I have what I believe is an interesting query: But first a bit of background information which will perhaps assist you in developing a response. I am married to a wonderful lady who for 30 years practiced as a RN specializing in Cardiac Care and Trauma. Highly trained, respected and active she truly enjoyed her work. But as is the case with many nurses she simply wanted to move on to something else. In the winter of 2004 I presented her with her registration for the Real Estate Pre-License course. She completed the course, passed the State exam and became licensed. Having NO sales experience she was the proverbial babe in the woods. So after a discussion about her joining our brokerage we decided that it would be best that she interview three other agencies who I knew had active training. You see all of the folks in our brokerage have been in the field for sometime and although we attend training we don’t have the time nor inclination to train a newbie. Well, she made her choice and has now been actively working as a Realtor for approximately 18 months. Her first full 12 months she had twenty sales and is on track at this time to exceed last years target by 50%. Not bad for a green bean. But she has fallen into what I believe is a trap that many newbie’s fall into. That is the techno-systems trap. Selecting, learning, importing information, in hardware and related software, pursuit of every available class from GRI to board offerings, developing strategies for attracting and retaining Clients is her focus. You see she is a Buyers Agent working for a fee for service agency. Now there is nothing wrong with neither pursuing education nor utilizing technology and related systems to track your clients. I use systems and technology as well. But the problem from my perspective is that she spends excessive amounts of time developing and learning rather than applying. By this I mean hours sent categorizing clients, their needs rather than taking what she has learned and applying it in the field. Unlike many of the newbie’s she has exceptional people skills but dedicates to much time to being letter perfect in her systems. I guess this goes back to the nursing background, where life and death decisions required this type of dedication and OJT was not the prerequisite. Although my example is my wife in discussions with other brokers I have seen a similar recurrent theme when discussing their new agents. That is having to use a sale management tool like Top Producer and be immediately proficient in it. Have to have the latest digital camera, lap top and related hardware and be proficient in it and of coarse attend any and every class that comes down the road. All these actives result in information overload, which leads to loss of productive time in front of clients. So my query is this common and is there a way to direct her to the more applied as opposed to the abstract?
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