Data Helps Remote Agents Make Smarter Decisions that Improve Sales Productivity

An organization’s success depends on the ability of the individuals within it to consistently make – and implement – high quality decisions. For the real estate industry, the growing number of agents spending most of their time outside the four walls of their local brokerage offices presents a challenge: these agents are making hundreds of micro-decisions every day that will cumulatively impact the perception, production, and ultimately success of your brokerage.

Think of how often your impression of a company is impacted by the small decisions a customer facing, front-line employee makes in the course of their day-to-day job: the attitude of the airline gate agent, the attention to detail and workmanship shown by the team installing new windows in your home or the helpfulness of a receptionist at your children’s pediatrician.

Many decisions with the greatest impact on a brokerage’s long term success are those made by individual agents operating remotely and responding to circumstances as they arise, without management input.

That reality of an increasingly remote workforce requires objective, data-driven tools that allow agents to operate remotely 90% of the time while maintaining managers’ visibility into their activity to ensure smart decision-making in the field.

Here’s a simple calculation to consider: depending on their production level, each of your agents are likely to make between 25 and 200 micro-decisions every day, each one of which will materially, and cumulatively, impact the perception (and ultimately the success of) of your company. For a brokerage with 10 agents, that results in between 250 and 2,000 critical micro-decisions every day, decisions like:
Will I be pleasant and helpful to the client on the other end of the phone?
Will I use the approved talking points for this kind of lead, or will I deviate from the script?
Will I respond to a hot lead today or leave it until tomorrow?
Should I check this number against required Do-Not-Call lists before calling?

Get most of these decisions right and your brokerage can win more business and ensure success. Get most of them wrong and you can’t.
This makes understanding what your agents are doing when they are away from the office 90% of the time exceptionally important. Getting these on-the-fly decisions right is mostly about three things:

1) Hiring the right people. All the training and management best practices in the world can’t help an uncooperative team of low performers.

2) Training your agents effectively and provide the tools and resources they need. Excellent managers with no access to reliable, real-time data won’t have the insight to deliver effective support or know what resources their team needs to improve. Furthermore, managers won’t be able to quantify the best practices of their high-performing agents and replicate their success.

3) Manage agents to clear, established performance standards. Setting ambitious but realistic goals for the quarter or the year is impossible without objective, accurate data collected from the source, rather than second-hand through manual CRM systems. Consistently and fairly rewarding top performers will help your brokerage retain talent, while relying too heavily on inconsistent gut instinct will send your top performers to your competitors.

Managers can’t continue to rely on out dated practices and succeed in the modern real estate market. Remote agents need to operate on the fly to stay competitive, but that doesn’t mean managers have to give up all visibility.

Gryphon’s sales intelligence tools make managing your remote agents effectively easy by placing in-depth analytics in the path of every call they make, allowing for the real-time collection and analysis of activity data.