The Secret Coaching Weapon for Real Estate Leaders…
Did you know that it’s not all that uncommon for a real estate business to grow 100 – 200% or more in a year as a result of sales coaching?
Which begs the question… what are sales coaches doing right that real estate managers aren’t?
One thing is they’re facilitating meaningful conversations that impact behaviour.
A report following research on real estate sales coaching* reported five key elements salespeople got from their coaches that they reported not getting from their managers. Namely: accountability, motivation, training coaching/consulting and emotional support.
So, if those are things that are making the difference to results, how do you do it? How do you have these conversations?
As a real estate leader, one of the most powerful tools at your disposal is an L&D Plan, or Learning and Development Plan.
If you haven’t come from a corporate environment, you probably won’t have heard of it. But organisations have known for decades the importance of learning and development strategy and planning for performance, and not leading from assumptions.
What is Learning and Development Planning?
Learning and Development Planning is a specific strategy that helps each team member to identify and bridge the developmental gap between where they are currently, and the skills they need to achieve their sales and career goals. It gives them an achievable path to the success they envision for their career and life.
A well-constructed L&D Plan helps to facilitate meaningful conversations between you and each of your team members about their strengths, weaknesses and where they want to go to work on their development.
This helps you to plan and prioritise relevant training and coaching to support their individual development needs.
And if you get it right, this obviously makes a significant difference on their listing and sales results.
Imagine this familiar scenario:
- Your sales team member struggles to consistently win listings and/or close sales.
- They have some good months and some bad months. You know they are licensed to sell real estate (which should mean they know what they’re doing), but they aren’t getting the results you expect (or that they want).
- It is obvious that something is needed to help them achieve better results consistently. They tell you that they’re busy, but their numbers hint that something is off.
As a leader, knowing what to do in these types of situations can be a frustrating challenge.
A lack of motivation is not the problem – but it is a symptom of the problem.
Jasmine Platt
If you’re like most real estate leaders, the assumption might just be that they need more motivation or some additional sales training.
The reality is, however, that the real issue is probably much deeper than a lack of motivation. Generic sales training might help some, but without an in-depth understanding of your salesperson’s skills and weaknesses, you likely will waste a lot of time and see little results. If you can even get them to training in the first place.
You also must understand that the people on your team are real people, not just sales-generators. They have hopes, dreams, and aspirations in their life.
With good leadership coaching you can help them clarify and use their personal career and life vision as a foundation for success at work.
This is where an L&D Plan shines, and why its value cannot be overstated.
Let’s take a more detailed look at what makes an L&D Plan so effective.
Here are six reasons you need an L&D Plan…
1. It helps your salespeople to think and plan with the end in mind in terms of career and life goals.
It’s easy for your salespeople to get stuck in the daily grind, forgetting the big picture of what they are ultimately working towards.
As leadership consultant Simon Sinek shares, to be consistently motivated, we must “Start with Why”. Our aspirations must guide our activity.
An L&D Plan helps your salespeople clarify their goals – both short and long-term. This helps them stay motivated to not just do the necessary work to meet their sales goals, but also to develop in their skills and competencies throughout their career.
When they work with the end in mind, it helps them focus on what’s most important each day to move them towards that desired end.
2. It helps salespeople think about working ON their business – not just IN it.
Each salesperson on your team basically runs their own business within your business.
They are each responsible for doing the work to produce their income and that comes with certain management, organisational, and developmental skills and efforts to ensure their business succeeds.
The problem many of them face is that they have not been intentional about being business people, structuring their business and efforts to ensure consistent success. They spend their time ‘working in’ their business and rarely ‘on’ their business.
An L&D Plan creates a clear path for each salesperson to grow their business by highlighting the specific areas that require development and improvement.
3. It helps facilitate conversations between you and each salesperson about their needs to improve.
Perhaps the most important use of an L&D Plan is to simply lay the groundwork for meaningful conversations between you and your salespeople.
An L&D Plan facilitates discovery of what your salesperson needs most in terms of development and training.
Training and development are important, but connecting with your salespeople on a personal level through conversation will pave the way for more effective coaching, producing better results from your salespeople as they implement what you teach.
Often, these types of conversations can be uncomfortable for leaders and salespeople alike.
Using an L&D Plan template makes it easier and safer to have these conversations. The areas of development, which are chosen by the salesperson themselves, are being highlighted by the document instead of coming directly from you.
4. It helps salespeople focus on the critical activities for improvement.
An L&D Plan forces insights for your salesperson about where they’re at, what skills they need and want to develop, and what they need to do to improve.
Self-awareness is one the hardest things to come by in personal development. We’re simply blind to our own weaknesses much of the time. We need tools and resources – coaching, often – to recognise where we need to develop.
An L&D Plan forces these insights in an efficient, kind way that would otherwise be difficult or even painstaking to discover. That’s why I use an L&D Plan template that streamlines the discovery process for what common problems a salesperson might be experiencing. It helps each salesperson shine a light on specific areas where development, improvement and effort are needed.
5. It gives you insights into where they’re at and provides you with the ability to plan what training you need to deliver to help your sales team members improve.
As the old saying goes: “you don’t know what you don’t know.” An L&D Plan also enlightens you on what you don’t know, and gives you a framework for facilitating positive change.
Not only does an L&D Plan help your salespeople gain insight into their own competencies and areas where growth is needed, it also shows you exactly what you need to provide for them in terms of training, coaching and support resources.
As a leader, this is gold. Just knowing what your team needs is most of the battle, and with that clarified you can confidently develop training and resources that target their specific needs.
6. It makes you a better leader by freeing you from the “Abandon and Hope” style of leadership.
Perhaps the Achilles heel of most real estate leaders is the unseen, but very costly “Abandon and Hope” style of leadership. This common mistake occurs when you encourage your team to “get out there and sell” and hope they actually do it, while you spend your time bogged down in the tedious management of your business.
For a more detailed look at the “Abandon and Hope” style of leadership and to discover if you are unknowingly leading with this approach, download our free guide, 10 Mistakes Real Estate Leaders Make and How to Avoid Them.
DOWNLOAD HERE
In Conclusion
With an L&D Plan you can know what your team members need to improve, provide them with specific, relevant training, and know that they are improving in the exact areas that will produce real results.
My coaching clients have access to a specific real estate L&D Plan template that facilitates discovery, conversation, and ultimately specifically tailored coaching to ensure each team member is doing exactly what they need to improve.
Every salesperson is uniquely different in their aspirations and struggles. I’d like to show you how to use an L&D Plan to improve your sales team results.
Book a free consultation with me and let’s see what kind of transformation you can see in your team by employing L&D Plans with your salespeople. It’s obligation-free – and might make all the difference to your business.
* “Real Estate Coaching’s Payoff” Inman Special Report
About the Author
“Most real estate leaders struggle to achieve the results from their team that they expected when they became the leader.”
Jasmine Platt works with real estate sales leaders to help them achieve personal and business success. She is an expert in motivation, with over 20 years of experience coaching, training and consulting with leaders, entrepreneurs, agencies and salespeople. She helps sales leaders to clarify their goals, achieve whole-life satisfaction and lead their teams to do the same. She is a regular contributor to the REINZ magazine and blog on topics relating to leadership, performance, and culture. She is also the mother of two gorgeous girls and wife to the wonderful Nick. Her favourite food is a good quality, medium-rare steak with horseradish sauce!