One of the biggest frustrations for agency leaders is getting their teams to focus on the actions that produce results. Many leaders battle with this for years, but at some point, you need to stop talking about it and take action.
If you’re leading an agency, theoretically you should be in control – not necessarily of your people, but of the agency’s results. When you control the actions, you control the results. To take back control of the actions, you have to alter your team’s focus.
In many agencies, especially those where salespeople are on commission-only or commission-against-retainer setups, principals fall into the trap of being scared to set standards. They worry that pushing for accountability will drive their salespeople away. But here’s the truth – letting people drift is no way to run a business. Certainly not a profitable one.
If you’ve got good people on board – people who genuinely want to win – then your job is to help them focus.
You can’t motivate people. Don’t even try. If someone doesn’t bring their own drive and energy to the table, no number of meetings, incentives, or one-on-ones will fix it.
Recruit people who are already motivated – then teach them how to channel that drive into results, and give those people a reputation to live up to.
Let them know they’re part of a high-performing team. And a high-performing team is made up of individual high performers. Everyone has a role to play.
Sit down with your people and help them set real goals. What do they actually want? Not the surface-level stuff – you need to go deep here.
Surface-level goals are often a new car, a holiday, or paying off some dumb debt. While these goals might drive action for a while, the momentum is usually short-lived.
Deep goals, on the other hand, help your people achieve what Abraham Maslow called self-actualisation. Who do your people want to become? How do they intend to define their lives? Connect with them at this level, help them achieve it, and you’ll have team members for life.
In the best circumstances, those team members will likely become your future partners – continuing to grow with you and growing your business together.
When you start talking about life at this level, the right people turn those ideas into action. They work hard, push through discomfort, and do what it takes to achieve their goals.
Goals without plans are just wishes. So, break it down.
Where do they need to be in one, three, and five years from now? What does their real estate career need to look like on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis?
What changes need to be made at home or in the office to set them up for success? A salesperson’s operating environment is so often the silent killer of a great career. Ensure theirs is curated for success.
Break it down even further – how many listings and sales do they need to make each quarter? Help them set a prospecting and marketing plan to achieve this. Be part of their journey.
Once they have clarity around their numbers, they begin to see their pathway to success.
It takes just as long to lose a listing as it does to win one, so make every presentation count. The better trained your people are, the more they’ll get out of every interaction – whether it’s a prospecting call, a buyer inspection, or a listing appointment.
There’s no point setting higher goals if no one is willing to do the training that gets them there. Check in, make sure they’re developing their skills, and hold them to it.
A note on training: Smartre Training has developed arguably the most successful sales system for agents to follow. Our flagship sales seminar, held over three days, covers 12 fundamentals that agents can master to achieve everything they want out of their sales careers.
The results speak for themselves. Across our community, 47 salespeople will be awarded Smartre Training Badges in 2025 – recognition reserved only for those who achieve exceptional sales results.
These include Gold (for $500,000 in gross commissions), Platinum ($750,000 in gross commissions), and Diamond ($1,000,000 in gross commissions). Each badge represents a salesperson who has not only mastered the fundamentals, but has consistently applied them.
This is a true testament to the effectiveness of the Smartre Training sales system – proof that when great training meets focused execution, high performance and results follow.
This seminar is only available to salespeople who work within our member agencies. However, if you’d like access to the next delivery of this seminar (happening February 2026 in Sydney), reach out to our team – we may be able to arrange access for you and your team.
Winners know their numbers. And although we don’t want to micro-manage our people, most salespeople get more out of their days when they have someone to be accountable to.
Ask your people how many appointments they’ve set, how many of those turned into listings or sales, and how many people they’ve prospected in the last week.
Use these answers to help them identify their ratios – and then use those ratios to help them improve. Tracking and monitoring these numbers can quickly lead to stronger, more consistent results.
If team members don’t begin tracking their numbers, it’s likely they’re not serious about their goals. It’s even more likely they’re simply the wrong people.
None of this is new. You’ve heard it before, and so have your people. But the question isn’t “what do we know?” – it’s “what are we doing about it?”
That’s where leadership comes in.
Your role is to regularly sit down with each of your people, one-on-one, and help them define what they really want out of their career. Then help them build the plan and the discipline to achieve their goals.
When you do this together, they’ll see you as partly responsible for their success.
The alternative is to be blamed for their failure – which would you prefer?
Focused salespeople are those on the right path – the path toward the realisation of a worthy ideal. Help them find that path and stay on it. The rest will fall into place.
One of the biggest frustrations for agency leaders is getting their teams to focus on the actions that produce results. Many leaders battle with this for years, but at some point, you need to stop talking about it and take action.
If you’re leading an agency, theoretically you should be in control – not necessarily of your people, but of the agency’s results. When you control the actions, you control the results. To take back control of the actions, you have to alter your team’s focus.
In many agencies, especially those where salespeople are on commission-only or commission-against-retainer setups, principals fall into the trap of being scared to set standards. They worry that pushing for accountability will drive their salespeople away. But here’s the truth – letting people drift is no way to run a business. Certainly not a profitable one.
If you’ve got good people on board – people who genuinely want to win – then your job is to help them focus.
You can’t motivate people. Don’t even try. If someone doesn’t bring their own drive and energy to the table, no number of meetings, incentives, or one-on-ones will fix it.
Recruit people who are already motivated – then teach them how to channel that drive into results, and give those people a reputation to live up to.
Let them know they’re part of a high-performing team. And a high-performing team is made up of individual high performers. Everyone has a role to play.
Sit down with your people and help them set real goals. What do they actually want? Not the surface-level stuff – you need to go deep here.
Surface-level goals are often a new car, a holiday, or paying off some dumb debt. While these goals might drive action for a while, the momentum is usually short-lived.
Deep goals, on the other hand, help your people achieve what Abraham Maslow called self-actualisation. Who do your people want to become? How do they intend to define their lives? Connect with them at this level, help them achieve it, and you’ll have team members for life.
In the best circumstances, those team members will likely become your future partners – continuing to grow with you and growing your business together.
When you start talking about life at this level, the right people turn those ideas into action. They work hard, push through discomfort, and do what it takes to achieve their goals.
Goals without plans are just wishes. So, break it down.
Where do they need to be in one, three, and five years from now? What does their real estate career need to look like on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis?
What changes need to be made at home or in the office to set them up for success? A salesperson’s operating environment is so often the silent killer of a great career. Ensure theirs is curated for success.
Break it down even further – how many listings and sales do they need to make each quarter? Help them set a prospecting and marketing plan to achieve this. Be part of their journey.
Once they have clarity around their numbers, they begin to see their pathway to success.
It takes just as long to lose a listing as it does to win one, so make every presentation count. The better trained your people are, the more they’ll get out of every interaction – whether it’s a prospecting call, a buyer inspection, or a listing appointment.
There’s no point setting higher goals if no one is willing to do the training that gets them there. Check in, make sure they’re developing their skills, and hold them to it.
A note on training: Smartre Training has developed arguably the most successful sales system for agents to follow. Our flagship sales seminar, held over three days, covers 12 fundamentals that agents can master to achieve everything they want out of their sales careers.
The results speak for themselves. Across our community, 47 salespeople will be awarded Smartre Training Badges in 2025 – recognition reserved only for those who achieve exceptional sales results.
These include Gold (for $500,000 in gross commissions), Platinum ($750,000 in gross commissions), and Diamond ($1,000,000 in gross commissions). Each badge represents a salesperson who has not only mastered the fundamentals, but has consistently applied them.
This is a true testament to the effectiveness of the Smartre Training sales system – proof that when great training meets focused execution, high performance and results follow.
This seminar is only available to salespeople who work within our member agencies. However, if you’d like access to the next delivery of this seminar (happening February 2026 in Sydney), reach out to our team – we may be able to arrange access for you and your team.
Winners know their numbers. And although we don’t want to micro-manage our people, most salespeople get more out of their days when they have someone to be accountable to.
Ask your people how many appointments they’ve set, how many of those turned into listings or sales, and how many people they’ve prospected in the last week.
Use these answers to help them identify their ratios – and then use those ratios to help them improve. Tracking and monitoring these numbers can quickly lead to stronger, more consistent results.
If team members don’t begin tracking their numbers, it’s likely they’re not serious about their goals. It’s even more likely they’re simply the wrong people.
None of this is new. You’ve heard it before, and so have your people. But the question isn’t “what do we know?” – it’s “what are we doing about it?”
That’s where leadership comes in.
Your role is to regularly sit down with each of your people, one-on-one, and help them define what they really want out of their career. Then help them build the plan and the discipline to achieve their goals.
When you do this together, they’ll see you as partly responsible for their success.
The alternative is to be blamed for their failure – which would you prefer?
Focused salespeople are those on the right path – the path toward the realisation of a worthy ideal. Help them find that path and stay on it. The rest will fall into place.
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