If I asked you—as a brokerage owner or team leader—what are your top five differentiation points, could you answer clearly?

What makes your company different from every other company in the marketplace? In other words, what’s your value proposition?

If you can’t answer that, no one else in your market can either.

Some of you might rush to say, “Well, we have the lowest commission plan in the market.” But that’s a terrible value proposition.

If a commission plan were all it took to recruit agents, then the brokerage with the lowest commission would have the most agents. But that’s rarely true.

Why?

Because commission plans are not the single greatest motivator for agents.

The #1 motivator for an agent to join your office is this: Will you help them grow their transaction count?

If your value proposition doesn’t clearly communicate how you’ll help agents do more deals, you’re going to lose—every single day—to competitors who can.

So here’s my challenge to you:

Take some time to...

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 transactions in the next 12 months. When I'm sitting across fro...

Have you ever had someone in your company say, "Geez, I can't believe how great it is here. I wish I had made the move years ago"? This has happened to me so many times as a brokerage owner. It often took years to recruit them, and once they join, they're like, "This is amazing. Why didn’t I do this sooner?"

It’s frustrating for us as brokerage owners and team leaders, but there’s something we can do about it.

The strategy is called “presuasion”—not persuasion, but “presuasion.”

What does that mean? It’s about taking a more casual approach to recruiting, in some ways, and showing people what they could experience if they joined you.

How do you do that? The easiest way is through testimonials from your agents. But not just from the agents who’ve been with you the longest—the best ones come from those who have joined most recently. When new agents say, "I wish I had joined six months or two years ago," grab that testimonial right away. Capture it in writing or, even better, on video....

If you're a brokerage owner or team leader, what's the number one reason someone would join your firm?

Often, when I talk to brokerage leaders, they say it’s all about commissions—that’s the driving factor.

But that’s not true. We need to move away from that outdated thinking.

What really drives agents to join a company or team is the potential to close more transactions.

It’s about transaction count, not commissions.

So, how do you build a company or team that focuses on generating leads and helping agents develop leads on their own? Your goal should be to increase each agent’s transaction count, making them one of the highest-performing in your market area.

Here’s an interesting statistic that might surprise you: 50% of all agents in America closed one deal or less last year.

Even if those agents are getting a high commission on that one deal, it’s not enough to support their families. They’re struggling and barely staying in business. What they need isn’t just a higher commis...