What Communication Tools to Use for Your Business

Welcome to the Leading Lane podcast for Real Estate Pros by Real Estate Pros, with your hosts, Ashley Frederick and Steven Burch. If you're looking for an honest, authentic, and raw perspective, you found it. All right, welcome back to our Leading Lane podcast. Today, Ashley and I are going to talk about communications, Basically implementing a process, leaning into some technology, and being more efficient with our team and with our organizations on how we communicate with them. So, Ashley, I know before you and I started working together, you. You had some different ways that when you communicate to your team, to your agents, your staff, you. You changed your method. So what did you use before? Kind of tell me the. The pros, the cons of what you had before, and then what are you using now? Sure. So I think when we first started, right, it was like a group text message, which, let's be honest, that is annoying in itself, doesn't always apply to everybody. So then really quickly, we started with just a. Like a secret or a hidden, you know, Facebook page. And then, so we would use that Facebook page for kind of internal communication because not everybody was at the office every single day or just things we wanted to make sure. So we'd have things on there, like a new listing or we have floor here. So if somebody needed help with floor coverage, we had an upcoming event, you know, every now and then, it would be kind of like a SOS type thing, or like, I need help with this. But I found it to be a little, like, lost in translation, if you will, especially with Facebook, because you get notifications for every other group that you're in. So it's really easy, I think, to, like, have that be piled down at the bottom, and you got. You missed it because there's 25 other notifications. But for us starting out, it was really simple place just to have it housed. And, you know, we used that for, I think, like, two and a half years. And that was, you know, there was no place for storing documents. I mean, there's like a files, you know, tab, if you will, but, like, not really helpful in that sense, or priorities or different types. If somebody just wanted to kind of chime in with questions. I just felt like it was more or less like a. Like a listing hub and a. Like, just, can you help me out here there type of hub. That's what we started with. So when you were with a. Your previous company, what were their communication methods? Like, how did they communicate to you as an agent. At all? Did it. I can't hide my facial expressions. People always say, my face tells A story. But I mean, communication was an issue. I mean, looking back, right? And it was normally like saved for an office meeting. So then an office meeting ended up being extremely long because any of the communication was done. Otherwise it was email. And that broker liked to put everything in capital letters. So that was always fun because we were trying to figure out like if she was screaming through the keyboard or not, if that was just how it was. So then you think about that. If you think about how many emails you get in a day and appointments, right? And you get back to your computer and there's 20 emails like that might be, you know, saved for the end or. I think the other thing like with email is that maybe somebody was asking for something and then they only responded to one person. So not everyone saw the response that it was going to be taken care of. So then the second person would take care of it and it was already taken care of. It's just kind of a rigmarole, if. You will, or if you get the people that do the reply all and say thank you to absolutely everybody. And it was unnecessary to have that email. I have a hundred other more emails that I didn't need. Yeah, but what about you when you were at your other brokerages? So it was, it's kind of funny, I'm writing down like looking back, what do, what do we do? I think that definitely it was the, the in person sales meeting that we had weekly that took freaking forever. And then, you know, it was my, my grandmother was my broker, right. So and I remember her going through sales meetings and we would go through a three, her three ring binder and she would flip page by page of the MLS sheet of all the listings and we would talk about each listing. And then if there was a new listing, how they would distribute that across the office is they would print out a copy for each person to lay it on our desk and then we would have, you know, five to 10 different copies of handouts ready to go in the actual physical page paper file as well. So it was very old school, you know, I mean, back then though too also, right. Like we, we didn't have a ton of technology and we didn't know what was. Was out there and available. So it was all face to face. Back then we didn't even have like a group message. But then when we started with our company with the franchise, we, we did the group text messages. We quickly learned that was not it. You know, we had. If people left or people, you know, joined the company, it would be a Whole nother group message and we would have 10,000 different messages. People wouldn't, wouldn't be, you know, putting it in the right group, so on and so forth. Then we went over to GroupMe which was a little bit better just because now it was an app based. So that was a little bit better but still it wasn't quite it. We jumped to Facebook groups for a hot minute but that drove me nuts. Just I mean Facebook is social media, right. And so agents will always say, well I didn't see that posted in there. Well, they get the alert. Yeah. But then they go in there and then they see what is on their social like their feed. They get distracted and now they're out there scrolling and not actually going to the Facebook group and having the conversation or looking what they need to be looking at. Lost in translation. We looked at Slack for a hot minute. We use Slack currently for our leading lane stuff. But I was on Slack for our company for a while and then you and I did a mastermind that did Slack as well. I, I can't stand Slack and it does not work the way that my brain works and functions. I'm not saying it's not a great product, it just doesn't work. It's not what my brain. For the company perspective of brokerage, it works great on the leading lane side of things. But for the brokerage, for communication now we use Blink. It's designed for more of frontline workers. What I did was I took Blink and I took all my wish list of what I wanted the different categories of posting so that we can see the new listings or if we have buyers looking, we can now category categorize each of our individual posts. And now it's our, our hub of all of our internal documents. It's our communication, it's our drive. Right. Like it took away from having to have all of these side apps and like 10,000 different directions to now from a company perspective we have one app to go to. It's organized in a fashion that even if it's we need to bounce, you know, somebody out to a different platform or software or area, we're able to direct them and it doesn't appear that we have the 10,000 different apps anymore because it's all within side blink. So I love Blink. That's what we, we obviously put into your company into effect there as well. That's what I do for the mass majority of my clients is implement Blink right away. Yeah, I love it. So what are your thoughts on Blink? And then I can Go into further on some other things. There's. Yeah. First of all, do you recall what the cost is? I mean, it's minimal, but I know that that's always something that people will ask. I want to say it's like $3 and 40 cents, don't quote me 100, like per person, per month type of thing. It's. To me it's minute. It is the best investment to, to have it within any sort of organization. I think I've talked about it with a couple people and then, you know, they'll, they'll figure out $3 and how much that is per month. And again it's, you have to like, you know, spend money to make money, if you will. And if your company could all be on the same page and have like this internal dialogue, like, I guarantee you that in senses it will make, it will make that up by what you can accomplish together. But I think there's also a sense of culture that comes out of Blink. So I wrote down a couple of things, but one which I think we implemented maybe six months ago was the under contract. So we have a new submission form button. Basically anytime an agent gets an accepted offer, they fill out this form. Basically all the terms which aren't seen to everybody, but then it flops over to a spreadsheet that our admins have access to. So there's on the back end, right. Like our admins have access to this spreadsheet of agents, price, closing date, etc. But then on the blank side, it does an automatic publication. For me, the broker that says, congratulations, Steven Burch, on your accepted offer on XYZ closing this day or what, whatever. And then everyone else gets to chime in and say, congratulations, great job. So cool. So I think that it's kind of like a relationship builder within the team to promote everyone doing well. But on the back end, I know that you and I have been at conventions and people have literally said like, I didn't know we had an accepted offer or I didn't know we had contracts get accepted while I was out this week. So for me as a broker, like depending, and I don't think it even matters if you have an agent, an office of 10 people or 50 people, it would still be coming through. So I, at least, I don't even know all the details of the offer, but I saw that that offer was under contract and to me it's just a matter of having that in touch with your business that you know that these are getting done. But also maybe it's somebody that's new in the company or that's been struggling and you see it come through and then you as a broker could take an extra step and send them a private message like, hey, just saw the contract come through, like great job. Or I know you were really struggling with that one. So there's some internal motivation there that I think is really important. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the going back to like the people that say that they don't know about the offer or contract or anything else. There's been people that I've had conversations with, I mean, just not a handful, like a lot that they basically say they, they don't know that they're under contract until they receive the check from closing their commission check. And they're like, where did that come from? Like, whose is it? And then they have to be this PI broker and try to figure out where in the world this thing came from. Like, there's so many things I think that are wrong with that, but that's my personal opinion. That's not how I run my company. I'm responsible for the, every contract that signed from the beginning that it's signed. So I need to be aware of everything that's going on. You know, in the, the Automat Automatic Alert that we, we implement into your, your blink system, it's great because the agents, like if it appears that it's coming from you, it's really not coming from you. Right. Like it's set up on the back end for automation. But I think the, the beauty of this is yes, it does create the culture aspect of things, but really I think it creates the accountability for the agent that just got that contract. Because if they want the recognition, so because we're creating the culture, they want the recognition. And so we're making it to where they. In order for them to get the recollection, the recognition. There we go. Can't talk. They have to submit it. Which in, in on my side is I want to make sure that we are getting the, the contracts coming in in chronological order so they. It appears. Wonderful. It is wonderful. But it's all about the reporting that it is doing that the agent now is doing the reporting on the back end for us, which then triggers our admins and our staff to be able to pick up and start doing what they need to be able to do. So yeah, it's warm and fuzzy, but it's the operations side that really is now making it way more efficient and streamlined across the board. Right. Because. Right. A lot of those offers end up coming through like overnight or over the weekend. So when staff comes in on Monday morning, they've seen them. Right. So they can acknowledge that. Now I have XYZ steps to take care of, you know, some other reporting portions of it, ask, you know, where did this lead come from? So that's one. A really good way for us to pull some numbers at the end as far as, you know, is it a specific sphere, et cetera. But more importantly, like we have referrals, right? So like we have SupaBase referrals. So the agent will select KVCORE referral. So again, it's triggering the admins to know that there is a referral that has to be paid when the closing comes. So it's just trying to make sure that steps aren't missed throughout the process because we get it, like things come up, you forget or whatnot. But this is supposed to kind of help with all questions and all answers. I think one of the things at the end too that you have is would this agent be a good fit for our office? And I. It's funny for me to look at those and I mean, I have my own little list, but it was really funny when the agents had selected yes. Which I was like, okay, fine. She came in like three weeks later and she's like, so, you know, when I submitted my contract a couple of weeks ago, I thought that this agent would be a really good fit. I hadn't done a transaction with them before and I'm just here to tell you that I changed my mind. And they. I just thought it was really sweet how she was like so concerned that she had put in like, yes, a good fit. And then she told me like the disasters of what happened and I was like, you're right, that probably would not be a good fit here. So I mean, they obviously like took concern that they put it in there and then wanted to let me know, like, they don't feel that way anymore. So I appreciated that. Yeah. And you know, the, again, the beauty of the. This new contract submission form is to be able to keep you as the broker and your staff more organized and efficient in their working. You know, like, that's one of the questions that I put in there. Yes, the. Are they a good fit for your company? And I get a lot of pushback at the very beginning when I'm working with a client, when I implement that into their, their company because they're like exactly this. Like, how do you know they're. They're a good fit? You just started, well, what we're Trying to do is we're trying to be able to help train our agents, our active agents that working on our company now to constantly be thinking like, is like a, are they a good fit or not? Yes. No. Right. Very simple. But it's to be able to show our current agents that look at the different level of professionalism that you get with agents within our company versus others. And now I can pull a full report and get opinions from all of my agents that's ever done a deal with this specific agent. And so if it, it's somebody that I'm going to go after, then I can pull that, that report and I can now have meaningful conversations with the agent that said yeah, they're a good fit and the agents that said no, they're not a good fit. What happened? So that helps me prepare for when I'm going to be in that face to face, you know, interview, if you will, of, you know, what happened in this transaction. Like I can now dive deep into a meaningful conversation with them versus just asking very generic, you know, questions and getting answers back. Like I want to make sure that they truly are going to represent my company properly. So there's so many different positives to implement those different types of questions and asking your agents. And I learned very early on that I was not looking at my numbers, you know, what, like frequently enough. So I was asked by Emman Palati one time. This changed my, my perspective on numbers drastically. He asked me like, what is my average sales price? What is my average production per agent? Like just kind of drilled me with these numbers and I was like, hell, I have no clue. And ever since then like numbers were my number one focus. I'm never going to allow Mr. Emman Pilati to ask me those questions again and I don't know the answer to them. Um, but like I have to have a pulse on my company and how else are you going to have a pulse on your company if you don't know the true numbers, if you don't know what's really happening, Your fallout rate. Right. Once I implemented this contract submission form, I started asking who is the title company that you primarily use or like on this, this actual contract, like, who is the title company, who is the lender? And now that analytical information allowed me to go to these lenders into title and ask for an msa. An MSA is a marketing service agreement. So because I was able to show, hey look, 70% of our transactions are being ran through you. So let's develop a partnership together, right? A Marketing service agreement that we will continue to promote you as a preferred lender and then we are able to financially be able to get, get money to be able to promote you. Right. And it's a joint effort on there. Obviously there's different parameters and everything else that you have to adhere to for RESPA and whatnot. But we then were able to negotiate having a lender come into our office and rent space from us. Same with Title. Now we can have a true conversation about, hey, we want to come up with different ventures together and have you rent out and be next to us to be make sure that you're, you know, the convenient choice for our clients as you're providing fantastic service. So, yes, it's information. Yes, there's, you know, a little bit of pushback from agents ask or like, why do I have to put that in there? But it really allows you, from the, you know, the person in charge to make great decisions because now you have analytical information that you can move forward and it helps you with your negotiations. If that's the type of partnership you want to be able to create, great. But yeah, we started with Communication app, right, With Blink. But then it ventured into so many, so much more that we can add into it to make us more efficient. And with being efficient in this communication app of operations. The other thing that we implemented was the communication plan is you're like going on and off. So we implemented the communication plan, right? Like I used to be, felt like I was the help desk 24 7. Having all of these agents call me with every single little question, should I do this? How do I do this? What goes on? And once we implemented Blink, we pushed people, we trained them to go to Blink and ask that question, right? Instead of sending a mass text or a mass email, now we're posting it into our form and internal communication app on Blink to allow their peers and other agents within our company and our staff to be able to jump in there and help them. Now that freed me up so much that now I'm having other people help answer the questions. People are getting their, their answers way quicker versus waiting on me to actually respond back to them. So it really then amplified the whole culture. Like we're making a virtual extension of not only a knowledge base, but of our culture right at the fingertips of all of our staff and agents. Yeah, I really liked the ask on Blink first. So it is a lot of the, do you have a minute, do you have a second, etc. Which don't get me wrong, there's plenty of opportunity or reasons that people need to talk to me directly. But there are a lot of questions that I felt that I was getting that other agents might not know the answer to either, because. Right. Like, every day seems to be something that we haven't come across before, or there's different ways of doing things as well. So even now, sometimes when people will message me, I'll just be like, that's a great question. Did you put it in blank? And then they'll see it. But for me, it's kind of. I enjoy watching other agents respond. So for me, it's like, good. And that they've been trained. Right. Like, they answered correctly. Like, and. Or sometimes it's just like somebody answered it. But here's maybe. And from my opinion, like, maybe here's a little bit more. I like to think about it this way. Or, let's be honest, maybe something. Somebody answered the question wrong, and then I can hop on and be like, so, great, great thought. However, like, we need to do this. But then that's an opportunity that I know we should do further training on so that it doesn't have that problem in the past. So I think the agents have done really well with that, especially with everything in real estate right now. You know, there's some messy waters that everyone's just trying to figure out, and they'll just hop on blank and say, you know, I heard this, or, did you read this article? You know, there was a video that was a really good video last week that I saw, and I wrote on Blink, everybody should take a peek at this video. So I think, you know, the other thing, too, is there's the hub, if you will. So it's like a file directory. So same thing. Like, we keep a lot of really important documents there or things that we use often. So for us, we have Supras for our access. And sometimes, you know, whether the Supra was removed or whatnot, like, you can't ever find the shackles code so that you can open your Supra. So we used to always call back to the office, text the office and ask what the shackles code was. Or we'd write it down on a sticky, and then that would get lost somewhere. So I just had them make a master sheet of all of the Supras. And then. So when I'm at a property, all I have to do is open up, blink, open up the spreadsheet, and pull the shackles code. I didn't have to call anybody. No, like,. Right. It. I mean, it's the mm. And so the meeting minutes are there for everyone to be like, oh, yep. But this is what we talked about last week, right? And literally, again, it's that virtual extension, right? Like it's resource right at their fingertips. And we have now the app on our phone, right? Blink is on your phone. So you know when you get a notification on Blink that it is pertaining to work, right? Where that's different on Facebook or, you know, other different platforms, you get a notification. You don't know if it's social and, you know, just casual or if it's actual something urgent and important for work. So when, when you talk about being able to push people back onto Blink, asking the question, what is that really doing? I mean, yes, we're answering the question right now, but what is that really doing for the future? Questions that are going to arise that might be the same type of realm, right? So you might talk about something six months ago, or you might have new staff or whatnot. But basically it's a search function. So if an agent does have a question, like really, they'll search it first, you know, like home warranty or something like that, that more or less it would bring up any discussions about home warranties. They can see if their question was already asked. So again, it's a resource hub for them before reaching out to anyone. Maybe they don't even have to post again because they found the answer by searching through the history. Right. I like to kind of compare it to. You're creating your own living library for your company. And so you in essence are creating your own search engine, your own Google for your company. Because anything that is in there, let it be within the hub, you know, the file directory, a question, a post, a comment, whatever. You're going to be able to be able to see anything that is searched with that word, just like if you were to go to Google. So for me, I love being able to have the trainings that are on there. The more that you are engaging and interacting and putting different articles and whatnot into it, the more robust your training and the different topics are going to be there. And like you, you know, we put our, our meeting minutes for our sales meetings in there. Uh, we actually record all of our, our sales meetings as well. We have a, an owl, like a little thing that sits on our, our conference room and it hoots every time that you turn it on. Um, but it, it, it's a 360 camera that is recording everybody that is talking. So if you happen to miss it or if you're in one of the offices and didn't come in person, you're able to see and experience the questions live. So now what that also does for me is again it's another resource. So if we go over something within a sales meeting, yeah we have the minutes of the different notes but sometimes we miss the different topics on there. So I would refer back, hey, go check out that video. You didn't happen to, you weren't able to attend in person. So watch the video then come ask me those different questions. And you know, I think at first when you implement anything type of like system like this that you're pushing back a little bit, people automatically are a little bit defensive. Like you don't, you're not taking the time. But now that we've implemented and have had it for three, three, four years, like however long it's been, they are so used to it and that is the resource that they constantly go to. And now we're creating empowered and empowering critical thinking agents and critical thinking team because we want them to be able to search, you know, our Google search first within blink post on there. If they have any questions, utilize their peers. Then if they aren't feeling like they're getting the, you know, the support or getting their question answered, then they can trickle it on up to us. But in being able to apply all of that has eliminated them coming directly to me every single time. So it's a win win all the way around for education, for the culture, for, I mean let's be real. What other real, you know, companies have their own internal app that they use right at their fingertips? Very little that I'm aware of. Right. That's why we implement this all across the nation. So I, I think it's beautiful for multiple different reasons in being able to truly scale and grow your company. Yeah, one other function that I like is the mandatory read or the like the acknowledgement the. So you know, there are certain things that might come up and you just need to make sure that everybody has acknowledged it, whatever might be. So you know, you can, you can also do like high priority those types of things. But there's a mandatory red one so they actually have to like check that they've read it. You can pull that up. So if it was something that changed effective this date XYZ mandatory read, they check it like now you have a log that everyone agreed that they read that and they're under understanding. So if they were to come back later and be like I didn't see that. Well actually you Checked this mandatory read button that said you did. And they love that, don't they? Yeah. Accountability. Right. But yes, it does. That's exactly what it is. It's this little B, more or less, that pops up as a notification on the top of your phone. So I think that people take priority in that, like, over Facebook. Right. It's kind of like we talked about. You're not getting lost in everyone else's posts. Like, oh, like something popped up. I wonder if somebody needs something. A lot of times we'll do it for, like, if I'm, you know, I had a. I have a board meeting tonight, and somebody wants to see a showing or wants to see a property at 4. Well, I can't. So I just throw it in, blink and can anybody help me with my showing tonight? So everyone gets notification that there's a new post, and then everyone will look and. Right. They'll respond. And then same thing. Maybe LeadingLane says he's going to do it, but LeadingLane was going to say, well, now LeadingLane doesn't have to worry about it because she already saw that LeadingLane did. Or maybe LeadingLane says, I can't. So then LeadingLane will be like, oh, yep, like, I can. I see. LeadingLane can't. So it's just really nice for everybody to be on the same page. Everyone knows what's going on. There aren't, you know, like, well, we talked about this outside of this. And sometimes if that happens, if there's a great conversation, you know, I'll just say, like, can you put that on blank? Like, this is what we talked about. I think this would help everyone else so that they're. They're aware. Yeah. You're empowering one another and within your company, lifting them up. So I think that's phenomenal. And one of my favorite phrases that it's told to me is that and in order to have peace in your company, you have to have organization and you have to have accountability. And that's exactly what I think that this app has done for our company, is that we've created the, you know, true peace in our company by applying organization. Because we have one place to go. It's a central location. It's not distractions. It's all work. Right. And then we have accountability on there as well. There's no excuse to. To not see or engage, ask. I mean, it's literally an app on your phone. And every single one of us use our phone constantly and are on there. So there's no excuse to be not holding agents accountable. And now we're eliminating Like I have not sent out a mass email to my entire company in probably three years. Right. Like there. I do not send out emails like that. Like we primarily. Not primarily, we use Blink to communicate. There are very rare one offs that I'm emailing one on one and that's acceptable. But everything that I have to communicate and broadcast to the entire company is all done through Blink. It's a lifesaver for, for me and I am so thankful that I found it. You know, are there more things that I wish that it had? Absolutely. But I work pretty closely with Blink and being able to start customizing some different things and categories and whatnot. So I'm excited to see what's going to come down the pipeline in the future so that we can only improve and the efficiency and the communication within our company. Yeah. So I think anyone if you currently are maybe in a little bit of archaic age of text or emails and you're looking for something that is super user friendly, that can help track across all kinds of different metrics, but also can create, you know, responsive responsibility, accountability and culture, I think that we would definitely encourage you to check out Blink. You can ask either one of us to hop on and screen share. You can see what it looks like and see how it can benefit your company. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please like subscribe and share with others. Stay connected for more genuine insights and strategies to boost your real estate career on Facebook or check out our website. We'll see you next time.