Building an Elite Team - Real Estate Champions

Building an Elite Team Through Key Producing Standards and Measures


© Real Estate Champions. All Rights Reserved

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The buzz in the real estate industry on building

a team is loud. The transition from a singular

agent to team agent is happening earlier in many

agent’s careers. Because so few agents come

from solid business or sales backgrounds, the

implementation of successful team systems and

strategies can resemble the jerking of your car

when you have run out of gas. That surge forward, with the eventual stalling,

accompanied by the move to the side of the road, with the lifeline call to AAA,

that is not too dissimilar than team leaders building or even expanding their

teams.

As an expert in real estate teams, I’m telling you that there is a strategy to

building a team. You might be reading this and asking, “What makes him an

expert?” That is certainly a valid question and one you should ask anyone that

holds themselves out as a speaker, coach, expert or guru .

The first is that I have personally been in the trenches. I was a top-ten agent in

a four state region for a large national firm. There is no substitute for actually

doing it. Most of the “experts” in the real estate field never sold real estate! They

additionally never created or ran a team in real estate. I built a team of people

from sales agents, administration team members, to marketing team members.

I was able to leverage people and move away from me always pulling the wagon

of production. I worked only Monday through Thursday for more than half of my

real estate sales career. I took Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off each and every

week! I was at my second home each week on those days.


Building an Elite Team Through Key Producing Standards and Measures 3

I have personally coached more teams on the Wall Street Journal’s list than any

other coach in the real estate business. From teams like Mark Spain, #1 in Keller

Williams worldwide, to the Koehler-Bortnick team in the Top 20 of the Wall Street

Journal’s list, to market dominant teams like Danny Burks, #23 in RE/MAX, or

Brian Flynn’s team, #49 RE/MAX, to fast rising teams

exploding into the Wall Street Journal’s list like Rob

and David Dekanski or Cory Meyer.

Finally, I wrote the book on teams. The Champion Real

Estate Team is the only best selling book on real estate

teams. When you can distill your thoughts, ideas,

systems, and strategies on paper it makes them more

concrete and easily implementable. While a book

doesn’t guarantee the success for people you work

with, it can mean, as in my case having written ten

of them, there is a deeper well of knowledge that is

usable to draw from.

The success or failure for most teams is contained in your implementation

of performance standards. If you think this process is a one-step process...think again!

In building an elite team you need to establish performance standards and

a training process. These two are interconnected in their value to produce

production increases for your business. Because the health of your team rests so

squarely in the sales arena, the performance standards, sales measurements, and



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training processes for your buyer’s agents and listing agents are most important

of all. Because the use of buyer’s agents in teams is more common than listing

agents, I will focus the emphasis in that segment. Our research at Real Estate

Champions concluded that the number of buyer’s agents on teams is more than 7

to 1 over listing agents.

It is easier to produce larger volumes of buyer leads than it is to produce listing

leads. This is one factor in larger volume of buyer’s agents within teams. The time

leverage is more efficient on the listing side. The team leader, due to this, can

keep driving the listing side business longer than the buyer side business. The time

invested for the typical listing is less than the time invested, on average, for a buyer.

In setting standards for your team you will first achieve what you inspect first and

expect second. The setting of strong performance metrics and then monitoring

these metrics is

frequently where a

large void exists on

teams. The

inspection process

drives performance

numbers. If you are

unwilling to inspect,

you are not willing

to do the work to be successful. You will get caught in the trough and not go

through it.



The only way to measure performance is with objectivity. The only way to achieve

objectivity is through predetermined standards and measurements. Champion

teams, and quality team members who desire to be Champions, don’t mind

performance standards. In fact, they prefer having them because they want

to see how they are doing relative to their goals and the production of others.

They aren’t looking to hide their tracks to protect being found out. They want

to improve, lead, and earn more. Most elite performers are competitive with

themselves and others.

When I played racquetball as a child, learning the game, and as a young adult at

the professional level, I didn’t merely want to win. I wanted to destroy, demolish,

and crush the competition. I was singularly focused on winning the tournament.

That was the performance standard. The standard in my head was: there is first

place, and there is losing. There was no in-between.

I was cleaning out my garage recently with my 11 year old son, Wesley. I had

decided to throw away a few boxes of trophies from my racquetball days that

I had stored for years. Wesley had never seen me play racquetball, even at the

“less than professional” level I would play at today. He was enamored with

looking at the trophies, awards, and plaques. He stopped after a few minutes of

looking at them and asked, “Dad, did you win every tournament that you played

in?” I laughed because I had no idea` where he got that thought. Then I realized

that I had never saved, or even taken home, less than a first place trophy. There

was only first place trophies in the boxes he was looking at. I had to come clean

that I had lost more than my share of matches. At an early age I had decided that

anything other than first was worst.



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Establishing that mental approach in a team is a challenge, but necessary. In real

estate you don’t receive compensation for second place. The best real estate

teams have that focus and standard of performance.

You are the one that sets the performance standards. All of your team members

must know what they are expected to contribute to the team. Additionally, if

you sit down with each individual to determine his or her personal performance

standards, in most cases, you will find them to be higher than you expected. The

first step is having strong expectations or standards, but the real power comes

from the inspection process. The acts of reporting, evaluating, comparing, and

monitoring are really the power source for increased performance in human

beings. This is especially true for buyer’s agents. Most salespeople are so

optimistic that they are able to put on their rose-colored glasses and never take

them off, even in the face of looming disaster. They recognize the problem well

after the point of no return. They recognize a low revenue problem in the month

it exists or just before. In the delayed revenue business of real estate sales, that’s



too late. For me to wake up September 1st and realize I have no closings for the

month will never fix September. It will fix October but September is a done deal.

The foundational performance measures or performance standards should be

for leads delivered. What is the number of leads you provided this week to each

individual buyer’s agent? You can separate them into type of leads, but having

8 different types of leads to track can lead to buyer’s agents rejecting tracking

accurately. The simplest, but still effective, is to break the leads into offline lead

generation and online lead generation. The offline leads should convert at a

higher rate than online. This is why you can separate in two categories.

The offline should be; sign calls, ad calls, call capture, text back, open house, even

walk-ins would be offline. The online would be from your Internet strategies. This

would be pay-per-click, Craigslist, organic SEO leads, Zillow, Trulia, or Realtor.com

leads. Any type of lead that is registration-based or electronic property request

based.

Further tracking and reporting of initial contacts via the phone or lead follow up

via the phone are key categories. While I recognize the shift in communication

with prospects to electronic via email, social media, or text, this method of



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communication is less personal than a direct phone conversation. The buyer’s

agents are more comfortable with technology based communication. When

a prospect is not responsive to email drip, text or social media it is not as

personally rejecting as a phone conversation. As a team leader you must

measure metrics that matter; the metrics that creates sales opportunities and

persuasion opportunities. The barrier to persuasion is much higher in text based

or electronic communication. No one on earth is more persuasive electronically

than personally. The personal communication of face-to-face or phone-to-phone

creates higher conversion rates...period!

Finally, you must track buyer consultation appointments, committed clients, and

pendings. These measures will uncover the face-to-face selling and presentation

skills of your buyer’s agents. The sales ratios of these three categories will tell

you where the breakdown of skill exists. It can also signal market changes.

For example, in much of the US the inventory of listings is extremely low. This

low inventory level has decreased the ratios of committed buyers to pending

transactions. The lack of inventory has made it more challenging to secure

properties for buyers. It has caused a high level of competition for homes, and

multiple offers in some markets. The net result, even for very skilled buyer’s

agents, is the need to carry more clients to achieve a similar result in pending

sales in a more normal inventory marketplace.



Two Rules for Increasing PerformanceTo raise our own performance, and that of others on

your team, you must establish some type of activity

management system. A system that monitors and

reports each staff member’s activities based on her

position or responsibility is best. For buyer’s agents, the

activity management system must count and report

contacts, leads, and appointments, and the

corresponding conversion ratios for these activities against the results of units

sold and revenue generated. This type of reporting and monitoring is rarely done

by even very good teams in the real estate field. There are many reasons why;

lack of knowledge, difficulty of system setup, and lack of time are frequently

cited. One of the most obvious reasons is that when the agent initially entered

real estate, his broker never required it so he was not taught the importance of

measuring activities from the early stages of his career. Sales improvement is

created by the reporting, monitoring, and evaluation of one’s sales ratios.

When you are dealing with your support staff, you again need to be able to

establish objective standards for them and to monitor, report, and evaluate their

performance.

z Are your support people establishing the right priorities for the day or week?

z Are they completing the things with the highest priorities before the close of business for the day?

z Are they getting enough done in terms of quality, priority, and volume to advance your business?

z Are they helping you achieve your objective and priorities for your day by protecting you from distractions and interruptions?



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Rule #1 – When performance is measured, performance improves.

You must be willing to devise measuring systems for your own performance

and that of your buyer’s agents. They need to know that there is a measuring

system and standards to hit. Performance rarely improves without measurement

to identify the where, how, and why of the needed improvements. Improvements won’t be sustainable unless people know the

specific how of the improvement. Knowing how the improvement will

be accomplished is essential for replication. Without measurement, the how is

merely a guess! You give me or my coaches your sales ratios for each buyer’s

agent, we then overlay that with a behavioral assessment, and we can determine

exactly the problems and help you implement specific solutions.



Rule #2 – When performance is measured and reported, performance improves faster.

When you require, not only the measuring, but also the reporting of performance

you will see performance improvement speed up. Issues that you thought would

take six months to correct fully may take only three months. You may save

yourself three months of lost revenue, lower sales, and the time and dollars

for increased training, and have more satisfied employees at the same time.

The more public the reporting internally on the team, the quicker the changes

will happen. Some of your buyer’s agents will not be overjoyed in this public

reporting. Those are the ones that are parading around like the emperor in the

children’s story, “The Emperor Has No Clothes”. They don’t want to appear

less skilled and less effective. It’s their ego or hubris that causes this.

Implementing a performance measuring and reporting system will cause one of

three outcomes for the salespeople on your team.

They will respond and

raise their sales. That is the first

outcome and creates a win for

all.

The second will be to justify or even “cook the books”. Many will report more



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contacts or appointments than are true. They will do this to avoid corrective actions taken by a rigorous team leader. The problem with this approach is you have an honesty and ethics issue with a team member. That alone is enough for de-hiring them. Eventually they will be discouraged because their ratios of appointments to true closed transactions will become seriously out of alignment. The deception will show up if you are checking in less than 90 days.

The final outcome will be, they will leave the team. They will usually frame the exit around lead quality or claim they were ready to go out on their own. The truth is, they want to exit before they are discovered.

Glengarry Glen Ross syndrome: In the classic movie, Glengarry Glen

Ross, most of the characters are real estate salespeople. They are constantly

whining and complaining about the lead quality; that only if their sales manager

would give them better leads they would close more deals.

This is the classic mantra of underperforming salespeople. Most will blame

the lead quality before they will blame themselves for a lack of sales skills,

time management skills, or personal management skills. They will miss the low

number of contacts, low appointments booked numbers, and low close rate of

appointments. It’s just easier to blame lead volume, and especially lead quality,

rather than look in the mirror.

If you have not watched this classic movie you need to watch it on Netflix tonight!

You might see parallels between your buyer’s agent team and Al Pacino, Jack

Lemmon and many others in the movie.



Establish Measurable Benchmarks for Buyer’s Agents

For a buyer’s agent, there should be a set standard or benchmark for the number

of units sold to be on your team. The minimum standard should not be below

two transactions a month, or 24 units in a year. I think that is low but most teams

are barely getting that level. If a buyer’s agent can’t do two deals a month, he

shouldn’t be on your team. With the leads that most elite teams create (pay-per-

click, Craigslist, Google Ad Words, the ad calls, sign calls, text back, call capture,

open house opportunities, and all Internet leads), 24 units a year should be easy

to obtain if the buyer’s agent has determination, desire, and a little discipline.

The 24-transaction minimum benchmark can easily be achieved through less

than 50 buyer consultations or buyer interviews. Buyer consultations or buyer

interviews need to be conducted in your office. NAR reports that 66% of the buyers



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bought a home through the first agent they met with. A buyer’s agent can book

one appointment a week and get to two units a month. I have teams where each

buyer’s agent is booking 5+ appointments a week; it can be done. The buyer’s agent

needs to be adept at explaining his role, his services, and the benefits of doing

business with you and your team. He needs to be able to convey the truth about

the market conditions and opportunities in the marketplace and why the buyer

needs to seriously consider acting now. The buyer’s agent must explore the clients

wants, needs, desires, and expectations for her next home and for the agent she is

selecting to represent her interests. He must then be able to ask for an exchange of

commitment of loyalty on the buyer’s part for his service guarantee.

There are two main reasons for poor buyer consultations or buyer interviews.

The first is that most buyer’s agents never get a prospect to such a meeting.

They lack the skill to enhance the benefits of working with your team. They are

uncomfortable in expressing your unique selling proposition (USP) and unique

value proposition (UVP) that clearly defines the value and benefit to the buyer

of a consultation meeting. They run around, show property, and attempt to build

rapport with the prospect using the same tired process that most other agents are

attempting to use. They don’t demonstrate to the prospect that an appointment for

a consultation with them carries significant value to that buyer prospect.

They don’t communicate the value of the appointment to a high enough degree

to gain the prospect’s desire to meet with them. In essence, those interviews they

do achieve a reasonable level of competency. No one is naturally outstanding at

anything without a reasonable level of practice, time, repetition, and discipline.

People can be naturally gifted at something. They can have previous experience

that is transferable, but they don’t become world-class through osmosis.



The second reason that buyer’s agents don’t secure buyer consultations is their

presentation isn’t planned. It isn’t dialed; in short they are winging it. For most

buyer’s agents, even when they manage to get a face-to-face meeting with a

prospect for a buyer interview, the structure of that interview (agenda, scripts,

dialogues, trail closes, value-building segments and questioning) is so undefined

and unorganized in its delivery that the odds of their success in securing an

exclusive right to represent contract are diminished.

Having a set agenda for your meeting with a prospect and knowing what to say

and how to anticipate each agenda item will enable you to stay on track; this

provides a better, more complete articulation of services, benefits, and values that

the prospect will understand more easily. Knowing what to say and the order in

which to say it will raise the conversion ratios of prospects to committed clients.

At the low end, a buyer’s agent with a reasonable understanding of the structure

and delivery of a high quality buyer interview will close more than 75% of the

prospects he meets with face-to-face to an exclusive right to represent contract.



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Develop Simple, Accountability Systems

Measuring , reporting, and accountability are connected with a chain the size of

what is used for a ship’s anchor. It’s forged with links of iron that are unbreakable.

Having a measuring and reporting system that buyer’s agents must use on regular

intervals is paramount.

Create a daily, weekly, and monthly tracking sheet that incorporates contacts,

appointments, committed clients, showings, and sales can transform your business.

This will enable your buyer’s agents to create the connection between their

activities and results. When there is the linkage of sales ratios to sales results the

buyer’s agent can track cause and effect. In the elite teams we are coaching, very

few had the reporting or monitoring systems in place that worked. Some had them

but they were too complex with too many numbers; which produced ineffective

results because the team leader asked for too much, and often the wrong metrics

of numbers. Start making every member of your sales team accountable. All team

members must hand a reporting to you at the close of each day, or at a minimum



weekly. They must also compile the daily numbers to create a weekly and monthly

report as well. This is where the light bulb can really come on in the sales ratio area.

Having to count and compile their own numbers speeds up the learning process. It

creates that linkage for the buyer’s agent in their sales ratios. The issue won’t be if

they go into a slump; the issue is when. All of your buyer’s agents will experience

the frustration of being in a slump.

The solution is to shorten the span of time in the slump. Another key is to combat

the attractive nature of slumps. Frequently when a buyer’s agent is in a slump they

attract others to join them. They might not be doing this deliberately but slumps

are attractive in nature and tend to draw others to participate. One of your main

objectives as a team leader is to remove the risk of multiple buyer’s agents in a

slump simultaneously. This can wreak havoc on your cash flow and profit.

You can recognize the signs of a slump for an

agent if you’re monitoring performance num-

bers and metrics. You need to personally

review your performance metrics for each

buyer’s agent twice a month. That will enable

you to respond to “off track” numbers before

they snowball. Being a great team leader

requires the willingness to establish and hold

to standards. It means replacing people when,

after a series of months, they fail to perform to your standard.

If you have that gnashing feeling inside you that says...”I need more help than just

a quick white paper on teams,” first, don’t be frustrated because if teams were

easy everyone would be doing it successfully. The gap between being a wildly



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successful team and a mediocre team is vast. There are a few that have closed

that gap. That gap is not crossed by more team members or number of units, but

by skills, strategies, systems and execution.

If you either want more for yourself, or your team, or cannot shake that nagging

feeling of, “Hey, we can do better,” let me offer you a lifeline. Click on the link

below and I will make sure you receive a complimentary consultation to improve

your team today...right now! Click here...to start your journey to success.

http://www.realestatechampions.com/BATCcomp

I hope that this white paper has helped you understand some of the steps to

improving your team performance. Because you have taken the time to read this

it tells me you are on your way to being an elite team leader in real estate.

I ask you, as a favor, please update me on your progress. The reason I do what

I do in writing, coaching, and speaking is to hear the stories of how lives have

been changed. I would be grateful to hear your success story. Until that time...

Success will be yours!

Dirk Zeller, Founder, CEO and Author

www.realestatechampions.com

www.facebook.com/realestatechampions

[email protected]

877-732-4676



Books by Dirk Zeller CEO and Founder of Real Estate Champions:

Your First Year in Real Estate

Success as a Real Estate Agent for Dummies®

Telephone Sales for Dummies®

The Champion Real Estate Agent

The Champion Real Estate Team.

Successful Time Management for Dummies®

Thriving in the Marketplace for Dummies®

Selling all in One for Dummies®

Effective Time Management for Dummies®

Running a Great Meeting in a Day for Dummies®

Building an Elite Team - Real Estate Champions

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