Sales technology often follows a predictable pattern: a company buys a new data platform, logins spike, and then usage quietly falls off. Results look the same as before, and the conversation turns to whether the tool was worth it. Mike Simon, founder and CEO of AgentBrief, has watched that pattern from the vendor’s side. AgentBrief is a platform built for title, escrow, insurance, and home warranty professionals who grow their business through relationships with real estate agents. It tracks real estate activity 24/7 and alerts users the moment an agent they follow has new business, along with an AI-crafted message they can edit and send.
In AgentBrief’s early days, Simon saw the drop-off play out with new customers. “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, modeled on familiar social media apps, was easy to learn. What people hadn’t done was change how they worked once they had it. Simon compares the habit to buying a sports car and driving it like a family van. When results don’t change, the blame lands on the tool. “They blame the data, they blame the technology, and they make excuses that the data and the technology are wrong, that it doesn’t fit their needs,” Simon said. “And then they revert back to old habits.”
AgentBrief’s answer was to stop centering training on buttons and features. “This is why we decided to continually offer not how-to training, but why training,” Simon said. “Why are you using this? What do you have to be thinking differently when you’re using this product to make it successful for you?” The why comes down to three things: timing, relevance, and relationship building. The alerts handle timing, so a rep hears about an opportunity as it happens. The message attached to each alert handles relevance, giving the rep a real reason to reach out instead of a cold call, which Simon said “is going to give you horrendous results.” The third piece stays with the rep by design. “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. “Technology will never do that for you.” That is the new habit: reach out when an agent has a reason to hear from you, then do the part of the work only a person can do.
When a team stops seeing results, Simon separates two very different causes. Sometimes the data is the issue. “I make no representations that real estate data is perfect because it is an imperfect science,” he said. A feature called See Something, Say Something lets users flag a problem in one click, with a screenshot attached, so the team can fix it. That fix, Simon said, is “very different than getting somebody to adopt a new process to how they use it.” To find out which problem a team has, he asks the manager: “What do you really want your salespeople to be doing? And why aren’t they doing it?” Then he pulls the usage report. “Numbers don’t lie,” he said. He reads it as three problems, each more costly than the last: reps aren’t logging in; reps log in but don’t follow enough agents for the platform to surface opportunities; reps receive alerts but don’t respond. Simon calls the last one “the worst problem of all,” because “that means all of these opportunities are going to waste.”
In Simon’s experience, the reps who respond to alerts most often tend to be the ones the manager already considers top producers. The report makes the habit gap visible. Consistency is how the new habit sticks. “It’s not just using it the right way; it’s using it the right way consistently,” he said. It is also why customers who ask how many new orders AgentBrief will bring them sometimes get a surprising answer: without consistent action on the alerts, none, no matter how good the data is. “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 any team about to buy its next platform, the question worth asking first isn’t what the tool can do. It’s what the team will do differently every day once it has it. New data on top of old habits brings the same results. New habits, practiced consistently, change them.
