The Manager Who Kept Asking About the Numbers

By Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton, DCH

The numbers were fine until they weren't

Ray had managed the same office for eleven years, long enough to know that production moves in waves and that a slow quarter rarely means anything by itself. So when Carla's numbers softened in the spring, a little each month rather than all at once, he did what he had always done with a dip that small: he asked about it in their one-on-ones, got a reasonable-sounding answer, and moved on to the next item on the agenda.

"Where are we with the pipeline this week?" he would ask, and Carla would walk him through it: two showings scheduled, a buyer under contract, a referral from a past client that looked promising. It was never a bad answer. It was never an answer that gave him anything to push back on. And because it was never alarming, the conversation would move on before either of them noticed what wasn't in it.

By June, Ray had asked some version of "how's the pipeline" in six straight one-on-ones, and gotten six reasonable answers, and Carla's production was down almost a third from the same point the year before. He had been managing the symptom in exact real time, every single week, and the symptom had kept getting worse anyway. It did not occur to him yet that the question itself might be the problem, not the answer.

He was asking the wrong question

The thing that finally changed his mind was not a number. It was a passing comment. Carla mentioned, almost as an aside, that she had let her expired-listing farm "go a little stale" because she had been so busy with referrals and inbound leads. Ray had heard her say some version of that sentence before and let it pass. This time he pulled her transaction history instead of taking the sentence at face value.

What he found surprised him. Eighteen months earlier, expired listings had made up close to a third of Carla's business, and she had been good at them, good enough that two other agents in the office had asked her to walk them through her approach. In the last four months, there was exactly one outbound call to an expired listing in her CRM, logged on a day she later admitted she couldn't fully remember making. Everything else in her current pipeline was inbound or referral, the kind of business that arrives without anyone having to pick up the phone first.

Ray's first instinct was to ask her why she had stopped, and he caught himself before he did. "Why" invites a story, and Carla already had one ready: the market had shifted, expireds were harder to convert right now, she'd been focusing her energy where it paid off faster. All of it sounded plausible. None of it explained a complete stop rather than a slowdown. So instead he asked a different question: "What happens, right before you decide not to make one of those calls?"

Carla sat with that longer than she sat with any other question he had asked her that year. Eventually she described a specific call from the previous winter, an expired listing where the homeowner had been sharp and dismissive within the first ten seconds, and how she had carried that one call around with her ever since, quietly deciding each week that the list could wait one more day. She had never told anyone that, partly because she hadn't fully put it into words herself until Ray asked the question that made her try.

Ray realized, sitting across from her, that he had spent a full quarter managing a production number instead of coaching the actual behavior underneath it, and that the two were not the same problem at all. Carla did not have a motivation problem or a market problem. She had one specific call type she had quietly stopped making, for one specific reason, and the relief of not making it had been reinforcing the avoidance every single week he had asked about her pipeline and gotten a reasonable-sounding answer back.

The three weeks that proved it

Once Ray understood what he was actually looking at, the fix was almost embarrassingly small compared to the quarter he had just spent circling it. He did not ask Carla to rebuild her expired-listing business. He asked her to make three calls that week, with no goal beyond making the call, and to text him a single word, "done," after each one. Outcome did not matter. Attempt did.

They also rehearsed one sentence together, out loud, in his office, until it stopped sounding like something she was reading off a card: a short, calm opening line that gave the homeowner room to be short back without the whole call collapsing because of it. It took less than ten minutes. It was the first time in over a year that anyone had worked on that specific ten seconds with her directly.

The first week, she made three calls and texted "done" three times, and nothing dramatic happened on any of them. No appointment, no listing, nothing Ray could point to as a win in the usual sense. The second week she made five. By the third week, she had an expired-listing appointment on the calendar for the first time in over a year, and she mentioned it to Ray before he had to ask, which had not happened once in the entire previous quarter.

The number that eventually moved, the one Ray had been asking about every week since spring, moved last, not first. It moved only after he stopped asking about it directly and started asking about the specific call Carla had been quietly avoiding and the moment, ten seconds long, where the avoidance actually happened. He still runs his one-on-ones differently now. He still asks about the pipeline. He just no longer assumes a reasonable-sounding answer means there is nothing underneath it worth asking about.

About the Author

Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton, DCH is the former EVP of Learning & Development at Douglas Elliman Real Estate and the founder and Chief Learning Officer of R2R Diagnostic Group, where he helps real estate organizations and agents diagnose and fix the behavioral patterns behind inconsistent performance.