Sales teams that invest in new data platforms often see initial excitement followed by a sharp decline in usage, and the results remain unchanged. Mike Simon, founder and CEO of AgentBrief, has witnessed this pattern from the vendor side. AgentBrief tracks real estate activity 24/7 and alerts users when an agent they follow has new business, providing an AI-crafted message they can edit and send. In the platform’s early days, Simon watched engagement spike and then drop off. “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 product was easy to learn, but users had not changed how they worked once they had it.
Simon compares the habit gap to buying a sports car and driving it like a family van. When results do not improve, teams blame the data or technology and revert to old routines. AgentBrief’s response was to shift training from how-to to why. “This is why we decided to continually offer not how-to training, but why training,” Simon said. The why centers on timing, relevance, and relationship building. Alerts handle timing, the attached message handles relevance, and the rep must develop the relationship. “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.
When a team stops seeing results, Simon distinguishes between a data problem and a habit problem. He acknowledges that real estate data is imperfect and offers a feature called See Something, Say Something for users to flag issues. But fixing data is different from getting someone to adopt a new process. To diagnose the issue, he asks managers what they want salespeople to be doing and why they are not doing it, then reviews usage reports. He reads the numbers as three escalating problems: reps not logging in, reps not following enough agents, and reps receiving alerts but not responding. The last is the worst, he said, because opportunities go to waste.
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, regardless of data quality. “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, the key question is not what the tool can do but what the team will do differently every day. New data on top of old habits brings the same results; new habits, practiced consistently, change them.
