How well should real estate business owners, CEOs, and managers get to know their sales team members? How important is getting to know your sales staff? What are the perks? If it is important, how do you go about it, and what boundaries should there be?
Knowing your sales team can make a huge difference for real estate business owners, managers, and team leads. The better you know them, the more successful the venture can be. In fact, via a recent Tony Robbins podcast, it’s the number one thing you can do. If it is that pivotal, the downside of failing to get traction in this area of your real estate business is equally as bad. Of course, this sounds like an uncomfortable task for some. It sounds a whole lot easier to just let staff churn and burn while they fuel your personal lifestyle with the revenues they bring in. So let’s dive into how bad, and how good it can get.
The Downside of Not Knowing Your Sales Team
What does ‘knowing your sales team’ even mean? It can apply to sales people in general, and to the individuals you pick to play on your own team. Things to know include:
- Their nature
- Personal strengths
- Weaknesses
- How they like to work, and not
- What energizes, or wears them out
- What motivates them
- Their aspirations
- Their fears
- How their personalities relate to their employers
Not being tuned into these factors can mean:
- Ineffective recruiting and hiring practices
- Poorly constructed incentive and compensation programs
- Unhappy staff
- High turnover rates
- Inability to retain great sales staff
- Higher labor and HR costs
- A less effective sales team than the competition
The Perks of Knowing Your Sales Team Better
Investing in getting to know your real estate sales staff can help in a number of ways. Those that excel in this area can expect many benefits, including:
- Highly effective recruiting and streamlined hiring
- Reduced HR, labor, and training costs
- Low turnover
- Getting the right individuals in the right seat on the bus
- Building trust
- Developing increased team loyalty
- Retention of the best sales people
- Empowering team members to excel and perform better
- Increased revenues and profit margins
- Competitive advantage
How Do You Get to Know Your Real Estate Sales Team?
Getting to know your sales team starts before they reply to job ads or you interview them. In fact, it should begin with analyzing the types of sales reps and people you want in your real estate business. Be meticulous in crafting your real estate job ads or choosing hiring channels.
The screening and interviewing process helps to filter out those you don’t want, while providing great insight into the finer parts of knowing the individuals you are bringing on. What are the things they are passionate about? What are their goals? What are their past experiences? Where are they from? What is their selling style? These are all great things to note, and to put in their file. Few new real estate business owners bother, but this is all part of what helps to win over the long term. It will help maximize the performance of each individual, as well as creating data sets for better hiring in the future.
Having teams connected on social media can be great. Their interconnection to each other helps strengthen the fabric of the team. They should all be on social, supporting the organization and its mission.
Team activities, small group activities, and even one on one sessions can help in better getting to know sales staff. This doesn’t even have to be expensive or exotic retreats. Going to events together, hitting the gym together, regular lunches, family picnics, and more can break down some of the formal office barriers and allow you to get to know people on a personal level, without the guard up.
This applies to more than your sales team. There is no reason this shouldn’t apply to your designs, PR people, processors, and more. This can be a scary prospect to real estate business owners that are not natural extroverts. It is worth trying to get to know people better. If it sounds like too much work for you, then delegate this to your HR and management team.
