Speaker 1 (00:00):
Simplicity, ease of use, interconnectedness, complementarity. If these ideas don't come to mind when you start thinking about your real estate tech in general, or your real estate, CRM in particular, you're in the right place. We have a great conversation with Elaine Akee. She started in the real estate industry as an ops member of a real estate team and led a CRM migration project and that unlocked a number of things that are still in play today as she's the founder of Key Technology Solutions, helping top performing agents and top teams make the most of their real estate tech to make it work for them in general by simplifying it, be sure to watch her listen for specific things like the three assessments she runs to find great ops people, how to know if you have too many tags or too many stages in your CRM and what team agents do and don't need to know about the way that your CRM is set up for your team. All that and much more right now with Elena Key on real estate team os

Speaker 2 (00:58):
No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Elena, thank you so much for joining me. I so appreciate your depth of knowledge in the zones that we're going into and B, for you participating in the follow-up on success community.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
Yes, thank you for having me, Ethan. I'm really excited for this conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Cool. We're going to start where I start all of these conversations, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. What comes to mind for that for you?

Speaker 3 (01:38):
The shortest answer would be standard operating procedures that are simple and easy to follow.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
When did you and your own business or in helping other real estate organizations come to understand the importance of standard operating procedures and what's your approach to developing those? It

Speaker 3 (01:53):
Started whenever I was working full-time for one real estate team. They were a small team locally and I started and pretty quickly took on the role of CRM migration where I was migrating them from one CRM to another and I realized that the current CRM they were using was all over the place. They didn't have any standard operating procedures for it, any metrics or guidelines they wanted their agents to follow. And so whenever we migrated over to this other CRM, it was like the CRMs not going to make a difference unless we change what the expectations are for the agents. So very quickly I became the database manager and created those expectations and consequences and the agents didn't like me, but it helps them close more deals and that's what I was always telling them is, I'm only doing this because I want you to close more deals, not because I'm trying to be some new micromanager in the company.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
If someone wants to tap into what was unlocked with you in that real estate team through this migration process, what are some of the characteristics? I mean obviously there's an orderliness to it, I assume that you wanted, well, if we're going into this new CRM, it needs to be buttoned up and organized. Is that a thing? And what are some other qualities or characteristics of people as you're working with other real estate teams that fits the type of person who can really take on these types of projects?

Speaker 3 (03:21):
You definitely don't need to have the requirement that they need to have experience in real estate because I did not. I actually didn't know I was going to have a job in the real estate space. I went to college for music and studied piano. So it's very different than what I do now. I think someone who appreciates order and is task oriented and documentation oriented, I guess is the way you would put it. I just like things to be in order. The team I worked with already had nice checklists, but I kept hearing the team leader talk to me and vent to me about his frustrations about the agents not putting in their call notes, not updating the stage of the leads and only taking in the sign calls or the open house leads. And so I may or may not be biased towards finding someone that's a little bit more introverted like myself.

Speaker 3 (04:21):
I have become a forced extrovert in this space, but someone who really likes attention to detail and there's actually a program that I've used for hiring and highly recommend y'all use it if you're interviewing people for an admin or database manager position. It's called Test Gorilla. And I have people complete three assessments. I don't do this before I do an interview, so I do an initial interview, make sure we're a good fit, and it takes about 10 minutes to do. The first one is called attention to detail. They have to score at least a 70%. The next one is communication because a lot of what an admin does ends up doing is talking to clients over email, and so they need to score 70%. And then the third one is critical thinking, which is something I just started incorporating this year. I realized someone also needs to be a critical thinker. I scored pretty low on that one. I got humbled by that one. So I'm not as strict. I require a 40%. Critical thinking is pretty hard, but the first two are the most important.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Really good. And I assume critical thinking is part of problem solving and really that's what a lot of this is, is problem solving. Name of that program again? Test gorilla.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
Yep, test gorilla.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Okay, cool. For folks watching and listening, we have descriptions right down below, whether you're watching in YouTube, there's a description down below where you're listening in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, there's a description down below or you're watching or listening@realestateteamos.com where we put up all these episodes. There's a description down below and I go round up helpful links for people. So if you want to check that out, I'll have a link to that as well as ways to connect with Elena and with key technology solutions, which you kind of walked me into this a little bit. Describe, I mean, you're obviously hiring and onboarding people, you're assigning them out to different projects that you're engaging teams and brokerages on. Tell us a little bit about key technology solutions and why you opted to build your own company to dedicate more time to this.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yeah, so when I left that position at that real estate team, I was planning on becoming a stay at home mom. And I did that for eight months after having my child and I quickly became bored and wanted to do something different. So I decided, because I was always a part of those Facebook groups, like Facebook real estate mastermind groups, I saw all the time agents were asking to hire a virtual assistant for a project here or there where the agent would give the virtual assistant, or in this case me instructions of, Hey, I just purchased this program, please watch it and implement it into my CRM or I just purchased this drip, please copy and paste it into my CRM. And that's what I did. I just worked very low hourly rate works work for one-time projects, and then eventually people started coming back to me and going, well that didn't work.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
What recommendations do you have? And I realized, okay, I can take what I learned as I was talking to them. And they go, I hadn't thought about that. I hadn't thought about that. I took what I learned at that real estate team and slowly over time, very organically, it was not a plan business created a standard setup for how to use your CRM properly from how you set it up in the backend, your settings, how you manage your accountability, manage your drip campaigns best practices for it. And so going on three years of doing that, I went from just myself working part-time in this to now growing a team of 20 people where I think seven of them are full-time and then the rest are awesome part-time employees.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
That's awesome. I feel like the gap that you described in the beginning there of I committed to this new thing, whether it's a new piece of technology or whether it's a new drip campaign, I need someone to just make it happen. Hey, this isn't working out the way I want it. I feel like the gap in that is that the approach is not holistic in your background in working inside a team, probably added to your perspective in terms of holism, would you identify that that's the case? It's one of the reasons a lot of this stuff falls down is that it's not thought about or approached or designed or timed or implemented consistent with all the things that touch it. Is it really that simple?

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So whenever I worked for that team full time, I was wearing many hats, admin, assistant operations manager, and I was on Facebook in these groups because the team lead wanted me to be in those groups. And any time he saw something that sparked his interest, the next shiny object, he would tag me in it to explore it. And it was my job to say, okay, this fits into the picture or why did you tag this in me? This isn't helpful at all. And so that is a problem a lot of agents have is they see shiny new objects, they see conversations happening in the real estate groups, most commonly in the Facebook groups, and they don't think about the big picture of what am I trying to, what problem am I actually trying to solve by implementing this new thing or by wanting my assistant or operations manager to research this? How is this going to fit into our current setup? So some agents I've worked with, they've done a lot of courses, they've done a lot of, had virtual assistant set up their CRM and then I take a look at it, I say, you've got a lot of things interfering with each other and this thing is canceling out this thing and you're sending five emails at the same time because they weren't intentional of looking at the overall picture of how their business is set up and their CRM set up.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
I would really love to get into the discovery diagnosis prescription process when you're getting into someone's CRM instance and you did a really nice job teasing that. But before we get there, I just want to acknowledge that you're working with a lot of very successful teams. I want to spend a minute in that including several people who've been on the show like Lauren Bowen, Nick McLean, Sunita Agarwal, and I would love to know from your perspective, what are top teams and top team leaders and kind of top team operators, what are they thinking about or what are they asking you or your team about? What are they working on? Just high level advice from your engagement with successful teams over the past several years.

Speaker 3 (10:50):
They want to make sure what we provide is going to work for their specific real estate market and they want to make sure it doesn't interfere with and compliments their technologies. So a lot of different agents for various reasons, use different website providers and lead gen providers and they know each of these individual pieces are really helpful for their business, but they all don't really connect in one central place being that CRM. And so they say, oh, I've got this great platform. I'll just name some like fellow gets me a lot of sellers. And so I see when people raise their hand, but then I've got YPO also generating leads, and then I've got this website from ypo, it does generating leads and they all work individually really well, but they haven't created a central hub being their CRM to tie it all in together. Say, okay, let's find those hand raisers and reengage them. Like, okay, great, you see someone is re-engaging through your remarketing ad, but now what? There's only so much that one lead gen tool can do for you before you need to plug it into your CRM. So a lot of the conversations are around help me take full advantage of what I'm paying for and make sure I'm not wasting my money.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
Take that one step further. I mean obviously what I'm going to intuit from what you offered there is that you need a CRM that can take multiple integrations that can bring people in from disparate sources and keep track of all the things that they're doing. A is that right? IT B, is there one more step there? Turn that into something practical for someone like, oh, that sounds like something that I struggle with.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
Yeah, yeah, exactly what you said to the first question is everything needs to be in one central hub. And so being in A CRM that allows you to use these tools to their fullest advantage, whether it's through a direct integration or through a program like Zapier or Make, which make goes outside of my knowledge, it just goes above my head. But finding a CRM that lets you be that central hub to connect all of these apps together to say, okay, let this app communicate to this tool and this tool, communicate to your CRM and let the CRM trigger different drips is very essential. So automation take for example, Y Lobo has all these different CTAs you can use on your website in your remarketing, and whenever someone re-engages on your Y LOPA website, various tags can get added to that leads profile in your CRM.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
And the one I'm talking about is follow-up boss and follow-up boss. When those tags get added, use those tags to an advantage because tags can become like an abyss where there's just thousands of tags and you don't even know is it worth to use these tags? Are they just there? How do I use these tags? So you can use it in two ways and these are the most common two ways I use it. The first one is automation. Use that tag as a trigger for an automation to say, for example, hand raiser or callback is what they call it, where a lead requests a callback, that's the furthest down the funnel you can get where someone's intentionally filling out a form and asking for an agent callback and you'd be surprised at how many people missed that. You can set up an automation, say when that callback tag is added, do this, this, and this.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
So for example, it could be add a note that notifies the pond or the agent reassign the lead to a first to claim so that someone gets it immediately. Or you can use a tool like Lead engage to do something called Call Connect where it'll proactively call your agents or calling lead will proactively call your agents and whoever picks up the phone gets the lead first. That way that speeds a lead that you initially should have implemented for brand new leads carries over into these re-engagement so that you don't miss them. So automation is the first thing. And then the second is smart lists or smart filters depending on the CRM you use because if you use tasks, tasks compile on really fast in your CRM. And so if you use smart filters, you not only have a list of who you need to call each day, but they're prioritized because those callback leads are so important. Those need to be separated out into their own list and you probably won't have very many, you may only have one or two, but those are one or two very important people you need to call immediately before you call all the other engagements and all of your other follow-up and nurture people.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
Alright, a lot of really good stuff in there. I remind folks of this now and then, but this is the reason you have a back button in your YouTube app or in your podcast app, you have a back button so you can hear some of that. Again, maybe take some notes. I get email replies to the emails when people subscribe and a lot of people are like, oh, I took a lot of notes during that episode. The back button is super helpful for taking notes. I know because I take notes on these episodes too. Okay, any advice for a solo agent that would be different than for a small team? Let's just say a team leader slash listing agent with one or two admin or staff positions and maybe a couple few buyers agents, let's say it's 6, 8, 10 people versus a larger team specifically. I feel like this shiny object situation that you were describing earlier, I think my gut in my impression and having talked with a lot of folks like you who are very kind of tech oriented or platform oriented or system and operations oriented is that the small team in the solo agent probably need a lot less tech than they think.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
And the focus on the tech takes them away from the blocking and tackling that actually creates closings. But that was a long way around. Any advice for solo agents, different from small teams, different from larger teams with regard to philosophy and approach to technology in general and CRM in particular,

Speaker 3 (17:08):
There's not going to be one blanket answer that can apply to everyone. I think it really depends on a number of factors. Where are you in your real estate career? Do you need more business and you've exhausted your sphere or maybe you don't have a sphere and you've moved to a new place or maybe you do have a sphere and you do have past clients, start with what you already have. So as a solo agent, your budget and time, your budget's limited, but you may have more time or maybe you don't have a lot of time, you're just doing things on your own. So as a solo agent, you want to prioritize your past clients and sphere number one, because they're already there, they're free, you're not having to pay for new leads. And two, those can become your super fans of essentially unofficial affiliates or unofficial brand ambassadors for your company, for your real estate business to refer you more people and to bring you more business.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
But let's say you've exhausted your sphere and your past clients. The theme of your shiny object question on Facebook groups at least once in every group, once a day, in every group, if not five times a day in every group, what's the best lead source? What's the best pay at closing lead source? What's the best lead generation company? And I see people just say, I tried this one and it was terrible and I tried this one and it was terrible. You're going to keep getting the same results no matter what lead generation platform, if you're doing it yourself or agency, you hire or pay at closing platform, you sign up for percent referral fee, you're going to have the same results if you're not changing the way that you operate. And so the common theme for solo agents, teams and large teams or brokerages is A CRM with that foundation of system in place and operations so that it's simple and you've got a realistic workflow and to the solo agent, don't bite off more than you can chew.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
You might think that the answer to all of your woes and the answer to you closing more deals is getting more leads and finding the next best lead source, but you're going to be wasting your money and ultimately becoming discouraged and may feel like all of these are bogus lead sources. And then onto the next one, make sure you have a system in place of, okay, when I get this lead, these are the things I need to do. Start with the classic like 10 days of pain. I just interviewed someone a couple months ago where he still, he calls it 10 days to profit, this sounds a little nicer, 10 days to profit and it is just him and his wife and they don't take on more than they can. They don't take off more than they can chew. They limit the budget that they spend on their leads so that they can do the 10 days of pain or 10 days to profit.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
And he said a lot of times people don't pick up until day eight or nine. And he said, if you're afraid to do that 10 day strategy, don't, because most of the time people are apologetic, they feel obligated to answer your call. And he said a lot of times they're apologetic and say, I'm sorry, I haven't gotten back to you. Thank you for calling me today. I've been really busy. Yeah, I've been interested in X, Y, Z. So being able to have that realistic daily expectation before you say, okay, I can take on more now I can take on more leads.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah, that's good. I mean essentially what I hear there is a reinforcement of an idea that we've established, which is that it's not the lead source, it's not the tools per se, it's not the tech per se. The question itself in these Facebook groups, which I agree, I see those daily really are not great questions. People can still learn from the comments maybe a little bit, they might get introduced to a new idea or something like that. But the underlying principle in all of it is what do you intend to do with it and how consistent are you in executing what you say you're going to do with that opportunity? Are you equipped to do it the way that you want to and are you learning as you go to make sure that you're improving the way that you're handling these opportunities? And tech can enable and support that, but spending money isn't the solution.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
It's knowing what you intend to do and equipping yourself to do it, doing it consistently and learning as you go. With that, I want you to walk us through your process of looking at someone's CRM instance and starting to ask questions, that kind of discovery and diagnosis situation to say, I may need to add some automations through a tagging process as you already described, or I may need to plug a couple of my other systems in more effectively or set up a zap through Zapier to make this work better. Or it turns out I'm set up pretty well. I just need to do a better job of spending time inspecting and making sure my three agents or my 35 agents are doing the things that we all agreed that would happen and then have more accountability conversations. So it's not a tech problem at all, it's actually an execution problem, but I can leverage the tech to create visibility and action on that.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
So when you are being invited into someone's CRM instance, what are you looking for? How do you think about it? What are some of the questions that you're asking? And for this case, because there are a lot of varieties and you did a great job off the top of that last response addressing some of the nuance there. Let's just say it's a team of eight to 12 agents, three or four staff, a team leader who's kind of ramping down sales production. I think that's a very common type of situation. I want to go more into leadership, but my production still matters. So someone about like that, who's got relatively productive agents, how do you get into that CRM? What are you looking for? What are some of the questions that you're asking? And feel free to fill in the gaps with stories related.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, definitely. As we continue working with someone, long-term, we go deeper and deeper into their business. But when we first talk with someone on one of our first couple of phone calls, our goal is to find out how are you currently managing your follow-up? We want to make sure everything is streamlined in your CRM. And so some people might say, oh, I'm using pen and paper for my top 10 people, or I'm using a Google sheet if they aren't using the CRM or I have a CRM, but I'm not really using it. I forget to put people in there. And the people I remember, I'll set a task and then I forget about the task and I don't get to it. And so we do spend a little bit looking through those people that they do have in their CRM and see oftentimes, oh, you have a hundred overdue tasks, or oh, you have 20,000 overdue tasks that has happened.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
So the first level of support and services we offer is helping you, as I mentioned earlier, figure out a way to have a more realistic workflow If you're a solo agent, if you have a team, the more complicated you make it for your agents, the less likely they're going to do things that they need to do. And so again, the smart filters are the first thing we recommend to people. Most people we talk to, they aren't familiar or don't realize the power that smart filter smart filters have. And to your question about accountability, that usually goes until another layer or two later on in the conversation with them of the accountability to plug follow up boss because that's the CRMI use the most. It makes it very easy to have transparency and they may say, well, my agents don't use their CRM. I say, make that a requirement to use their CRM to call their leads and to, if they don't use the dialer, at least log the call and log the note because then in your smart filters, you can either look at the team as a whole or you can drill down.

Speaker 3 (25:34):
You can drop down and say, okay, I want to see Ethan's leads. Okay, now let's look at these lists. His expectation is to zero out, meaning call all these leads. So they go away, zero out lists, the first four lists each day, and if you look and you see leads on there that are been sitting there for 10 days, most likely Ethan has not been calling those people. Another transparency that FPAs makes very useful is the reporting. You can see how many dials people make, and that's why I live by the phrase of if it didn't happen in your CRM or FPAs, it didn't happen that way. You can see number of calls made, talk time conversations and it drills down into, I forgot what the exact categories were, but reached versus conversation. Having that expectation of you need to make this many dials and you have this many conversations and this much talk time and then a layer deeper.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
After we've worked with someone, this is probably like a year in, then we drill down into more customized workflows and checklists where they say, okay, I've been using Top Producer for example. I still use Top Producer just for their checklists or I use monday.com. And so we have a conversation about, well, maybe there's a way to where you don't have to pay and use that outside tool. Let's take a look at what you're using that tool for. And a lot of times you can just use your CRM for it and we're working together to figure out how to implement it. So for example, the most common use cases are your listing checklist. Once you take on a client, what are the steps you need to take? You need to schedule the photographer, schedule the stage or follow up with the client. If they're not ready for those things, you need to schedule a property visit, put the lockbox in the front door, take room measurements.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
And so teams may be using a PDF document to do those checklists. That's the team I worked for. They would print a physical file because I worked in the office, they would print a physical file with all these checklists and then I would check off physically, but then if I weren't in the office or if someone else weren't in the office to pull that file from the file cabinet and open it up and see, okay, she checked off and wrote down notes, then no one would know what was going on. And so going back to that simplicity and transparency, using your CRM for your admins, for your tcs, I am a huge fan of just bringing in as much as you can into one central hub being your CRMI worked with one team who they were really good at this planned yearly event calendar where every January we do this.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
Every February we do this, and they needed their basically event admin to be reminded X number of days before each event to start preparing for those things like start researching vendors for this. And so we figured out a way to have these automated checklists from the dates of, okay, when it's five days before January 20th, then you need to receive this task when it's three days before do this task. And so just thinking through all of the things you do manually or that you want to do like client events and you remember, oh yeah, client events are important, but I never remember you systematize it so you don't forget and add those checklists into your CRM and just be a part of that standard operating procedure. Again,

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Again, a lot there. So I'm going to try to summarize and then have you confirm that I didn't miss any big gaps. So you need to document the things that are happening on a repeated basis, whether that's a client event or following up with a lead. You need to document that it's going to turn into some form of a checklist type of thing. It could take the form of a standard operating procedure, which I think has some additional maybe instruction, maybe some screenshots or video to teach someone else what it looks like to do some of these steps. So we need to document that, but these checklists can be turned into things inside your CRM, especially if it's a CRM, like follow-up boss. And that's where it starts to get really interesting because one of the best advantages of teams is that someone else can come in and back you up, whether that's a TC, backing up a TC or whether that's an agent who has an injury or a vacation getting backed up by another agent.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
And if these checklists and things, and I love your physical example of the printed out PDF that if you didn't have access to that piece of paper, you had to make a note for yourself to go physically check that box on that one piece of paper in that one file. But oh, by the way, the person who really needs to know the statuses thing also isn't in the office so they can't see that piece of paper either. When it's digitized, we can do so much more. Everyone has visibility. Anyone can step in and pick it up where you left off. They can go in and look at the notes. A leader or a manager or a director can go in and identify some of the problems with the organization at large, or as you said, with smart filtering and smart lists, design things for individual people. Any other common gaps when you think about like, oh gosh, if I have to see this one more time, I'm going to lose it because it seems so it's easy and time effective and cost effective to make some of these updates. A, did I cover all that range properly? And B, what are some other things that you wish more people were doing for the betterment of their agent experience, staff experience, client experience and ultimately results?

Speaker 3 (31:28):
Yeah, there are two things that come to mind. The first one is super simple. You probably as a team lead have an expectation that your agents follow a script of some kind when they call leads. And so something super simple you can do is let's take that example of the automation triggering a re-engagement drip. You can also add in to add a note and that note includes the script you want them to follow. You mentioned I'm so tired of seeing this. A lot of times when team leads or sales managers are listening to recordings from the CRM, they can a hundred percent tell that the agent leaned it and didn't follow the script and making things, again on that theme of simplicity, making things as simple as possible, easy for your agent to access that script according to the specific scenario happening. You can add a note and say, Hey, here's the script, hi name, and I do that with our salespeople when they reengage on our website.

Speaker 3 (32:26):
Hey, it looks like you are on our website and you clicked to get started. I'm curious what prompted you to click the button? Just something as simple as that other than, Hey, just following up, you actually have a reason to call. That's the first thing I can think of. The second is think about all the different scenarios you face through a lifecycle of a lead from a brand new lead to needing to nurture them to closing and beyond closing and then a repeat client. A lot of times agents and teams are very good at the very beginning. They follow the 10 days of pain, they make their calls and that they need to make and then they reach the client, but they're so focused on trying to find or not client, but they reach the prospect. They're so focused on trying to find the now business, they forget about the nurturing side, and so they just move on.

Speaker 3 (33:21):
And so what can help are two things. One, automation. So let's say you finally do reach a lead because you're putting a lot of effort towards making your calls and there's money in the follow up. Once you do finally reach a lead, of course you log your call, you put your notes in, but then incorporate automation. So an agent doesn't have to remember to do this. All the agent needs to do is update the status or the stage of the lead to say, okay, they're not ready now, but they may be ready in a year or two. So you change the stage to let's say warm, and so you change the stage to warm and then just that simple two clicks is click to drop down the stages, click to select warm, and then click the confirmation. Green check mark then triggers an automation to drift the lead.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
It's not meant to replace an agent, it never will. A drip campaign never will, but it helps to supplement and you incorporate educational content and getting into the whole topic of what do you put in a different drip campaign is a whole different conversation. But implementing automation to help supplement, because as you grow your nurture database, it's going to become less and less realistic for you to call your hots twice a week. It's going to be less and less realistic to call all of your warms every 14 days and your colds every 60 days. You're going to eventually have a thousand people in your cold list and 500 in your warm that you can't get through everybody. So utilizing automation and thinking through, okay, we can segment. Don't just do a blanket drip campaign, segment your database and think through, okay, the type of clients I call and work with I call expired, so let me have an expired nurture campaign once I communicate with them. So yeah, it would be the script and the notes and then incorporating automation to help supplement what the agents are doing.

Speaker 1 (35:16):
Really good. Thank you for that. I appreciate the caution too, or not the caution necessarily, but the call out on the idea of automation and nurture sequences being a supplement to what we're doing. It isn't the job, it supplements the job. I also, another issue with automation sometimes is that if we don't understand the process or we don't understand what we're trying to achieve or if we're not thinking about this piece of automation holistically, we're very often exacerbating the problem rather than solving it by inserting something that's just going to be acting that we're probably not going to be supervising in any way. I think a lot of this technology probably needs to be better supervised in general unless it's really well thought out and really well designed from the implementation stage. So you probably run into, I would guess that you run into people who maybe have too many stages because the more tags, the more stages, the more complicated it is, the harder it is to onboard an agent into this thing that's designed for multiple agents and for multiple staff. Talk a little bit about stages. How do you think about stages? How do you advise people around stages? How many is too many? How few is too few? And I know that there's some nuance in variety there, but speak to that however you wish.

Speaker 3 (36:33):
Nine times out of 10, the people that we talk to have way too many stages. You can go down a rabbit hole really fast of stages of trying to create a stage for every little scenario, whether it's even not interested stages, like was just looking is a stage, working with another agent is a stage, was just looking for mom is a stage. And it just gets so crazy that it's like you could just have a not interested stage. It all ends up in the same bucket. Same goes for your nurturing. I had mentioned you can segment your database by expires or circle prospecting or FSBO or open house. Don't turn those into stages. Those are sources. And then you can use tags as well as conditions because you will quickly have a hundred stages like hot, expired, warm expired, cold expired, hot, warm, cold, fsbo, or even just as simple as buyer and seller, hot buyer, hot seller, warm buyer, warm seller.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
And then what do you do if they're doing both, then you have to have hot buyer slash seller, warm buyer slash seller, cold buyer slash seller. And so that's where you want to focus stages on where someone is in the process of working with you, use the source of where someone came from and then use tags for further segmentation. And so it's not a bad thing if you have a thousand tags as long as you have a purpose behind them. So a lot of times you'll use website providers that automatically tag leads when they look at properties and it'll tag their zip codes. That's great. You can use that for your batch emailing if you have a listing coming on the market. But use tags in a way to, in this case for automation, I would use an expired tag to say, okay, I just have a simple hot worm, cold stages, just those three, but then I can use expired.

Speaker 3 (38:30):
I can use a FSBO tag, I can use just a general seller tag, I can use a probate tag. And each agent will most likely have their own specialties. So they will most likely not be prospecting. All these types of lead sources, they just select the few. Maybe they work with land buyers, maybe they work with investor buyers, maybe they work with first time home buyers. You need to define who your ideal customer is as well for you as a team lead if you're in production, but also for your agents. So you can definitely go crazy with tags as long as they have a purpose, even as suppose like has dogs, has kids, and then if you have client events and you want to do something at a dog park or a dog friendly restaurant, then you pull up people, stage past client or sphere that has the tag has dogs and then invite them to the event. Or if you want to do a family friendly event with family photos or bounce houses, whatever has kids as a tag, and you can send a batch email there, but what is the right number of stages? I would say anywhere between 14 and 20 stages is good, and that's because you may have your referral agents in there, you may have your preferred vendors and preferred contractors in there. I would say once you reach 25, that's probably too many stages in your account.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
What I heard with regard to tags is more isn't the problem. More can be a problem for stages, but more isn't a problem for tags. It's that they just need to be unique and purposeful. Which leads me to the last main zone I want to get into, which is it's obviously important for someone in generally let's say operations or technology and the tech part of the operations in particular to get into the weeds on all of this stuff. But there's a very human side to this that's been thematic throughout all of this is that people need to understand what are the tags and why do they exist? What are the stages and why do they exist when I do this thing? Does it trigger some kind of a nurture sequence that I'm not, as you said maybe half an hour ago, sending five emails on the same day to the same person for two or three or four different reasons?

Speaker 1 (40:44):
So I think there's a human side to these things. So someone needs to be clever enough to design these things to happen inside the CRM, whether it's tagging automations, smart lists and rule sets around those things, but that needs to be translated and communicated to the agent. We have new people coming into the system. We have agents that have been with us for years and we just maybe did a major upgrade to the way that we've organized inside our CRM. Any tips for training, education, buy-in and actual adoption of not just the tool itself, but the understanding of how it works that I can use it effectively as an individual.

Speaker 3 (41:28):
An agent doesn't need to have a deep understanding of what's all going on in the background of A CRM. That's what the operation manager or integrator's doing. What you want to make sure they understand is starting number one, what do the stages mean? You can't assume that an agent knows what a stage means because of the name. So one example is last year I was on a call with a team doing a training call and we had done multiple training sessions, we had implemented all the changes and they had a stage in their account called nurture. And one agent pointed out, why does the nurture stage start a nurture drip? And we were all confused of, well, of course the nurture stage is going to start a nurture drip. And so I said, what do you think the nurture stage means? And she goes, oh, I was putting old leads I had never talked to in there.

Speaker 3 (42:18):
I'm like, okay, well that might be the case for some teams, but with this team they mean nurture is you spoke to the person and you need to nurture them. So having clear definitions written down, I have something called a cheat sheet of here are the stage names and this is what they mean. Nurture means we spoke to them and they're not ready to buy or sell with us, so we're nurturing them until they're ready. Even something like past client versus closed, some of our clients have both. And so that could get confusing of agents using one for one and one for the other. So teams will use past client for our clients they worked with and they want to continue working with. And closed could be people that you've closed with and you don't want to work with. Again, there's different definitions, different agents and team leads.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
Use stages is the number one thing you want to make sure your agents understand the definitions of. And then the next thing is what should they do when they log into their CRM, how do they locate the people to call? And as far as adoption, I think that goes back to the initial conversation you're having with an agent before they join your team of laying out not only the tools that you're going to provide them and the technology, but also the expectation that you have so that you help them increase their sales and business. That's the whole reason you're having this conversation with them is they have goals, they have goals in mind, which side note, use the goal section and follow a boss to help them meet those goals. But adoption is do these accountability calls. If you don't do it as a team lead, hire a sales manager to do them not as like a, oh, you didn't call this person, oh, you didn't call this person.

Speaker 3 (44:06):
But looking at the overarching goal of, okay, your goal was to make $300,000 in commission this year. We're halfway through the year, you're at 50,000. What can we do? What activities can we do to get you to that 300,000 so that you can move into, you have your goals in there, personal goals. So I see you want to buy a new house, I see that you want to remodel your kitchen. I see that you want to take your kids on a nice trip in order to make those things happen. How can we do it? So being goal oriented rather than just checking things off of, oh, you didn't call this person, you need to send this email. You didn't make as many dials as you needed to. And that's where tools like Maverick are so helpful as well as they make it very clear of helping you predict activities equaling certain outcomes.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Awesome. High level teams. When did teams kind of come onto your radar and you're like, oh, this seems like it's a real thing, and where do you think teams are going?

Speaker 3 (45:12):
I think the concept of large teams is new. Whenever I entered the space, it was mostly where I live was mostly five to 10 agent teams not any bigger than that. And so I think there's a trend of teams turning into many brokerages where they aren't a brokerage, they aren't planning to start a boutique brokerage, but they operate in a way to where they have teams under teams or maybe they have multiple offices that focus in different regions or even different states. I've worked with teams that work in different states, so I think there's this transition away from small team over to larger teams and then team ridges to not an actual brokerage, but I think there's a trend to mega teams and I think there is a trend to team mergers. I'm seeing more and more people creating boutique brokerages, but operating like a team and bringing in their brokerage as a team ridge in their CRM rather than independently operating agents so that their agents are a lot more successful.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
I agree. I see the same thing. I see a lot of, the biggest trend I've seen is this independent team rich scenario. It's people maybe coming out of a brand that they were in before they maybe started a team or explored it in there, but ended up wanting to do their own thing and they ended up starting an independent hemorrage for the reason you just said. If we design systems and processes, if we provide the support of specialists at a variety of different positions, we create a really nice tech stack that is easy to plug into and you don't need to solve all those questions. You need to go to the Facebook group to ask what's the new this, that, or the other thing. There's someone else watching out for you so that you can just stay in dollar productive activities of making your calls and have great accountability calls with your sales manager and closing a lot of business.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
It could be right for an agent. It's certainly right for a lot of team leaders and other folks like that. So this has been awesome, Elena, it's overdue that we connected. I'm really glad that we did. Before I let you go, I have three pairs of closing questions that I think are fun. I hope you do too. And the first pair is, and you only need to answer one or the other. What is your very favorite team to root for besides key technology solutions or what is the best team you've ever been a member of besides your own company?

Speaker 3 (47:42):
So I know that most people are probably answering a sports team or real estate team. Mine is not like a traditional team in a sense, but back in college I joined, I didn't join. I created and formed a band with some friends and we got to play some fun gigs. So although I never have been or never will be interested in sports, being a part of that band and doing gigs and creating music was the most fun I've ever had.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
That's awesome. Your assumption is exactly right and the only person who's gone in that direction was Christie Belt Grossman back on episode 23. I'm not sure if you know her, but she and her husband or a band that just brings friends together. What is one of your most frivolous purchases or what is a cheapskate habit that you hold onto even though you probably don't need to?

Speaker 3 (48:30):
Yeah, so paper towels, I've grown up knowing that they're very expensive and so I try to avoid using paper towels. I have microfiber cloths and then stick them in the washer and clean, which I guess is not necessarily a bad thing. It's more eco-friendly, but it's still something where I'm like, do I really need a paper towel? How much does this one sheet of paper towel going to cost me? Even though I don't need to nickel and dime myself anymore. I'm like, how much does this paper towel roll cost? Let's just use a towel instead.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
Yeah, I love it. I hear you on that. And we've gone down that route too, and then they start making the half sheets, so you feel like you're maybe wasting less, but then you're also like, how far? This is the other end of this. How far can I push this paper towel? How much more can I do here and maybe can I leave it out to dry? I'm cheap. How do you invest your time and attention into learning, growing and developing, or how do you invest your time in resting, relaxing and recharging? What are you doing when you're going in one of those two directions?

Speaker 3 (49:30):
I'll answer both. The first one has a short answer. It's something I've recently implemented. It was a question I posted in the Facebook group actually for in the follow-up by success community of how do you have time, how do you all have time to watch these incredible webinars and trainings because like you mentioned, you need to focus your time and energy on dollar making activities. So I said, do you have someone on team that is on your team that is strictly watching webinars for you? So about a month ago, I actually hired that position. I hired an adjuster and having that ing adjuster washes webinars from the lens of what she knows what I'm looking for and what's important to me, and if she knows that I'm not going to find that webinar helpful, then she doesn't share any information with me. But if she does know, then she'll share the notes with me, the cliff notes of it.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
So that's one part of how I'm learning other than actually choosing webinars myself to watch or books to read and then rest, resting time, I would say I really like to play Sudoku. I like Sudoku books. I don't know if they're actually doing anything for my brain. I like to think that they are, but they're fun. Just simple one through nine as well as playing video games. I don't know if anyone on your podcast is video games, but I go through seasons of playing really, what's the word? Cozy people usually like cozy, easy, just chopping trees type games versus really intense like Assassins Creed games. I'll go through seasons of both right now, my cozy phase, I don't know how long is I'll stay in that phase.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
That's awesome. Funny thing, only one person has mentioned video games besides you, and that was Cindy Agrawal. Oh, how funny. And he said it's just a way that was his rest, relax and recharge too, or I take that back. It might've been a frivolous purchase. He just came back from a store with a PS five or something and she's like, I hope my wife doesn't see it. Okay. Anyway, this has been awesome. I appreciate you. If someone has gotten to this point close to an hour, but not they may want to learn more about you or about how you're helping other agents and team leaders and teams and brokerages, what are some of the places people could go to learn more about you and what you're up to?

Speaker 3 (51:46):
Yeah, so if you're in the learning phase, you can go a couple places. The first is our website, key technologies, KEE technology.com, and you can see exactly what we do for agents. But if you just want tips and tricks for using your CRM, I have a YouTube channel I post videos to, and you can just search Elaine Key or Key Technology and you'll find a playlist of quick tips. I also interview vendors as well if you're curious to know. But again, be mindful of what problems are you trying to solve because I don't want you to get stuck down that path of shiny object. Again, think through what problem are you trying to solve if you decide to pursue that app or that vendor.

Speaker 1 (52:30):
I love closing on that caution slash reminder. Really well done. I appreciate you, Elena, and I hope you have a great rest of your afternoon.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
Thank you, Ethan. You as well.

Speaker 2 (52:39):
Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up@realestateteamos.com.