contacts. And here’s… You know, because we’re not willing to let each other down, so we had to go down to the daily about accountability to make sure that all of us are lead generating and following up. Because otherwise, it’s really easy, especially when you get super busy to forget about building your business for the next 60 to 90 days.

Matt: I wanna go in-depth with you real soon about how you do your lead conversion, how you do that follow-up because it is so important. But first, let’s sort of set the landscape for listeners here. Where do you get your leads? What are your primary lead sources?

Shanan: So we have about 600 people in our sphere, which yields us about 60 deals a year. Automatically, every time we…you know, when we go up, we’ll be at, you know, 700 next year because we don’t like everybody. Most of the people we like, we put them in our sphere, right? So, we’ll go up to like 700 next year, and then we’re gonna get 70 deals. Well, that’s not enough for us to hit our goals. So here’s our other lead sources. HomeLight is obviously one of my very big ones. FastExpert, Effective Agent, OJO, Opcity, we do open houses, sign calls. Our website gets a lot of traffic. And the one stinger here that everybody misses is Google My Business.

Matt: Shanan told me that her team has done $109,000 in GCI just this year from converting those Google My Business leads, and they don’t run any Google pay-per-click ads. That is all organic. She says they will occasionally run some Facebook ads, but it’s not a huge focus. If they do that, the ad budget is usually less than $100 per month. Now Shanan just reeled off about 10 different lead sources. Most of them are sending what I would call cold leads, right, people that they have never met or spoken to. I asked Shanan, with all of these different lead sources, why don’t you use ISAs? Well, you heard part of her answer to that at the beginning of the episode, she said, “I’m the best ISA. My agents are the best ISAs.” That’s not just talk, it’s based on experience. Some time ago, she hired a virtual ISA, someone offshore who didn’t know Kansas City. So listen here as Shanan describes what that experience was like and, this is important, how her team adjusted to be able to compete and win leads without an ISA.

Shanan: They were so clueless, Matt, about our market, about our industry. You know, there are people that just sign up for a job and all they know is they’re gonna be on the phone and they can’t handle any objections. They can’t handle any questions. They can’t handle anything. Even though you role-play with them and you prepare them and you train them, they’re not from here. They can’t answer, you know, what park is close by. I don’t know, right? And then right there, you’re done. So, I mean, I know that a lot of big teams have ISAs because they want the quickness of it and that’s fantastic. We win in the after game.

We win in the quick game too, by the way. I mean, like, both Eddy and Steph have HomeLight app on their phones. All three of us get it at the same time. We’re also on shared calendars so we can see…like, they know if I’m on a coaching day… Every Tuesday I’m on a coaching day, both of them cover all leads coming in. And we don’t care which one of us converts it, by the way, because that’s the other thing that happens. “Well, wait a minute. That should be mine.” We don’t care. We have enough leads, it doesn’t matter.

Matt: Some agents, some teams have, you know, the 33-touch system, I’m sure you’re familiar with. Other agents and teams, you know, it might be 20 touches, 25, whatever it is, what does your system look like? Let’s dive into that.

Shanan: Okay. A new lead comes in, everything is parsed. So Follow Up Boss is the CRM that we use. Follow Up Boss parses the email, auto tags it, auto labels it, and drops it into a plan that starts immediately. And that has been really cool because two deals closing this month, Matt, I didn’t get ahold at the first time and then I got busy. And even though, you know, I took it, I assigned it to myself. I didn’t do a great job of following up. The system caught them in the trap and then they ended up calling me. Both of them said, “Oh my gosh, you’re so sweet. Thanks so much for those nice emails. We’d really like to hire you.” And then when I sit down with them, I’m always curious, “What caused you to choose me?” I ask it all the time just so I know because it helps me learn the business and how we’re doing. What caused you to choose me? This one was very pointed. I love this answer. They said, “Three of us called the first day, three of us emailed the first day. Only one that kept emailing us was you.”

Matt: So, three different agents they were in touch with, but you kept after it, is what they’re saying?

Shanan: Correct. And most of the time, if I don’t get them converted for an appointment upfront, I can’t reach them, right? Because 10 other people are calling them if they’ve done multiple sites. Then it’s about the follow-up game.

Matt: Do you recall what those emails would have said? The ones that went out automatic because you said you didn’t have time to respond right away, but the email autoresponder went out. What’s that email say?

Shanan: So the first email says the…it auto-fills their name, by the way, right? It mail merges their name. So, I’m gonna say, “Matt, we are here to help.” That is the subject line. “Thanks for requesting your home’s evaluation, I’m going to gather all of the information you need and send it over shortly. But first, I have a quick question. We are currently working with a lot of qualified homebuyers who can’t find the perfect home. Would you be interested in selling your home if the price was right?” That’s day one.

Matt: That’s the day one email. Okay.

Shanan: Day two email, subject line, “Home selling.” “Hi Matt, I’m Shanan, your local point of contact per request on selling your home. I’ll be assisting you from this point forward. Every home has things that make it the best on the streets, from the doorway to the kitchen, to the finishings, every home has things that make it special. Remember, these are also the same things that can bring up its value. What are one or two of the themes that make your home the best? I want to make sure and factor those into the report I send you.”

Matt: Short and sweet.

Shanan: And engaging by the way, and they’re all asking questions.

Matt: So, you gave the day one and the day two emails. How long does this…like, do you have like a 7-day, a 10-day? What does it look like?

Shanan: Oh, this goes on for 30 days.

Matt: So you’ve got a 30-day system. How many contacts, like, the first couple of days? Are we talking…is it just that one email or if you can, are you also gonna make a phone call, followup by text? What does that look like?

Shanan: Definitely a phone call, a follow-up text. If it’s a seller, we put a handwritten note in the mail and then we also deploy our pre-list or pre-buyer depending on if it’s a buyer or seller through BombBomb, which includes a video from us. So all of a sudden, they know that we’re not some bot or an ISA calling. We’re actually a real person. And now they get to see our face and our voice. And they’re like, “Oh, she’s real. Look at that. That’s the person I get.”

Matt: That’s a super important point right there, right? Because that’s what the video does. It humanizes you, it creates a connection and you’re using BombBomb to do that. Can we play, I don’t know, one or two of your BombBomb videos that go out to a buyer or seller?

Shanan: Absolutely.

Matt: Okay. Let’s listen to what those sound like.

Shanan: Hi, my name is Shanan Steere with Keller Williams Realty and Shanan Group. Hey, I just want to introduce myself and my team. There are some quick links below for you to check us out, our Google reviews, and also how we market and our story. This is really important because this is what separates all agents. We look forward to seeing you soon in our appointment and have a great day.

Matt: Okay. That is a BombBomb video email that Shanan sends out to sellers when a new seller lead comes in. Let’s listen to a similar BombBomb video email that is targeted more towards buyers.

Shanan: Hi, my name is Shanan Steere. I’m with Shanan Group and Keller Williams Realty. Hey, thanks for reaching out through HomeLight. It is such a fantastic time to buy and here’s why, the interest rates are lower than we’ve ever seen in history, which means you have more buying power. We would love to set up a Zoom consult and/or an in-person consult to see how we can help you get ready to either get your credit ready to go, get pre-approved, and get you in that house of your dreams. Please let us know if you’re still in the process and interested, and/or if you’ve already bought a house so we can take you off of our list. Please see the information below. Check us out at our Google reviews. We have been in business for 23 years. We sold 130 houses last year, and we want to help you buy your dream home. Looking forward to connecting with you soon. Thank you so much.

Matt: Okay. So, there’s Shanan, just a couple of the video emails that you send out through BombBomb. How many touches do you think there are in that first week or so?

Shanan: This is a touch game, and it all depends on how the people respond. So, if you text and they text back, then you text. If they pick up the phone, then you call back. If they don’t do either one of those, then you may even go stalk them on Facebook and private message them. You have to be creative about how to go get them. And the way I look at it is, I mean, if we don’t win the lead then our competitor will and who’s going to give them better service. And that’s the one thing that drives us, right? We know that we give great customer service. We have incredible vendors. We give a ton of value for what we do. And it’s important for us to get that out to as many people as possible.

So you can’t just put it on an email and let it go. That’s not gonna work. Because it’s a combination of, like…think about a boxer in a ring. You can’t just have a jab and make a knockout. You have to have a jab and an uppercut. So I want you to think about how do you get a knockout of a lead? Well, you may have to do a text and then a call, and then an email. It’s like a dance until you finally get the appointment. And that’s the knockout.

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Matt: And you said earlier, if I heard you correctly, that when a new lead comes in, all three of you, all three of the agents on the team might call back right away, at the same time. Is that right?

Shanan: Absolutely. And we all reference each other.

Matt: If all three of you call, I’m trying to put myself in a listener’s head right now, if all three of you call, do you worry that that might overwhelm or confuse or annoy the person, that they’re getting so many calls from the same real estate team?

Shanan: By the way, they’re getting calls from 10 people at the same time. And if you think you’re just getting three, you are hallucinating because I ask them all the time, “How many agents call you?” “Oh my gosh, so many. They won’t stop calling.” Probably because they went and put in on multiple sites and then all of a sudden, you know, other rainmakers like me have their team call too. So even if they just got it to three and they each had three people, we had three people, and they had three people, that’s nine people calling. Speed to lead is everything, which is why all three of us drop and roll.

Matt: Let me unpack that real quick. All three of you drop and roll. What if all three of you are out with clients already?

Shanan: Number one, we put tones on our phone. So I know if it’s a HomeLight lead, I know if it’s a direct call from HomeLight, I know if it’s an OJO lead. Like, the ones that text me like that, I have different tones on my phone. So I’ll just tell my clients, especially if they came from HomeLight or online, I’m like, “Hey, there’s another one of you calling me. I gotta go. Hold on. Go to the master bedroom. I’ll be in the kitchen. I’ll be right up.” They don’t care. Now if I’m in a listing appointment, that’s a different story. Only one of us is in a listing appointment typically at a time. And everybody else watches the phone while somebody is in a listing appointment.

Matt: Okay. So, if you’re looking at houses, whatever it might be, you’re willing to step away and say, “Hey, look, I need to take this call,” but listing appointments, that’s a different ball game. We’re not gonna interrupt, somebody else on the team is going to pick up those leads when they come in.

Shanan: Not just listing appointments, vacation, nights out, date nights, whatever’s on our calendar. Somebody has something important on their calendar, that’s their time, everybody else covers.

Matt: Let me ask you what that first phone call is like. Is it scripted? What do you say?

Shanan: Hi, Matt. This is Shanan Steere call from Keller Williams Realty and Shanan Group. Hey, I’m calling on behalf of HomeLight today and I just wanted to reach out and find out when would be a good time for us to connect, either by Zoom or in person, whatever your comfort level is. I look forward to talking to you. You know, just so you know, HomeLight only partners with the very, very top agents. And I just happen to be lucky enough to be in that group. And we’d love to connect and see how we can help you with your move. Something like that.

Matt: Right. So something like that. So the goal there is to set the appointment?

Shanan: Always. Either Zoom…right now, right, we’re going back into possibly Zoom. Buyers, we always Zoom with. Ninety percent of our buyers now since COVID, we’ve continued to Zoom with because I can stack up three buyers in a row and be done in an hour and a half versus meeting them face-to-face and taking an hour and a half per buyer. So all of us have kind of converted into that. Sellers, we’re still going out to their homes, you know, and it just depends on what happens with COVID, you know, what comfort levels are. So, we’re willing to do either.

Matt: Obviously, Shanan, not every lead is ready to buy or sell right away, right? They might be three months out, they might be six months out, whatever. Tell me about your nurture process for leads that aren’t ready to transact. What does that look like?

Shanan: So on a buyer’s side, if somebody says, I really don’t want to start looking for six months, that happens quite a bit, right? We can see that in our HomeLight notes too. Then we’ll put them…we have different plans built in Follow Up Boss for 30 to 60 days and then we have over…30 to 90 days and then over 90 days. So the ones that we work on are under 30 days, like we’ve talked to them, they’re warm. Okay, that’s what pulls up on our screen every day, that we’re gonna go hunting for. Over in the right-hand side…and our goal is to move it from the 90 to the 30 to 90, and then from that one over to under 30. So all of them have different plans that they’re on. On the seller side, one of the most important things that we do is we drop them into Homebot. And Homebot is a service that, you know, we partner with a lender on, I don’t know if the lender pays, we pay $25 a month, and Homebot sends them out pretty much like evaluations of what their equity is.

And we’ve had a lot of people, a lot of engagement of our leads are cold to us, they’ve never responded to us, all of a sudden start opening that Homebot, and Homebot will automatically either go in and look at the report or it’ll email us and say, “Hey, here’s your hot people this week.” So now we have a spy system on them. Now we know they don’t want to talk to us, however, they’re curious about our information. And as long as we are the ones giving them the information, chances are they’ll convert to us versus somebody who’s never even called them back.

Matt: How important is accountability in making all this work?

Shanan: Well, if you’d like to make money, it’s huge. I mean, I don’t do this for entertainment. If I give you a lead, Matt, and you don’t report back to me, you’re not self-managed. So, which means that I have to micromanage you and go, “Hey, what happened to Bobby Joe?” Like, “I gave you Bobby Joe, where’s Bobby Joe?” That should never happen in a team. Your team members should be self-managed, meaning if I give you a lead, now that is your baby. You’re gonna carry that around. You’re not gonna drop that baby. You’re not gonna harm that baby. You’re gonna feed that baby. It’s gonna be your baby. You’re gonna tell me, “Hey, by the way, Bobby Joe’s good. I got it. I’m showing them houses. They’re under buyer agency.” So that the rainmaker just goes, “Yes.” Right? And so that accountability of those leads, well, quite honestly, if people aren’t accountable with my leads, they don’t stay on my team.

Matt: Tell me more about the requirements that you have of your agents, as far as, you know, making calls, setting appointments, and so forth. You already mentioned earlier that every day you go through the list of contacts, right? You mentioned that you share planners with each other. Tell me more about what all the accountability requirements are.

Shanan: So this is gonna go really airy-fairy on you. So I read this book once by Brian Moran called “The 12 Week Year.” This was in 2019 when my business was tanking after the first quarter. And this is when our accountability came in and we ran our first 12-week year. At the first quarter of 2019, we closed a whopping 17 deals for $3.8 million. And we had a goal of $30 million that year, $30 million. My coach got on me, which was a really fun conversation after the first quarter review. And we decided to do a 12-week year. This is when accountability started. So scoreboards are important. Having a scoreboard in public is super important for teams. You would never go to an NFL game like the Chiefs and not have a scoreboard up to know exactly what’s happening with everybody. So scoreboards are important.

And then we developed a planner, Matt, that basically it’s for our accountability and our coaching for our team members. So I use it too. I mean, I carry it everywhere with me because it is a way for me to dump my head and actually be present with where I am. So once a week we coach, we go over the planner. What’s happened in the last week? Where are your leads? Where are your deals? Where are you at in your 12-week year goals? How do we get you there? And it’s not about like being hard on people or whipping people. To me, coaching is about helping them strategically lift them up and help them get to where they wanna go. My job is to build wealth. My job is to lead wealth-building for the people around me that have trusted me. So, that is my strategic way of going, “Okay. Okay. Forget that lead, let’s go on the next couple of leads.” Right?

When we did our first 12-week year, we ended up doing 46 pendings and took 30 listings in 12 weeks. After the first quarter of closing 17, that was almost triple. Every day it was, who’s next? Who’s the next buyer? Who’s the next seller? Look at your pipeline list. Look at your call list. Who’s your next target? Go. Go get that person. Okay. Who’s next? And it’s fun when it’s team language and everybody is positive around it, right? Like, hey, you know, we wanna win the game together. We’re a team. We’re helping each other. One of our team members has a baby that’s been in the hospital for four days and so the other team member and I were like, okay, every morning at our 8:30 meeting, by the way, that’s really important for me to touch on that. You’ve gotta have a start time. Games start at a time. They’re on national TV, they can’t be late. We have a start time every day at 8:30, preferably in person. If somebody is out and about, we call them in. That is our what’s going on, who’s got what, who’s on first, who’s on third? Who’s ready to run…you know, who’s on the bases and who needs coverage? Go.

Matt: Do you ever get to a point where you have to stop giving an agent leads, take them off lead flow?

Shanan: Absolutely. I mean, if they’re not going to take care of the leads that they already have, the last thing I’m gonna do is bombard them with more. One of my friends up in Minnesota, this was a great example, by the way, if you don’t show up for role-play twice a week, you don’t show up for team meetings, and you don’t add at least five people to your database every week, you’re off of lead flow for the next week. So he is drawing them in with the leads and making sure that they are doing their job, following up, role-playing, doing everything possible to make their business great.

Matt: Shanan, we have a Facebook listener community, and I posted in there that we were going to be doing an episode about lead conversions for small teams. And so some of our listeners were like, “Yes, let’s talk about this. I have questions.” So, Marshall Walker, he and his wife are a team of two, they’re both agents. His question is, “I am good long-term with rapport building. I’ve been in another sales career for almost 20 years. I’m having a difficult time with instant rapport building with internet leads.” What would you say to that?

Shanan: One word, video. You have to set yourself apart and not be a bot, because they’re getting hit by all of these automations from who knows how many people all at the same time, Matt, that you have to be real. And I would tell you when you’re calling, make sure and slow down your tonality or your rate of speech, change your tonality, become human to these people. Do not sound like you’re a robot on the phone because that’s exactly how everybody else sounds. Same thing with video.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Shanan, one last question. This is from Keenan Gottschall. He is part of a small team outside Detroit. His question is, “If you are receiving more leads than you can handle, do you recommend bringing on a buyer’s agent or finding a third party ISA service?” I think we already know how you feel about the ISA services, but what are your thoughts in terms of expanding how many agents are on your team?

Shanan: The first thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go hire a showing assistant to get rid of all my nighttime and my weekend showings and all the times that I can’t show two or three people at the same time so that I can be the one back behind converting, writing offers, getting them through the process versus just out showing and opening doors. I can hire people to open doors. That’s the first thing I would do. The second one is I would then work them into a buyer’s agent, or hire somebody who has experience as a buyer’s agent so they can take the process and run with it. Now, I will tell you the first year that you bring somebody on, expect to spend 150 to 200 hours with them in training. And if you’re not willing to make that commitment, then you better hire somebody really experienced and really good, and it may cost you more money. This is a developmental position. You really have to have leverage in opening doors, which gives you your time back, and then you can go after it and slay the listings.

(Speaker: Matt McGee, Host)

Slay the listings. Amen. Thank you so much, Shanan.

I wanna make something clear before we go any further. Early in the conversation, you heard Shanan describe her experience with using a virtual ISA as a train wreck. Now that’s not an indictment of all virtual ISAs and virtual ISA services. You might use one of those services with great success. I know a lot of agents swear by them and that’s fantastic. Shanan’s experience wasn’t good, so she and her team developed systems and processes to succeed without ISAs. And that’s what I wanted to share with you in this episode. It’s what I want to share with you as we do more, “No ISAs, No Problem” episodes. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use ISAs, virtual or in-house, I’m saying here’s how agents are able to succeed without them. Okay?

Now you may have heard Shanan mention that Tuesdays are coaching day. In addition to running her team, Shanan also runs Propel RE Coaching, which you can find easily on Facebook if you’d like to learn more. She is taking on new clients right now. So I will link to that in today’s show notes.

I have a listener question coming up in just a moment that I think you can help with, but for now, what stood out to you from today’s show? What notes did you make for yourself? Let’s do the takeaways segment. Here is what stood out to me.

Takeaway number one, real estate is a contact sport. When a virtual ISA didn’t work, Shanan and her team found several ways to get around it. You heard things like all three agents on the team reply to every lead. They’ll respond to new leads even if they’re with another client. Shanan said they have things like specific ringtones and alerts set up so that they know when a new lead comes in and where it’s coming from. So that’s just some of what you heard about how Shanan’s team gets around not having ISAs.

Takeaway number two, speaking of things like ringtones and alerts, tech is a huge part of their solution. They use Follow Up Boss as their CRM. They have it optimized to make instant contact with new leads, right? Speed to lead. They also use BombBomb to send videos as part of their follow-up because video humanizes them. It shows that a real person is following up. They also use Homebot to nurture seller leads. So tech is playing a big role in this.

And then takeaway number three, maybe the biggest thing of all, accountability is a huge part of their success. Shanan said the agents on the team have to be self-managed. She said visible scoreboards are huge. Each agent has to make 10 new contacts a day. They text each other with their names at the end of the day. Shanan said the team shares calendars so that everyone knows where the others are, who’s available, things like that. They have a planner that they go over together for tracking their leads, deals, and goals. And they do a daily meeting at 8:30 a.m. that keeps everyone on track and accountable to one another. Great, great stuff.

Okay. I mentioned earlier that I have an email to share with you. This is from “The Walkthrough” inbox. Juliette Declercq is an agent who sent in this question. “Can I be a great real estate agent as an introverted person?” Can I be a great real estate agent as an introverted person? She went on to say in the email that she’s not comfortable putting herself forward in photos and videos, and basically asked how can she make this work? If you can help, here’s what I’d love you to do. Call our voicemail line and spend a minute or two giving Juliette your best advice. The number is 415-322-3328. I will try to compile the most helpful replies and use them in a future episode. Again, the number, 415-322-3328. How do you succeed in real estate as an introvert? Let’s see if we can get some great answers to that question and turn it into a future episode. And thanks to Juliette for the great question.

Speaking of which, if you have questions or feedback about this episode or any other, well, you just heard the phone number. You can also send an email. The address is walkthrough [at] homelight.com. Or you can find me and Shanan Steere, today’s guest, in our Facebook mastermind group. Just go to Facebook, do a search for HomeLight Walkthrough, the group will come right up.

All right. That’s all for this week. Thanks so much again, to Shanan Steere for joining me. And thank you for listening. My name’s Matt McGee, and you’ve been listening to “The Walkthrough.”

At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents, we’re on a journey to find out how great agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable. Go out and safely sell some homes.

Hey, no episode next Monday. Next Monday is Labor Day. So it’s a company holiday. I will talk to you again in two weeks with another new Walkthrough. Bye-bye.

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