There's a moment every selling principal hits on the way up. You've done the hard part. You've recruited good people. And then you notice something strange happening to your own numbers.
They're slipping.
Not because you've gone soft. Because your new salespeople are doing exactly what good new salespeople do. They're coming to you with questions. They want coaching. They want your take on a vendor’s question, a stalled listing, a sale they're not sure how to close.
And here's the trap. These are conversations you want to have. This is the job. So you say yes, every time, to every interruption and by the end of the month you realise your productivity isn’t where you expected it to be.
That's the double-edged sword of growth. The better your team gets at asking, the less time you have for selling.
There's a season in every growing business where you're building the team and carrying it. Your personal productivity can't collapse while you're bringing people through. The business still needs your listings and your sales to fund the growth.
So how do you stay available to your people without leaving your own desk in ruins?
At Smartre Training, the answer we keep coming back to is structure. Three deliberate meetings. Three intentional conversations, held on a rhythm your team can rely on. When people know when the important conversations happen, they stop ambushing you between them.
Three meetings. That's it.
The first meeting: The Sales Meeting
This is where the whole team comes together and commits to the week ahead.
It works in two directions. Looking back: did everyone actually do what they said they'd do last week? And looking forward: what next actions are you each committing to now?
This is your moment as a leader to set actions and results for the week. To lay out the prospecting, the appointments, the level of follow-up each person needs to be doing. Nobody leaves that room wondering what's expected of them.
That's what keeps the whole team pointed toward productivity.
The second meeting: The Weekly Training Meeting
Here's the mistake almost everyone makes. They fold training into the sales meeting.
Don't.
Your sales meeting is about results. It should never drift into how you go chasing those results, the moment it does, you've lost both conversations. So you give training its own slot. Friday mornings work well.
This is where you sit down and build the actual craft. Prospecting skills. Role plays for the loungeroom, so that when your salesperson is sitting across from a seller at a listing presentation, they've already rehearsed the hard bit.
A sales meeting tells your team where to go. A training meeting teaches them how to get there. Keep them separate, and you protect your productivity and lift theirs at the same time.
The third meeting: The Monthly Planning Meeting
When you hire great salespeople, you get more than production. You get ideas.
The right people don't just want to work in your business, they want to contribute to it. They see something in the marketing, or the prospecting, or the way things could be done, and they want to be heard.
Give them nowhere to put that, and it curdles into frustration. Give them a platform, and it becomes ownership.
That platform is your monthly planning meeting. Once a month, you open the floor. You build the plan for the month ahead together, and every person on the team takes ownership of it. It feeds the entrepreneurial spirit that made them worth hiring in the first place and a plan the team built is a plan the team defends.
Three meetings. One outcome.
A weekly sales meeting. A weekly training meeting. A monthly planning meeting.
Put them in place and watch what happens to those one-off interruptions. They fall away. Because your people already know when their questions get answered, when their skills get sharpened, and when their ideas get heard.
You stop having the same conversation eleven times a week with eleven people. You have it once, with all of them, on purpose.
And your own productivity? Protected.
Where this fits
We've only skimmed the surface here. Those three meetings sit inside just one of the six essential elements we teach in the Smartre Training management seminar, the element we call Team.
Team is the whole journey of a salesperson after you've recruited them: taking them through the initial micromanagement stage, into leading and coaching, and eventually all the way to mentorship the point where they need far less of you, not more.
Want to see the rest?
We've put together a one-hour webinar that gives you a look inside our five-day management seminar. The Profitable Agency – What Your Numbers Aren’t Telling You covers all six of the building blocks we believe you need to grow a genuinely profitable real estate agency. One that isn't quietly dependent on you personally continuing to list and sell.
If that's the kind of business you're trying to build, you can register here. We'd love to see you there.
Because a growing team should give you more freedom, not less. If it's costing you your own productivity, you don't have a people problem. You have a structure problem and that one you can fix.
There's a moment every selling principal hits on the way up. You've done the hard part. You've recruited good people. And then you notice something strange happening to your own numbers.
They're slipping.
Not because you've gone soft. Because your new salespeople are doing exactly what good new salespeople do. They're coming to you with questions. They want coaching. They want your take on a vendor’s question, a stalled listing, a sale they're not sure how to close.
And here's the trap. These are conversations you want to have. This is the job. So you say yes, every time, to every interruption and by the end of the month you realise your productivity isn’t where you expected it to be.
That's the double-edged sword of growth. The better your team gets at asking, the less time you have for selling.
There's a season in every growing business where you're building the team and carrying it. Your personal productivity can't collapse while you're bringing people through. The business still needs your listings and your sales to fund the growth.
So how do you stay available to your people without leaving your own desk in ruins?
At Smartre Training, the answer we keep coming back to is structure. Three deliberate meetings. Three intentional conversations, held on a rhythm your team can rely on. When people know when the important conversations happen, they stop ambushing you between them.
Three meetings. That's it.
The first meeting: The Sales Meeting
This is where the whole team comes together and commits to the week ahead.
It works in two directions. Looking back: did everyone actually do what they said they'd do last week? And looking forward: what next actions are you each committing to now?
This is your moment as a leader to set actions and results for the week. To lay out the prospecting, the appointments, the level of follow-up each person needs to be doing. Nobody leaves that room wondering what's expected of them.
That's what keeps the whole team pointed toward productivity.
The second meeting: The Weekly Training Meeting
Here's the mistake almost everyone makes. They fold training into the sales meeting.
Don't.
Your sales meeting is about results. It should never drift into how you go chasing those results, the moment it does, you've lost both conversations. So you give training its own slot. Friday mornings work well.
This is where you sit down and build the actual craft. Prospecting skills. Role plays for the loungeroom, so that when your salesperson is sitting across from a seller at a listing presentation, they've already rehearsed the hard bit.
A sales meeting tells your team where to go. A training meeting teaches them how to get there. Keep them separate, and you protect your productivity and lift theirs at the same time.
The third meeting: The Monthly Planning Meeting
When you hire great salespeople, you get more than production. You get ideas.
The right people don't just want to work in your business, they want to contribute to it. They see something in the marketing, or the prospecting, or the way things could be done, and they want to be heard.
Give them nowhere to put that, and it curdles into frustration. Give them a platform, and it becomes ownership.
That platform is your monthly planning meeting. Once a month, you open the floor. You build the plan for the month ahead together, and every person on the team takes ownership of it. It feeds the entrepreneurial spirit that made them worth hiring in the first place and a plan the team built is a plan the team defends.
Three meetings. One outcome.
A weekly sales meeting. A weekly training meeting. A monthly planning meeting.
Put them in place and watch what happens to those one-off interruptions. They fall away. Because your people already know when their questions get answered, when their skills get sharpened, and when their ideas get heard.
You stop having the same conversation eleven times a week with eleven people. You have it once, with all of them, on purpose.
And your own productivity? Protected.
Where this fits
We've only skimmed the surface here. Those three meetings sit inside just one of the six essential elements we teach in the Smartre Training management seminar, the element we call Team.
Team is the whole journey of a salesperson after you've recruited them: taking them through the initial micromanagement stage, into leading and coaching, and eventually all the way to mentorship the point where they need far less of you, not more.
Want to see the rest?
We've put together a one-hour webinar that gives you a look inside our five-day management seminar. The Profitable Agency – What Your Numbers Aren’t Telling You covers all six of the building blocks we believe you need to grow a genuinely profitable real estate agency. One that isn't quietly dependent on you personally continuing to list and sell.
If that's the kind of business you're trying to build, you can register here. We'd love to see you there.
Because a growing team should give you more freedom, not less. If it's costing you your own productivity, you don't have a people problem. You have a structure problem and that one you can fix.
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