5 Key Team Leader Strategies to EXIT Production in 12 Months – Set Clear Expectations for Your Team

For the next article in our series about how team leaders can exit production in 12 months, I want to discuss expectations. One of the largest issues that real estate team leaders run into is setting vague sales goals with minimal direction and even less guidance. Micromanaging a sales person’s time and activities will drive away top talent and should be avoided. However, you need to make clear what is expected of them and regularly check to make sure your people are working towards it.

How to Set Expectations for Your Real Estate Team

As a real estate team leader, you have to both set clear goals for your agents and ISAs, and you have to hold them accountable for their progress towards those goals. Open and clear lines of communication is always the best and most productive route to go. That way, your ISAs and agents know what they need to accomplish, and you know where to expect them to be at different times.

For your new or underperforming sales people, I recommend building out a series of 30/60/90 day goals and expectations to ramp up their targets. That way, if they turn out not to be right for the job, you will know MUCH sooner than waiting the 6 months it typically takes for a real estate ISA or agent to ramp up their sales.

For your real estate sales people, this means tracking things like number of dials made, number of contacts made, contact to appointment ratio, number of appointments set vs. appointments converted—and having benchmarks for where they should be with each of them at each time mark.

Expect a Lot from Your Real Estate ISAs

As a real estate team leader who wants to exit production, you need to focus effort and expectations on your inside sales agents. One of the most important metrics to look at for them is: How many contracts or closings did they cause to happen?

Because real estate ISAs aren’t the ones actually showing homes, negotiating deals, writing offers, or spending time out in the field, you might think it’s unfair to judge them by this metric. But it’s not. At the end of the day, the reason for hiring an ISA is for them to directly cause contracts and closings to occur. As long as you can directly attribute how many contracts and/or closings were generated as a result of the ISA, then you can see how effective they are.

If your real estate ISA knows from the outset what is expected of them, it will give their targets over the first 30/60/90 days clearer purpose.

Inspect What You Expect

If you’re really serious about creating a top performing real estate sales team that will allow you to remove yourself from production, then you can’t only set expectations. You need to inspect what you expect.

What that means is “shadowing” your new hires or underperforming agents to make sure that they are hitting their goals and correctly implementing the training you’ve provided. And it’s not a one time thing. If you really want to build a rockstar team, you have to continue “inspecting what you expect,” coaching them through what’s working and what isn’t, and holding them accountable for the goals you’ve set. Even experienced agents and ISAs can benefit from getting that outside perspective, or even just another set of eyes and ears to help them further refine their skills.

Initially, as you are still involved in production, inspecting what you expect may result in more being on your plate. But trust me, it’s worth it. Because by the end of these 12 months, you’ll have an effective team that can produce enough volume of business for your real estate team without you even being involved in the day to day.

Track Your Key Metrics

If you want to see where your real estate team and business is heading, and how well everyone is meeting expectations as a whole, then you have to look at the leading indicators. Here are the most important ones to consider:

• Number of leads generated
• Number of contacts made
• Number of appointments set
• Number of appointments met
• Number of contracts signed

These key real estate metrics allow you to see how much business is currently in the door, how much is right outside the door, and what business is on the horizon. They also give you a good idea of how much successful effort your agents and ISAs are putting in to create more business for your company.

They are a crucial part of understanding how well your team is meeting the determined expectations.

After you hire the right people, setting and measuring clear expectations is the next key step towards removing yourself from production in 12 months. Keep an eye out for the next article in this series that will cover the next important strategy: training!

You’re not alone as a real estate team leader. We have training that can help! PLUS, our exclusive Ignite 2024 special offer is now LIVE until January 9th, 2024! 

You can access both our Conversion University Solo Bootcamp and Conversion University Teams programs for the lowest price you’ll see ALL year. 

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