I have had a good number of recruiting appointments over the past few weeks. It must be that time of year where agents are more open to changing brokerages.
As I discuss the benefits that Prudential Texas Properties offers our agents, I always spend a good amount of time discussing the tools and technologies that we provide our agents. They are among the most competitive tools/technologies sets that I have seen offered by any brokerage and usually, the agents I speak with have an idea about them even before we meet.
This week, however, I had an agent sit and talk with me about joining my office and when I go to the tools and technologies discussion the conversation hit a brick wall. Now, when I had originally asked this agent about why he was considering a brokerage switch and about his business plan, he had told me that his business was off considerably from where it had been even a year ago and when we discussed how he pursued his business, I could tell that this was an agent who would benefit from what we offer in the tools and technologies area.
All this made me wonder why, when I got to what SHOULD have been an “Aha” moment in the conversation, the agent’s eyes just glazed over. I asked him why he didn’t seem to be engaged for that part of the discussion and he told me, “My current brokerage makes similar things available to us at a higher cost, but I won’t pay for them because I don’t think they work or make the phone ring.”
At that point, I backed up, regrouped and refocused the conversation on the specific tactical ways that these tools could be used to generate business at very little out-of-pocket expense. I even offered examples of other agents who were using them successfully. He claimed that he had never seen proven evidence that these things make a difference in cultivating business and until he did, he was standing by his assertion that they do not work. (BTW, one of these tools is an individual agent blog! Needless to say, I spoke from personal experience on that topic.)
I explained that perhaps his perspective was skewed by the fact that he had never actually used any of the tools in question. A hammer doesn’t do very much sitting in a toolbox either, I told him. But pick it up and hit a nail with it and then let’s have a real world conversation about what it can do. And with that comment, the light bulb over his head illuminated.
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