Your business is only as good as the people who work inside of it. You need to be clear that your sales team is made up of dedicated, productive people. No doubt your team members are some of the best agents in the business, but is there anyone on your team that you feel less certain about?
Think about how much time you need to spend with each of your agents to keep them on track and meeting goals. Now go through your organisational chart and apply a grading system to all of those agents based on the time you spend directing them:
• A Graders: These agents require as little as 5 minutes of direction a week
• B Graders: These agents require a few hours a week of your guidance
• C Graders: These agents require significant time with you daily
Consider the time you spend with each team member as time you cannot spend with your family. How many B Graders do you have in your sales team? How many C Graders? The more A Grade agents you have inside your business, the less time you will spend providing direction and checking up on your sales team’s productivity.
Go through your organisational chart again and this time simply rate each agent with a plus or minus sign depending on whether you have a positive or negative feeling about their performance. This will help you to target coaching sessions with team members on areas that need to improve while evaluating their capabilities for achieving those goals.
Some of your existing people simply cannot perform at the level you need them to. This is why it is important for you to always be recruiting new talent. Recruitment is an ongoing task, not only to replace low performers, but also to expand your sales team and grow your business. New people keep your brand fresh and progressive.
Think about the last person you hired who became a real asset. What was your system to get them oriented and on track for success? What worked brilliantly and what could stand improvement? And what did this individual bring to the table that helped them become productive quickly?
As a principal it is your responsibility to make certain that prospecting is being done consistently. Momentum drives your business’s growth and is maintained by constantly generating leads. Open for inspections generate a large portion of your leads, so each of your agents needs to be doing 5 to 10 open for inspections each Saturday. If you have an agent who consistently produces on the lower end of those numbers then that person is essentially setting an organisational standard for low performance. That affects your entire business.
In order to prevent low standards from being established inside your business you must actively set and enforce higher standards. Visualize what success means to you, and then set benchmarks for performance expectations that each team member must meet in order to keep a position within your agency.
You will also need to have some required performance standards in mind when you are recruiting, but not necessarily industry-specific standards. A mistake many agencies make is to only hire from within the real estate industry, but there is much significant potential talent outside the industry. Consider that work ethic, corporate disciplines, and the ability to generate leads and sell properties are not limited to the real estate business. If you have a recruit who is doing very well in another industry that person will likely also shine in your organisation with the right training and good coaching. Of course you will also recruit from within the industry as you meet other agents in the course of conducting your daily business, particularly during open for inspections. Whatever their experience, you will need to orient new hires to work within your business environment.
It is best to start new hires in positions that align with their current level of expertise. If they have not worked in real estate and/or were under-performing in their previous position, then place them for the first year as an assistant to the lead agent. Not only does this help with the lead agent’s workload, it also trains that agent to be an effective coach for new hires. Of course, the new assistant will learn how the basic tasks they do are essential to the business, and they will learn from the ground up how your brand works and what drives its success.
Always make sure your new people have or receive this foundation of real estate experience and training before you move them into higher positions. It is important that they are able to work to capacity where they are before you move them upward. New hires are expensive if they do not produce. They are also expensive if they leave and take their average percentage of your income with them. Of course, when they do work out they add significantly to your profits. A good standard for consistency is to make sure that no one agent is producing more than 15% of your total revenue so that if that person does leave your organisation they don’t leave you with a staggering income deficit. Naturally this does not imply that you should hire mediocre agents. Just maintain a balance between the number of agents you hire and how much they can reasonably produce within their marketplace. This is where territories and relationships become a factor. Assign sales territories to agents best suited to them. Some agents will do better if you keep them focused on client relationships.
You will grow your best possible business by recruiting fresh talent all the time, maintaining a team of A Grade agents who personally want to succeed and grow with your brand, and making sure your time growing and directing your sales team is minimal and is spent as efficiently as possible.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s Leadership Training Tip. If you would like more information about coaching opportunities by the Josh Phegan Company for your organisation, simply reply to this email. I look forward to seeing you here again next month.