This is a webinar that we did with Spring Bengtzen, team leader of The Utah Life Real Estate Group who grew from 100-200 transactions in just 12 months after dialing in her accountability program. She is one of the first users of the Sisu platform. The article and webinar (below) talk about the little culture shifts she's created in her team that made a huge difference.
You may have seen Spring on stage at some of the recent events in real estate, such as KW's family reunion, a handful of other masterminds, or team building summits.
She's an early adopter of Sisu, and runs one of the coolest team cultures we've ever seen.
We were lucky enough to get an interview with her to talk about the little things that have created a massive culture shift with her core group of 15 real estate agents.
How Spring Grew From 100 to 200 Transactions in 12 Months
Before we get too into things, just know that Spring has had tremendous success with her model
Things took a massive shift for her in 2016 when she shelled out the money to bring on an excellent coach and doubled down on her accountability efforts.
When her agents started tracking all their conversion ratios and knew exactly WHERE they needed to be coached, she was able to give them the real-time training they need to fix wherever they were coming up short.
This shift allowed her team to close 200 transactions in 2017, vs. only 100 in 2016. The team continues to grow at an incredible rate by building on this core model.
The focus of this article and webinar isn't on that core model (we have other blogs about that on our main blog at sisu.co/blog) but rather the things she has implemented on top of that for exponential results
Make Accountability A Driver
Like many teams out there, Spring makes a huge time investment by creating a business plan with each of her agents.
This plan reverse-engineers their business down to the specific numbers that they'll need to hit to hit their high level goals.
You want to make 100,000 this year? Great. That numbers just a pie in the sky. How many deals is that, based on your average deal size/commission percentage? How many appointments will you need to get those deals? How many calls to get those appointments?
Once they've done their business planning, the agents know how many calls they need to hit each day to hit that number.
Too often, however, those numbers sit in a spreadsheet for 12 months and are never looked at again.
Spring gives her agents Sisu as a way to track their progress towards those goals each day, week, month, and year. They'll always know if they're on pace.
She has her agents present each of their business plans to the rest of the group to bolster accountability and comradery. This also promotes collaboration as agents work together to create and execute business plans.
Finally, she has a coaching cadence that helps keep them on track and identify areas of weakness. With the numbers right in front of her coaches, these meetings can be 30 minutes of pure, effective coaching. This is in contrast to the standard industry coaching meeting, where half of the time is often spent just trying to figure out what's going on in the agents business.
A Team Culture That Motivates
Most agents want to kick butt. They want to hit their goals. This typically holds even more true for agents on teams. By joining a team, they are typically opting in to a higher level of accountability and mentorship that will help them hit their goals.
Sometimes, the motivation just runs out. Great team leaders understand this.
This is where Spring has an edge and creates more value than almost any team leader we've seen. Here are a few ideas:
- Contests. It's common for team leaders to offer incentives or friendly competition, but often times they don't find an appealing way to display the score or progress. Spring uses her Sisu dashboards so that everybody knows the score, all the time. These KPI dashboards are displayed throughout her office. She can run contests on them or show progress towards goals.
- "Ring The Gong" and other momentum strategies. Closed deals create momentum. Spring integrates Sisu with her Slack channel so that whenever a team member wins a new client or closes a deal, they get shouted out. The objective is to use one win to create momentum, resulting in high-energy agents and a domino effect.
- The Money Gun. We thought this was cool and fun... sometimes, she'll pay her agents by showering them in cash with a money gun she bought on Amazon
It's The Little Things
See what we mean? It's the little things that create momentum, that make your team have a strong culture.
All teams have systems.
All teams provide leads.
All teams worth their salt provide some kind of coaching.
The differentiator is culture. And all it takes for strong culture is a system for accountability, dedicated culture, and a little bit of effort to help keep your agents motivated.
To learn more about the system Spring uses to manage her team, schedule a quick phone call with our team here.
