Want to build office performance?

Build an effective learning strategy and culture

As a real estate manager, your job is to build salespeople’s capability and performance. Yet the biggest challenge in the industry is how to do that. Managers work hard to plan for and run sales meetings and trainings, yet are often left disheartened when they don’t see the behaviour change they were hoping for that lifts a salesperson performance. They’re left questioning what the heck to do to ‘jolly up the troops’.

The reason training and sales meetings don’t often lift results is partly to do with the absence of strategy - and partly to do with psychology.

When it comes to strategy, most managers don’t have (and don’t even know that they should have) a solid, well-considered strategy for making learning and development stick. In their absence, efforts to lift the game can be like throwing mud at a wall and “hoping something sticks”.

What managers often miss with this approach, is that true learning (i.e. behaviour change) requires buy-in. Your salespeople need to want to learn - and put in the work to apply what they learn to their daily activity. You can’t just achieve that by telling them they ‘should’.

In this article I explain how you get their buy-in by building a learning culture. I also share seven practical strategies for how to begin that process.

So, to get you started on building a learning culture, let’s first answer what a learning culture is – and isn’t – and why it is important?

What a Learning Culture is – and is not

A training culture is not a learning culture. A training culture uses training as ‘the solution’ to performance problems. This tends to ignore factors significant to performance, including motivation.

A learning culture, by contrast, is a set of organisational values, practices and processes that encourage employees – including yourself, your salesforce and support team – to focus on personal mastery and continuously learn and add new skills – in the name of achieving their own goals.

Seven practical strategies to start to build a learning culture

1. Initiate a Development Programme for them – and yourself – to build capability

To begin engaging with them, it helps to share your intentions with your salespeople to get better at supporting them. This demonstrates intent, your commitment to them and your own learning. Share that you’ll be doing this by working with them to develop an individual Development Plan, linked to their goals.

Start with your own Learning and Development plan, so you understand the process and can begin building your own competency in areas you currently lack fitness before engaging them.

2. Develop your own coaching competency

Coaching is one of the most important skills of sales managers.

What is coaching? It is both the demonstration of care – and a skillset of moving people to act.

Different levels of learner experience different challenges and needs. Develop your coaching skills so you can move each salesperson forward through their challenges.

3. Know their goals – and link everything you do to it

Your salespeople will engage with both the process, and the content and tasks you lay out in your initiatives (training, sales meetings, coaching), when they see a direct relationship with how they fit with their goals. The connection needs to be super clear for them. To test this, consider how many times you’ve attended a training or meeting where the context hasn’t been set, or the content hasn’t connected to what you care about. How engaged were you? How much did you apply afterwards?

Once you have confidence in your ability to coach, engage them in 1:1 dialogues to learn and capture: (1) their goals (2) their current action plans, and (3) any gaps they perceive in their competency (knowledge, skills and abilities) that are in the way of them achieving their goals. Aim to arrive at a common understanding and agreement of the learning needed moving forward.

4. Create Development Plans for each individual and the office

Armed with your team members’ learning and development needs, you can begin to work with them on a plan for addressing them.

Consider the use of monthly 1:1 coaching and mentoring for individual needs and progress checks– and group training and facilitation for common development needs.

Where possible, use group learning and collaboration.

5. Develop a Peer Mentoring programme

Anyone who is not already independently proficient will grow faster paired up with a more experienced, willing salesperson to learn and gain support from as they ‘build their water-wings’, experience, exposure to different real world scenarios and confidence to let go of the edge at their own pace.

6. Build your reputation as manager as safe and supportive

To engage your salespeople in critical, meaningful dialogue about their goals and mastery, they need to feel safe to share their weaknesses and struggles. If they don’t, self-protection is likely to get in the way of identifying growth actions and all you’ll experience is resistance.

Build an identity of genuine help and support. This will enable you to set up your relationships to provide the coaching, training and support required to enable performance.

If you don’t have a safe, trusted relationship with each of your salespeople, plan to build this. You’re going to need it.

7. Provide structured ongoing support and accountability

Create pre-arranged steps scheduled over time to check in. This is powerful and supports both manager and salesperson to know what’s needed next to achieve their goals.

Don’t let them fail to achieve their targets, especially not month-on-month. Help them rework their targets if they tend to overcommit. Work with them on their plan if they underestimated the work. Support them to put in place learning and practice opportunities to develop the skills they’re lacking.

As a manager, accountability to their goals is important, but needs to be safe. To build a learning culture, it’s important for such conversations to occur for salespeople as a conversation with a trusted manager who helps them to connect their goals, their actions, their challenges and learning gaps – not as judgement.

Use these conversations to unpack what’s happening. Where do they need support? Is it a competence or confidence issue?

Creating an effective and robust learning culture that lifts performance isn’t necessarily easy – but will sure pay off when you take the time and do the work.

In their absence, you’re likely to struggle to move the dial for the majority of your salespeople – and to be left wondering why your salespeople head to the competition. As such, learning how to build a learning culture is worth its weight in gold.

Have a go at using the above strategies. Or if you’d like a hand to implement any of it and build a solid learning strategy and culture to lift performance, please get in touch. Development and Performance is what we do.

Jasmine Platt Founder, Real Estate Leaders

Jasmine Platt is the Founder of Real Estate Leaders. As a high-performance specialist, she works with head agencies, branch leaders, franchise owners and salespeople to help them lift their results, make more money and win more of their time (and sanity) back in the process. To speak with her about how she can help you, email her directly at jasmine@realestateleaders.co.nz