Questions, answered straight.

ISA stands for Inside Sales Agent. An ISA isn't a virtual assistant. A VA wears many hats, but an ISA has one job: following up on your leads and converting them into appointments. They nurture leads through calls and texts, building a relationship with each prospect and figuring out where they are in their buying or selling journey. They run on numbers. They know how many calls they made in an hour, how many people answered, how many appointments they set, and exactly when to follow up next. And they can gauge a prospect's interest level just by listening to them. They know when to ask the right questions, like 'Are you working with an agent or lender?' and 'What's your timeline to buy or sell?' The best ISAs know the real estate industry inside and out, and they represent you and your brand across social media while providing real value. Their conversion is your conversion. They'll do everything they can to move your leads from prospect to closing. Treat them like part of the team, include them in the wins and the losses, and communicate with them constantly. When your ISA feels like a true partner, they'll care a lot more about your success. Great ISAs also adapt their follow-up plan to the lead type and level of engagement. Some think the more you call, the more success you'll have, and that's true for certain leads. The best ones know how to follow up persistently without ever feeling pushy or salesy.

The fortune is in the follow-up. If you've ever heard that age-old saying, I'll explain exactly why that is. On average, it takes about 8 to 12 touches before a lead becomes a client. But the numbers show a lot of agents don't even give their leads a chance. In fact, only about 2% of sales happen on the very first contact. 48% of people never follow up with a prospect. And 65% of companies out there right now don't even nurture any of their leads, and they're paying to get these leads. That's the most important thing: they're paying and they're not following up. 25% of all agents won't even make a second contact. Now, an inside sales agency isn't here just to help you build your real estate business, but to help you reach a new level. We want to help you stop leads from falling through the cracks, give you back your time, and give you back your freedom so you can do what you love: be around your family and friends, doing things outside of real estate. I'm sure you love real estate, but it's not the only reason you're doing this. Our objective and goal is to help you do those other activities. It will help you really increase your business all around. You'll be able to get potentially more referrals, maybe more appointments from individuals you spoke to, or you'll be able to go to more networking events and get in front of more of the right people. It'll ultimately increase your sales. And of course, what we want to do is help you increase your peace of mind, because you know that if someone is following up on your behalf, it allows you to operate at your very best self. Now, some people need a little bit more time before they decide on who they're going to hire in making such a massive decision. And in fact, for most folks, a home purchase is the largest purchase they're ever going to have in their entire life. And so that's why we're going to create a custom follow-up plan that's going to keep you top of mind while your prospect decides.

An inside sales agent answers any inbound leads you have. They qualify your buyers and your sellers, they follow up, they respond, and ultimately they book qualified appointments that go directly on your calendar. They never negotiate, they never show property, and they never close on your behalf. That job stays the same, it's your job. But at this stage, you don't have to chase the leads down, and that really makes life a lot easier. They also make outbound calls as well. They'll call cold leads and warm leads, and their job and objective is to have a meaningful conversation by phone, make an impact, and once they've had that meaningful conversation and made an impact, that is when they look to form that relationship on your behalf and ultimately help you close the deal. And they do the closing of the deal through having that first high-level conversation, really figuring out the ins and outs, the why, and the motivation behind the prospect.

Over 12 years in this business is what makes us different. Think about that for a second, how much the industry has changed in 12 years: interest rates to the floor and back to the roof, homes coming out of the subprime meltdown and recovering, long days on market and homes selling quickly, buyers markets, sellers markets, low rates and high rates. We have seen it all, and that longevity makes us stand out. Most staffing companies hand a caller a script, give them a little training, and hope and pray it sticks. We build a customized business solution, a customized playbook to help you grow. And from our own experience we know the northern markets, the southern markets, and the West Coast all need to be approached differently, because the people who live there are different. We understand your marketplace on a local level. We train our callers with a quality control analyst who sits in on calls, grades them, gives feedback, and shows callers how to get more out of every conversation. We pair human ISAs with AI-generated inside sales reps and customize it all to a very specific real estate approach. That combination is why my team and I have produced well over $44 million in closed gross commission and over $1 billion in sold volume for our clients over the past 12 years.

Our goal isn't just to set you up on an appointment. There's a lot of folks out there that if they get an appointment, they celebrate that, then give up for the rest of the day and put zero effort towards your business. For us, we want to set that appointment up so that you can go in and actually close the deal. We are as invested in your business as you are in your own, because ultimately your success is our success. That's why every single lead we pass to you has a list of qualifying questions that must be asked every single time. With that list, we make sure the folks you're connecting with are truly 100% ready to talk to you. They're committed, they're motivated, they are willing to buy or sell a home, and they are open-minded about their path when it comes to home ownership or home sales. We also know it's frustrating when someone sets up an appointment, say a for-sale-by-owner says they want to preview your home. We're not about that. We want the lead to know exactly why you're coming: to help them list their home or help them buy a new one, with clear intentions across the board. We also get rid of fake names and bad numbers, we clean up your lead database, we trace the quality of the data, and we make sure our ISA does everything they can to hand you a really solid lead generation list. In addition, every ISA on our team has significant real estate experience. The vast majority of our ISAs have between two and three years of external real estate experience, and we attend real estate events consistently as a team. Our leadership is constantly traveling around the country, so we're always implementing the latest trends. And of course, myself, the owner Matt Milia, as a realtor, I have paid for leads myself and I have had my own inside sales agent set me up for appointments. We really know how to help you get the most out of your leads in any and every market.

So, what does it cost to hire an inside sales company? This is a great question and one that I get asked all the time. Cost depends on a lot of different variables. Number one, it depends on your lead volume. It also depends on your market and whether you want us to either staff an ISA for you and you want us to choose the ISA, or you want to choose your own ISA and they essentially work directly for you, or AI calling, or both. But there's a lot of different variables that go into how much of an investment it is to hire an inside sales agent. Keep in mind that you're also getting yourself a sales manager, a trainer. In most cases, you're getting a dialing system. You're also getting a quality control manager. And so, we do everything in our power to make this an extremely affordable all-in-one solution. In fact, nine times out of 10, we are going to be significantly lower of an investment than what you would pay to have someone calling directly out of your office. And we don't publish our pricing because we don't have a one-size-fits-all type of model. We have a setup for a solo agent. We have setups for teams. We have setups for speed to lead. And so, ultimately, the best thing for you to do is to go ahead and get on the calendar with us, book a strategy call. There is no cost, no obligation, completely free. And we'll help you make a decision to see how much this investment would look like for you.

Most engagements go live within days, depending on what we're doing for you. The first thing we do is map out your lead flow and figure out what CRM and what system we're going to use. We then build out the scripts and train your callers specifically on your market. We'll train them on your CRM too, if that's applicable. And then we start calling directly in your time zone. We build out reporting that starts immediately on day one, so you can see what's happening with all of your leads at a glance.

So, do I have to sign a long-term contract or can I try it first? And I love this question because it's a very, it's a great question and ultimately it's one that needs to be addressed in a very different manner. So, to answer the question, yes, we don't have long-term contracts. We believe in, we don't want to hold anyone hostage into a long-term agreement. In fact, in a lot of cases, I prefer to usually bring somebody in. We try it out. We make sure that it's a good fit for both of us because it needs to be a good fit for us and for you as a client, it's got to be a good fit. So, it basically goes both ways. It's very important that it's a good relationship because if you're constantly upset with our results or maybe we're doing a lot of really good things and then you're not converting them and then there's, you know, animosity, we don't want that. And so we always like to make certain that we allow you to try it out first. And so, but because it's not a one-size-fits-all solution, we put together customized solutions for just about anyone. So, if you want to get a little bit more information and see what this would all look like, go ahead and click the link below to book a strategy call. And it's a no cost, no obligation call. Would love to chat with you more about what this could all look like for you.

The leads we work best are the ones most companies run away from: the cold calls, the circle dials, the neighborhood prospecting, the expireds, the for sale by owners, maybe internet leads, probate leads, past clients, and databases that have gone from red hot to ice cold. We don't force a one-size-fits-all script on all of your lead sources. An expired list needs an entirely different strategy than a for sale by owner, and an expired lead needs an entirely different approach than a probate lead. So we create custom scripting and custom approaches for every one of those leads, so we have a very powerful conversation where we do one thing: add value to every conversation we touch. We want the person to leave that call knowing we've added value to them, added value to their life, and added some value to their day. Whether that's an internet lead or a buyer lead, our callers know the difference. This is how our team has done over $44 million in closed gross commission income for our agents, and we've closed over $1 billion in real estate volume in total.

We believe in results. In fact, what you measure gets improved. So our objective and ultimate goal is to make sure you can see everything: every client we work with gets a custom dashboard. You'll see total transparency. You'll see how many dials we're making, how many conversations we have, and how many appointments we're setting. You'll also know if there are wrong telephone numbers, people who say they're on the DNC list, a lot of answering machines, or a lot of no answers. Ultimately, we use data to determine quite a few things. That data tells us whether the leads are good. It tells us whether the ISA is doing a good enough job, whether the ISA is calling enough times, and whether the ISA is having enough conversations to get appointments. How many conversations does it take to get an appointment? How many dials does it take to get a conversation? All of those numbers are absolutely critical in how we help you navigate day-to-day business. We report on every element of lead calling and lead generating activities. And we want you to know going in exactly what you're getting, what type of data, and what type of volume. That way you can forecast and set your own goals and projections based on what's being done and what's being reported on a daily basis.

The data is 100% yours, and this is actually part of our agreement. We believe that no matter what, that's a huge part of our relationship. I have seen companies try to sell off data to multiple people. I've seen companies compete over data. I've even seen big corporations sell to multiple agents in the same place. We believe data is extremely important. So if we ever part ways, no matter what, the data is given to you. Specifically, it's your data and your data alone. We'd rather be remembered as the team that protected you and respected you in your book of business than one that held you hostage or sold off your data. So the data is ultimately always yours.

Your leads are absolutely 100% exclusive. This is a great question and, quite frankly, I cannot understand for the life of me why someone wouldn't keep your leads as exclusive. So let me answer that for you. Whenever you provide us a lead, whether we generate the lead for you or you provide us the lead, it doesn't matter how that lead is generated, that is your lead. We don't sell to three or four other realtors, or three or four other insurance agents, or three or four other marketing agencies. The lead is specifically yours and yours alone. So you can have the peace of mind that every time we're working a lead, it's your lead. It will never be shared with anyone except for the members of our calling team.

We define a qualified lead before we start. There are certain folks we do what's called nurtures with. A nurture is a lead that's not committed to an agent. They have either a home they want to sell, or if you're in insurance they have a need for a policy, or if you're an agency they have a need they want fulfilled and they're looking for some sort of marketing. We define all that upfront. They have a home they want to sell, they're not committed to anyone in particular, and they've given us the reason why they want to make a move. That's what's called a nurture. But a qualified lead and a result, we define that together as we go. We'll sign off on that before we get started working together. Price expectations and all of that are captured, and they're going to be 100% willing to meet you either by phone, by Zoom, or in person. And that's a real result, not just a contact with a pulse.

There are no hidden line items, we lay everything out up front for you. We'll let you know exactly what's covered: the callers, the management, the CRM, the training, the dialing system, the multiple phone numbers, all of the additional accountability, the tracking, and the reporting. All of that is done. You're going to get a very clear picture of your cost upfront. We're not an ala carte type service, so there are no surprises after you sign.

Am I required to pay a bonus or commission or some type of performance-based bonus to my inside sales agent? So, I love this question because I get asked this one all the time. And so, what I would tell you as business owner to business owner, I would say that it depends. And let me kind of explain what I mean by that. So, if you're someone who likes to reward people for doing a really good job, then I would highly recommend that you pay some sort of bonus. Now, that's totally up to you because when you pay us for a done-for-you service where everything is done for you, we generally will give them some sort of internal bonus. We do some things to internally motivate them. But in order to get the best out of them, I would definitely recommend some type of small incentive. And so, giving you an example, if you're a real estate agent, what I would recommend is when you go and you list the property for sale that they made that call on, I'd give them $100. And then when you close the deal, I'd give them $150 or $200. And so this way, I mean, you're giving them a few hundred. It's not huge money, but that money is directly passed through from us. The only thing we pretty much charge on that is pretty much the cost of moving the money. So, generally, we usually get charged anywhere between 4 to 6% between moving the money, taxes, etc. So, we would take that out and then we would send the remaining balance directly over to the caller. But I do recommend that if you want to grow long-term and have the very best results, then incentivizing them even just a little bit can be a massive difference maker in their overall results.

Absolutely. All of our callers are in the Americas, and I want to be clear about what that means. We have some callers that are actually from Canada, and we have some callers that are in Mexico, but they are all originally from the United States. Most of them have a US-based type of accent. We've got some folks that used to reside in Texas, some that resided in California, a couple from Illinois, some from New York. We're all over the map with where our folks are from. Most of them work from home, but they are originally from the US, so they have a US accent. They may have more of a southern accent or more of a northern accent. Of course, everyone kind of has a little bit of an accent, but they are all from the United States originally. They've lived here, and they've got many years of experience calling your leads.

This is a great question, one that we get asked quite often. We generally give you a choice depending on what the situation and the circumstance is. We like to train on the flow that you already have running within your business. If it's a mainstream real estate lead-generating system, CRM, lead sources, everything that you include, we will generally jump right in and make calls. If we don't make calls on it, we will integrate, or we will tell you exactly what we recommend based on past experience. Your callers will log notes, track any follow-ups, and make sure that any appointments are logged, documented, and put into your system. We'll also schedule them directly on your calendar. So ultimately, nothing lives in a black box. You don't miss any opportunities. You can see everything at a glance so that you are always in the know of what exactly is going on, which allows us to be in great alignment and great communication with one another.

This is a great question and one that we get asked quite frequently. You're going to have your own dedicated account manager and your own dedicated point of contact. The account manager is essentially like a lead inside sales rep that has years of management experience. Their objective and goal is to make sure they manage the team of callers. They can also be the one that talks with you directly about your performance, the leads, the quality of the leads, and the quality of the conversations. They're going to walk you through all of the reporting. This way, you're never going to wonder who you need to call and who you should reach out to. Of course, if you ever have a direct question and maybe they're not available, you can also go to our email, support@appointmentstoday.net. Inside of that email, our entire leadership and management team is there. Even if your dedicated account manager isn't available, another member of the team will get back to you very quickly to make sure that you know what's going on at all times.

If you live in any of the United States of America, including Puerto Rico, and if you live in Canada, then yes, we serve your country and we serve your area. Our callers will work and align with your time zone. Most of our callers are usually in Central Standard Time, and we have a couple that are in Mountain Standard, but for the most part they're all right within your time zone. We're going to make sure they're going to be the freshest, meaning they're going to be physically well rested and ready to go, and we are going to make sure that your leads are answered very quickly when they are ultimately the hottest.

This is one of my favorite questions, because training to us is pivotal. In fact, it's the key to everything we do. It's the one thing that separates us from all of the other call centers that are out there. Every ISA has a very structured training. The average inside sales rep goes through 30 days of training before we actually launch them to go live on the phone. Generally what we'll do with our ISAs is go through mindset training. We go through how to handle rejection. We go through how to stay motivated even during challenging times. We go through the ins and outs of teaching them about mortgage, teaching them about insurance, teaching them about real estate. They're going to know the ins and outs of the niche and the industry that they're calling in. What we've created is a paint by number system. For about 3 weeks' time, they're going to go through a rigorous training. They're going to watch videos, they're going to role play, they're going to do call listening, and they're going to consistently and constantly get better. Then for the very last week, they're going to have about four to five days where they listen to a seasoned ISA. They stay on the call with them. Basically they do a Zoom screen share. They'll watch the screen, watch how they disposition the notes, watch what they do, and they also get the opportunity to make some calls during that time with another inside sales rep watching them. Our guys go through a full month of training before they even get on the phone. Best of all, we give them coursework. We're constantly and consistently coaching them up, training them, making sure that they are the very best they can be, so that they can turn your leads into red-hot appointments today.

All of our ISAs are, first and foremost, college educated. We feel like that's very important, because we want to make sure that they're able to do something for two to four years, commit to it, and see it through, so that they are an exceptional member of society and so that they are great at what they do. Every ISA on the team also has access to some of the best real estate training and insurance training in the industry. Our folks have trained with individuals like Jeremy Miner, Tom Ferry, Craig Proctor, Club Wealth Coaching, NAEA, which is the National Association of Expert Advisors, Hoss Pratt, Jordan Belfort, the list goes on, but that is the bulk of our training. Essentially what we do is put together some of the best frameworks from that training and put together a step-by-step system so that we could plug it into your specific lead type. Our guys know what questions to ask, how to ask them, what tonality to use, and ultimately what they need to do in order to get you the very best possible results.

I love this question. It's a great question and, in fact, it's a question that I go back and forth with coaches, mentors, and some of the most successful people in the industry. So let me explain what I mean by this question, because I get asked all the time. Our ISAs, first and foremost, we teach them what we call guard rails. Meaning, I want them to learn how to have a conversation, expand, and get people to open up. When I think of scripts, I think of a very narrow, very rigid approach without much room for deviation. Now, all of our guys use a very specific framework. One of the things that my team is very fortunate and blessed to have access to is some of the best trainers. We actually had Jeremy Miner train our team on basically how to go through neuro emotional persuasion questions. What that allows our inside sales reps to do is basically get a prospect to convince themselves that now is the time to buy or now is the time to sell, whatever the industry is. We are also leaning off of other coaches like Craig Proctor, Tom Ferry, Mike Ferry, Club Wealth Training, Dirk Zeller, Hoss Pratt. These are just to name a few. We have so many more. The goal and the objective is very simple. Our team uses a proven, repeatable framework and structure, and we've tested this on tens of thousands of leads. We know that these approaches work. We know these scripts work. Ultimately, we're teaching our folks to be able to deviate and pivot from a script, but they do have a framework that they use and they know how to approach it in every single phone call. They know how to ask questions to avoid objections upfront. They know how to ask a question to get an objection. They also know how to handle objections and diffuse them. And they ask the right questions so that they can find out the exact motivation as to why someone would want to do business with you.

This is a great question, because we never depend on one person. In fact, we are relying on our system, and we operate with a next man up mentality. Everyone that we have on our team is cross-trained and ready to go. Generally speaking, we usually have two to three people on your account at all times that know the ins and outs of your account. This way, there's never any downtime, and there's never any issues. Now, here's how we solve for the name challenge, because most people say, 'Well, what do your guys go by? What name do they go by?' All of our callers go by Alex. If someone's out sick, if something happens, or maybe the results aren't where they should be, we've got an entire team of inside sales reps that are ready to go. They're cross-trained on your specific business type, and they're ready to step in on your leads. God forbid someone gets sick or maybe they can't deliver, the next man up system is already in place and it works extremely well. This is going to help keep your pipeline from never going cold, from never being untouched, and ultimately help you get to the next level in your business.

All of our callers are held to extremely high standards. We have a set of core values that all of our callers have to meet and align with, and we hire and we fire based on those core values. We also do recorded call listening review. We listen to calls from other members of the team, and then as a team we come back and give feedback. We say what was good about the call, what didn't work, what should they have done, what we like about it, and then we come up with an action plan. We have scorecards. We also have a quality control analyst that sits there throughout the day and listens to calls and scores them. In addition to that, we role play. We go through regular role playing sessions. Our inside sales reps go through 5 days of training where they jump on a call every morning before their call session even begins, and we have a meeting to go through the specifics of what needs to be said and what needs to be done. We're holding these folks to an extremely high standard. This is why we have the next man up mentality, but it is also why our inside sales reps have been with us for so long. We're tracking them with an external system, with a dialing system. We can see how many calls they made, how much time they're taking in between calls, and we can see pretty much every second of the day what they are doing. In fact, we can even turn their cameras on when they work from home. We don't generally like to do that, and we're very conscious of being careful about doing that. But we let them know that if we need to turn the camera on, we will, just to make sure that we watch that they're doing the job that they are paid to do.

The answer to that question is yes, we can. We generally like to work inside your CRM, as long as the CRM is a productive CRM, a CRM that's built and designed for making phone calls. We test this entire system prior to even starting to make dials. We want to make sure that we can ultimately generate appointments, that we can get you warm transfers, that the notes in there are working, the tags are working, and the stages are working. We want to make sure that any recordings and any notes, or anything that needs to be done, is happening directly in your platform. That's when you or your team can act on those. If it doesn't work in your workflow, then it doesn't work, and we've got to figure out a solution to make sure that it integrates seamlessly.

AI calling answers every inbound lead instantly, day or night, and runs the first-touch conversation: qualification on your criteria, answers to common questions, and routing. A human ISA adds judgment, rapport, and negotiation-savvy on the conversations that matter. We deploy AI for volume and humans for the close.

Modern AI calling speaks naturally and conversationally, and it follows your scripts, not a scripted robot read. The design matters less than the outcome: an instant answer beats a missed call every time, and hot leads still get a human on the line fast.

I get asked this quite often, and it's a very difficult question, but one that's extremely important to understand: an AI caller is built for volume and built for coverage. Now, the answer depends on whether you have an elite sales team, an average sales team, or a below-average sales team. If you have a below-average sales team, then yes, AI can certainly replace your calling team. But if you have an average or above-average sales team, I would say don't have AI replace your entire team. In fact, we call this the hybrid model: AI and having a setter work together directly. It's a perfect pairing, and in most cases it will drive massive amounts of revenue and growth into your company. So I always recommend pairing them together. But we can take some time, meet on a quick call, and go through it together to see if it would make sense to replace your team of callers or not.

So, how much money can I actually save by installing an AI caller over a human caller? Well, it's a great question and the answer I have for you is it depends. Here's what I mean by that. An AI caller, you could probably get an AI caller from anywhere between, for very low-end, $500 a month, and for very high-end, maybe upwards of $2,000 a month. But I have so far never seen anybody at that $2,000 a month mark. The reason why I say that is because there is generally, once the AI caller is set up, there's monthly maintenance. There's some ongoing systems that are needed. We of course have to make sure that we pay for credits for the AI. And so, of course, it's not a set it and forget it. But I will tell you that if you were to pay for, let's say, an AI caller, and let's just say that you were paying, I'm just going to use a wild example, but let's just say you were paying $1,500 a month for that AI caller. That one AI caller at $1,500 a month would probably replace about four to five human callers. And so if your average human caller, let's say they're making, let's say on the very low end, let's say they're making $2,500, and let's say on the higher end they're making $4,000. The average usually human caller, especially if they're calling local to your market, is usually probably about $3,500 to $4,000 a month. Plus you're paying them bonuses. And of course you probably have other expenses with them as well, taxes, all those other types of things that come along with hiring a person. But paying for an AI caller at $1,500 a month, you could probably reduce your payroll by about 70 to 80%. Now, I always recommend having one of your best human callers and one AI caller. One amazing human caller and one AI caller could very easily close over a hundred deals per year. I'll say that again. One really good human inside sales rep paired with an AI caller could very easily close over 100 deals a year. So, you can save quite a bit of money because again, you're paying a fraction of the price for the AI in comparison to what you'd be paying for a person.

Are there downsides to hiring an AI caller? So to answer that question, yes, there are absolutely downsides to hiring an AI caller. I'll give you some examples. So an AI caller generally struggles with empathy. Even though in a lot of cases we can program it and over time we can make it very empathetic over long periods of time, it struggles to match the voice of empathy. So if someone were to come in and say, 'Yeah, I'm selling my home because my husband was working a full-time job and now he has gotten sick. He now has cancer and so he had to quit his job and now we're basically relying on social security and a little bit of retirement.' Now most inside sales reps would be trained up in empathy. The first thing they say is, 'Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry that's happening to you. That has to be really difficult. So what are your plans then as far as this home is concerned? Are you thinking that you want to take the equity out of the home and potentially use that to purchase another home?' Now the AI on the other hand might say, 'Oh, okay. So then is that why you're selling because you need to get the cash from the house? Is that why you're selling this home?' And so it doesn't hit the same. You're not building that personal connection. And so therefore, sometimes the appointments, sometimes the handoff, the delivery, the conversation is going to be much more forced. It's going to be much more, it won't be as personalized. And of course, it's going to be missing that emotional element that makes a human caller. And it's kind of the difference between the good to great caller. And so having the AI caller is great, but those are some of the downsides that empathy it is going to struggle with mightily.

Answer engine optimization, also known as AEO, is the practice of getting your business cited when buyers and sellers ask AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, or AI overviews, how and where to find a real estate agent, an insurance agent, or a marketing agency. It combines a consistent business profile with citable content and structured data, so these large language models, which is what an answer engine is, have a clean, trustworthy source they can recommend. Answer engine optimization is going to be the way of the future for lead generation, because more and more people are relying on these large language models to find businesses just like yours.

Let me start this off by aging myself a little bit. If you remember the days of Netflix back in the early 2000s, where you used to get a DVD in the mail, watch it, put it back in that paper returnable envelope, and send it back, well, that's kind of how I look at search engine optimization. SEO has been around for quite a few years, and essentially what it is, is getting cited directly on Google. Search engine optimization targets the blue links on the search engine results page. Answer engine optimization targets the synthesized answer itself. AEO is built solely around the large language models like ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, just to name a few. There are dozens upon dozens of large language models out there. And the ultimate objective is to have AI make you the first answer that comes up for the recommended service provider in the area. That's how answer engine and search engine optimization differ from each other. Answer engine optimization, in my opinion, is the way of the future. In fact, it's one of the strongest indicators of where our technology is going, and how you can become the number one go-to agent in your marketplace.

Who should get an AEO audit? Well, if you've got a website and you sell any product or service, you should probably get an answer engine optimization audit. Specifically though, any agent, any team, or brokerage whose market research happens on AI is a perfect candidate for it. If buyers in your area ask ChatGPT which agent to call, you want to be the one that's named on answer engine optimization. An answer engine optimization engagement today starts with an audit of your current footprint and a plan that's ultimately going to make you the answer to the questions that your prospects have.

Well, in 30 minutes, we're going to map out your lead flow. We're going to figure out your goals: where you're at now compared to where you want to get to, and kind of help you bridge the gap. We're going to find out about your team. We're going to see if there's any hidden gaps that you already have in the business that you may not be aware of. Then you're going to leave with a game plan, a strategy, and a clear picture of what staffing an inside sales agent, what AI calling, or what both of those could do for your pipeline. And you'll also learn what your pipeline would look like, of course, if you were also answer engine optimized. And during that call, there's absolutely no pressure, no obligation whatsoever.

Well, congratulations. You are the perfect avatar, the perfect client for Appointments Today. You are exactly what we're looking for, and this is the exact situation we built our entire company off of. Our trained inside sales agents will take over the work of answering the calls, qualifying, and following up with your leads, so you can stop throwing your money away buying leads you don't have time to follow up with. We'll make sure to help bridge the gap so you can take the lead from ice cold to red hot, appointments today.

We understand that every business has a seasonality, whether you're in real estate, a marketing agency, or insurance. So your calling capacity should have a seasonality as well. We want to make sure we add seats during the busiest time of the year to help you launch and get the most out of your leads, but we also understand we might need to cut back and trim down when things are a little slow. We'll start with our pilot, which is generally a very short-term program, and then grow into a full team of callers. But you're never locked into any specific headcount or any specific number of hours if it doesn't match your current lead flow or align with your calendar.

It's based off of eligibility. If you're eligible for a pilot program, that essentially means we're going to have a 30-day program that allows you to test drive our service. You're going to be able to see the volume, see the measurable milestones we're hitting, and see results on your leads before you commit to anything long-term. To be clear, we don't generally believe in long-term commitments. We're very upfront about that from the very beginning. Most of our commitments are very short, and we always want to put together a customized solution for you. If we're not a good fit for you and you're not a good fit for us, we don't want a relationship that's not in alignment. We feel it's very important to be in business with folks that we know, like, and trust, and that we can help grow their business from the inside out. So we want to make sure we're a good fit right off the start, right from the very beginning.