You will never find a more fierce advocate of the importance of training for real estate agents and the author of this blog post. In late 2017, I committed $2000 a month to a year-long training program for the agents in my company. By 2021, Our brand had nearly doubled in production. Moreover, client satisfaction was noticeably higher. The agents in the company got more five star online reviews, escalations for upset clients virtually disappeared, and the agents themselves were making more money.
Anyone who has experienced the Floyd Wickman course, individual coaching, and a variety of other valuable resources, such as Crush It in Real Estate can attest to the effectiveness of more and better training.
Every system I have ever been exposed to work with the nuts and bolts of the industry: prospecting, lead conversion, objection handling, best practices with buyers and sellers, and many more fundamental and necessary spokes in the wheel.
In my own experience is managing broker, I gradually learned that there were still many gaps to fill. For example, I had extensive discussions with an agent who needed to fire a client who was crossing boundaries, but no agent should tolerate. When we did release the client, she breathes a relief and went on to distinguish herself with no regrets after that. More over, she never tolerated treatment from anyone in the public after that.
Eventually, another agent began to experience the same thing, and I found myself duplicating my time. Why not get out ahead of this prevalent issue in the industry and create a training from my team? As a matter of fact, why not write a column about it for my spot in real estate? I created the training for my team and I wrote the column which was selected for a National Association of Real Estate Editors (NAREE) award.
As I looked back over the syllabus of trainings that I gave my team, I noticed that many of the subjects I covered filled the gaps that most, if not all trainings do not cover. For example, what should a real estate agent have in their car? How should an agent handle relatives who are interfering in a first time homebuyers transaction? What should the protocols be when a transaction starts to fall apart?
This was the birth of my offbeat training curriculum. Much of the subject matter are things that occur in our industry, but there is no published guidance on it. Other subjects are a deeper dive into some of the more banal components of an agents practice. One recent training, entitled “the communications that you’re not making “ was particularly well received. I took a subject that is fundamental to our industry, communication, and I deconstructed it in a way to give my agents a window into excellence.
There are now dozens of trainings on offbeat subjects, and I am proud to say they have made an impact.
Where the training helps most is the perception of the client. For example, as broker I had many instances where a deal was falling apart and the client would be understandably upset. Often, we were heroic and saved the deal but things were not the same with the client after that. Their perception of their agent was altered negatively. Right or wrong, fairly or unfairly, the agent's best was not good enough to have a raving fan. So I put together a training on what to do when a deal falls apart.
Now, agents who take that training don't have their hair on fire when a transaction goes off the rails because they have a protocol to follow, and instead of panic, their client sees them confidently deploy action. What was once a setback and commission killer was now an opportunity, even if the deal did die because the agent was no longer a deer in headlights and the client saw that.
That, my friends, is what Offbeat Training is all about.
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