An ISA — Inside Sales Agent — is someone whose entire job is following up on leads so your agents don’t have to. They call, text and nurture until a lead is ready for an appointment, then hand it over. They don’t show homes and they don’t close. They keep the top of your pipeline from rotting.
Now the part nobody selling you an ISA program will tell you.
I hired mine too early, and it cost me.
I hired ISAs because of peer pressure
I remember constantly being told I needed ISAs. Every event, every mastermind, someone was talking about their ISA team. So I built one, and in hindsight we hired prematurely.
Before you hire anyone, run a lead shift system until it breaks. Assign your agents defined windows where inbound leads are theirs to answer. It costs nothing and it works longer than you’d think. Don’t move to ISAs until that system is genuinely breaking down and causing you real stress.
Work the lead shift system to its fullest potential first and save your money.
That’s not me being humble about a service I offer. It’s the actual sequence, and skipping it is how team leaders end up paying salaries for a problem they hadn’t created yet.
What changed when we did hire
Our problem by then was real. Leads were sitting in the database untouched. Agents were working the easy deals and ignoring anything that needed six months of nurture. Leads sat uncontacted for weeks because everyone was busy.
We hired two full-time virtual assistant ISAs. What happened next:
Follow-ups went up 300 percent. Conversion improved 25 percent, because leads were finally being nurtured instead of forgotten. Our agents got more productive, because they were only touching leads that were already engaged. And we pulled six figures in revenue out of old leads everyone had written off.
We did all of that without spending another dollar on lead generation. The leads were already there. Nobody was working them.
The script my ISAs actually run
Most ISA scripts fail because they try to sell. The job on that first call isn’t to sell anything — it’s to lock three things down before you hang up.
We call it ALM. Appointment, Location, Motivation.
Appointment first. You already know why they called. Don’t ask if they’d like to see it, tell them you’re scheduling it and ask when. “Zillow tells me we need to schedule a showing for you at [address]. When would you like to go see it?” That is a different question from “are you interested,” and it gets a different answer.
Location second. Once you have one showing on the calendar, ask what else they’d like to see while you have them out. One appointment becomes a tour. This single question is the difference between an ISA who sets showings and one who sets days.
Motivation last. “What did you like about [address] that caught your eye and made you want to see it?” You’re not qualifying them — you’re handing your agent something real to open with. The agent walks in already knowing what the client is chasing.
Then close the loop out loud: confirm the appointment, tell them their agent’s name is coming by text, and tell them the agent will call before meeting. People no-show when they feel like a lead. They show up when they feel expected.
The follow-up cadence, exactly
The script gets the appointment. The cadence is what stops leads rotting after it, and this is the part most teams never write down.
A brand new lead gets 3×3 — three attempts over the first three days. If that doesn’t happen, the lead goes back to the pond. Not to a reminder. To the pond.
Once someone has actually spoken with the lead, the agent owns it on a five-day rhythm. The ISA sends a reminder on day five and again on day six. On day eight, if nothing has happened, it goes back to the pond.
Once an appointment is set, the rhythm continues in weekly blocks — the agent gets reminders on days five and six, and on day seven the ISA reaches out as the agent’s assistant. Same pattern at 12, 13, 14. Again at 19, 20, 21. Again at 26, 27, 28.
Long-term nurture leads get one meaningful touch every 28 days — an open, a text, or a connected call. Agent reminders on day 28 and 29. On day 30 the ISA steps in.
Missed appointment, no contact in three days, back to the pond.
There is one release valve in all of it: if the agent completes a real task or a relevant call drip fires, the clock resets and the ISA stays out of it. The system isn’t there to nag people who are doing the work. It’s there to catch the leads nobody touched.
Pay them when everyone else gets paid
When I first started the ISA program, the common practice was to pay per appointment. Most of the people who ran it that way no longer have ISAs, and there’s a reason.
Do not pay per appointment. It creates the wrong metric, and you get exactly what you measure — appointments. Not good ones. Appointments.
Pay them when the deal closes, the same as everyone else. If an ISA only gets paid when the transaction closes, they care whether it closes. Their follow-up support for the agent and their check-ins with the client get about ten times more effective overnight, because they now have the same stake in the outcome that everybody else in the transaction has.
Scaling from two to six, and what broke
We grew the team from two ISAs to six, and I learned that more ISAs didn’t automatically mean more deals.
Higher volume brought a new problem: our CRM became a mess. Multiple ISAs were calling the same people, which made us look disorganized to the exact prospects we were trying to impress. Leads were assigned and then never touched. Notes were missing or so out of date they were worse than nothing.
I was paying for leads that were never going to convert because we’d lost track of them.
Three things fixed it. I brought in a dedicated VA to support the ISAs — cleaning CRM data, tracking follow-ups, keeping notes accurate. That VA started pulling a daily data hygiene report flagging uncontacted leads, duplicates and missing notes. And I made one rule explicit to everyone: if a lead wasn’t properly updated, it didn’t exist. Didn’t track the conversation? Then the call never happened.
Accountability followed on its own once people knew the work was visible.
What an ISA actually does all day
Mine live inside Follow Up Boss. They watch it all day for hand raisers and nurture those leads until they turn into appointments. They manage automations, reply when something needs a human, and act as an assistant to the agent.
The daily volume is roughly a hundred outbound calls and fifty text drips per person. They also work expired listings, for sale by owners, and circle prospecting across every lead source we have. Today they handle about ninety percent of our inbound leads.
That number is the honest argument for the role. Not that ISAs are magic — that consistency at this volume is something a producing agent will never sustain, because they’re out showing property.
Where mine are, and why
I built a US-based ISA team first. Local reps, no accent, cultural familiarity — Americans calling Americans. It made sense.
I was dead wrong.
Despite spending significantly more on that team, it underperformed my offshore VA ISAs. I was skeptical of the result. The numbers didn’t care.
The VAs made more dials, followed up more consistently, and booked more appointments. They followed scripts. They didn’t drift into small talk or spend an afternoon on a lead that was never going to transact. And the accent I’d worried about turned out not to matter — in some cases prospects responded better to a polite, well-trained, professional caller than to a local one being casual or pushy.
Here’s what I actually took from it, and it’s the part worth keeping:
The right training, strong processes and relentless follow-up mattered far more than where anyone was sitting.
I eventually phased out the US team. It was one of the better decisions I’ve made.
Be selective, because the failure mode is ugly
I’ve had horror stories. An ISA who got paid on a Thursday and turned up at the office wasted at nine on Friday morning. Another who worked for me for years, recorded slurring his words on a call at eleven in the morning.
Beyond that: people chasing only the easy leads and neglecting everything else, hitting on agents, sending inappropriate pictures to colleagues. One tried to sell multilevel marketing shakes to our buyers and used the lead list to do it.
Hire slowly. The cost of a bad ISA isn’t their pay — it’s the leads they burn and the reputation damage with prospects who never tell you why they went elsewhere. The same logic applies to the agents on your team: what actually makes people stay has very little to do with what you pay them.
How to hire one
If you hire direct, start with OnlineJobs.ph. Upwork and LinkedIn both work. I used to have luck in international worker Facebook groups, though they’ve gotten harder to find.
If you go through a service, check what the VA is actually paid versus what you’re billed. Some services are fair. Others pay very little, mark it up several times over and call the difference a management fee. That structure makes VAs unhappy and clients feel gouged, and unhappy VAs don’t make a hundred calls a day.
Screen properly. Ask for a video of the applicant reciting one of your scripts — that tells you more about English proficiency in ninety seconds than any résumé. Ask for the résumé too.
Then put what we call skunk questions in the job description. They’re there to test thinking and personality, not knowledge:
What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream? If you could be a superhero, which one would you be? Describe an experience that required you to think critically. Reflect on a sales call where you believe you could have performed better.
Change them regularly. I generate new ones with ChatGPT so the answers stay unrehearsed.
The one trait that predicts performance
We have about eight VA ISAs now and we’re always hiring, because the return is too good to pass up.
The best one in my entire company is a woman named Jovi. She’s thirty, has three kids, and sets around a hundred appointments a month. She has closed close to twenty escrows this year while going through chemotherapy. She was our best performer before the diagnosis too.
Ray is our fourth-best. He doesn’t look like an obvious top performer and he delivers every month anyway. Don started slow — he was a trainer at the call center where our VA ISA manager worked — and has rebuilt half our workflows since.
Different people, one common thread: they follow checklists and finish tasks.
That’s it. That’s the trait. Not charisma, not sales background. The ability to run a process the same way on a Friday afternoon as on a Monday morning.
So do you need one?
Not yet, if your lead shift system still works. Run that until it breaks.
You need one when leads are sitting untouched for weeks, when your agents are only working the easy ones, and when you can feel money leaking out of the database but can’t point at where.
That’s the moment. Not the moment somebody at a conference tells you their ISA team changed everything.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does ISA stand for in real estate?
Inside Sales Agent. They handle lead follow-up — calling, texting and nurturing leads until they’re ready for an appointment — then hand off to a licensed agent who shows property and closes.
What is the difference between an ISA and a real estate agent?
An ISA works the top of the funnel and doesn’t close transactions. They make contact, qualify, nurture and set appointments. The agent takes it from the appointment forward. In most teams the ISA never meets the client.
When should a real estate team hire an ISA?
When your lead shift system has genuinely broken down — leads sitting uncontacted for weeks, agents working only immediate deals, and no reliable follow-up on longer-term pipeline. Before that point, a lead shift system does the same job for free.
How many calls should a real estate ISA make per day?
On my team, roughly a hundred outbound calls and fifty text drips per person per day, alongside expired listings, for sale by owners and circle prospecting.
Do real estate ISAs need a license?
Requirements vary by state and by what the ISA actually does on the call. Check your state’s rules before you define the role — this is one to confirm locally rather than copy from another team’s setup.