Can you hear the relief of the recharging real estate market?
With opportunity everywhere, how can you invigorate your sales team to change gears and take advantage of new market sentiment? There are some foundation areas you need to have right to ensure your sales team starts the spring selling season well.
Regardless of the technology that supports your real estate agency, the key factor all successful sales teams share is motivation. Motivation lies at the heart of surviving the day-in, day-out routine of prospecting, helping clients to achieve their real estate goals and to obtain the best market result in the shortest possible time.
Other critical supporting factors that create a high-performing sales team include:
A unified approach:
A motivated team performs better than a motivated individual. Bounce off each other’s successful prospecting techniques, systems and learnings.
Be generous with your smarts, and share knowledge about the best ways to use the systems around you to best effect. As a collective, your team is a bigger, more powerful force when you master the art of winning business and serving clients as a group.
This can feel counter-intuitive in some sales environments where the star individual is deemed to have more value than the team – but by harnessing your strengths and sharing knowledge, your sales team will thrive.
Efficiency and focus:
Staying focused on dollar productive activities is one of the major challenges of busy real estate agents. Time and money are easily lost on inefficient processes or systems that slow agents down. Look closely at the end-to-end workflow in your agency and note where a talented administrator can free time for salespeople to pursue productive activities.
Help salespeople enter data directly into mobile apps, which synchronise with your central CRM, so information isn’t double-handled and you minimise multiple system use. Ideally, administrative staff should take control of SMS communication, email follow-ups and client reporting.
Motivation is linked to the very culture of a real estate practice, and it is embodied by the colleagues you work with, the energy of the office and the management team’s attitude to mentoring and living their business values. Above all, you can’t fake energetic motivation. It needs to be authentic and lived in the actions taken across the business.
1 KEEP IT SIMPLE
Salespeople should have their ideal day focused on making phone calls and physical client meetings – not bogged down in administration or taken up with clunky systems.
Dollar productive activities around calls and out of office activity include negotiation, prospecting, authoring market appraisals, following up previous appraisals, making follow-up calls to OFI attendees and anniversary calls.
These actions are of the highest priority.
Track each agent call with an outcome, notes, and follow-up task (ideally all from a mobile app) which synchronises to your central CRM to update reports, contact records and property statistics. It’s imperative that this live data is immediately available within management and vendor reporting.
2 WORKING RELATIONSHIPS
Having the right information at their fingertips impacts how productive a salesperson can be when talking to their clients.
Technology that helps your salespeople make the right calls at the right time may include a CRM which has a full picture of all contact interaction, AI technology which helps you sort the most active contacts in your list, so you prioritise those calls first, and automated email intelligence, which allows target communications based on a contact’s online activity.
3 KNOW YOUR NUMBERS
It is vital your agency has a system to help you understand and improve your business at every key conversion point. Analysis of every stage of your sales cycle – what is working and what isn’t – is a non-negotiable activity.
Why are some salespeople converting more appraisals?
What is it about their technique, communication style and organisation skills that sets them apart?
Key metrics and conversion rates to monitor include:
• Calls made
• Appraisals
• Sales
• Commission
Embrace the new sales season with vigour and be sure your agency is doing all in its power to remove obstacles and harness the opportunities available. Once your sales team is on a roll, your momentum will only build.
