Priorities are things that are most important. Successful people identify their priorities and spend the bulk of their time working on them. As the leader of a real estate office, do you know your most important priorities?
Most leaders immediately jump onto some urgency in their rental or sales departments. If low on sales, they say that making sales is the most important priority. In the short term this is correct. Survival is a most important priority.
In the long term, however, we need to set priorities that go way beyond survival. It is a given that we need to make sales, but how you make those sales is the difference between effective and ineffective leaders.
Many leaders were once great salespeople, but as leaders they make great salespeople. What do great salespeople do when the sales department is low on sales? They go and make sales. In the short term your company will survive if you do this, but in the long term you will build a company that is dependent on your effort. This is not a business; it is a job. Make your company dependent on you and you have created a job for yourself, not a business.
For the typical leader, the top priority is to try and wring as many sales out of the sales team as possible. Despite that fact that their sales teams are quite often filled with mediocre performers, these leaders seem to feel that this is as good as it's going to get and so they persist in trying to get non-performers to perform. When that fails, as it most often does, these leaders go and make sales themselves. They then complain that they cannot find good people.
This is true: if you won't go out and look for good people you will never find them.
Ask most leaders if they are hiring at the moment and most will say 'No'. But ask these same leaders if they need more listings and sales and they will say 'Yes'. If you want more sales, it stands to reason that you need more salespeople. This is why effective leaders put hiring at the top of their priorities list.
It takes time to design, implement and test a marketing program designed to attract winners to your company. It takes time to qualify applicants to sort out those who have a chance of becoming winners. It takes much more time to train those people so that they become winners, and even more time working with them so that they produce CONSISTENT results.
Yes, it's time consuming, but the rewards are great - a team of winners who each produce fees in excess of $250,000 per annum regardless of market conditions. These people are a joy to work with.
Compare this to the outcome of not putting these actions high on your priorities list: by default you develop a team of mediocre performers who shirk doing the actions that will make them winners. They won't train - "Been there, done that!" - they complain, they don't think YOU are doing enough to bring listings into the agency.
If you think finding and developing winners is time consuming, try getting great results from mediocre performers. It saps your energy. It tires you. You lose faith in the possibility of developing winners. You give up, as has most of the industry.
Why do you think many real estate business owners believe that their rental departments pay the bills - they are the 'bread and butter' - while sales are the 'cream'? They say such things because they have given up on developing sales departments full of winners producing consistent levels of sales.
It's not that you can't find good people, but to do so requires time. You must also elevate finding and developing winners to the top of your list of priorities.
It's rewarding work. Let's do it!
Gary Pittard
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