Agents hire real estate coaches for two main reasons, according to an Inman survey: they want to 1) grow their business, and 2) be held accountable to the goals they have set. The same study showed the results of agents who hired a coach:
Notice that a majority of agents saw at least a 25% increase in their business. While this kind of growth justifies your investment in a coach, I believe that truly effective programs/coaches will boost your business by at least 50 percent and that by diligently holding yourself or your business accountable, you can even increase your business by 100% in 2018.
What’s the difference, then, between the outstanding real estate coaches that create 50-100% growth and those that only create 25%? This is an important question for both coaches and agents.
Number Tracking: The Key to Real Estate Accountability
The world of sports is religious about statistics. It seems that every single characteristic or action by a player can be classified by some kind of stat. This gives coaches great perspective on the game and performance of their players.
If sports teams, at all levels, have systems for tracking and analyzing performance, shouldn’t real estate teams do the same? After all, real estate is an industry based on performance just like sports. The problem is, most agents don’t track their numbers, and if they do, they often aren’t very accurate.
This is why the first change that an effective real estate coach will implement is a system to help agents meticulously track their numbers. The best coaches and leaders in the industry claim that just by doing this, you can increase your income by at least 25% (and some claim up to 100%). Finding a coach that utilizes these systems is just as important as finding a reputable coach with expertise in scripts and growing a real estate business - neither can be missing.
With an in-depth report on an agent’s performance, coaches can analyze your situation each week and leverage their expertise to give you helpful advice that’s specific to you and the stage that you’re in. For example, if you make 400 contacts per month but only go on 3 appointments, you need to work on your scripts so you can get that up to 10 appointments. If you go on 10 listing appointments per month and sign 2, it’s obvious you need some help with your presentation. If you sign 7 or 8, you are now at the conversion ratios of other successful agents. Having this data will allow your coach to drill down in the areas you need the work. Without the insights from this data, it’s all just guesswork.
Problems with Tracking Numbers
While it’s proven that tracking and analyzing performance is the #1 key to growth, effective tracking isn’t always easy. Thankfully, I started in the business on a team that understood the importance of number tracking years ago and created a solution using the best tools available at the time: Smartsheets and the google spreadsheet.
Number tracking worked miracles for our business, but here are some problems we ran into:
- Tracking numbers can be tedious. Turning it into a game makes it fun.
- Moving data between multiple spreadsheets (e.g. daily, weekly, and monthly reports) is time consuming.
- It’s hard to track numbers in the field. No one wants to pull up a spreadsheet on his or her phone.
- Infrequently updating spreadsheets forces agents to rely on guesswork when they track their numbers.
- If you don’t analyze and take action on the numbers you track, they don’t do much good.
- If the numbers aren’t presented in the right format, it’s difficult for agents, leaders, or coaches to analyze them. Analysis is a critical step for growth.
- Leaderboards, contests, and games based on performance inspire agents to take their business to the next level.
Keep in mind that even through all of these challenges, we saw massive growth in our business just by having everyone tracking their numbers and then holding them accountable. Leaders (whether coaches or team leads) were able to draw from the data in our spreadsheet and give agents relevant advice. Agents accelerated through the learning curve at a rapid pace and their activities were way up because they knew this was key to hitting their goals - I was one of them! It was a great time. In addition, I knew this was something that could be done even more effectively and that every real estate business could greatly benefit from.
How to Track and Analyze Real Estate Performance
Here’s a question for both agents and coaches about number tracking:
1) As an agent, would you rather track your numbers in a spreadsheet or track them as you go on a mobile app that you can carry with you into the field?
2) As a coach, would you rather see your agents data in a dashboard that shows their goals, progress, and pipelines month over month? (in place of looking at this data in a spreadsheet or weekly progress email)
The impact of effectively tracking and reporting data makes such an impact that I took action to develop an accountability solution that would be a complete game changer for any real estate business that implements it. Sisu, the accountability software for real estate agents, was born. Sisu solves all of the problems I mentioned above. It’s a solution that enables agents to track their results at the click of a button. That way, they don’t have to return to the office to track their numbers into a spreadsheet - they can do it as they work. They also don’t have to input into multiple places. Their broker, team leader, and coach can then quickly view the data on scoreboards and leaderboards to understand instantaneously exactly what is happening with that agent or any other agent on their team.
Since our launch to the public a few months ago, agents and owners constantly let me know how happy they are to be free from spreadsheets. Even more importantly, their numbers are accurate, they always know how close they are to reaching their goals, and are motivated to take their business to the next level.
While Sisu has been instrumental in these agents success, the feedback from coaches and team leaders has been just as positive. Leaders don’t want to look at spreadsheets any more than agents do. With Sisu Scoreboards, they can pull all the information from their agents into one neat dashboard. This dashboards becomes the basis of coaching sessions, where coaches can easily see the agents progress and goals, then leverage their expertise to analyze the results and give them specific advice.
Whether you’re an agent, broker, team leader, or a coach, Sisu will propel your business and you will not only reach, but exceed your goals in real estate.
