“The Backbone of the Sales Funnel” with Shannon Youssefi [Inside Whissel Realty]

Here in episode three, inside Whissel Realty.

You'Re learning from a third generation real.

Estate agent turned listing manager turned listing and transaction coordination manager, now Director of Operations for the number one team in San Diego and consistently a top team in California, in the country and in all of Exp Realty. Our guest is Shannon Yousefi. Throughout this conversation you'll hear how that sales background informs the approach to operations. How moving from listings to transactions to operations overall and unifying the tech stack in that process became the backbone of their sales funnel. Ways that they're using that visibility into the sales funnel not just to improve lead conversion and sales but also to inform the whole process, to do storytelling with data and in a way inform. And you'll hear more of this too in episode four with Director of Sales Rachel Chu.

Inform.

What are we training on? What are we coaching on? What's broken in that sales funnel that we need to help agents with? You'll learn the three pieces of tech that their operations are built on. You'll also learn how that first VA that she hired became a 25 member international team and get tips for doing that yourself. This is a fantastic conversation with Director of Operations Shannon Yousefi as we go inside Whissel Realty. Only on real estate Team os.

No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team os, your guide to starting growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

Shannon, I am so glad that we're going to have this conversation. I love what you've built inside this organization, what you've all built collectively and I look forward to learning more about it by having a conversation with you.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah. So where we always start in these conversations is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. What comes to mind for you?

That's a good question. I would say having the right people in the right seats is at least has been key for us and also kind of what, what, what I would say is the right, when you say the right people like I would say it's really to do with like mindset and like their attitude. Like a having a growth mindset and surrounding yourself with other people, whether that be agents, admin staff, our international team, like people that want to do more and be better and like really have a good positive attitude towards that that I think is the most important thing because it solves all the other problems. Like when you know Issues come up, things like that. Like, it's like if you, if you have someone who wants to solve problems, who wants to do better, who wants to grow it, like all the other things kind of like take care of themselves with the right people.

It absolutely does. I was just as in my mind, what I'm trying to, I try to actively listen and then I sometimes I try to beat an idea up in my head. And like I couldn't come up with any exceptions to that. Like, that is so foundational because no matter what the issue is or no matter what the opportunity is, it's that, you know, let's discern a good idea, pursue it and stop if it doesn't work and keep going and make it better if it does.

Yeah.

And it all comes out of this essentially a growth mindset which covers a lot of ground. What was your path into Whissel Realty Group? Like, how did you find them? How did they find you? How did that go?

It's actually kind of funny. So I've actually been in real estate my entire adult life. I had no intention on getting into real estate, but I'm a third generation realtor, so my mom, my grandparents.

Inevitable.

Yeah. Well. And I plan on actually becoming an attorney when I was in college. And then I was working for my mom as her assistant back in Chicago. And that's kind of how I got into it was. It was like, you know, start as a part time job for me years ago and then discovered, oh, wow, I don't really want to go into the law. That's a lot of years of school. I can make a lot of money and be really successful and kind of achieve what I want to achieve in real estate without doing an additional, you know, all that education and stuff. Right. So that's, that's kind of my path to real estate in general. And then, uh, I moved to California five or six years ago. Um, took another job in another industry, was completely miserable, was not a good fit. Um, and then was looking like, okay, this is what I know it was. I was at, took a sales job doing like, it was not a good product. Basically. Like, I felt yucky. Yeah. It was like, felt like, like the customers, I would talk to them and I'm like, it's hard to sell.

Like if you don't believe in it, how is anyone else?

Exactly, exactly, exactly. And that's, that was my experience with that. So then I was like, no, I'm going to go back into real est. I want to work for someone else. I don't want to, you know, be a solo agent trying to figure it out in a new market, a new state, new everything, right? So I started doing research on, like, the biggest teams, the most successful teams, things like that in San Diego. And I had actually called in to the main, like, office line and I talked to some agent. He's actually not. He's not here anymore. But I had asked, like, do you guys have any admin roles available? Are you guys hiring at all? And he was like, well, I could pass along the message to, you know, the person that makes those decisions, but I don't think we're hiring for anything. I just didn't really get, like, much of an answer. Right. And then the very next day, there was a job posting that went up from Whistle and I was like, oh, my gosh, this is the universe. Okay, I'm going. So I applied. They, like, called me, like, you know, pretty quickly, and then here I am five years later. It was a good fit.

Nice. Were you in real estate sales? Initially, yes. So talk about the differ, because I feel like. Sorry to interrupt. I feel like there are a number of agents who are in the industry for any of a variety of reasons, and I feel like the growth of the team model in particular and the nature of the companies that are being built in real estate today. I've talked with a number of folks who are in essentially some version of an ops role because they always favored, as an agent, you have to be good at all the things. But when they looked at what they liked and what they didn't like, they really favored, like, systems, structure, process. And there are opportunities for those people that are outside of sales.

Yes, exactly. I started off as an unlicensed assistant back in Chicago and then became a producing agent, got my license, was actively selling real estate for several years. And then once. Once I moved here, I was like, no, I want to get back into that admin role again, mostly for just like, the. Especially being in a new market and things like that. I wanted the security of, like, you know, being able to learn and things. Like, I actually intended to get back into sales at some point, and then that didn't. That didn't happen. You know, it's a good opportunity. And I was like, no, I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay the admin role, right? Because I got, you know, promoted and that. We've got a really good structure here. But yes, so. And that's actually one of the things that I think really is kind of unique. Almost like a lot of People do come from an ops background, but a lot of times agents themselves are like, they have like a sales hat on, right? Where it's like they don't want to do all the paperwork. And that's part of the reason why real estate admin people have jobs. Right. Like, we need the agents just as much as they need us and we keep their head screwed on straight and all that stuff. Right. So it's very much a mutually beneficial thing. But I do think it's, it's a unique kind of skill set to have done both and done both at a high level and, and being able to understand and kind of marry those two things together in a way that they really need to be like connected.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, because at a minimum, empathy is based in understanding and the idea that you've been on both sides of that relationship and been in both of those seats allows you to serve them more effectively. Describe the director of operations role as it is today. Like just scope it a little bit. Like, what are your core responsibilities?

Yeah, so I oversee the people and the processes. Quite a bit of like our tech stuff too for basically all the positions that are outside of like sales and marketing mostly. So it started as like, I started actually when I took the job at Whissel. I started as a listing coordinator and then just like, you know, worked my, my position now didn't exist at the time. We didn't have that at the company. And it was something that we created as we grew and really had a need for. It started as like overseeing the listing management and transaction management departments and then kind of grew into, you know, like working with our in house photographers and our field coordinat. And then now it's really become much more of like I oversee the people and the processes for basically anything like leverage. Like so we provide leverage for the agents time, right. Where they can get more time back in their schedule to go sell more houses because that's what we really want them focused on. So I oversee the teams of people. We have like an agent concierge, we call them the ACE team. It's agent concierge experience. And it's basically like a group of people that do a bunch of admin work that's not specific to a listing or a transaction, but it's admin oriented things. So it makes it so that the agents don't have to hire an assistant like for a very, very long time until they get to, you know, a really high level of production. They have people that can help them put Together, you know, open house tours and booklets and things like that. Scheduling, showings, all that type writing offers. So I oversee that team listing and transaction management, and then also like our HR and kind of I liaise a lot with finance as well.

Okay, that's a lot of stuff. So who are you talking with every day? Who are you talking with? I talk with that person or that role or that function, like weekly. And then who are you checking in with monthly? Like, who are you? Like, these are the people I'm closest with every single day to. Like, I just check in with these people or I'm in a meeting with these people or this person or this role, you know, monthly.

So every day, definitely. Our coo, Chris, we work very closely together. There's a lot of things right now. Kind of what my role has grown into as time goes on is kind of working with the other departments and collaborating with them and helping them really operationalize the way that they. That they do stuff and their processes and things. So that's. I talk to Chris multiple times a day, every day. And that's something we work really closely together on as well as really the rest of the leadership team. That's. Those are like my main people that I talk to along with our. Our operations manager who oversees listing and transaction management. She overse the people that do that stuff on a weekly basis. I check in with our. Our ace team that, you know, assist our agents for, like, little mundane tasks. And then finance is more probably more like a monthly thing with our finance team and kind of looking at like all the numbers and the tracking and those things. Although I do actually close to every day. I do also oversee the. The commissions department, I guess you could say commission specialists are the people that make sure, you know, hey, are we paying people the right amount? Checking all the things that need to make the agents get paid, get paid quickly, all that good stuff. So I talked to that. The commission's people probably two, three times a week.

Okay, cool. Good breakdown. You mentioned you oversee some of the tech. What part of the tech is your world?

So one of the things that we. One of the actually first things that I did when I took on my new role was we had a lot of tech and we had a really cool systems and processes, but none of them talked to each other at all. And that was actually something that kind of naturally came about because I'm kind of just like a naturally curious person in general. So it was as I was listing manager, I, you know, the transaction managers, those two things we should Be using the same system and talking to each other. Right. But we didn't at the time. Right. So it was like, like discovering that just out of like, hey, how do you guys do this? Or what's the way? Like, what's the process for this? Or like kind of just asking questions kind of naturally like progressed into, oh, wow. We have a bunch of different things that are all kind of operating separately and will be a lot better and a lot faster and a lot EAS easier if we connected them together. So that's one of the main things that, that we did. I worked really closely with Chris on that. Is okay, when an appointment gets set, what. What needs to happen. And then as we move through the funnel, connecting it with the different departments that need to get involved because of where the client is in the process, all that good stuff. So I set up a lot of those things. It's kind of has turned into like the backbone of, of our whole sales funnel really.

Okay. So logistically you just started with the customer journey at some level and went step by step and said, okay, where does. Is. Does the data match in these two different systems? Can we unify them? Like, go give me another layer of detail and a pass on that. Cause I'm sure it's something that everyone struggles with at some level. So I'd love to know kind of how you got it to its.

Yeah.

Current state.

So one of the things that we set up basically is we have like a.

It's.

It's not very exciting. It's not like, it's not very sexy, I guess you could say.

But it depends who's watching or listening to this.

That's true. Because it would excite me and it does excite me.

Right? Yeah.

But like one of the things we do is we have like a very clear like forms structure where from within follow up, boss, when an appointment gets set, the agent submits a very, very short. We try to keep them as short as possible form for that appointment. And it does different things. It triggers different things. Sending out a calendar invite to the client and putting it in our agent's calendar and all these different little things. Right. And it updates our numbers for how many appointments we've gone on. And then we do, after they meet, there's a subsequent form. Same thing. When they get a listing signed, there's another form. And what it does is it's updating the system automatically so that we have really, really solid data in terms of like conversion metrics and things like that. Like we could, I could within Five minutes tell you exactly how many appointments we've gone on in the last month, in the last six months, in the last year, how many of those turned into signed listings, how many of those turned into pending deals and closings.

Right.

And being able. And also, that's really kind of one of the things we're working on right now is, okay, getting that. That data, having real information that we know is accurate and true, and then being able to use it and tell a story with it so that the sales team can really go in and do effective pipeline reviews with the agents on an individual basis or even like a group setting. Right. And without having the information, it's really hard to be able to coach people on the right things. And so that's something that we've been really, really focused on and really working on over the last several years. But it's. It's always like an on thing. It's never, like, done. Right. So that's one of the things we set up was like, creating that. That structure of, like, how we track the sales process and where the client actually is so that we can have real conversations around next steps and things like that.

Cool.

Yeah.

You just lit me up significantly with one word that I think some people, it might seem like, oh, that's not very interesting. But storytelling.

Yes.

Is so important. So what I think I heard you say was, one of the things that I do, maybe with some of the people on my team is we review these things and we look. We review the numbers, dashboards, etc. Look at some trending, and we look for the stories. Essentially, another way to say it is headlines, what's the headline? You know, and we're going to bring that to the sales team because we think this headline or this story is one that could be corrected or steered in a better direction or doubled down on and amplified if you know it. If we bring it to sales and they turn into some training material or they raise it again in the meeting or whatever. Did I hear that correctly? And talk about how important, because I want to hear it in your words, because I got a bunch of my own. The importance of turning it into a story for people.

Yes. That's actually something that I think is one of the more challenging things. Like, as for sales leadership in general and salespeople, they don't tend to want to go into a spreadsheet and it makes their head spin a little bit. Right. They want to be able to see, like you said, dashboard. Right. That's actually something that we created recently, like on A per lead source basis. So, for example, with Zillow, we have now a dashboard where our sales team can go in and see, okay, this agent has like eight people that is in like appointment met status, but they haven't moved to the next stage of the process. And that's a higher number of people than, than, you know, the rest, than.

Average or than their average over the past 12 months. Rolling.

And so it's like, hey, what's, what's going on here? Right? Like, then can go and have a really productive conversation where it's like, hey, how do we get people to the next, like, are they, how do we get them submitting offers? Like, what's the holdups here? And sometimes it's like very like anecdotal things where they're like, oh, yeah, this person, they're actually not quite ready yet or whatever it might be. But a lot of times it's, it's able to, like, when you dig deeper into those and you know the right questions to ask, you can really kind of bring out like, oh, okay, here's some skills that we need to, to work on. Like, maybe it's closing for the signature or closing for the appointment. They talk to a bunch of people on the phone, but have a low appointment met. Then that's another metric that we can tweak and figure out what needs to be changed to really get their performance to the next level.

Yeah, really good. So three areas I'd like to hit are listing coordination, transaction coordination, and again, maybe double back into tech a little bit to kind of get specifically into some of the tools that have helped you harden this super critical part of the organization. So you came up in listing coordination.

Yes.

Talk a little bit about that process kind of at a high level. Tips for people who are like, oh, gosh, that would alleviate some of my pain in this area. What does it look like when it's running really well? What are a couple keys to getting it running really well?

Yeah, so it's such a big picture question, so do with it whatever you want. So one of the things that I did when I first started, we had kind of a checklist. It was there, but it wasn't really not enough where I could look at it without someone really walking me through it. And so that was one of the things that we did is we went through line. I went through line by line and like, okay, this needs to get done every time. I know this needs to get done every time, but it's not on here. Right. So we, I, I revamped all of those things and really making it a very. Like, the process is the same every single time unless there's a reason that you need to tweak it. Right. And like, that doesn't mean we have to be completely inflexible all the time. But, like, for the most part, if you want it to be an efficient process, it has to be a duplicatable process that you follow day in and day out every single time. And then you can deviate where you need to. Right. Like, where it makes sense. Like, oh, this client has, you know, tenants in there, the seller. So we need to, you know, tweak how we schedule showings on it or whatever it is. Right. So like, definitely being flexible enough where you can be nimble, but like creating a very specific process. And actually one of the things that I. One of the first things that I did when I got to. We got to a point where we had a lot more listings than I could realistically handle. And it was just me at the time. And so I brought on. I was actually the first person at the company to bring on a va and it. Oh my gosh, it changed my life. Changed my life. It was so great. Like, so he took on all the things that didn't require like agent communication or client communication. I delegated to him and I created very specific, like, SOPs, like loom videos that with the instructions. And it's all very well documented because that's the other thing too is like, if. If someone else can't come in and be able to cover for or do that job, you need a more buttoned up process. Right. Like, so that's one of the things that I did first thing when I started was being able to delegate it. I had to make heads or tails of it all and really create a very structured process. And it's the same thing on the. On the transaction side too. That's really was kind of a big overhaul that we did as well there.

Good. So the I don't want anyone to miss Loom video is a screen recording where you're walking step by step through essentially some version of your sop. Maybe showing an interface of the software that we're gonna do it in or something like that.

Yeah, exactly. Literally, I just. Here's the task and here's how you do it. And I would just narrate literally every single step and explaining why. Right. That's another thing that I feel like can sometimes people get lost in if they don't realize why we have to do something A real specific way. Because especially in the OP side, I feel like there's, there's little nuances. If you don't check this box on a contract, there's all these other domino effects that can, that can be, you know, screwed up because of, because you forgot to check a box. Right. So like that's the stuff where I really went through in detail, narrated exactly what I was doing, why I was doing it, and then it was able to delegate it and really, really scaled to the point where now we have like two people that do about a hundred listings at any given time. So right now like they're running between 90 and 100 listings total. And that's like signed listings, active listings, not, not our escrows. That's separate. So yeah, so really scaling that up and providing clear instructions and giving yourself clear instructions too was key for, for scaling it. Yeah.

If you can't teach it, you don't understand it as well as you should.

Yeah.

So you talked about previously, you talked about this idea of let's design it for. I'm putting it my own words now, like, you know, 90% of cases are going to fall within this standard thing. So this is a replicatable, duplicatable process. What's your philosophy on. Because I've heard it both ways in these conversations. One of them is, well, when we have an exception and it's accept an except that's happened before, let's make a subtrack for that too. Or is it, listen, this is going to cover 90% of the cases. This is about how we do it. And in your own words, there, you know, you have some flexibility where you need it. Do you think you make separate rule sets? And now we have, you know, this is track one, and here's 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E. You're probably not going to use one 1D except 1% of the time. Like, do you even bother making that type of detail for exceptions?

That's a good question. So I think it really depends on, for me it's the nature of how, like how often it really comes up it. Like for example, if we have a different process, I think I said earlier, scheduling showings, right. So when we schedule showings on our listings, on our seller transactions, if, if it's owner occupied, we do it one way and if it's vacant, we do it another way. Those two situations are going to come up, up 50, 50, like it's going to be half the time someone lives there, half the time someone doesn't. And so like that's significant enough where. Absolutely. We'll have like a 1A and a 1B. I would even say, actually, we do have another process for tenant occupied properties. But if it's like some weird thing where there's like, roommates that live in the house in the random room, like, you know what I mean? But the owner actually lives there, like, okay, we don't create a process for that because it happens so seldom. And then I feel like there's. There's a point where you kind of overcomplicate the process.