Team Angst Revealed
Managing sales teams comes with a sea of
challenges. Here’s how to preserve the peace
while keeping your brand and bottom line strong.
If you ask agents what they love about
working on a sales team, you’re likely
to hear passionate testaments about
the benefits of strategic collaboration
and the comfort of knowing that others
can step up when you can’t be in two
places at once or need a day off. When
broker-owners are being totally candid
about teams, their views tend to be more
circumspect. Their skittishness comes
from reconciling competing sentiments:
They may be reluctant to come across as
unfriendly to the team concept given its
rising popularity, but the proliferation of
those teams could potentially chip away
at a company’s bottom line.
Although there’s no national data on
how many teams operate in the industry,
few would question that their presence
has exploded over the past decade. “The
number and kinds of teams, and the
amount of business they do, continues to
grow,” reports Steve Murray, president of
REAL Trends in Castle Pines, Colo., a real
estate research and consulting firm.
Allen Tate, REALTORS®, in Raleigh,
N.C., currently has 92 teams among its
1,450 salespeople and estimates that it
has experienced team growth of 10 to 20
percent in the past two years, according
to Phyllis Brookshire, the company’s
president.
At Coldwell Banker Sea Coast Advantage in Wilmington, N.C., more than 30
percent of its 400-person sales force
belong to teams. Currently the company
has about 50 teams, which is double the
number from a decade ago.
That type of growth poses challenges
for brokers. “Frankly, many brokers don’t
know how to handle teams,” contends
real estate trainer Jon Cheplak, CEO and
founder of Seattle-based Cheplak Live,
who does quarterly coaching phone calls
with broker-owners nationwide. He says
brokers’ main concern is whether teams
will hurt the company’s profitability, but
they’re also worried about how teams
could disrupt their company culture or
dilute the brokerage’s branding.
And then there’s the worry few
broker-owners own up to publicly: how
to manage an associate who in some
respects functions as a peer. “Teams are
essentially a brokerage within a brokerage,” says Cheplak. For some, there’s a
very real fear associated with figuring out
how to lead team leaders.
Different Stripes
Despite the challenges, Murray says,
most broker-owners and managers at
larger firms have made peace with teams
and will grow even more team-friendly in
the future. They’re achieving that peace
by creating policies and guidelines to
manage teams wisely. That starts with
defining what exactly constitutes a team.
Teams fall within three categories,
Murray says. The most common now is
the two-person team. “All they’re doing
is sharing the costs and burdens of the
business, and having a team enables
them to get away so they’re not killing
themselves,” he explains.
The next most common, and becoming more so, says Murray, are teams of
three to 50 people, though they often fall
within the eight- to 12-person range. In
these groups, the team leader is hugely
involved, acting as the primary listing
generator and hiring others to fill such
positions as buyers’ agents and market-
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