How A Three-Person Real Estate Unit Scaled Fast

We unpack how a specialised three-person real estate unit creates momentum through clear roles, protected prospecting time, and buyer care that turns into listings. James Williams explains why most agents already know what to do, but still stall without discipline, practice, and trained words that make clients feel safe saying yes. 
• moving from reception to a leveraged team role through energy and initiative 
• why the effective business unit model works when roles stay tight 
• building a weekly structure around morning outbound calls and afternoon appointments 
• the real bottleneck in real estate sales being listing acquisition 
• getting comfortable doing the boring work that produces the wins 
• using scripts and dialogues to negotiate with clarity and confidence 
• practising words through role play, voice memos, and simple rehearsal habits 
• reframing closing as opening a relationship and a new chapter 
• handling fear of rejection with belief and exposure outside the comfort zone 
JamesWilliams.coach, C-O-A-C-H. I look forward to seeing you at the Hunter Valley Complete Salesperson course.

Hosted by Lee Woodward Training Systems

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Transcript

From Reception To Job Offers

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hello and welcome back to the podcast We Are Selling. My name's Lee Woodward, your coach and host, and the author of the Complete Salesperson course. Today's program is brought to you by the Agency Portal, Australia's first listed to settled execution platform. This incredible digital platform allows us to use Agency Sign, Agency AML, the sale funding process, commission funder, agency supplier pay, and agency settlements. Agency Settlements is the Pixar partner that allows the real estate digital transaction to exist. Let's get started with today's podcast. Our guest today has had an incredible journey from reception through to leverage agent and then to being one of the best effective business units we ever saw put together in this country. And that effective business unit was Phil Harris, Georgie, and James Williams. And he joins us today as the leverage agent, and he's now in the coaching world. James, welcome aboard. Pleasure to be here. Now, James, we were chatting off air before of how you and I met, and you had to remind me. Take us through that.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Well, I'm not sure if you remember the first time that we met because I was, or I was sitting on reception at Tupanto, and you came into the office to do a training session. And only because I didn't know who you were, if not, I would have been a bit starstruck. I carried on with my usual personality, gave you the royal tour, and so on. And supposedly that day you stood up in front of all of the agents at Tupin Toop. And back back then, sort of mid-2000s, this was the who's who of agents in Adelaide. And you said, I might paraphrase here, but all of you should take a page out of that kid at Reception's book in regards to energy. And if any of you could hire him as your PA, you should have done it yesterday. As far as I remember it, that's what you said. And I got three job offers that afternoon, and one of them was from Phil Harris. So I have a a lot to thank to you for that.

Why The Team Model Worked

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Method of introduction, and thank God someone executed. But let's go back to this time. The effectiveness unit worked well, everyone kept in their lanes, the roles were documented, the pay structure was understood, the commitment for phone calls in the morning was a non-negotiable. But take us into your reflection of working in that unit alongside Phil, where you think it went so well.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Well, I think it's that you've got three people doing what they're great at and only doing that. Rather than the one agent being spread thin or even with an assistant, however the team is set up, doing these various things throughout the day and you know, wearing different hats and jumping in between because you need to win real estate. You had everybody that was hired for specifically what they were good at and just doing that throughout the day. So they had an ability, I guess, to get into a flow state. So you had Georgie, who was the business manager and the glue that held the team together, an organizational machine, admin focused, and good at having the hard chats as well, sometimes with Phil and I holding us into line. Then you had Phil, who's the lister and presenter and handling the bigger negotiations. He could just be in the zone winning business appointment after appointment. Then you had my role, which was the buyer specialist, and I was just speaking with buyers all day long, whether it was over the phone or face to face.

A Week Built On Structure

SPEAKER_01 3:35

And when you're working with buyers like that, the purchasing community will then say, I've spoken to 10 agents this week. No one had no one had any time for me. They just push me to the open. But I met this one person and he explained it in full. He sent me a purchase a pack on the property. That's where the big business comes in when people start to feel that difference in how how they're treated. I completely agree. So, James, take us into a typical week of your week working alongside Phil and Georgie, but doing your role and specifically your role.

Where Agents Get Stuck

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Sure. So we had a very organized structure which served us very, very well. It was protective mornings for prospecting and face-to-face appointments in the afternoon. So my role was to communicate with, you know, on a Monday, it obviously looked a bit different. That's the callbacks. For the rest of the week, I am communicating with buyers, trying to match them to properties and trying to turn them into listing opportunities for Phil. That's up until midday. And then the afternoon is the appointments that I had booked from those conversations. Quite often buyer appointments, but sometimes they had they were um appraisals and listing appointments where I'd booked for Phil, but because I'd been speaking with them, they said, Hey James, can you come along as well? So that was a pretty simple but standard day that was very effective for us.

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Let's step you forward to today. And your role today is just like me, you are a stage speaker, you do private coaching, public speaking. What have you noticed in observation of working with all these agents about where they get locked, where they get stuck? What holds them back?

SPEAKER_00 5:09

I think in a general sense across the country, the problem isn't not knowing what to do. It's about not doing what they know they should be doing. I think a lot of people are attracted towards real estate because of the freedom and the opportunities it presents. But I think that that gets the better of a lot of people when they don't have the discipline or structure to do the work they need to do to be able to find the business they've defined. The hardest part of real estate in most marketplaces and most of the year round isn't selling houses, it's finding the houses to sell. And they struggle to do the outbound activity that's required to bring in the business.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

I was speaking about this on that ultimate agent with Matt Steinweight, which we recorded just late last year. And I said to Matt, you've got to be okay at doing the boring stuff. And what I meant by that is people love the grand final, the the the the office men accepted, the vendor loves me, and they think that's a consistent moment, but that's a very end part of the moment. Uh today I've been in the recording studio taking ums and ahs out of audio, yet this week, everyone will see me at the complete salesperson calls and think, oh, what a job. There's a whole boring side to what you do to get to the parts which is the grand final and so forth. And I think, you know, people have got the jargon but not the behaviour. I think that's an issue. And if anyone's listening to this now, it's it could be the day to have that business maturity moment and say, that is what I do in the mornings, because that's what it takes. And for you and Phil, you like accountability accountability buddies to make that work. James, when we look at this role and the effective business unit success, yes, it's got the required outbound calls in the morning and the commitment to do that. But throughout your career, you studied and became very, very good with words. What did you do? How did you bring it about?

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Part of the hiring process was to be sent to the complete salesperson's course and to learn some specific scripts and dialogues. And one of them was the signature negotiation process. And on my very first day, maybe second day, I think it was my first at Toop and Two, Phil had me on the phones and he was sitting, you know, right across the table from me. And I was calling these buyers back, thrown straight in the deep end. And one of the buyers wanted to make an offer. I was running through the call, but it was actually both scripts. So I'm going callback script and then saying, You do you have any interest in the property? Says yes. Um, and then we then we move into the offer process. And I quickly shuffle the papers around and I get the script out, even though I'd memorized it. And I ran him through this process of how did you arrive at that figure? And just so you know how the process works from here, I'm happy to take your offer forward to the vendor, but they're going to ask me what I think of it. And as they're aging, I'll look them in the eyes and tell them it's on the lower side of the property's fair market value. So just knowing that offer's not going to be accepted, cutting out the middleman to save us both some time, what would your next offer be? Only laugh there because that dialogue was, you know, 25 years strong. Um and he goes up and then I go to the next step and I say, Dan, if we had another buyer in it, this amount, would you be happy to miss out? Or would you want me to get back to you? Anyway, this guy's following along with the script, and I think Phil's got a friend on the other end of the phone. Like I'm being, I'm being stitched up here. But it wasn't. It was a real buyer, and I got him up$35,000 and the property was sold. And I remember getting that contract laminated, and I think I intended to get it framed. But at that moment, I thought to myself, wow, there is a difference between being a natural communicator and a trained salesperson. I'd always looked at scripts and dialogues as something that people needed who weren't good communicators. When when Phil was first coming across to Toop and Toop, I was told that this guy was into scripts and dialogues. And in all honesty, in my young, immature brain, I thought, what a loser. This guy, this guy doesn't know what he's doing. He doesn't understand sales and um how wrong I was. And so that day I got really excited. And, you know, we'd role play twice a week from there and start practicing all of these key dialogues and figuring out the right answer to key objections. And this was what significantly fast-trapped my success, our success as a team, and then, you know, these teachings, learnings, and the foundation of a lot of these dialogues has helped me help agents across the country.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

What a brilliant way of explaining that learning the technique to say it correctly and the thousands of hours of psychology that's gone in to write these sequences out and to pick a word. So improve the price is different to reduce the price. And what would your next offer be? Next is very different to increase using the walkaway. But the pausing and let pausing do the heavy lifting becomes such an important part of the process. And you just, you know, there's people doing the course this week in Sydney, and we'll go through the signature negotiation process. And what a classic timestamp of from when you learn it to when they learn it, there's been no difference. One addition is the mid-flight price reduction. So if the owner does accept an offer, we say, well, let's change it on the internet with some headroom so we can maybe trigger some other interest if this one doesn't go ahead. And that mid-flight price reduction is just mentioned. It's not even in the text of that same sequence. But here you are today, you're now coaching, you're training, you're you're doing one-on-ones. What what's James Williams doing today?

Role Play As The Secret Weapon

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Well, Lizzie, quickly, you said I got sent to the school of hard knocks, though, because I the second completed us person's course I went to less than 12 months later, may it even been sooner than that. I was sitting there and you were teaching the negotiation process again, and somebody came around, tapped me on the shoulder, and put the microphone in front of me and I had run through it in front of, you know, a hundred agents. Um, yeah, it it had a massive impact on my career. And just from there, just the understanding that and seeing sales as a skill rather than something that we're all naturally gifted at. And like any skill, the more that you practice it, you'll get better. Whether or not you're, you know, you're seeking your dialogues, Lee, or you, you know, you want to reinvent the wheel and come up with your own, which there's it's not necessary to do in this industry. Whatever tickles your fancy, though, get into the training room, get into an office, a bedroom, anywhere, and just start putting some thought and practice around what you're saying, because everything that we do in this industry comes down to how we communicate. It's how we list, sell, negotiate, everything. It is a skill that, like any skill, like playing the drums, playing the guitar, doing anything, the more you practice at it, you'll get better. I was at an office this morning and I asked the same question when I'm surfing around uh this topic that I ask every office. And it's how many people in this room are practicing what they say maybe once a week for half an hour, setting the bar really low. And once again, the answer was no one. Sometimes it's one or two out of a hundred, but the opportunity that this presents in an industry where it's not standard practice to practice is that this is your secret weapon. Imagine being a like an amateur sports team in a league, and you were the only team that practiced, you would start dominating very, very quickly. And that's um, that's the opportunity in real estate.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

You're so right. Getting match fit is really important. If you're presenting only a couple of times a week and there's no role play, no rehearsal, and roleplay today is so simple, you can just put on Zoom, talk to it as if you're speaking to someone on the other side of the world, listen back to the recording and fix it up. There's only you listening to it so it doesn't have to sound uncomfortable. And there's so many great tools for doing that. Uh and I'll give you an example of repetition. This is my third podcast today. Uh, I'm on some private podcasts for people as well. Back off to the complete salesperson course for 16 hours of speaking on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday, Saturday, uh sorry, Friday, I'm recording the new certificate of registration for New South Wales. Wow. And then Friday night at 8:30, I've got to do a listing workshop to the UK webinar. So by the time Friday comes around, I'll definitely be warmed up from speaking. If you're speaking all the time, you can hear that difference in the tempo, the tonality, how they work. And especially when it comes to the influence part of getting an offer, getting a yes to go ahead with that appraisal. And James, why do you think the role play is so beneficial?

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Well, because you're you're practicing for the big game, the big moment, whether it's a phone call or a listing appointment, you know, I think people underestimate that what they're saying is having a direct impact on how comfortable they're making their potential clients feel, and what they're saying is impacting whether or not they win or lose the business. And I think a lot of agents would prefer to lose inadvertently, they would prefer to lose the business in the lounge room than to practice their dialogues with their colleagues because there's no room to hide when they're practicing with their colleagues and embarrassment and all of this stuff comes into it. But when they they leave the lounge room and they come back to the office and they can they can make any excuse. Oh, I didn't get the listing because of this or that, or the other agent did this. When the reality is they failed to communicate effectively that they were the best agent for the job. And so what I think is really helpful is that role play practice, a skill session, whatever you want to call it, doesn't have to be this high pressure thing where you're sitting around a table grilling each other. It can be as simple as getting out your iPhone, recording something that you want to say into a voice memo on your phone and then driving around listening to that. That can be the role play or the skill session. It doesn't have to be this high-intensity environment that's scary for a lot of people.

Stop Closing Start Opening

SPEAKER_01 15:02

Couldn't agree more. Final questions for you. Yes. In the area of words and influence of getting people to yes, what have you learned and what are you teaching in that area to get people better results?

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Uh it sort of moves into the space of teaching around, you know, what we were talking about earlier, which is closing. And um I heard you say something before and that you don't call it closing, you called it something else. Beginnings. Beginnings, nice, yeah, exactly. So I call it, you know, opening. I say we're not closing for a sale, we're opening a relationship. It's funny. I I think the stereotype around asking for the business and being pushy, kind of, you know, I don't know if it goes back to the Glen Gary, Glenn Ross, or Wolf of Wall Street thing, people kind of shy away from. But when we look at real estate, we're not selling dodgy insurance or locking people into something they don't want or they don't need. We're trying to help them with something that they do need. And we're certainly not closing anything. We're opening up a door, we're opening up an opportunity to be able to help people. You know, when you negotiate with a buyer and you you, you know, close a buyer to put in an offer, that can be the beginning of the next chapter of their life. When you close for a listing, that's the beginning of hopefully a successful campaign with a client who turns into a friend or a referrer for life. So we're not closing anything, we're opening something. And so helping people get comfortable with it, I think a lot comes back to their belief, because their belief is influencing, you know, how they do things and the outcome. And then addressing things like overcoming the the very, very, very natural fear of rejection, which is just our reptilian brain trying to keep us in our comfort zone. So exposure therapy into stepping outside our comfort zone and asking for things can be really helpful. And then thirdly, empowering people with dialogues and words that work. And so they have a higher probability of getting the outcomes when they are having the conversations that they may have been avoiding in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

Couldn't agree more. That word closing is an American term and we are doing beginnings or openings. The only thing we are closing is the other agent out of selling that particular house because we've been appointed. And I think that's important that you look at it and think, if I don't stand my ground now and really explain with clarity why I would like to represent them, the other agent's going to get it and they're not going to do as good a job. We know why, because a lot of people can s or the jargon, but not the behaviour. When you're passionate about what you do, it's so much easier to deliver those words. If you are faking what you do and you're just saying stuff to sound good, you'll be caught out pretty quick.

How To Find James

SPEAKER_00 17:57

So I I always say to to agents Lee, don't forget you're swimming with sharks in the sense that there are competitors around you that if you don't ask for the business and if you don't go for it to try to help these people, if you believe you're the best agent for the job, then let's almost see it like a duty of care that you need to ask for that appraisal. You need to ask for the business in the lounge room. Because if you don't, that agent down the road that you don't think is as good is gonna do it. And then they're gonna sell with that person and not be looked after as well as you could have.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

James Williams, fantastic information for any of our listeners that want to get hold of you. We'll put a link in the show notes. But how do they get hold of you? What is your site?

SPEAKER_00 18:35

JamesWilliams.coach, C-O-A-C-H. There's a podcast, James Williams Coaching, as well, and tons of free training. You can find me on Instagram and everywhere else if you just type in James Williams Coaching. Lee, I'm holding in my hand here a real estate hot topic CD from 2009. The central lock system, Lee Woodward, Gillian McGrath, Jason Boone, and James Williams. Um you have been an integral part of my career and my growth from the first day to then your teachings, your CRM, your dialogues being the foundation for our learning. Very generous of you to provide this platform for other coaches to speak on. I speak every day. I public speak in front of hundreds of people, and speaking to you, I get a little bit nervous. That's how much respect I have for you, and I'm very thankful for everything that you've done for the industry.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

James, lovely words, and thank you for joining us, and I'm sure we're going to have you back on the program in the future. Thank you so much. And that concludes another edition of We Are Selling. And thank you to our sponsors, Agency Portal. My name's Lee Woodward, and I look forward to seeing you at the Hunter Valley Complete Salesperson course.