Gary Keller Talks About How a Virtual Assistant Can Fuel Growth
Gary Keller: We’re here to talk about MyOutDesk. First off give me the short 1–2- minute explanation of what a Virtual Assistant is from your point of view.
Daniel Ramsey: About 3 or 4 years ago I was at a conference and somebody said “If your doing your own paperwork, you’re an assistant”. If you’re basically saying your worth, you know, what an assistant gets paid. Are you worth $10 bucks and hour or $12 bucks an hour. And as a mega agent most people understand the value of leverage. Then you, you’ve pointedly said you know focus on leads, look at listings, and then look at leverage. And a lot really good, really, really good agents are great at generating business but once they get in the door, they need help. In my opinion, there’s 3 areas that a real estate virtual assistant can really be, you know, impactful to a Real Estate agent in their office.
One is on the Admin side. You know, transaction coordination. That’s inputting MLS. That’s taking care of all the paperwork kind of mundane stuff. You know what’s cool about the, that personal admin person is you can also use them on a personal side. So my wife’s birthday is coming up this weekend. On Wednesday she wants to go to a comedy show on our favorite restaurant downtown and so I sent over a link to my VA, my virtual assistant, and said “Buy 6 tickets, make reservations at this restaurant, go”.
And so from what a virtual assistant can do, that’s really cool example on the personal and on the business side. It is organizing your life.
Gary Keller: On the Admin side. What’s the second one?
Daniel Ramsey: The second one which we all need is the marketing side. And that’s like social media, creating in 33 Touches, doing videos, flyers, all that kind of stuff that drives business in.
Social media and video, it’s such a big push and on KW got a video division now and I think everybody understands that the growth in Real Estate is online marketing and having a great presence there had been able to capture those leads. And so there’s a lot of repetitive work that goes into creating that marketing machine and so that’s another area that a virtual assistant can help.
Gary Keller: Now you used the phrase repetitive work. It would that significant when you said that? Is that way that we view a virtual assistant’s highest and best use is repetitive work?
Daniel Ramsey: Whenever you have an hourly employee who’s not being paid on commission, repetitive work is reading that machine continually that you can depend on that’s always he and the virtual assistant, their strength is taking a program that you’ve created and then running with it.
You can have them in a specific role where they excel and that’s kind of how we view our virtual assistant services. The repetitiveness, the system, the process, the coaches, the agent, the players, the virtual assistants. They can be used in many different things but they shine, just like you said, they shine when it’s a systematic, repetitive kind of machine driven task.
Gary Keller: Got it. And the third thing was?
Daniel Ramsey: The third one is, the whole sales support side. I mean such an important part ofwhat we do today. You know making calls, talking to clients. And so we’ve created a Leads Coordinator position or an ISA. On what’s interesting just some basic statistics here 80% of sales are made between the 5 th and the 12 th contact so most agents are really good in making 2 or 3 contacts to someone.
This is something that was put out by the National Association of Realtors probably 3 years ago.
What is basically says is that most sales people need to make a consistent follow up program. And this is R and D rebuff and redistribute from our company. I think I saw it on a blog post three years ago from another agent and it’s just a really good testament that it’s got to keep in contact with your client whose interested today may or may not buy. But if you talk with them over 6 months, create rapport, develop a relationship, show them value, make them feel like they’re important and, cared for, you’re most likely get a sale out of that transaction. The difficult part for a sales person is doing all of those follow up calls. Keep providing that value over time so we’ve created a position within our virtual assisting company called an I.S.A. An inside sales person. And that’s when you’re using our model, an agent can get on the phone, start building that rapport, set an appointment, gather the details, and then all they had to do, they didn’t have to make 24,000 calls. They didn’t have to make 4,322 conversations. They had 350. And this is spread about 40 different clients so they only had to talk to that person who raised their hand and said “I’m ready to list today” or “I’m ready to buy today” and that’s an important, powerful tool.
Gary Keller: So what are your biggest AHA!’S that you had from agents using virtual assistants?
Daniel Ramsey: So when somebody calls us, you just jump on to our website, myoutdesk.com, you call our 1–800 number or you filled out a lead form on our website. You get put in on a queue and then we actually have a coaching. It’s a free coaching session. And it’s actually really a good thing because most people call us and they, they ask simple questions like, you know, “What time does the virtual assistant work if they are 16 hours ahead? Do they work my schedule or their schedule?”.And so we answer all the basic, you know, housekeeping questions but at the same time we dive in into their office and we find out who they have currently. We identify talent versus non-talent on their current team and then we look for the holes within their company like where are they dropping the ball. My biggest AHA! is that without that piece, the virtual assistant side doesn’t typically work. In the beginning we just didn’t know that it was necessary and certainly one of the biggest AHA!’s for us.
Gary Keller: What do you think the biggest mistake that an agent makes when they hire a virtual assistant?
Daniel Ramsey: We look at this as an overall leverage piece and when we’re doing our consultations or when we’re had a team meeting for, for any office, we’re really talking about, you know, when your triangle the leads, listings, and leverage. We’re really talking about leverage and so the biggest mistake I think that agents make is assume that that’s not as important as the other sides of the triangle.
Gary Keller:Leverage is a business concept and it’s a whole, new discipline not related to leads and listings. So you can go and study Real Estate all you want and it’s gonna deal with those first two.
The problem or challenge that every Real Estate agent has; All of their success as a Real Estate agent doesn’t qualify them one iota to be successful in hiring someone. It’s like studying one field and then trying to be something else.
Daniel Ramsey: I think the difficulty is if, if an agent focused on generating as many leads on the leverage side as they did on the Real Estate side, then that problem of finding talent wouldn’t be an issue.
Gary Keller: What you just said is the, the keys to the kingdom. That’s a step that every Real Estate agent has to ask themselves “Am I ready to make?”. Because the problem is, that when you decided to generate leads for leverage and you decided to master that, you’ve now agreed to do 2 things.
You’ve agreed to be a Real Estate agent and a business person. And that’s like a 2 masters that’s taking on 2 roles and something’s gonna have to give. And usually people don’t even realize that that’s the issue staring at them. So 2 quick question for me to go. Number 1, what will I expect to pay?
Daniel Ramsey: $9.60 is our high end executive person and we have a range between and the reason for that is because you know, we want to be able to offer high quality people over in the Philippines and give them an option to it that they don’t have in their country. And so we pay our virtual assistants 2 times the standard income over there. We give them health care. We give them vacation time. We do two conferences a year and so we give them more incentive to stay with their clients for a long time period because turnover is the enemy of the leverage piece in the business.
And what’s cool about that is it’s like paying a cellphone bill. They work 20 hours, which is on minimum by the way, or 40 hours. They sign in to our website. They log in to our stuff and they log their time and then we send you a bill, you know, it’s kinda like $300 bucks a week or some crazy small number like this and you know, you just pay it. And there’s no health care, and there’s no tax or fight care you know, other kinda jazz that’s crazy in our country. It’s a great option to supplement your current leverage piece within your office. And that’s, that’s kind of our motto right now.
Gary Keller: So last thing and that is if I was listening to this today and I wanted to contact MyOutdesk, how would I do that?
Daniel Ramsey: MyOutdesk.com is the website, you can fill out, you can watch videos there. So it’s a really great resource. If you have some questions you can call us at 1–800- 583–9950 during business hours and we’re gonna, we’re gonna set that consultation up with a licensed realtor whose have hundreds of this exact same consultations.
Gary Keller: You know Ramsey, it’s been fun. MyOutdesk, thanks a lot.
Learn more by visiting us online at https://www.myoutdesk.com and book a Double Your Business Strategy Session while you’re there!
Original Story: https://www.myoutdesk.com/gary-keller-williams-growth/
