Are you running sales contests with your teams and brokerages?

If not, you're missing a big opportunity. Sales contests can generate energy and excitement, which drives performance. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do a sales contest.

Here’s the wrong way: focusing the contest on results.

You might wonder, what else would you focus on?

Well, if you're tracking things like how many escrows were created or how many listings were taken, the same people will win every time. The problem with focusing on results is that you can’t control them.

What you can control is the work. So, instead of focusing on results, shift the focus to what actually creates results—the work itself.

For example, you might say, "We’re doing a contest this month on who adds the most people to their sphere of influence." Or, "Who can do five posts a week for the next four weeks?"

You could track how many unsolicited CMAs agents push out in three weeks, who does the most open...

If I were to sit down with you today and talk about why an agent should join your firm, what would be the top five reasons?

I do this all the time—teaching live classes and coaching brokerage owners and team leaders. This is a conversation I love to have. Often, I'll hear things like, "We're a family-oriented organization, we have a great culture, we do a lot of social events, we're really engaged with the community, and we're hyper-local. Staff is great, we have an open-door policy."

Those are all great things… But these are centered around what I call “soft value.”

Soft value is what keeps agents at your company. It’s important for retention—and trust me, you want to retain agents.

But if you’re going to move agents from one company to another, you need a different conversation, one focused on “hard value.”

Hard value moves agents, soft value keeps them.

So, what's hard value? It’s anything that helps me close more...

When we talk about targeting for recruiting in your market, who would be your number one target?

I’m going to share an opportunity you may not have considered yet: Who’s the most likely to move?

NAR did a study on how often agents switch companies, and they found that the average agent stays at a company for about five years. So, agents move about every five years on average. But there’s a group of agents who move more often—agents on teams.

Agents on teams don’t move every five years; they move every three years, making them much more likely to make a move.

Why?

In my experience, the number one reason is their splits. Team members are often on lower splits, maybe 50%, 40%, or even 30% when all is said and done. They're typically earning around 30-50% from a transaction, and they’re often doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The issue is that they start to look at their team leader and think, "The team leader isn’t working as hard as I am."...