Sales teams often invest in new data platforms only to see usage spike and then plummet, with results unchanged. Mike Simon, founder and CEO of AgentBrief, a platform for title, escrow, insurance, and home warranty professionals, has witnessed this pattern from the vendor side. “You see massive interest. People get really excited. You see very, very high early engagement. And then it drops off a cliff,” he said. The problem, according to Simon, is that users don’t change how they work once they have the tool.
Simon compares the behavior to buying a sports car and driving it like a family van. “Why would you buy this souped-up sports car and try and use it like a minivan?” he asked. When results don’t improve, users blame the data or technology and revert to old habits. AgentBrief’s response was to shift training from how-to to why. “Why are you using this? What do you have to be thinking differently when you’re using this product to make it successful for you?” Simon explained. The why centers on timing, relevance, and relationship building. AgentBrief tracks real estate activity 24/7 and alerts users when an agent they follow has new business, along with an AI-crafted message they can edit and send. The alerts handle timing, and the message provides relevance. But the relationship remains the rep’s responsibility. “You must not rely on technology to do the one thing that you are skilled as a human being, which is to develop a relationship with somebody else,” Simon said. “Technology will never do that for you.”
When teams stop seeing results, Simon distinguishes between data problems and habit problems. “I make no representations that real estate data is perfect because it is an imperfect science,” he said. A feature called See Something, Say Something lets users flag data issues with one click and a screenshot. But fixing data is different from getting someone to adopt a new process. To diagnose the issue, Simon asks managers: “What do you really want your salespeople to be doing? And why aren’t they doing it?” Then he pulls the usage report. “Numbers don’t lie,” he said. He reads it as three escalating problems: reps aren’t logging in; reps log in but don’t follow enough agents; and reps receive alerts but don’t respond. He calls the last “the worst problem of all” because “all of these opportunities are going to waste.” In his experience, the reps who respond most often are already top producers.
Consistency is the deciding factor. “It’s not just using it the right way; it’s using it the right way consistently,” Simon said. Customers who ask how many new orders AgentBrief will bring sometimes get a surprising answer: without consistent action on alerts, none. “Your job is to sell your product,” Simon said. “My job is to tell you the people who want to buy it and when they want to buy it before anybody else.” That holds whether the product is title and escrow services, homeowners insurance, or a home warranty. For teams considering a new platform, Simon suggests asking what the team will do differently every day once it has the tool. New data on top of old habits brings the same results; new habits, practiced consistently, change them.
