You spend a lot of time and resources trying to hire the best talent for your team. You spend a lot of money on technology and lead generation. And while talent, tech, and leads are vital elements to real estate success, one of the most overlooked elements is training.
“But all my new agents undergo training when they first start!” you may be saying to yourself. But training should not just be a one-time thing when starting a new job or learning a new skill. Here is how you can enhance your training process to ensure maximum success.
Prioritize Career Development
Our Training Team at BoomTown likes to refer to training as a “learning journey.” Investing the time and resources to develop your team’s career development shows that you believe in their future.
The best subjects to cover for ongoing training and career planning are:
Lead Generation
Transaction management
Time management
Customer service
Focus your training around processes and systems. Encourage your agents to create a personal business plan with goals and objectives that line up with the company goals, as well as strategies to achieve them. Review the plan together, provide tips and advice, and discuss how to track results.
5 Tips to Develop a Successful Training Plan
1. Set SMART Learning Objectives
Learning objectives are the goals you want to set and reach with your training. What change do you want to see from your team after they complete their training? The key to a good learning objective is to have a strong action verb to drive its purpose.
Use the SMART goal setting guidelines to ensure that your learning objectives are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Doing so will ensure that your training will make the biggest impact, and make it easier for you to check progress and improvement.
2. Provide an Incentive
Why should your team members make the effort to learn? What will they get out of this training? Clearly define the benefits of retaining the information behind the training lessons. If people don’t see the benefit to what they’re being taught, they’re less likely to pay attention.
Provide an incentive for your team members to learn the material taught during training. Show them how retaining the information from training will get them more leads, grow their client base, or increase their commissions.
3. Keep Training Sessions Short & Sweet
It’s hard to keep anyone’s attention for long periods of time, so don’t let your training sessions drag! Find ways to keep your training fun to capture (and keep) your team’s attention. Studies show that people actually retain more information when they’re having fun.
Our brains are programmed to keep information it considers necessary and purge the rest. Provide lessons in digestible “bite-size chunks” so it’s easier to remember. It also helps to separate information into “need to know” and “nice to have” categories. Providing a “cheat sheet” of the “nice to know” information allows them to dig into the content on their own and keep as reference for later.
4. Evaluate Your Results
Remember the goals and objectives you set at the beginning? Now it’s time to measure your results.
Were you looking to increase agent production or have agents log more calls? Evaluate the results to see how thing have changed or improved from before and after. See if your agents are using the systems you put in place. Measurements help gauge whether something is working or not, so you can make necessary adjustments to your training or processes.
5. Make Training a Long-Term Plan
Training should go beyond showing someone how to use a technology once and expecting them to follow all your processes. Incorporating a long-term training plan into your overall business plan is the key to maximizing your success.
Things move and change quickly in the real estate industry. Trends shift, strategies improve, new features get released. Regular training helps you and your team stay on top of these changes instead of falling behind the times.
Visualize Your Success
Once you have your game plan down, visualize what success looks like to you. Use these tips to develop and facilitate the best real estate training that will impact your bottom-line.
