Something I never quite realized until moving into the real estate vertical nearly a decade ago is that REALTORS® are essentially specialized sales professionals. As a child, I grew up seeing real estate agents on billboards, signs, and moving trucks. I even married into a real estate family (my wife's father and his brothers collectively own a small 30-agent real estate brokerage in northeast Ohio). Even then, it wasn't until I started working directly with agents myself that I realized just how much "sales" is in the DNA of their profession.

As Vice President of Sales for Delta Media Group®, I've grown to truly love the sales profession. I'm passionate and driven to learn more about how to better my own sales skills, as well as grow the skills of the professionals on my team. I'm constantly looking for new tools and technology that can help make my job more efficient and increase our overall sales opportunities. 

One of the many things I'm involved with at Delta Media Group is ongoing product reviews of our newly developed tools. I have the unique benefit of working directly with our largest real estate brokerage partners (such as Latter & Blum, BHHS Homesale, Watson Realty Corp, and many others) and hearing feedback about what tools their agents need day-to-day. I take their feedback directly into our product development review meetings and through collaboration with our real estate partners, our own internal sales team, and the vision of our CEO Michael Minard, I have the opportunity to help craft high-quality automated technology tools that any sales professional could leverage for their business.

As I challenged myself during these product development meetings to build a high-quality user experience for the sales professionals that utilize our products, it hit me that there are six key things any real estate agent is going to be looking to accomplish in order to be successful with their business. These six distinct tracks are all areas that I would challenge any broker-owner, office manager, or executive to ensure are in place within your organization. 

1) Agents need to Advertise. I mentioned earlier that real estate agents are sales professionals, but the reality is, they're a lot more than that these days. A critical component of any agent's business is their ability to advertise their brand and their listings. I've seen dozens of training courses and webinars online about how to effectively advertise as a real estate professional, and that's even more critically important now than ever. 

At a real estate conference in October 2022, I learned that more than 70% of all licensed real estate agents today have never experienced an economic downturn. Many of these agents first got their license in 2019/2020 when the market was booming, so they have never needed to effectively market a listing considering for several years the listings essentially sold themselves due to increased demand. 

One key area of support that you should be focused on this year is helping your agents advertise their listings when they have them, and teaching them how to market their own personal brand when they don't. There are forms of advertising such as Google PPC (Pay-Per-Click), Facebook Ads, automated listing advertisements through tools such as AdWizard, and more. Whatever your niche, keep advertising at the forefront of your business. 

2) Agents are definitely going to need to learn how to Prospect. In this vertical, I've also seen it referred to as farming. The reality is that for most agents, relying on your sphere of influence alone isn't enough to pay the bills. So really tapping into the sales side of the business and proactively prospecting is a fantastic way to get your brand in front of new prospects. This is where the rubber meets the road in finding a quality technology product to help make you efficient with this type of work.

A CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) tool is designed to help you organize contacts and user groups for proactive outreach. One highly successful method of proactively prospecting I've seen over the years is as straightforward as adding contacts from your neighborhood, church, or other local businesses and enrolling them to receive something like an automated Market Watch Report. These types of reports provide something of value to these prospects, showing your brand alongside real-time updating market data that can run every week, every month, or just a few times a year. 

Prospecting is an entire article of content on its own, but to keep it brief, I strongly believe in having three forms of contact with each prospective client you reach out to. Reach out with a phone call, an email, a text message, or a letter. The sales trainings that I've attended have taught me that, on average, you aren't getting in touch with the person you're trying to reach until the 11th attempt. I've found that reaching out to prospects on an eight-day rotation is a healthy cadence to show them you want their business without being too overbearing. Ensuring you have a top-of-the-line CRM for note tracking, activity tracking, and other automations will be substantial in helping your proactive outreach efforts. 

3) Speaking of automation, that's the third major tool that brokerages need to ensure is in place for their agents. Automation gives you the ability to accomplish all of the things you know you need to be doing, even if you don't have the time in the day to do them. When you think of automation, it really touches both the advertising and prospecting component of your agent's business. Here are a handful of the most popular automations in the real estate industry that your brokerage should have in place for any sales associate:

• Automated advertising for new listings and upcoming open houses. Agents should be able to pre-set a budget so any time they get a new listing or an open house an ad is automatically built and run for them on Google or Facebook.
• Automated email newsletters. Our data has shown time and time again that consumers really do engage with high-quality targeted email content relevant to their interests. Products on the market such as My Customer for Life provide an opportunity for an agent to have high-quality buyer, seller, and home-improvement content running to all of their clients.
• Automated social media posts. One of the #1 expenses agents report is managing their social media profiles and ensuring there's quality content on them. It can be very time-consuming to manage channels across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Automated posting tools like Social Connector allow an agent to have timely real estate content intermingled with true content and market statistics running in as little as five minutes. 
• Automated drip email marketing campaigns. The bread and butter of any quality marketing technology platform are the dynamic email campaigns that are built into any CRM worth its salt these days. Dynamic drip campaigns can have quality content running to your prospects, and based on how they engage with those campaigns, the content will adjust to boost your chance of getting someone on the hook. Good CRMs on the market will even have automated task creation so you know exactly when someone clicks on an email and have the chance to follow up with them. 

4) The fourth area where a sales professional is going to spend their time is when they need to Build something. While this may seem like a vague tool, if you take a step back and think about the things a real estate agent needs to build, the tasks can feel endless. Build a great-looking website, great-looking flyers, postcards, or email marketing templates. Build a CMA for a prospective seller. The list goes on. 

As a brokerage executive, I believe it's important to evaluate how much flexibility your current marketing and technology platform offers your agents in terms of building their own brand. Can they build their own landing pages on their websites? Can they customize and build their own print or email marketing templates? Can they customize and quickly build a CMA for a client? If the answer to any of these questions is no, it may be time to take a look at other options in the marketplace. Brokerages that don't offer these types of solutions to their agents will usually come to find that agents will just outsource this and go off and spend thousands of dollars a month on another third-party system that you as the broker-owner no longer have visibility into. 

5) The fifth "tool" in your toolkit should revolve around helping agents Analyze what is happening in their business. As a sales professional, I find that I live in spreadsheets and find data trends fascinating. If one particular marketing strategy is working really well, you want to find out why. If something isn't working, you need to understand why that is. Ensuring your agents have plenty of tools at their fingertips to analyze things like website traffic, email engagement reports, and market statistics can go a long way in their understanding of how their strategies are performing and where to make adjustments. 

6) Finally, an agent is going to need to have quick access to your brokerage's Resources. This is where the true value of any brokerage's technology solution gets to shine, and the value of a brokerage is sold to the agent. Agents need to be able to get into a company intranet and see messages from other agents that work for the company, access company files (or share files of their own), access internal training and education systems, and more. A true company intranet should offer tools to help agents connect with other agents in the organization through internal communication channels like message boards or chat rooms.

One of the tools I have continued to see grow in popularity is a "Haves & Wants" notification system. For example, an agent can send a message to every agent in their office saying, "I have an open house that needs to be covered on ," or "I have a buyer who wants in a property." It's a method of sharing details with other agents in the company through either instant alerts or daily email digests. 

Overall, I believe that every agent or sales associate within a brokerage, or any other sales profession, has six key responsibilities in their business that should be addressed by their toolkit. Tools to help them Advertise, Prospect, Automate, Analyze, Build, and easily access company resources. If you have an existing marketing technology platform in place that checks all these boxes, then you're good to go. If you feel like you may be missing a component or two, there's never been a better time to check out software solutions in the marketplace.