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For real estate professionals, success is measured by performance – how many homes you sell or how many customers you reach. One thing, however, is certain – the real estate industry is complex and requires strong motivation to remain successful.

One of the most important issues associated with building a high-powered real-estate organization is hiring the right people. According to the 2012 Economic Census there were just over 86,000 offices of real estate agents or brokers in the United States. How can your agency rise to the top of this crowded field?

There's no doubt that trust impacts an organization's reputation and culture. Building and growing trust in the workplace can lead to great success for an organization, rooted in employee satisfaction and genuine, authentic interactions among supervisors, employees, and customers.

Sales professionals make judgments of their customers' preferences and tastes throughout the selling process – at times without being conscious they are doing so. These judgments enable effective selling.

The average worker would agree that breaks, although not necessary, are helpful in making a workday more manageable and possibly enjoyable. Research has shown the benefits of evenings, weekends, and vacations on employee health and performance, but surprisingly little research has investigated breaks during the actual workday itself.

The old adage tells us that the customer is always right, but does the customer always feel in control?

Complexity threatens organizational competitiveness. Nearly 70% of executives attribute rising costs to excessive complexity, and many firms are aggressively combating complexity...

Recent academic research shows that two types of salesperson or agent behaviors play important roles in creating successful sales organizations. The question motivating our research is: what can the people who lead sales groups do to further encourage these behaviors?

Michael L. Mallin, PhD Sales managers have a vested interest in hiring, developing, and retaining sales professionals who have a propensity to be proactive since research shows proactive behaviors among salespeople as a key factor in generating higher levels of sales performance.

Companies spend over $3,300 per hire on recruiting and the cost of not recruiting well results in poor performance, dissatisfied employees and high turnover. Little research has addressed sales force recruiting at this stage of career and the motivations of a millennial salesforce in their job searches.

When it comes to the art of selling, there are two sharply opposed views: some view salespeople as individuals who are born with the "right" attributes, who can easily sell different products and move from firm to firm with little difficulty, no matter what is being sold.

When entering the work force, new employees face a learning curve associated with their new positions. Real estate agents face the task of establishing themselves as a credible assets in the community and understanding the dynamics of working with clients.

With the advancement in storage technology and the rise of Internet and social media, more and more information is becoming readily available to both customers and agencies. Today, customers are able to get almost all the information they need to make a purchase decision through websites both of the focal company and their competitors, feedback and ratings of other customers and users, through blogs, online product reviews and social media...

Salespeople constantly seek ways to communicate persuasively. Storytelling is a type of communication that you and I use every day. It is so common you may not even think about it when telling or hearing a story. Stories are such an important part of the fabric of human communications that failing to use them effectively in sales can be a serious handicap...

The real estate industry is fiercely competitive. Since the 1990s it has not only been a competition between individual agents but one between agents and realtor teams...

Internet-based applications are very commonplace within business and personal contexts. Online banking, chat-based customer service, and shopping are just some of the e-functions that permeate our day-to-day lives. Some consumers, though, show great resistance...

Do you have a balanced work and family life? For many, this question is difficult to answer because the definition of “balance” varies. Regardless of the definition, it is clear that the demands of work can impact an individual’s...

When looking to add new agents to your agency, finding individuals who can add value immediately is important. Additionally, finding the right person who will fit your job and your agency will increase the probability of...

Efficiency, process improvement, and value creation are not just buzzwords in today’s business world; they have become the foundation for real, sustainable competitive advantage. However, the path to achieving or improving upon these fundamental concepts is not always clear...

This article is written to help “unmask” the qualities of high-performing salespeople in the context of task and time management preferences to help managers and agents achieve the greatest business outcomes. Understanding an agent’s task and time preferences can help increase...

Are extraverts are the best candidates for sales positions? Despite the proliferation of this assumption in numerous sales organizations, studies have shown that there is a weak and inconsistent relationship between extraversion and sales performance. In fact, recent studies indicate that...

How can a salesperson improve her performance? This is a question that sales management researchers have spent a great deal of effort and time trying to...

The real estate agency leader can make a marked difference on agency outcomes by creating, enhancing, and changing connections between...

Sales control systems play a critical role in directing, evaluating, and monitoring the activities of an organization's salespeople. Sales quotas, for instance ...

Organizations must not only have the capability to accurately measure performance, but they also must be able to understand how these metrics are managed to drive revenue ...

Curtis Schroeder, MBA Candidate - Associate Editor, Keller Center Research Report Achieving extraordinary results and happiness is simple. In fact, each of our personal and professional ambitions should point back to ONE question...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the major components of spending - food, housing apparel and services, transportation, health care, entertainment, and...

Productivity, as it applies to sales organizations, is not uniformly defined. Simply put, productivity is maximizing sales results (output) by minimizing resources expended ...

Finding and retaining high performing salespeople continues to be the #1 challenge for most sales organizations. Organizational commitment has garnered considerable ...

Imagine the 60-foot-long boat of the U.S. women's national rowing team cutting across a crystal-clear lake in a heated 2,000-meter race. As the team synchronously rows their ...

Many sales organizations focus on measuring or tracking outputs or results with less emphasis on inputs, which is akin to telling a football team to stop the opponent from scoring without working on essential defensive skills such as tackling and pass coverage.

Loyal staff, engaged clients, impressive brand recognition; these are adjectives that managers and leaders hope to ascribe to their business. In his book ...

In real estate, as well as other sales-related jobs, creating strong partnerships between buyers and sellers is one of the keys to business success. Understanding the types ...

What is the right approach method for the professional salesperson to lead a buyer-seller interaction and achieve effective, efficient and consistent sales results? The pragmatist ...

Joe is a highly successful broker in northern Virginia. Until a month ago, his life seemed ideal. He enjoyed a professional reputation for integrity and insight. Scores of agents ...

Charles Fifield, MBA Whether it is the first or a subsequent meeting, salespeople must have a clear understanding of their call objectives and how they plan to achieve their desired ...

Real estate agents must undertake a variety of tasks to establish, sustain and develop a clientele base. Acknowledging the complexity of their job, most agents recognize the ...

In today's fast-paced, competitive marketplace, effective information management is arguably the most powerful non-employee lever to trigger sales productivity and ...

Assessing the developmental needs of a sales organization normally involves measuring behaviors against a set of competencies or performance metrics, in order to pinpoint ...

Runners to the starting blocks... Take your mark... Wait for the starter's pistol. A sprinter knows the drill. S/he begins a race so many times in ...

Salespeople have myriad experts within the organization whom they can recruit to create a successful customer engagement. However, in companies in which experts are ...

There are two different types of sales managers, those that wait and react to a situation after it occurs and those who proactively engage themselves to ensure their sales team ...

Culture influences many aspects of an organization. Unlike the tangible outcome measures that determine profitability, market share, or the value of good will, culture ...

The sales function has probably the greatest single operating impact on the financial results of business. What business needs is a salesforce driven by productivity ...

In business organizations, the relationship between marketing and sales personnel is often sub-optimal. Marketers view their sales counterparts as short-term, tactically-focused while ...

Sales force retention is a critical objective facing managers. The costs of high turnover rates can be substantial and include lost sales, abandoned sales territories and costs ...

There is a longstanding belief in the service industry that in order to gain loyalty from customers, companies must "delight" them with customer service that goes above and ...

In most service businesses customers' perceptions of a corporate brand depend highly on the behavior of frontline staff. Service firms face the challenge of having employees ...

Research has often failed to find a relationship between customer satisfaction with salespeople and sales performance. Some research shows that as satisfaction levels ...

The sales process is how a sales organization chooses to effectively transform its throughput flow of inputs into outputs. In the case of real estate sales, the process ...