The real estate market has and will always be a fast paced, rapidly changing environment and like in other similar but not the same conditions, brokers, executives and sales leaders need to pivot and reprioritize quickly to be able to react, maintain and grow and weather the storm. Tough environments bring out the strong leaders within your organizations and well now is another phase of change that requires everyone in your organization contributing at literally “A-Game” levels.
Best practices of great leadership are easy when times are easy. Your top-performing leaders will shine their best when really put to the test. The following 12-24 months can be managed, and you can sustain but only if you have the right people on the bus doing the right things. Will it be tough? Yes, but you are made to do tough things. True leaders come from times of adversity and challenge. Make it a point to sharpen your saw for improved behavior and increased action and make it a mission to bring everyone in your organization with you.
I still believe that driving top line sales revenue solves everything through recruiting and coaching your current agents up to greater sales success. As part of any healthy and fiscally responsible company though, it is imperative to do a review of expenses to make sure all is in alignment with the reality of market conditions.
Here are the priority areas that you and your leadership team need to be focused on to ensure minimizing losses while maintaining and growing sales during any market conditions:
1.Double down on listings and sales. Everyone should be 100% focused on generating sales for your agents. Having weekly sales meetings with team goals and how to motivate and inspire your agents to ‘double down’ on their activities. Maybe they need to do ten times the amount of prospecting right now to generate listings. Maybe they need to double down on open houses or start calling expired listings or even increase their connections with their client databases, sphere, and referral sources. Communicate this 7 times 7 different ways to make sure they see the benefits that this massive action will create opportunities for them.
People are and will still be purchasing homes in the foreseeable future and we have the unique ability to push and challenge our sales teams to greater efforts that will create their success. It may look different, and the work may require more effort, but the rewards will be amazing.
2. Train and coach agents and managers. I recommend offering 2-4 times the amount of weekly training, coaching and general sales activity sessions with your teams. Hold sessions on how to generate leads and how to convert those into appointments. Have your agents and sales managers write a weekly and daily action plan that literally increases the number of social media, texts, emails, phone calls, drop-bys, open houses that they will commit to doing to ensure they will be creating listings and sales. Managers should be double downing on the amount of recruiting calls and efforts they are making daily and weekly to increase their opportunities for successful recruiting. Ask your agents and managers how many appointments they are going on weekly for listings and recruits and encourage them to set really high goals. Massive efforts create massive results every time. This is not a new concept at all but will help you right now to increase activity and hopefully become your normal, daily routine of behavior.
3. Hold contests for listings, sales and recruiting results. These always bring about a higher amount of focused effort towards specific goals. Holding these monthly for your offices helps remind everyone what the prize is, it’s not winning the contest, it is winning the listing, the sale and ensuring they continue to make income. The contests don’t have to cost much money either. Literally the goal is to get everyone excited about the contest and work towards achieving it for the team and for themselves.
4. Audit your operations, staff and ROI. An audit of your staff and operations should be done periodically but maybe it’s time for another one right now to tighten up where you can. Review job descriptions, roles and who is directly brining in revenue or providing necessary support to review if you are in fact overstaffed. Maybe you have outdated systems that people use day in and day out that either are not relevant or are now being done with software reporting. This area of focus will tighten up your operational costs and help improve your teams’ performance at the same time. This review of your return on investment as well as looking at redundancies of procedures, tasks, job positions and the like will be a healthy activity leading to both cost savings and improvements in efficiencies and work output.
Mostly though, I think it is imperative that your staff and leaders know that everyone is being asked to do more. Our sales teams, yes, but everyone is expected to take on more to help support and create sales revenue to ensure everyone’s future success.
5. Consolidate and regionalize for greater efficiencies and cost control. It may be a wiser decision to regionalize staff for your sales teams or have managers lead multiple offices. Looking at things differently than you have done for the last however many years will help you see there is opportunity to take advantage of cost savings where you can either temporarily or for the long term. Making tough decisions quickly though is the key. Once you know what you must do, it is important that you execute it. It may not feel good, and it may seem drastic but waiting will only create more loss and more problems to correct for you. Often, these external market conditions thankfully drive us to look in at our organization with a different lens and make our companies better by having to continuously evaluate costs, revenue, profit, and staff to make the best decisions for long term health.
6. Everybody is at “A-Game Level” every day. It is true that every person in your organization will need to level up their efforts to provide more value, more support, more solutions, and more action to generate greater results for your organization. Get the buy in and commitment verbally from each of your leadership team members and have them write down 5-10 action items they will personally do to create massive action within their departments, offices, or regions to help everyone compete and win. If everyone upped their game to doing 50% more, the results will be outstanding. Those who aren’t operating at an “A-Game” level may need to reconsider their role and get off the bus and that’s ok. Running a real estate brokerage right now requires fast action on the right things while keeping people motivated, full of enthusiasm and relentlessly doing more. It will be tough, but if it were easy, everyone would be doing it and you’re not everyone.
Making a commitment to relentlessly communicate and focus on massive action right now will make sure your teams are making it in any market. Make it your personal responsibility as a leader to drive and inspire greatness from your agents and managers for more activity by bringing their “A-Game” with them every single day. Everyone will love the results.
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These are just a few of Johnson’s proven and exclusive leadership and development strategies that produce amazing results quickly. For more information about Johnson’s exclusive turnkey, team solutions to massively grow your organization or to learn about our custom and co-branded training platform, Sherri Johnson Academy, contact Sherri Johnson at www.sherrijohnson.com/onetoone for a complimentary strategy call.
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