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Beth Nordaune started the Enclave Team in 2010 as an early adopter of the team model. A few years later, she was at almost 10 agents. A couple years after that, she was opening multiple locations across the state of Minnesota.
But going from small team to big team was anything but easy. Here’s how Beth overcame the scaling vs. agility challenges and built a tight-knit team with over $100M in annual volume.
The Challenge
Losing clarity as the team grows
Beth Nordaune grew up in real estate — but she never imagined she’d one day lead her own team. After an established career in corporate training at TGI Fridays, she took on the role of assistant helping her dad on a condo project.
“I thought, well I’m a hot shot. I can do this,” she laughs. Little did she know.
After hustling as a solo agent for a couple of years, Beth started building her own team in 2010…and quickly realized she needed help.
“I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I hate paperwork and I'm terrible at it. I just want someone to answer the phone and take care of paperwork.” But soon enough, it was clear to Beth that the ad hoc hiring had to stop.
As the team grew, it became less agile. If she really wanted to build her business, she’d need to let go of ad hoc hiring and focus on the things that actually moved the business forward.
But to do that, she needed to be able to see everything clearly — and that’s where Follow Up Boss came in.
"Follow Up Boss is really phenomenal – the way it can communicate with a lot of different resources and help with tracking."
BETH NORDAUNE
CEO AND FOUNDER OF ENCLAVE TEAM
The Solution
Building an airtight lead management system
“When we first got Follow Up Boss, what I loved is that we could plug and play, and yet we had this robust system,” Beth recalls. “It is really phenomenal — the way that it can communicate with a lot of different resources and help with tracking.”
It wasn’t long before she was digging into the data.
Tracking the pipeline
Prior to building a set system, Beth knew leads were coming in. She just didn’t know what was happening after that — and with no “funnel vision,” it was too easy to fall into the tunnel vision trap and focus on things that simply didn’t have an impact on lead conversion.
The game changed completely when she zoomed out and started tracking the entire lead journey, including:
-Number of leads and opportunities generated per month
-Number of those that convert to booking an appointment
-Of those, how many met with agents
-How many agreed to work with you
-Number of those leads that make it to closing
Simply tracking how leads move through her team’s pipeline (and if/when they stopped) revealed breakdowns and opportunities across the business.
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As Beth points out, issues at each stage in the lead journey require different solutions: “Maybe we don’t have enough business coming in for everyone. Or we can’t get people to meet with us. Or they are meeting with us, but then they’re not signing with us — that’s a whole other set of problems.”
Knowing where those problems exist helps Beth lead her team with precise focus.
Smart Lists & Action Plans
In 2018, Beth spotted one such breakdown in their lead management.
The team’s blanket follow up strategy just wasn’t working. So Beth created two distinct pipelines:
-Past clients and SOI
-New online and open house leads
Beth and her team created tags inside Follow Up Boss for past clients and SOI. They also began sorting leads by stage to pull lists and customize their follow up messaging to different groups of people based on where they are in the buying or selling journey.
“Making that separation for agents seemed to be really helpful. Instead of treating it all as one, because they are very different groups. How we treat them, how we communicate with them, our conversion out of it is really different.”
The team also uses long term Action Plans for past clients and Smart Lists for contacting their database or past clients quarterly. “It’s a different conversation with people we know vs. people we have not worked with before. It’s also a different conversation between someone who is buying now, buying someday, or when the ‘right’ property comes up,” she explains.
Agent accountability
And when it comes to holding agents accountable? The clear-cut data in Follow Up Boss “takes all of the emotion and drama out of it,” and her agents always know exactly what they need to do to get back on track.
Plus, she’s learned something very interesting:
“The people who are the highest producers of the team send about three times as many emails, text messages, phone calls."
What can we say? The proof is always in the data.
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The Results
From seeing to scaling
Using Follow Up Boss gives Beth the crystal clear insight she needs to understand her business, solve problems when they arise, and help her team succeed. To put it in her words, “Literally, you can see.”
In the last ten years, Beth’s team has grown steadily, moving to a team of ten after the first couple of years, and now to a regional team with three offices throughout southeast Minnesota.
But with that growth, Beth’s personal focus has shifted from production to leadership and mentoring her team. Having a clear line of vision into the team’s pipeline makes it easy for Beth to identify the training her team needs and the goals they should set. She can narrow in on each individual’s performance and identify their areas of strength and weakness to help them grow and succeed.
“I really believe there has to be a path that everyone can succeed and have opportunity…So stepping to the side and coming alongside your team to see what you can do together in collaboration…that's magical,” Beth says.
