- You are in a specific time and place in your career, and a good coach will adapt his or her training to your specific needs.
- A good coaching company will provide you notes or a recording of your sessions.
- Come to each coaching session with something to discuss. Reflect on where you are at, what struggles you are having and what skills or knowledge you need.
Congratulations! You are ready to invest in yourself as a real estate agent or team leader, and you’ve hired a real estate coach. Hopefully, the potential to grow personally and professionally brought you to this point.
Sometimes, it is unconverted leads piling up, general burnout or even just a static state for you and your team — the numbers aren’t great, but they’re not bad either. They just are.
Let’s see how you can get the most from your real estate coaching experience — go from jogging in place to lapping your competitors — but more importantly, let’s beat those personal bests.
After all, with the right real estate coach, the principles offered by him or her transcend the personal/professional barrier.
Hiring the right coach
Some coaches are accountability experts; they’ll keep you hitting your contacts, appointments and contracts. They yell in your face as you round the bend: “Faster! Harder! Stronger!”
Some people may need this kind of coach, but most of us are already working pretty hard.
The other kind of coach is motivational — a cheerleader of sorts. Pep talks are wonderful, but real motivation starts with an honest, willing and open connection between the coach and the agent — not just pompoms and marching bands.
A good coach will ask you what you want to achieve, where you are in your career, what your goals are, what key performance indicators (KPIs) you need to measure, and he or she will know what the path to your goals looks like.
All good coaches will take the old adage to heart that depth is more important than breadth; it’s great to know how to generally coach most real estate agents and teams, but you are not most agents.
You are in a specific time and place in your career, and a good coach will adapt his or her training to your specific needs.
Be coachable
Being coachable means you are willing to be self-reflective and take an honest appraisal of your habits as an agent or real estate team leader.
Standing bare in front of the mirror can be an uncomfortable place for anyone.
Can you be vulnerable? Are you ready to accept that your success or failure lies squarely on your willingness to become the salesperson, leader and mentor that you need to be to hit your goals?
If you are always right or a perpetual victim of circumstance, then perhaps you are not coachable.
What lengths are you willing to go to personally and professionally hit your goals? Ask this of yourself before you contact a real estate coach.
Be accountable
You wouldn’t hire a trainer at the gym and expect that the simple act of hiring a third-party source for assistance will make your muscles bigger or your stamina greater, right?
You need to get in there and sweat alongside them and adhere to their workout schedule and dietary advice. Can you be accountable in the same way with your real estate coach?
A willingness to be accountable is critical.
We all draw away from accountability from time to time. The more you can stay engaged, on task and completing the steps asked of you, the faster you can get to where you want to be, or at the very least, closer.
Sticking to the agreed-upon KPIs established with your coach is a good place to start.
These indicators are more than the numbers you must know about your performance on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. KPIs go beyond a measure of progress or stagnancy. They also tell you what needs to happen to improve your performance.
Get recordings or notes
A good coaching company will provide you with notes or a recording of your sessions.
These are great reference points for you if you find yourself getting caught up in the day-to-day hustle. Being able to review what it is that you and your coach discussed helps provide clarity in our often foggy personal and professional lives.
Always have deliverables
Let’s revisit KPIs, but this time, in terms of your personal growth. KPIs in the broad sense, can seem overwhelming and are often a catalyst for procrastination or the perpetuation of a static state.
A good coach will break your goals down into manageable pieces. At the end of each session, you and your coach should set goals for the next call.
You should have a few deliverables that you agree to complete by the next call — deliverables that advance your overall goals or contribute to specific skills or knowledge discussed in your session.
This can be as complicated or simple as your current goals dictate: building a new system or part of a system, having a tough conversation with a client or employee or obtaining some tool or resource you need are all sound deliverables.
Take time to prepare
Come to each coaching session with something to discuss. Reflect on where you are at, what struggles you are having and what skills or knowledge you need.
This is the depth versus breath adage I discussed in the introduction. The more proactive you are in assessing your situation and needs, the more effective your coach will be.
It provides a level of depth the coach can bring to his or her set of training skills. If your coach has to drag everything out of you on each session, it will take much longer to see effective changes, and it will take longer to reach your goals.
Be honest with yourself about where you are in your personal and professional development. Only then can you be honest with your coach, and if he or she is a good coach, he or she will bring depth based on your status, not breadth, to your customized coaching experience.
Honesty is step one. Step two is accountability. Step three is open-mindedness. Are you ready to be coached?
Dale Archdekin is the founder of Smart Inside Sales and the current director of lead generation for Global Living Companies at Keller Williams in Philadelphia. Follow him on Facebook or checkout his Facebook group.
