I remember when I really got into technology back in the late 90s and early 2000's. There was a saying that went around, and it really resonated with me.
Data is the new oil.
When we got better at storing and transmitting data, data became insanely valuable—basically overnight.
And just like oil, it's not that useful when it's unrefined. But when you can pull it out of the earth and refine it, it becomes one of the most valuable substances on the planet.
Almost 30 years later, I still see truth in that comparison.
And I see a lot of real estate teams sitting on massive, valuable pools of data... and they're doing nothing with it.
It's a huge missed opportunity.
Your operations team is a data goldmine
This is the first mindset shift that needs to happen.
I see a lot of team leaders who don't even know what systems their operations team uses for transaction management.
"I let them use whatever they want. As long as they get the job done".
NO!
It makes sense on the surface, but after spending a decade working with thousands of real estate teams, you're missing out on a massive opportunity when you let your operations team work in a silo.
Think about it. You might have a big operations team, with a Director of Operations, multiple Transaction Coordinators and admins. Or it might be smaller, maybe just one TC or one admin/assistant. Either way, someone is helping you run the operation of your business. And the people who help with that are your most attention-to-detail people. They're the ones who cross the t's and dot the i's on everything. They're process oriented, often perfectionistic, and they hate inaccuracy and misinformation.
So naturally, whatever system they work out of, is going to have very up-to-date and accurate data.
And that's where people are missing out. Because they let their operations team spend 40 hours/week working in a system that gives them next to zero reporting. All of that data is wasted.
Or worse. Instead of leveraging the wealth of data created by their natural processes, they force their operations team to fill out a separate spreadsheet or enter data a third or fourth time into some system that does give them the reporting they need.
And then they wonder why they're not profitable—it's because you have redundant processes that require too much operational overhead, and the margins in this business just aren't good enough to support it. If you double transactions and need to double operational staff with it, you just wiped out most of the profit from the extra transactions.
It's insanity.
And the fix is so simple.
Your operations team should work out of a system that they love, that gets the job done, and makes the data valuable for everyone else in and around your business.
It's possible.
The real estate team leader's biggest blindspot
When times get hard, one of the biggest challenges for the real estate team leader is pinpointing what exactly they need to fix in order to start winning again.
Even more concerning is when teams are winning, but the team leader can't tell you exactly why they're winning.
Either way, the issue is the same. It's the biggest blindspot of the modern real estate team leader—the inability to tie inputs to outputs. It's a data problem.
It's the inability to answer questions like these:
- We set 100 appointments through our ISA department last quarter. How many of those held? How many of those are now clients actively searching/listing their home?
- Which of my agents give me the best held > signed ratio on ISA set appointments?
- We generated 300 PPC leads in Q1. What is the conversion and ROI on those leads, 6 months later?
You solve the back half of the equation by getting your operations team working from a system that gives you great reporting. This will give you great insight into your lagging indicators—clients signed, under contract, closed, and all the commissions and financials related to them.
What about the front half of the conversation? Dials, conversations, appointments, lead generated. The leading indicators. Where do you get those?
The CRM is the key
What's the easiest way to tell the difference between an agent that waits for business to fall on their lap, and one who's out hunting? Are they even following up with the warm leads you're giving them?
You look at the CRM. For the simple fact that it's impossible to manage multiple 100s of relationships and opportunities in your head or on a piece of paper.
So the easiest way to get your team to act more like hunters and less like order takers is to push CRM adoption. Make it a standard.
Just like you need to get your operations team working out of the right system, you need to get your agents doing the same.
If CRM adoption is a challenge, we have some really great tricks we've found over the years that can pretty much take your CRM adoption from the average 30-50% to dang near 100%, basically overnight—talk to my team and we can share some details on that.
When your agents work out of the CRM, you start to generate all of the leading indicators you could ever need—leads generated, calls made, speed to lead, appointments set/held, all of that good stuff.
Now you just need to combine it all in one system that gives you the full picture. Do that, and you'll have a solution to the team leader's biggest blindspot, i.e. you'll be able to tie inputs to outputs in a way that 90% of businesses in this industry cannot.
Tying together your leading (agent) data with your lagging (operations) data
If your leading indicators sit in the CRM, and your lagging indicators sit in your transaction management platform, you're still going to have trouble tying inputs to outputs.
The best place to start is looking at the agent-to-TC handoff. When an agent gets a new client, how do they hand that client off to your TC?
If it's via email, you're missing out on data and creating duplicate data entry.
If it's via text, phone call, or paper... even worse.
The agent has to communicate all kinds of information to your TC about the transaction, and that data can be used both to report on your business as well as make transaction management easier (so that you require less overhead).
The best way I've seen to do this is an intake form. The smartest teams already figured this out a long time ago, and they put in place some kind of Google form, Wufoo form, Cognito form, etc. This ensured that when the agent made the handoff, all the important and necessary information was included.
If the agent forgot to enter a field that's required, the form would simply show an error and tell them which field they need to complete.
This makes for clean, accurate, and data-rich handoffs between the agent and TC. It saves everyone time because all the communication happens up front.
The problem is that Google, Wufoo, Cognito—any of those generic forms—are not connected to either your CRM or your TM system. So your agent is re-entering data that's already in the CRM, and your operations team is re-entering data from the form into the system where they manage transactions.
It should all just be connected. The amount of duplicate data entry happening in this industry has always just felt like insanity to me.
Sisu is the only way to solve this problem
Here's what we're trying to accomplish in this article:
- Your operations team works out of a system that they love and gets the job done for them.
- You get tremendous value (reporting) out of the data your operations team takes such good care of.
- Your leading (CRM) and lagging (transaction) data lives in the same place.
- Agents can hand-off transactions to your operations team via intake form without re-entering data.
- Transaction coordinators can take the data from the agent hand-off and work it right away, without duplicate data entry.
I'd be lying to you if I told you there was a way to accomplish all of this without Sisu. There isn't.
There simply isn't another system on the market that can manage the most complex of transactions and commissions, ties into the CRM, allows for agent handoffs via intake form, and gives you reporting from lead>commission.
As teams get bigger, this really starts to hurt them. So they start trying to tie CRM, TM systems, spreadsheets, and google forms together with Zapier, Make.com, or custom code.
Then they end up needing to hire a Really Expensive Chief Technology Officer to manage it all for them. Worse, they pay a third party software developer to develop a spaghetti mess of custom developed software. Their operations team balloons because the systems take so much effort to manage.
It's why most teams in this industry are not profitable. The margins don't support all of this. We built our system to do all these things without breaking the bank. So if you're not on Sisu...
Talk to the Sisu team. If nothing else, as a sanity check. Let's see if there's a way we can simplify for you. Especially if you're still small. It's so much easier to fix these issues before you get big.
If you're reading this and you're already on Sisu, reach out to your account manager and make sure you grab some time. Lots of teams adopted us a ways back and just don't know what all can be done in the system. When they realize it, they're able to simplify significantly. This often means lower headcount, less man hours per transaction, fewers systems, and most importantly—better profit margins.
The endless possibilities once you get this right
So what can you do once you get all this data flowing through your business properly?
Your business planning changes, for one. Instead of coming up with business plans out of thin air, getting excited about them for two months, and forgetting about them before Q2... you can sit down with your agents, come up with a data-backed plan, and track progress against that plan week over week for the entire year.
You can actually hold a standard, because you know what to expect when it comes to metrics like appointments set / appointments held.
Your marketing gets a lot smarter, because you actually know the odds on a lead source before you cut it's spend or double down on it.
You can even bring the customer into the transaction (using the Sisu client portal), giving them an experience they've come to expect through Amazon/Door Dash.. and your repeat business will flourish. Because when they get the old school experience from anyone else, they'll be wildly disappointed.
Most importantly, you'll be able to tie inputs to outputs in a way that's impossible to 90% of businesses in this industry. While they're playing with cards face-down, you know your own cards and have a good idea of what's in the deck.
I've found in business that the answers are usually pretty straightforward. They're common sense. The problem is that most people don't have the data to even know what questions they should be asking. When you can tie inputs to outputs, you start asking the right questions—and you'll find that the answers are intuitive if the question is right.
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