[Inside Whissel Realty] Lead Sources and Lead Flow with Rachel Choo

Here on Real Estate Team os, we're going inside Whissel Realty and you've already met and learned from founder and team leader Kyle Whissel, Chief Operating Officer Chris Vandervock, and Director of Operations Shannon Yousefi. Now you'll meet and learn from Director of Sales Rachel Chu, who went from school teacher to inside sales agent to Director of Sales of the number one team in San Diego and consistently a top team in California, in the country and in all of Exp Realty. Among the many things you'll learn from Rachel here in this conversation, we're are their top lead sources and how agents get access to those the four different quartiles that agents can land in bronze, silver, gold and platinum. What those stages mean and how you move between them. How they set sales goals, track pipeline and adjust their training. The three main topic buckets of agent training, as well as why and how we need to train agents on one of the most important keys to success, emotional regulation. Here's a fantastic conversation with Director of Sales Rachel Chu as we go inside Whissel Realty only on real Estate Team os.

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Rachel, I'm really excited for this conversation. Thanks so much for sitting down with me.

Absolutely. I'm excited to be here.

Cool. Well, our opening question always is what's a must have characteristic of a high performing team?

I love this question and I think there's multiple correct answers and you know, a lot of places you could go with this. But ultimately, in my opinion, it's a mix of having really clear expectations and alignment. And so how I kind of look at that is you can really align with a company or a team or a place and really like what they have to offer. But if you're not meeting the expectations and you're not meeting your own expectations of contributing to that team, it's probably not a great fit for you or the team. Conversely, if you, you know, are just checking the boxes and you can meet these expectations, but you don't align with the core values or the financial opportunities that the team provides, you know, you're not feeling fulfilled either. So it's that blend to me of having an understanding. This is my role, this is what's expected of me. And I understand also the bigger picture, the alignment, the vision of this Company. And I myself can see myself, you know, there and being excited about that. So I think it's the marriage of those two things.

Love it. I love the way that you broke that down. And I think the biggest challenge in it, of course, is that people are interesting and dynamic and hard to.

Hard to understand.

Sometimes people will put up a different front, especially in a. I want to be a part of this. You know, I'm just thinking of like, you know, who we hire, whether staff side or agent side or whatever. So it's partly communication, the team's ability to communicate. This is who we are. This is what we're about to attract the right types of people. The ability to vet it out, the ability to get past people answering questions in a way that they're giving you what they think you want to hear and all these other things, like, it's. That's why it's so hard.

It's an art, you know, the recruiting and the negotiation part of I want to attract you, but I also want, you know, you to be intrigued enough to come to the next step. And I want to be transparent. And I think leading with that, transparency so people can decide if they align with you ultimately is what will, you know, make people happy to be there and stay.

Yeah. What is the director of sales role, scope, mission, purpose? How do you know you're being successful? Take that wherever you want to go.

Yeah, absolutely. So my biggest goal is always is, you know, to operate within our yearly goal. What's our vision track of our vto, of what's our sales goal and how do we get there? And so there's a lot of different ways that that plays out into, you know, looking at numbers of how are we performing on a micro level, how are we performing overall? You know, what is our sales numbers look like and what is our recruiting look like? Are we retaining agents? Are the agents who are here happy are promote? Are we providing feedback to agents and helping them grow? So holistically, I'm looking at the whole picture. Inside sales or outside sales agents. What is our production like and how can I help make it better is really the main scope. And then you can break it down into all those other arms of, you know, inside sales, the sales agents themselves, recruiting, training, education, you know, numbers, reviews, one on ones, and how does that play out? And so while I may not do all of those things actively, I have a hand in making sure that those things are running appropriately so we can hit our sales goals.

Cool. And it's ownership over all of those functions. As well.

Yeah, it's a pretty big scope. Yeah, it is. It's exciting though.

Yeah. Describe the team that works alongside you, like directly your team within this larger organization, because that's a lot of ground to cover for one person.

Totally, absolutely. So we have our recruiting arm, which is also some of the agents on our team. So they help recruit for us, and they're active agents. We have Katie, who's our in house, our head of agent development and training, and so she runs all of our trainings, our ongoing education for agents. And then we have Tad, our head of inside sales, and so we kind of make up the sales team. We also have Aaron, who's our database manager and helps us run the back end of our portals and keep things up to date in our CRM. And so together we kind of handle all of those things.

Cool. And how did you come up through the organization? Were you the first person to have this role or was it filled before? Why did this make sense for you? Just talk about your path into Whissel to director of sales.

Absolutely. So I actually started out, my first career was an elementary school teacher, which I loved, but I knew I couldn't do it long term. Love the kids, love education, but was experiencing a little burnout. And so I knew I needed to, you know, maybe just volunteer with kids and not make that be my livelihood. So I transitioned into real estate. And my first job was with Whissel, and my job was an acquisitions agent with Zillow. At the time when Zillow was buying houses, I don't know if you remember, there was a period of time where they were, you know, purchasing homes. And so my job was to convince sellers that they should pay Zillow a, you know, 6 to 10% service fee to sell their home instead of selling it with a traditional agent at maybe a 4 to 6% service fee. So it was a great entry to sales. I learned so much about overcoming objections and how to build rapport with clients and customers and get those sales. And I was, you know, fortunate enough to receive some national recognition, you know, in my spot there for acquisitions. And that really helped me grow and to understand, you know, real estate sales and making those connections and talking to people. And so that evolved and I became an isa. When we parted ways with Zillow, they weren't buying houses anymore. I started to work as an inside sales agent at Whistle and then kind of, you know, promoted my way up, built an inside sales team, grew that, and then when the opportunity came up, was able to be promoted to head of all over sales.

Cool. I don't mean this as flippant or disrespectful as it might sound, but what is it like working with kids and parents versus working with a team of agents?

You know, people are still people at the end of the day. And the great thing I think for me is there's so much stress when you're working, you know, when you're alone with 30 children that in a role like this where you're responsible for a lot, it doesn't compare to the stress of, you know, 35 year olds and their parents and those expectations. And so it set a really good foundation for me to be able to emotionally regulate myself through any sort of challenge. So in the perspective is it helps everything else seem a lot easier to me. So when other people might be afraid or worried, it's like, well, I can go to the bathroom whenever I want now. So I'm not, you know, beholden. So it's, it's definitely a perspective thing. But you know, people are people. At the end of the day, we're all trying to manage emotions, help people grow. And it's a lot of, a lot of the skills are very transferable and applicable to what I'm doing now.

Cool. I love the language of emotional regulation and I just love for you to, to describe a little bit more about that because I certainly know people in this industry that we love who would benefit from more emotional regulation. Challenge, opportunity, benefit. When did you become consciously aware of this and is it any part of your agent training?

I love this question and I wasn't expecting the conversation to go this way, but I think, I think it's an impactful thing to talk about. I think a lot of times in this industry specifically it is very much like a roller coaster. Right. For agents especially and you know, you have your income come in and out and you're, you know, you're not in that steady paycheck. And a lot of us as team leaders or people who run teams are helping agents manage their own emotions, helping agents manage their clients emotions. And emotional regulation actually becomes a huge piece of why I think some agents are successful and some aren't. Because it's difficult. It's not a steady, you know, show up to my accounting job and I put in my numbers and I get paid the same. And there's a lot of different challenges and jobs that agents have to tackle. So I understand why that's such a, an issue for a lot of people because it's a challenging job and it challenges your own emotions. So it is actually part of our training. Um, so you know, having goal setting to understand your own. Why, why do you want to do this? If you're not grounded in understanding your role or your purpose for wanting to do this job, it can be really easy to spiral when things don't work out. Part of that training is understanding who to ask for, for help and having leadership, having ment come from a grounded place. You know, we talk all the time about how nothing's an emergency. You know, we're not saving lives, we're not the ambulance. Most real estate transactions are real estate. Right. So reminding people of urgency versus, you know, what's it, what's an emergency versus urgency and having those conversations. So emotional regulation, super important. And a lot of that goes into understanding the scope of your job, what you can control, knowing what you can't control and practicing those tactics to help you ground yourself.

Yeah, it's key to success in so many different situations. But there is a uniquely emotional. I think that's actually probably the agent's one of the agents highest values, especially in a highly like in a place like Whissel Realty Group where so much of so many of the things that they have to worry about or work on or whatever if they were operating solo, you've designed for and built around. So this idea of being present with clients in an emotional situation, sometimes it's excitement, sometimes it's not. It's the exact opposite, like, oh my gosh, I wish we didn't have to sell this house for any of a variety of reasons. I think that ability to be present and be more emotionally aware of yourself, but also of the situation that you're in and kind of manage and regulate is like a really high value in a leveraged agent position.

It is, absolutely. And it becomes more important in a sales situation where you don't have a product to lean on. Right. Like if you don't, you know, you're selling knives or washing machines or you know, windows or anything, even a high ticket sale sale, you can lean on your product. But if you're an agent, you know, you're selling how you present yourself, your confidence, your empathy, your ability to relate to people to your point, whether they're excited or they're going through something stressful. And so teaching agents and helping agents work through, hey, how do you recognize when somebody is, you know, either really excited or not and how do you be their guide really? You know, you're not so much of a salesperson, but you're their, their guide. And if you think of yourself that way, it can kind of help you maintain that groundedness that is needed in order for that client to trust you and in order for you to get deals done and build that healthy relationship with them.

Yeah, really good. You just introduced one of the zones I was ready, willing and able to go into, which is the training side of it. I know that you have a team member now who will be part of this Inside the Team series who does a lot of that really directly. But I'm sure there was a point at which you were probably doing that and or supporting it. Like how do you think about agent training? You know, group, small group, one on one, cohorts of people. Let's start there. Like, how do you structure training inside the organization and what does that look like? Maybe over the years that you've been with the team.

Yeah. And it's changed a lot, which is the truth. Right. We're always iterating, we always are trying to find new ways to do things.

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I think ultimately I like to think of training in kind of a few buckets, right. You've got your, you got your building rapport and you know, converting leads. You're converting leads into clients, right? That's, that's one bucket. And now once they're a client, how do I get this client to transaction? And now once I'm in the transaction, how do I run the transaction? And so there's multiple sales hats, if you will, that you're putting on depending on what stage that client is in. You know, are you converting lead to a client, client to a transaction, transaction to closing, and so you Want to make sure that any training touches on all of those things. You know, how to convert, start that relationship, how do you next step it once you're in that relationship? And now once we have the house, what do I skills and negotiation and contract knowledge, Do I need to close it? And so ultimately we want to make sure that our training program, our mentorship program, checks all of those boxes so agents are able to feel like they have a comprehensive understanding of a real estate sales cycle.

Cool. You mentioned mentorship alongside training. Talk about the mentorship program and how it intersects with more formal, structured training.

Yeah, absolutely. So typically there the our new agents will go on a two week boot camp is what we kind of call it, where we'll go through tactical real estate skills, all of the things they need to know with our systems, our tools, our processes, the whistle way of doing things, our value propositions. And then after that two week boot camp, they're paired with a mentor for their first one, two or three transactions, depending on how many transactions they've done previously. And that mentor's job is to shadow their appointments. They can shadow your appointments. So you're doing that shadowing together and their job is to walk you through those first three contracts and so you're able to learn how to negotiate and now they're there for you. So you have that foundation and you're making sure that you're getting your client across the finish line.

Cool. This is going to sound cliche, but in most mentorship, whether formal or informal, that I've been a part of on either side of it, mentor, mentee, I think most mentors would say I got as much out of it as my mentee did. But what is your qualification for and what is the incentive for someone to be a mentor to a new agent?

Yeah, and we've tried, we've tried a couple different iterations of this and it will probably continue to evolve as we always are, trying to learn and grow. But one of the things on our team, to even be on our team, we live and die by our core values. And so I know a lot of companies, it's just a cheesy saying that's on a wall or no one refers to it or you know, it's maybe in a job description, but we refer to our core values weekly, if not daily with shout outs. And it's a huge part of how we run our business. And one of those core values is come from contribution. And so to be on the team, you know, we've had great producers who I've unfortunately cut because maybe they weren't living up to those core values. And that's a hard decision to make. But ultimately, the people on our team are people who are happy to contribute and want to contribute. And so when we have a whole sea of people who enjoy giving back and giving that feedback, it helps everybody grow with it. And so that's the base level. Yes, we compensate them too, so they're not working for free. But the mentality of wanting to contribute is a huge part of being on our team. And if you don't like doing that, you're probably not a fit for our team anyway. So we start with kind of that basis. Then the rest of that is they're getting a 10% clip of their first 1, 2, or 3 deals for helping with that.

Cool. As we record this at the end of the summer, releasing in October. Ish. We're still, like, in the very earliest days of a lot of changes to the buy side of the business. Talk about what the past few months have looked like for you, essentially leading a team of agents into the earliest stages of this change. What are some of the cliffs you had to talk people down from? How are you all thinking about it? Loosely. But then also, have you maybe formalized some training around it to date?

Yeah, that's a great question and very relevant to now. The biggest thing, you know, in any state of change is we want to make sure that people feel confident above all else. So before we can even get into training and the changes, do our agents feel confident in the value that they can provide, in the value that the team that, you know, they're on and how to explain and articulate that value to consumers? So first and foremost, that's always part of our training. That's part of our core, you know, business is making sure people are comfortable. So when you start with that foundation of confident, you know, emotionally regulated people to go back to that topic, training for something new or a new hiccup becomes a lot easier. And so we're lucky that overall it hasn't been as tumultuous, I think, for our team. We purposely shielded our team from a lot of the changes and purposely didn't do any trainings actually until the beginning of August because so much was up in the air. And we actually had an agent say, how come we have. I haven't talked about this. I've seen so much about it in the news, and I feel like other teams are doing trainings and we're not. And, you know, we came out and specifically said because until something's finalized, it's just taking your eyes off the goal. So we chose, actually, we opted to wait, really, until the changes were formalized, final and in the mls, really, to say, okay, now that we know exactly what it's going to be. Cause it's changed, you know, multiple times throughout the summer. Now we can train on this. So maybe a little counterintuitive, but we chose to wait. And that, I think, helped our agents not think about it so much and fixate on changes. So that was part of the strategy. And then additionally, how do you script around it? I think scripting is a huge practice for us. You can tell people in theory, hey, talk about this or keep it positive, but how? What do I actually say? And so scripting and role play of those situations is a huge part of being on our team. We do it every week, we do it daily, we do it weekly in different formats. So, hey, here's a bunch of doing it right outside this door. So we have. It's like, hey, here's some ideas of different ways that you could go about this. And how I prefer to train is to always give people options, because how I might say it in my personality might be different than somebody else. So here's a couple options of ways to frame this. Ways to talk about it with talking points, with bullet points. Some are more formalized, some are more of an idea. So that way you're appealing to all different kinds of agents. Learning styles and then giving them the opportunity to practice and get feedback on it is huge. And I love that style because scripting only works if the other person has the script, and usually they don't. Right. So giving people talking points. Here are some ways to handle the objection without a traditional script has worked really well for our team.

Yeah, I like that a lot, too. Specifically, just scripting. I think of it as, like, guardrails or guidelines or bullet points. Like, it needs to be in the spirit. These are the facts.

Right.

Everything else, own it. Like, there's something, in my experience, there's something in that process of taking the guidelines or the guardrails or whatever, staying within them, but making them your own.

Absolutely.

Kind of cliche language. But, like, if you don't make it your own a. I don't know that you understand it well enough to be in conversation with a client and to have them see you, hear you, and believe you as you're speaking your own words.

Absolutely. Yeah. And that's because otherwise, it's, like you said, it's disingenuous. It feels blocky. And so people have to take that ownership. And that's, you know, a stance that we've had with all of our trainings.

Yeah. What are, what are some of the kind of the bullet points or guidelines or frameworks in this vein of communicating value to a buyer such that we might figure out a compensation situation that, like, doesn't involve it coming from the sell side as it has historically.

Yeah. I think the biggest piece of success that any agent can have when talking to clients about this is actually less about the words and the scripting they're using and more focused on their tonality. So, you know, if you look at. There's some really cool studies that have been done about how people receive and perceive communication. And I think, I believe, and you don't quote me on this, but I know there's been a couple studies and the results have been the same. The one from like the 50s, and they redid it again more recently. And interestingly enough, the results were very similar. And 55% of the way that we communicate is through body language, how close we are. Right. Visually, what we can see about 35% is our tonality, and then 7ish percent is our words that we say. So if we know that going in, we need to focus a lot more on our body language and our tonality. And so prefacing our training with talking to buyers about, hey, how you're gonna pay us, or what this looks like the focus is a lot more there than, hey, say this word at this time, because that's how people are making a decision. So how are we standing or what environment are we talking about this in versus hey, let's just focus on the script. And I think that's one thing that we've done a little bit differently is, hey, let's talk about, maybe it's a better setting to do this in a coffee shop than in front, or, hey, maybe this is how we might want to present it with an upswing and asking questions about it versus, you know, just sending it online and hoping for the best. And so I think when you focus on the holistic picture of how does somebody receive information, any change is a lot easier to go over.

Yeah. It's funny, you made me think about something that probably a lot of teachers and definitely a lot of parents have said was like, listen, it's not what you said, it's how you said it. That's why we're having this conversation right now.

100%.

It's more of a corrective situation.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I feel like you all are probably very clear about the value prop of working with an agent on this team for a buyer. A, I'm sure you believe it, but go ahead and say that you do. And B, what are some of the unique values to a buyer of working with with an agent on the Whissel Realty Group team?

Absolutely. I love this question. So there's tangibles and intangible benefits that all buyers are going to get from working with our team or from any, you know, high performing team. And one thing that we have in our offer suite is our VIP buyer program. And so we want to incentivize buyers to work with us and give them more than just, you know, hey, you get to work with me, I'll show you houses. And so, you know, we've named that.

And there is a value to that. It's not very unique.

It's not very unique, no. So when clients work with us, you know, we're able to provide them this opportunity of, hey, you can be one of our VIP buyers, meaning you're going to get a free moving truck and actually for life. So you're able to move your things. We have three moving trucks and hey, if in the future after you close, you need to move a couch or something, just call us up, we'll see if we can rent it to you. So we want to offer that service to them as lifetime customers and to not have to deal with U Haul or, you know, renting that out and dealing with all of that. So that's one thing that people love. We also have a love it or leave it guarantee. So if somebody doesn't love their home that they buy in the first year, let's say their neighbors actually are crazy or something happens and they regret, you know, they have buyer's remorse, we'll sell it for free, we won't charge them a commission. So they have that peace of mind. Yeah, we include, you know, home, home warranties, things like that. You know, our strategic negotiation experience I think is one of the intangibles. But when you've negotiated collectively thousands of deals, there's not much that we haven't seen. So you can rest assured knowing as a client, hey, there is no situation that we couldn't negotiate or we wouldn't know what to do because of our history. You know, we have a bunch of reviews, we have tons of five star reviews and we're constantly focused on the consumer experience, which is one thing that I would say sets up us apart. We send everybody a rating to Work with. We want to know what clients actually thought about working with our team. And when they give that feedback, we consistently review that in our weekly meetings. Hey, if we got a bunch of low scores, we're going to put on pot. Like, what do we need to change right now to help that? And so to us, the customer experience is everything. And, you know, being able to articulate that to a buyer and show them that is really powerful.

Yeah, a lot of really good bullets in that, in that rundown there. Slightly different topic. You mentioned lead sources earlier. I think one of the things that someone might be hearing from their agent population is I don't like these leads or this lead source isn't great. What I've heard from most operators and team leaders is that it really isn't about the source, it's about the way that we manage the whole situation.

Totally.

So I'd love for you to speak to that. Like, what are your primary lead sources? Do you train differently to different types of lead sources? Kind of who gets what? I'm sure you're kind of like bartering and negotiating.

Sure.

A lot of different things here. So. So take that wherever you prefer.

I love that. That's a multifaceted question. I want to hit on both of those points for our team leads. Specifically, we have moved to a lead team policy. So each agent on our team is a part of a lead team. And so what that means is rather than having all of our agents get team leads from various sources is they're hyper focused on either one source or one way of getting team leads. And so specifically what that looks like, our largest team is our Flex team, as we are a Zillow Flex team. And so we have agents who are taking leads from Flex and that is their main team lead source. We have our inside sales agents who are setting appointments for our outside sales agents, and the ISA team leads as one source. So we have a group of agents who go on those appointments at the ISA set. And then we have our OP City leads. We are one of the largest accounts in San Diego, so we're able to get a decent amount of lead flow from OP City. And so we have agents who are taking those OP City leads. And what we found is it really helps those agents dial in. They know the same, the scripting is the same for each one. We get to mastery faster than, hey, take this call from this one. And this one comes this way. And this person's had this experience, but this lead hasn't. And it's allowed us, the agents, the Comfort of knowing I know what the leads experience is, I know how to take these, I can convert these better. I have more confidence in understanding what's expected of me. And you know, it streamlined their process of, of working those leads and understanding how that happens.

Cool. Is there a graduation out of one into another or is it like okay, we have more opportunity from this lead source and we just got these five new agents out. So all five of them are going to. Yeah, because there's a lot moving parts.

There is, there's a lot of moving parts. And so typically we, what I tell all agents and typically is our standard is you typically will have to close one self generated deal before we'll put you on a lead team when you join. With the exception of if we have a very high lead flow month and we have allocation and we need people to take them, great, you get lucky. But I'd always rather, you know, under promise and over deliver than say hey, we're giving you leads right away. So the standard on our team is typically you need to close one self gen deal. You know, we're venture capitalists, we invest in you. Once we, you know, have confidence that you're able to deliver and once you've had a closing, we know you know what you're doing, great, let's turn you on to lead flow. And typically people understand that explanation and like that. So, so we'll add them once we have that. And that's very much determined by seal seat allotment, by how many leads are coming in, what's our projection and performance. So it's not about how long somebody's been here or you know, they just always are on this team. You know, we have scorecards to look at and if you're not hitting certain metrics on those scorecards, but we have an up and coming agent who is, you know, doing all the things they need to do. They're setting appointments, they're showing promise in their metrics. They will be able to take that seat if somebody else who's not performing. So it incentivizes the team to always, you know, be at the top of their game. And they know that it's merit based not just who has ever been here has that spot.

Yeah, I like the graduation process very much. When you're setting goals, there's so many. You just triggered for me something I was going to ask earlier which is, you know, when you talked about setting an annual goal and then of course you have this quarterly process through EOS to kind of look at pace against Goal and all these types of things. There are so many variables that go into hitting that goal. I assume that it's a general production goal for the entire team. And of course, some of the levers are, we could bring on more agents, or we could build into the agents that we have and get 10% more deals out of all of them, which would be this huge lift. Or let's just hold all those numbers, conversion numbers the same. We could just invest more in a couple of our best lead sources or. But some of those tap out or max out in different ways. How are you factoring those things in together to set a collective sales goal for a year, which is. And then you have the market. I mean, certainly it's easy for people to blame the market for why they aren't where they want to be, but I feel like a team like yours probably figures it out and persists and plays all the different levers to get to where you want to go. And I. And I think that's gonna be increasingly true going forward. So anyway, I know that wasn't really.

A specific question, but I feel like.

You have things you wanna share.

No, I'd be happy to touch on that. I think when you're to your point, there are so many pieces that go into an annual, you know, a big sales goal like that. And so having micro goals for each piece of that make it trackable, make it easier to know are we on track or are we not? And so part of that looks like, what's our recruiting goal for the year? Because we know some months we're going to have more agents, some that we're not. You know, if you have it too specific, it becomes too much of a roller coaster. So what's the general. How many people do we want to add? What's our general retention rate? What does that look like? And how many do we need to have by the end of the year to maintain our goals? And so each month as we're looking at our recruiting classes, we can tweak that or know, hey, we're actually doing okay, or hey, we've lost more. We really need to do more of a push here. So we're looking at that as a one track of getting our goals. We also want to look at that are what. Where is the disbursement of where do closings come from throughout the year? We typically have a lot heavier months in the summer where we know, hey, if we didn't maybe hit our monthly target to transaction in January or February, we know we can kind of make that up generally in August or July or whatever that looks like. And so as we have our yearly goal, we also have monthly target transaction targets that we're looking at to make sure, okay, are we we around in that vein of where we should be to make sure that we hit that 900, which is for us what we're looking to do at the end of the year.

Cool. When you're looking at dashboards, to know that we're in a good place, hey, we maybe missed the actual transaction number this month, but these are three or four leading indicators that make me feel confident about the next three months ahead or whatever. What's on your dashboard? What are you paying the most attention to when you're going into a meeting with the other leaders in the organization? What are the, some of the numbers that you're bringing in? What are some of your key leading indicators and things that people want to know from your piece of the business?

Totally. So we want to look at agent engagement, I guess is maybe the best way to put it. Are agents adding self generated leads to the pipeline? And so we're looking at that every week. How many total self generated leads are we adding? Our agents, you know, doing open houses, are they working their sphere business? Are they adding people, you know, are they feeding that funnel and doing lead generation? So, so we look at that weekly. We also look at how many appointments did we meet every week as a wholesales organization. So both from the inside sales side, the outside sales side, how many appointments were met each week? And we know we have targets that we need to hit in order to see that leading indicator turn into pendings. How many pendings did we have this week? How many did we have? Any lost listings or lost transactions, what does that look like? So we're constantly looking at that. We also try to track reasons why things, things fell out. So if we know, hey, a lot of people have fallen out over, you know, an inspection, hey, we should probably do a retraining on how to talk to buyers about the inspection. What, what's the language to use? How do we set proper expectations so we don't have so many of these cancellations? Right. So we're looking at things, you know, on a macro level of just, you know, appointments, things like this. How many pendings do we have? What does this look like? And hey, if we're seeing a dip, that tells us, okay, let's put the magnifying glass on. Hey, if we have a dip in pendings, oh, looks like we had a dip in med appoint. The Previous month. It all tracks. So we're looking at those regularly.

Yeah. I love this essentially tip you offered around. Take a look at what's happening in the dashboards and do your training based on that. Speaking very generally here, very generally, we have trainings every this day and that day from this time to this time. I'm responsible for the training. Gosh, what haven't I trained on before or what haven't I trained on in a while? I just show up and I give a training. And I think there are two interesting things about what you offer there. One is that the numbers tell us what we need to be training on. And then two, overcoming the fear of like, we already trained on this, so maybe we don't need to train on it again. Like, I think we can say the same thing five times in three different ways in a three month period and still be engaging and effective.

Absolutely. And I think I, Joe, I part of it. You know, I always like to use humor, but I, but I think the agents were really sick of all of the NAR updates. We had multiple company meetings in a row where we were focused on scripting, on going through the contract line by line. How do you explain it? And by the third meeting, you know, you gotta make a joke at, hey, I know you're excited for another one of these. But by letting em know who feels like they have mastery, nobody raises their hand. Cool. It reminds everybody. All right. Yeah, you're right. I should listen to this. So I think just being really real about, hey, we're gonna do this over and over again because, because we want to make sure you understand and you know, again, when you have that expectation, people understand why they generally are more on board with some repetition.

Yeah. When you feel like it's been a really good week or a really good month, besides hitting the key numbers, like, what else is going on? Like, what gives you that feeling and how fleeting is it?

That's a great question. I think there's. Well, I know there's. There's multiple facets to consider when you're looking at how is a sales organization successful? And yes, we spoke a lot of. Some of that is we need to hit our. We have numbers and metrics that KPIs that need to be hit in order to hit company goals. Um, so that's part of it. But the other part is some of those more intangibles that are, you know, culture. How is everybody feeling? What's the morale like of the group? Are people happy to be a part of this? Are they feeling burnt out. And so one thing that makes me that's you know, less focused on the numbers is how many shout outs did the team get throughout our, our company meetings or in our wins platform on slack? Are we having a lot of wins or we're shouting each other out and we're seeing a lot of success? Right, That's a great testament to morale. Um, are people showing up? What's our attendance like to certain trainings and meetings? Are people feeling burnt out? Do we need to maybe reach out a little bit? So for me a really good week obviously besides hitting, you know, numbers and, and all of that is how are we interacting? How are we, you know, giving each other some love and some shout outs and, and what the is that look like?

Is any of that tracked? Like are you tracking attendance? Because I feel like this general category that you offered is like these are the intangibles that allow us to be successful and not just keep coming back with sticks. You know, there are carrots all throughout the environment if the environment's built well and you offered one of them, which is like people self reinforcing the positive aspects of the culture by shouting each other out in slack or in meetings or these other things. But some of it can be tracked. How much of the this non sales performance stuff do you track?

Yeah, that's a good question. So as far as shout outs, no, we don't have like a tally of how often that looks like that's a little more intangible. But we do have attendance metrics for our expectations for our agents and we kind of talked about that, you know, expectations being a big piece of what makes a team successful. And so for us we do have expectations for our agents that are tracked and that changes depending on where they're at in their production level. So we work on a, what's called a quartile system. So we have agents, bronze, silver, gold and platinum. And so what that looks like is your close. The number of closings that you have On a rolling 90 days dictates what quartile you're in. So if you have less than two closings in a 90 day window, you're in bronze. And we expect you to be at more of those trainings, more of those role plays. We expect you to be hosting more open houses every month than an agent who's in gold or platinum. And so we do track attendance for our role plays for our monthly or our weekly huddles for how many open houses people are doing for showing up to the in person Role plays versus the phone. Role plays. Our company meetings, we track attendance for all of those things, and we have metrics that are posted to so agents can know are they on track or off track.

Cool. And those in those levels, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, are very clear. From day one, I know where I am, I know where I want to go. I know how to get there.

And they're. And it's great. Yes. It's. It's very. It's laid out upfront. And the cool thing is it allows newer agents or agents who are struggling. Hey, we're going to give you more support weeks. You know, we want you to come to these things because it'll get you to production. And, hey, when you have seven escrows going at once, we know you don't need to be at every. You're in the field, and we want to allow that time. So it kind of gives you that tiered structure of support. So those who are really busy and crushing it with deals, hey, we're not expecting you to be at every, you know, company event or every training we have, because what you're doing is enough. We know that, you know, you've got the skills and your deals show that. So that kind of tiered expectations really works for our agents and helps give support and freedom when it's warranted.

Yeah. I mean, clarity and having a path is, like, super helpful.

Yeah.

What are you looking forward to in 2025? I know the EOS system has a whole system and a process for this, but I would assume that someone like you has her own list of. These are some of the things that I'm really excited about or I'm going to find the right time to kind of of pursue or push forward or to introduce to the team. Like, what are you interested in and excited about for the year ahead?

Yeah, that's a great question. I feel like, you know, I've been with the team since 2019, and we've evolved so much from, you know, a very small amount of agents to now we have over a hundred agents. And the growth has been really exciting. And for the past few years, it's felt like we're really constantly revamping things and pushing things to make things okay. And within the last year, I feel like we've gone from okay to really good. And so the. The jump that's needed to go from really good to great is so much smaller than okay to good. And where I'm most excited is we've made so much progress in the quality of our training, our Recruiting our expectations that we have for agents, our culture, where things aren't, you know, an emergency, where they felt a lot like that in the past. So what I'm excited for is to, to work on mastery instead of, you know, just overhauling processes or overhauling, you know, here's how we do one on ones or X, Y or Z. Hey, now let's really double down on the training aspect. And how do I work with Katie, our trainer, to make our trainings even better? How do we streamline that even more? How do we go more in depth on those things that, you know, we're doing at a good level right now, but how do we expand on that? So the training piece obviously with the teaching background is really exciting to me and that, that's, that's one of the parts of my job that I like the most and I, I get the most joy out of seeing agents grow and, and, and move through those barriers and, and do the transactions that they want to do. So I think really just doubling down on expanding our training offerings and niching those even more than we already have is gonna be a really big game changer for us.

Awesome. Well, I'm excited for you. I'm gonna be talking with Katie. That episode is gonna be coming out next and I wish you continued success in that. I hope you have a great year ahead of. It was a pleasure to spend this time with you. Before I let you go though, I would love to know what it looks like for you to invest time in resting, relaxing and recharging or in learning, growing and developing. When you say like this is my time for this, what are you doing?

I love that I am a big reader. So to answer kind of, I guess, both of those questions, I love reading books. I've always loved books. So whether I'm reading for fun, I'm reading like a fiction novel, or I'm reading maybe a self help book. That's both a way that I love growing and recharging, depending on what mode I'm in. So I'm looking forward to doing that. On the beach is my preferred location that I'm living here, so I love doing that.

It's not that far away, so you can probably get that when you need it.

Absolutely.

Cool. Well, thank you so much.

Yeah. Thank you, Ethan.

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