With so many offices making record profits, everybody is busy. But for leaders, you can be busy making sales, or you can be busy running a business. What type of busy are you?
Leaders who spend much of their working week listing and selling can, if they are not careful, fall into the trap of being too busy to recruit effectively. Recruiting effectively doesn’t just mean finding help, it means finding the RIGHT HELP and coaching them.
Selling leaders often don’t monitor their teams unless something goes wrong, and they don’t monitor the progress of individual team members either, unless the salesperson is in a slump.
This scenario is common in many real estate offices: when you examine the breakdown of sales production in teams led by selling leaders, you find that the leader is close to being the number one salesperson in the company, perhaps with one, and sometimes two, other solid performers. There is a gap between the higher performers and a pack of salespeople who aren’t doing well.
Stopgap becomes these leaders’ recruiting program of choice – a team member leaves and the leader, who is too busy to recruit properly, plugs the gap with somebody who, had the leader been more thorough with recruiting, probably would not have employed that person.
It is common for selling leaders to say, “I need an assistant“, and probably the leader does. But does the leader need a good assistant or just somebody to fill the gap? Does the leader need help from just anyone, or does the leader need the right help?
Recruiting should be targeted to address a need, not a stopgap measure to fill perceived deficiencies in the team. You can waste a lot in wages and time this way.
What do you really need? An assistant, or more salespeople? An assistant will enable you to work with more clients, but are you a business owner, or a salesperson in your company?
You might do better with more salespeople, but it takes systems, dedication, and focused work, to recruit, train and induct salespeople the right way, so that the ‘help’ you employ is the ‘right help’.
Many leaders put thorough recruiting into the too hard basket. They lower their standards in a desperate attempt to find anyone to help with the workload.
It’s a paradox: in the short term, recruiting properly adds to the leaders’ workload. Inducting recruits properly does also. But the long-term benefits of recruiting and inducting properly are people on the team who know what to do, who know how to get results and create happy clients.
In the long term, having the right people on the team requires less of the leader’s effort to lead, train and coach. The right people stay longer and enhance the agency’s culture. The right people are a pleasure to lead and very profitable.
Yes, I know you are busy. But before you appoint another person to your team, ask yourself, “Do I want help, or the right help?”
There is a big difference, and that difference has a huge impact on your profit.
Gary Pittard