Four Steps to Gamifying Your Database - Keller Williams Realty Yuma

Being successful involves doing some of the same things over and over again. Even so, repetition does not have to breed boredom. Instead of letting yourself slip into monotony while completing those everyday tasks, try making them fun.

“If we can make a game out of our daily activities and out of the boring things, that’s a hack because that’s the thing that can get us doing the right things every day,” says James Shaw, VP of learning at Keller Williams.

Gamifying your database is a two-prong strategy that can make it more entertaining for you to interact with your database while also making those interactions more fun for those on the receiving side.

“What an amazing opportunity to have more fun in your business,” says Jennie Wolek, a KW agent with The Wolek Group in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “We help people buy and sell homes, and we get to have fun along the way and share that joy with them, with others on our team and in our community.”

According to NAR data, 74% of sellers and 91% of buyers say they’d work with their agent again, but only a small percentage actually do. The key to increasing that number and your referrals is to stay in front of those clients by interacting with your database. Wolek’s success bears that out. She got purposeful about gamifying her database five years ago, when she was closing 79 units a year. In 2020, her team closed 174 units, with half of those leads coming from their database.

Laying the Foundation

In The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, Gary Keller lays out four laws for your database. The first is simply to build the database, and the second is to feed that database every day – both with people and with specifics about those people that extend beyond addresses and phone numbers. For Wolek’s team, that extends to asking clients their favorite celebratory beverage so they can bring it to closing, as well as their favorite nonprofit and favorite local restaurant because it’s always possible to weave those into your touches.

The final two laws offer more opportunities for gamification. The third law of the database is systematically connecting with it. The MREA prescribes 36 touches in a year, but the gamification is in figuring out what those touches look like, whether it’s mixing up the contact medium (email, text, event invite, etc.) or the content. Servicing every lead is the final law of the database, and it provides more chances to up the fun quotient.

Related Reading: Outfront MREA Archives

Four Ideas for Gamifying Your Database

You need to do the work anyway, so why not make it fun? Here’s four steps to get gaming.

1) Have quantifiable goals.

When Wolek and her team set their goal for the year, they realized they needed more listings to achieve it. So they created a game – 90 Listings in 90 Days – and elected for 30 and 60 days to be their midpoint check-ins. If they’d secured 30 listings (seller listings or buyer agreements) in 30 days, they’d have a big team lunch. If not, they’d schedule a purposeful day of working together to complete more calls. They didn’t reach their ultimate goal of 90 listings, but in striving for it, they realized they landed 60 listings in a time period during which the year before they only had 30.

2) Use feedback to keep score.

If you aren’t held accountable, you won’t know how you’re doing. For teams, it can be easier to implement accountability to each other, so if you’re flying solo, make sure you have a coach or someone at your market center you can confide your numbers in so you know if you’re on track to win or lose.

3) Strategize how to hit your numbers.

Wolek suggests looking back at your economic model worksheet if you’ve created one and finding your “listings needed at all times” number. If you aren’t hitting it, work backward to figure out how you can. “You can also go figure out how many contacts it takes for you to get an appointment and how many appointments you need to take a listing,” Shaw says. “And now the game just becomes ‘I need to talk to X number of people today.’”

4) Get social.

The easiest way to make working on your database more fun is the social component. Whether it’s collaborating with your team on a call-your-contacts day or engaging in some friendly competition, getting more of the team involved is a win-win. But try to extend this thinking to the leads in your database as well. How can you create social opportunities for connection in your database? This can mean invitations to in-person events like giving away free pies for Pi Day (March 14) or virtual options like a call-in contest that ends with a big prize.