- Strong financial motivation can have a powerful effect on sales skills, especially when coupled with a performance-based pay structure.
Chances are, if your real estate team’s sales figures are less than impressive, your hiring process is at least partly to blame.
John Pyke
Even the best training in the world won’t help someone who doesn’t belong in sales. You need to learn how to hire great salespeople and stop wasting resources trying to train real estate agents who just can’t seem to close.
Pat Hiban sat down with John Pyke, The Talent Genius, recently to discuss why the hiring process is so important in sales-focused industries.
He also explained exactly how to hire great salespeople in real estate so you can make the most of the raw talent in your market. Read on for a few of his top hiring tips. To hear them all, listen to the complete interview below.
Why real estate businesses hire bad agents
Real estate businesses hire bad agents all the time. Some businesses simply aren’t sure how to attract the best agents. In most cases, however, businesses hire bad agents because they pay too much attention to details that have little to no impact on actual sales results.
DISC profiles, for example, often affect hiring decisions in real estate. Pyke says they really shouldn’t.
Personality instruments, including the DISC profile, haven’t been proven effective as hiring tools; they’re only slightly better predictors of real-world sales results than traditional resumes.
Furthermore, traditional hiring interviews don’t generate the information needed to make smart hiring decisions in real estate.
If you interview potential agents the same way you’d interview any other run-of-the-mill employee, you won’t have anything meaningful to base your hiring decisions on.
Hire great salespeople in real estate with Pyke’s tips
If you can’t rely on traditional hiring practices or personality profiles when evaluating potential agents, what can you do to make smart hiring decisions?
During the interview, Pyke shared several specific tips on how to hire great salespeople in real estate that will help you answer that question. Here are a couple of them:
- It’s crucial to evaluate each agent’s financial motivation. Essentially, you want to know how driven a potential hire is to make as much money as possible. When coupled with a performance-based pay structure, the desire to build wealth can be an extremely powerful motivator and will likely result in impressive sales figures.
- Take a deep dive on the data that actually matters: how agents rank comparative to peers and how much they’ve exceeded their sales goals in the past. If you’re considering new agents who have never been in sales, try to determine whether they possess the strong drive that defines successful salespeople.
For more information on how to hire great salespeople in real estate, including a breakdown of the ideal interview structure for agent positions, listen to the complete podcast with John Pyke.
Pat Hiban is the author of the NYT bestselling book “6 steps to 7 figures: A Real Estate Professional’s Guide to Building Wealth and Creating Your Destiny,” the founder of online real estate sales training site Rebus University, and the host of Pat Hiban Interviews Real Estate Rockstars, an agent-to-agent real estate podcast with Hiban Digital in Baltimore, Maryland. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.
