Your Lead Database is Dead and You Don't Even Know It

Part 1 of 2: Based on “The ISA Scoreboard: How Top Teams 2× Conversion with Real-Time Metrics & Pro Dispatch, a conversation between Daniel Keeton, Marissa Canario, and Gabe Cordova. Watch it here.

Daniel Keeton was buying Facebook leads for under a dollar, which felt like winning. Then he'd call agents, basically begging them to follow up.

They'd say sure, but they were swamped with showings and contracts. One day he exported everything from the CRM and ran the numbers.

One-tenth of one percent.

That was the conversion rate staring back at him. From all those leads, all that begging.

This was 2017, with Daniel running an independent brokerage in Richmond, Virginia. He's not the only one who's been there.

Most team leaders hit this wall at some point, though maybe not all of them actually run the numbers to see how bad things really are.

The breaking point: 3 warning signs you need ISAs

Teams don't just wake up and decide to hire ISAs. Something breaks first, usually a few things all at once.

1. Your conversion rates are embarrassingly low

Daniel's story is brutal, though it's pretty common if people are being honest. After pouring money into lead gen, he finally sat down and looked at what was actually happening.

One-tenth of a percent. That's when it clicked for him.

Buying more leads wasn't going to fix this, but converting the ones they already had might.

He describes it like this:

"I was begging agents to call leads. I'd say, 'Hey, you got 10 more in there. Can you please call them?' Poor agents, they're running around trying to sell houses, trying to write contracts. Here I am begging them to call leads."

The thing is, agents aren't ignoring leads because they don't care. They're ignoring them because they're drowning in the actual selling part.

2. Your database is growing but dead

Marissa Canario had this problem at scale, running a national team across 168 different markets (yes, 168, I had to double-check that number too). She had massive databases in each location, and when she looked at the activity, it just wasn't there.

Regional directors kept coming back saying the same thing:

"We're trying, but it's not working. We can't get people on the phone."

Marissa wasn't buying it though.

"I'm looking at the size of the database going, there is no way with a database this size we are not making connections unless we're just not doing it right."

And she was probably right. They were tracking everything in spreadsheets and jot forms, which meant no real visibility into who was calling what, how many times, or whether conversations were actually happening.

Just agents saying they couldn't reach anyone and no way to verify any of it.

When you can't see what's happening, people start making assumptions, usually the wrong ones.

3. You discovered the hidden talent

Daniel ran a contest once where whoever sets the most appointments wins a weekend at Virginia Beach. Most agents set maybe 3 or 4 appointments, which was pretty standard.

Then this one guy sets 15 in a week, and everyone's confused.

So Daniel takes him to lunch and asks what he did differently. The agent says something interesting:

"I love it. To me, it's more of a game than going out and meeting people."

That's when Daniel realized something. Some people are actually phenomenal on the phone, not phenomenal in person necessarily, but on the phone?

That's their thing.

Marissa saw the same pattern when she started pulling top dialers from each region.

"We have so many people that were phenomenal on the phone and not phenomenal in front of people. They're getting the phone calls, they're actually making them... but they're kind of losing traction when getting in front of the person."

Turns out there's this whole subset of agents who actually enjoy the calling part. They just didn't know that was supposed to be their job.

Changing the game with real-time visibility

Before these teams got proper tracking systems, they had spreadsheets with self-reported data that agents would fill out manually. Jot forms.

There was no way to verify if calls were actually happening or if they were quality conversations, and zero visibility into whether anyone was even asking the right questions.

What changed things was getting MaverickRE, a system that automatically pulls data straight from the CRM and transaction management platform. Not manual entry but actual API connections that combine everything into a real-time scoreboard.

It sounds simple, but this isn't something most CRMs can do on their own. They're built to manage contacts and stages, not to give you this kind of deep visibility into productivity and conversion.

Though I guess that makes sense. CRMs have to be everything to everyone, so they can't go super deep on any one thing. That's where MaverickRE comes in.

Building your ISA scoreboard: The metrics that matter

Daniel breaks ISA productivity into two categories: effort and skill. It's a useful way to think about it because an ISA can be putting in tons of effort but still not converting if their skill isn't there.

Or they could be skilled but lazy, and you need both.

Effort metrics: are they doing the work?

Total calls matter, obviously, as your baseline. But they're really just the starting point because you can make a thousand calls and not have any actual conversations.

• That's why you also track conversations, anything over 2 minutes that Follow-up Boss registers as meaningful contact. Not just "hey not interested bye" but actual dialogue.

• Then there's unique leads called, which tells you whether they're spreading their attention across the database or over-calling the same people.

• And calls per lead tells you if maybe they have too many leads (not enough touches per person) or too few (calling the same people way too much).

Both scenarios are problems, just different ones.

Skill metrics: are they converting?

Appointments set is the obvious one, since that's what you're paying them for.

But you also want to look at calls per appointment because that's your efficiency indicator.

Daniel's ISA manager averages 11 and a half calls per appointment set, which is apparently pretty solid. So if someone's taking 30 calls to set an appointment, that's probably a skill issue.

And then there's the AI call grading in MaverickRE, which gets granular. It listens to calls and tracks whether they're asking for motivation, asking about location, hitting the right discovery questions.

Daniel says it'll actually tell you "you need to ask for the motivation more" or "you're not asking what location they want to be in," which is probably more useful than a manager listening to calls manually and giving vague feedback.

The power of the leaderboard

Daniel focuses on who's doing well more than who's struggling.

"I want to see who's doing really well. We don't always want to think about who's not hitting the numbers we want to hit. Who's doing well? Let's analyze that. How are you hitting these numbers? How are you converting at this rate? So we can glean something off of you."

Makes sense, I think. If someone's crushing it, you figure out what they're doing and teach everyone else.

Though that assumes the high performer is doing something teachable and not just naturally gifted, which isn't always the case.

One of the things Daniel loves about Maverick's scoreboard is that the data updates constantly in real time. No more waiting for end-of-week reports or manually pulling numbers from the CRM.

The results: Wwhat actually changed

When teams put ISAs in place with actual tracking, the numbers shift pretty dramatically.

According to the data they pulled from Follow-up Boss, conversion rates went from 1.2% to 2.8%, which isn't a small bump.

That's 16 times more appointments getting set.

Per-agent GCI went up by an average of $44,000. Daniel puts it like this: "My database would not be nearly as valuable if I did not have an awesome ISA team."

Database value doubles, basically, when someone's actually working it consistently.

What surprised people though was that the ISAs themselves liked the accountability. They were frustrated too, setting appointments with no visibility into what happened next.

Did the agent show up? Did the lead? Did it turn into anything?

They had no idea. With proper tracking, they could finally see their impact, which turns out to matter more than you'd think.

You don't need 168 markets to start

Marissa had 168 markets, but she treated each one as its own individual team.

"We did have scenarios where maybe in Grand Junction, Colorado, there's three or four people on a team and one person identifies as the ISA. We treated each location very individually."

So even small teams can use this model, like a three or four person operation where someone naturally gravitates toward phone work and someone else is better face-to-face. Even spouse teams work this way sometimes, where one person's on the phone all day and the other's out showing properties.

Team size doesn't really matter. What matters is identifying who actually enjoys living on the phone and giving them the tools to do it well.

The wake-up call

If you're not tracking ISA activity in real-time, you don't actually know what's happening.

You don't know if they're making the calls they claim, if those calls are quality conversations or just quick hangups, if the appointments they're setting are actually happening.

And you definitely don't know if you're getting ROI on your lead spend.

Marissa said it this way:

"For years we had been just lighting bags of money on fire, literally. My thing is, you might think we're a small team, we don't necessarily need an ISA. I would encourage you that there's probably someone on your team that actually identifies more as an ISA than being like a realtor out in the field."

That's probably true for a lot of teams. Someone on your roster right now would rather be dialing than showing homes, they just haven't said it out loud yet.

Part 2 covers the appointment side: the outcomes, the routing, all the stuff that happens after the appointment gets set. Because apparently that's where most of the money leaks out, even when you have ISAs working.

How long can you afford to keep operating blind?

MaverickRE gives you real-time visibility into what's actually happening with your ISAs, your appointments, and your database. Not spreadsheets. Not manual entry. Not hoping your agents remember to update the CRM.

Automatic tracking. Text-based outcome collection. Smart routing based on conversion rates, not favoritism. AI-powered call grading. Leaderboards that show you who's crushing it and what they're doing differently.

👉 Your database is probably worth twice what you think it is—but only if someone's actually working it with the right systems in place. Ready to see what's really happening in your business?