Mid-sized residential agency, Bali

Situation

Two of the founding agents were responsible for 61 percent of the prior-year gross commission. The bottom half of the team turned over every nine months on average, and recruitment was a permanent line item in the cost base. Management was reluctant to coach because the language of the sales floor and the language of the leadership team had drifted apart: leadership talked in pipeline, agents talked in deals. The three offices reported close rates that were not comparable because each office defined a qualified lead differently. A board-level conversation about whether to acquire a fourth office had stalled because no one could agree on what the existing three actually produced.

Intervention

• Built a single conversion model used across all three offices, with shared written definitions of qualified lead, hot lead, reserved, and lost. Republished weekly until the language was uniform on the floor.
• Ran a 12-week programme of working coaching sessions with area leads, in their own pipeline meetings, not in classroom training. Focus areas: objection handling, structured viewings, and pipeline honesty.
• Introduced a monthly commercial cadence: pipeline, forecast, retention, and capability, reported in the same format each month so trends were visible.
• Advised on a revised commission tier that rewarded consistency of contribution over hero deals, and on a 90-day onboarding programme to reduce early-stage churn.
• Sat alongside the founder in the first three monthly commercial reviews, then handed the chair over and observed for two more, then stepped out.

Outcome

• Close rate on qualified leads improved by 38 percent across the bottom half of the team within seven months.
• Agent retention at 12 months improved from 49 percent to 71 percent across the post-engagement cohort.
• Cost of recruitment per filled seat reduced by an estimated 30 percent on the back of lower churn.
• Founder began running the monthly commercial review without external support from month seven, and revisited the fourth-office decision with a credible internal forecast.