8 Tips for Building High-performing Teams

8 Tips for Building High-performing Teams

The ascent of teams is expected to move at an alarming rate throughout the next couple of years as the market relaxes and lone wolf agents grow hungrier for leads and support. 

What should agent teams center around? Should individuals get a steady diet of leads, or should they be responsible for generating their own business? And what about dealing with agents who are a questionable fit? Should leaders try to sculpt them or cut them loose?

Effective group leaders as of late addressed the questions and more at Inman Connect New York 2019. Here are eight hints for comprising a high-performing group that can flourish even in a down market. 

1. Don’t let people call 

One all-important question is scrawled on a whiteboard hanging in the office of Jeff Glover’s team: “How can we make it so that a customer never has to reach out to us?”

That is to emphasize the significance of foreseeing clients’ needs and putting a laser focus around client experience, Glover said. 

For instance, sellers regularly call to ask about appraisals not long after appraisers leave their homes. Why not call them first? 

“We should have done a better job of focusing on the customer experience during the last shift [in the market around 2011],” Glover said. They will not make the same mistake this time, he said.

2. Don’t go overboard with leads

Veronica Figueroa, a specialist proprietor of RE/MAX Innovation, said her group endured an intense instance of “lead exhaustion,” with individuals feeling overpowered by a consistent deluge of forthcoming clients to call. 

To bring more order to the situation, Figueroa sliced her team into three pods of five, each comprised of a leader and two other agents. Now, one week out of the month, each pod is dedicated to taking and making calls. During the other weeks, they can focus on existing clients.

In the meantime, Glover doesn’t send any leads at all to agents in his group. He’s discovered accomplishment with them snaring their very own customers. Some portion of his mystery has been putting every new part, including veteran agents, through a half year of preparing where they serve only as inside sales agents (ISAs), before they can go on listing appointments. 

3. Don’t focus too much on the numbers

Focusing on whether team members are meeting their KPIs (key performance indicators) almost “crippled” Figueroa’s business, she said.

Supporting agents and encouraging a friendly group culture must outweigh the numbers in some cases, experts concurred. One way that Figueroa guides agents is by tuning in to their calls with clients and afterward offering productive input. 

It’s critical to enable agents to develop progressively and professionally, she said. One way she did this was by nixing the hard line she had once drawn between buyer’s agents and listing agents.

“The minute I took away the glorified listing agent who was sitting back and wasn’t growing inventory,” the team’s listings jumped by 25 percent, she said. 

4. Consider hiring a coach 

Both Figueroa and fellow specialist Therese Antonelli, broke-owner of Moving the Mitten Real Estate Group, said that contracting a mentor had done miracles for improving the association and responsibility of their groups. 

5. Perhaps, specifically, a recruiting coach

Antonelli said some of her team’s “below-productivity agents” likely won’t be able to weather the down market ahead. It’s more important than ever, she said, for her team to snag new talent. A recruiting coach she hired has been “life-changing” in that respect.

6. Because recruiting is key

Figueroa, too, said her team is “now accepting the reality that we have to be recruiting. We constantly have to be attracting new talent,” she said.

7. Hold accountability sessions

When deals are falling into your lap, as has sometimes been the case for agents during the last couple of years, “accountability kind of falls to the wayside,” Antonelli said.

But Antonelli has changed this by creating accountability groups. Once a week, she said, team members meet for an hour in a room, “no drinks, no food and no cell phones allowed ” and discuss whether they are meeting their goals.

Toward the end of these gatherings, agents pair up in teams, and after that check in with one another consistently throughout the following week to hold each other responsible. 

8. Fire bad fits

Figueroa says one lesson she learned is to release team members who aren’t a good fit before they “explode in my face.”

Best to be upfront about what’s working and what’s not with team members and adjust the nature of their employment accordingly.