For many real estate businesses, the path to growth follows a familiar trajectory.
A high-performing agent builds a strong personal brand, wins more listings, recruits people around them and eventually finds themselves running an agency while still carrying a significant sales load.
The challenge comes when the principal is simultaneously expected to list, negotiate, step into difficult deals, manage the pipeline, recruit, coach and hold the team accountable.
It raises an important question for growing agencies: is the principal building a sales business that can perform without them, or simply becoming an increasingly productive salesperson with a team around them?
Oliver Tuffney is the founder of Sales Velocity, in the UK, which is a consultancy focused on building structured and repeatable sales systems for growing businesses. He argues there is an important distinction between a leader adding their own sales production to the business and using their time to improve the performance of the entire team.
“The second one would be around having sales managers sell. It’s counterintuitive when you have a sales manager also selling because the role of a sales manager is to multiply the output of the team that sits beneath them. They can either multiply or they can add,” he says.
“If they’re managing the team, coaching them, holding them accountable, motivating them and managing the pipeline, that’s multiplying the output of everyone else beneath them. If they’re individually selling as an individual contributor, they’re just adding to the number.”
For a real estate principal, the distinction is worth considering.
Personally winning another listing contributes directly to the agency’s results. Building an agent who can consistently prospect, win listings and progress deals without relying on the principal has the potential to increase capacity across the business.
Oliver argues that continually stepping back into the sales role can deliver results in the short term while making it harder to build a genuinely scalable team.
“While that might be a good thing in the short term, it might help you hit your month target. It might help you even hit your quarter target. What it won’t do is help you hit the full-year target and continue to grow substantially over years to come,” he says.
“Sales teams end up running on a treadmill, never really getting much further than a couple of inches, because they’re maximised on resource.”
Can your agents replicate what your best people do?
The issue goes beyond whether the principal is still selling.
Many real estate businesses have successful individuals who instinctively know how to prospect, conduct an appraisal, build trust, follow up, negotiate and convert opportunities.
The test comes when those skills need to be transferred to the next recruit.
Oliver says one of the foundations of a scalable sales operation is creating a repeatable process rather than expecting every salesperson to work it out independently.
“The second thing is having a repeatable selling system. Rather than having everyone reinventing the wheel, this is the way that we sell, this is the way that we win, and have it systematised for everyone to easily follow.”
That does not necessarily mean turning every agent into the same salesperson.
Rather, it means being able to explain what drives results inside the business: how opportunities are generated, how prospects are followed up, how the sales process progresses and what should happen when an opportunity begins to stall.
Recruitment is the other side of the equation.
“The things which are absolutely critical for every business when ensuring sales success is, number one, the recruitment process of salespeople. You can’t sell if you don’t have the right people, and so what you have to ensure is you have the best people coming in. A robust talent acquisition process and talent assessment process is absolutely key,” Oliver says.
Once those people are in the business, he argues leaders need enough visibility over their numbers to understand where performance is succeeding or falling away.
“The third thing is a tight grip on the numbers. What is the average deal size? What is the average deal lag? What is the flow of leads per month? What are the standard conversion rates?
“Once you have that, you can build a model and build a team around it. You know if you’re up, you know if you’re down, and you know where you need to intervene.”
For an agency, the terminology may be different, but the principle translates readily to real estate.
How many prospecting conversations become appraisals? How many appraisals become listings? Where are opportunities being lost? How long is conversion taking? And are the strongest results dependent on one or two individuals?
The value of tracking those numbers is not simply knowing the final sales result. It can help identify where an agent needs support before the problem appears in their settled figures.
Relationships aren’t the whole sales process
Real estate has always been a relationship business, but Oliver believes reducing sales performance to relationships alone can obscure the other skills required to produce consistent results.
“The biggest pitfall within sales is people thinking that sales is just about relationships. It gets oversimplified and doesn’t get the time, effort and attention that it deserves in order to create greatness.
“When reducing it down to just being about relationships, the things that get lost is the consultative component, the effectiveness of asking great questions, providing a great solution, pricing strategy, touchpoints within communication and consistently following up.”
It is a distinction with obvious relevance to an industry built heavily around databases, referrals, repeat clients and personal profiles.
Relationships may create opportunities, but Oliver’s argument is that what happens next still needs to be coached and managed.
“It all gets reduced down to, ‘It’s just about relationships.’ There’s a lack of accountability on the other activities that should be taking place. There’s a lack of coaching on those other activities that should be taking place,” he says.
“What you get is a drop in results, and that creates a big disparity between those that are good and just have a little bit of charisma, and those that are great and consistently provide excellent solutions to problems and get great results for clients.”
Where is your agency leaking opportunities?
Oliver’s approach to building a sales playbook starts with three areas: outcomes, the activities that have the greatest impact and what he calls “leakage”.
“The first is: what are the outcomes that you’re trying to achieve? That’s not just revenue. It might be conversion rate, average deal size, deal lag, whatever it might be. Be clear as to what is the measure that we’re trying to drive,” he says.
“After that, it’s high-payoff activities, or HPAs. What are the activities during the sales process that have a disproportionate, or an 80/20, impact?
“Finally, looking at leakage. When you’re looking at the sales stages, where is it that we’re losing the majority of opportunities?”
For agency leaders, that provides a potentially useful way to approach coaching.
An agent generating plenty of appraisals but struggling to convert them has a different problem from an agent with a strong listing conversion rate who is not creating enough appraisal opportunities in the first place.
Rather than treating both as a generic performance problem, looking for the point of “leakage” allows the principal or sales manager to focus on the stage where support is needed.
Oliver also cautions against turning a sales playbook into an enormous manual that nobody actually uses.
“Across those three things, if you extract the key insights, what you get is, ‘Okay, this is where we should be focusing when building our sales playbook.’ You don’t want to create lots of information for the sake of information. By focusing on those key things, you’re focusing on the most sensitive nerve.”
Could a new agent follow your system tomorrow?
Oliver divides his sales playbook into four areas: proposition, sales process, foundations and sales management.
The proposition covers who the business is selling to, what it is selling and what the team needs to understand about its customers and markets.
The sales process then captures how the team actually sells.
“This is the meat and potatoes of a sales playbook, the how behind the selling. For each of the different stages within your sales process, that could include prospecting through to discovery, through to solution creation, what are all of the different steps and what are the hows that sit behind them?” Oliver says.
His test for whether that information is genuinely useful is straightforward.
“The marker of a great sales playbook is one which somebody could come off the street into your business, look at that and go, ‘Okay, I get it. I know exactly what I need to be doing for each of these different steps and stages.'”
The third component covers the foundations surrounding the sales process, including CRM use, automation, KPIs and commissions.
The fourth turns the attention back to leadership.
“How is it that we’re holding the team accountable? How is it that we’re coaching? How is it we’re motivating? How is the compensation structure set up? So you can ensure that when the team are operating, they’re operating at the highest possible level.”
For agency principals, it creates a useful test of how much of the business’s sales capability exists as a system and how much remains inside the head of its best salesperson.
If a new agent joined tomorrow, could they understand how the business expects them to prospect, follow up and progress an opportunity without spending months simply watching the principal?
Can a sales manager look at the pipeline and identify exactly where an agent needs coaching?
And if the principal stopped being the person who stepped in whenever an important listing or difficult deal was on the line, would the process still work?
Being a strong salesperson can be what allows a principal to build an agency in the first place.
Oliver’s argument is that scaling it requires turning that individual capability into something the rest of the team can learn, measure and repeat.
This exclusive interview with Oliver Tuffney was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.