Over the last few weeks we’ve had a number of people that have been speaking to us about how to work with an assistant.
In most businesses you need to write around $300,000 in gross commissions before it becomes financially viable to hire an assistant. A lot of people ask me “What do you get an assistant to do and do they even make phone calls?” and it’s such a great question. In my opinion an assistant is exactly that: someone that assists. When you hire an assistant, you need to make sure that you’re running at double your normal speed because you will need lots of overflow work in order to be able to get the assistant to do what they need to do.
When you’re looking to employ an assistant, you really want to get someone that’s most importantly coach-able. And coaching or someone who is trainable is probably one of the most important characteristics. You see, you can teach skill but you can’t teach attitude, so it’s absolutely important that you get someone who’s really good at what they do and interview them throughout the sales process.
Often what I see is that a lot of people put on an assistant as a knee jerk reaction, and they don’t really think about what they need that assistant to do. I would have my assistant handle all of my email, all of my email enquiry and all of my database marketing and automation. That would allow me to stay focused on making calls and being face-to-face with all of my clients.
If you want your assistant to do dollar productive activities then you need to make sure that they are competent in their capacity and ability to be able to do the calls. Instead of having them do the OFI callbacks, I would have them spend most of the time calling back all open for inspection booklets and old enquiry logs.
BUT, before I do that I would teach them the ten best qualification questions:
1. What’s the reason for the move?
2. Did you need to be there by Easter?
3. What locations are you considering?
4. Have you inquired anything or been to any other opens?
5. Have you bid on anything or came close to making an offer?
6. Are you going to be using the bank?
7. Where are you at with them?
8. Is this your first, second or third purchase in the area?
9. Is there any chance I can come and see your place as it will give me a great idea in what you’re actually looking for in the next one.
10. Have you had anyone from our brand through to give you an idea of the value?
What we’re doing here is training for competence. And what you want to start to think about is when you put on an assistant, you want someone that you can train for competence in their areas of skill. Administrative assistants are usually the first assistants that people put on, and then in time they may also put on an additional assistant that may do a lot of the buy work in terms of open for inspection overflows, a lot of buyer appointments and also in addition to that to do live prospecting around new properties that have been listed and sold inside of the marketplace.
There are a couple little tips here in making the assistant and relationship work correctly.
1. Be very clear and specific about how the assistant is actually measured – i.e., what does success look like to them in their role.
2. Train them for competence around those core skills. So now it’s qualification questions or how to actually use the database.
3. Meet every morning with them every morning first thing and ask “So what have we got on today?” And you want to ask them that question and let them tell you what they think that they need to be doing. That way you’re training for competence, but most importantly you’re training for them to have initiative.
It is also important to understand a little bit about their world. Things like are eating correctly, exercising correctly and pretty focused around the work that they’ve actually got to get done.
If you’ve got an assistant who is dollar productive, they need to be producing income, but you can’t expect them to produce income if you’re not producing it yourself. It is critical that if you’re going to get an assistant, you need to stay focused on the prospecting and the listing component of your business, allowing them to assist you throughout the course of the sales process.
We have seen some great assistants that come into the marketplace, and it’s not determined by age. Most importantly, what you’re looking for is people that are hungry enough to get the job done. One important thing here: make sure that you understand what it is personally that your assistant is wanting to achieve, because their personal goals are the number one things that’s going to drive them to be active and working inside of your business.
Make sure every day you have a really clear task list, and at the end of every day you sign off on that task list around the things that have and haven’t been done. It’s important that you actually keep these simple business disciplines in place in order for you to have a great relationship.