E 74 | PROVEN Agent Strategies to Get You Back in Production FAST! | with Mie Yamashita

Mie Yamashita breaks down how to get your agents unstuck and back into production. Drawing from her experience with thousands of agents, Mie shares practical strategies for team leaders to boost engagement, set clear standards, and drive consistent results. From understanding the real reasons agents struggle, to using effective training techniques and role-playing strategies, she provides steps for leaders to help their agents perform at a higher level. If you’re tired of watching your agents underperform, this is the episode you need to hear.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 – Unlock Productivity: How to Get Agents Back on Track
• 00:00:38 – Webinar Kickoff: Host Suneet Welcomes You
• 00:00:59 – Why Agents Get Stuck: Tackling Productivity Challenges
• 00:02:49 – Meet Mie Yamashita: Productivity Powerhouse
• 00:04:30 – Mie’s Opening: How to Revamp Your Training Approach
• 00:05:32 – Leadership and Engagement: Modeling the Standard
• 00:08:55 – Standards and Trust: The Core of Building a Thriving Team
• 00:15:40 – Agent Engagement: Fostering Resiliency and Proactivity
• 00:21:46 – Structuring Success: Daily and Weekly Routines that Work
• 00:32:09 – Supporting Agents Through Failure
• 00:34:18 – Setting Clear Standards: Leading Through Clarity
• 00:35:36 – Failing Forward: Teaching Agents to Learn From Mistakes
• 00:39:16 – Mastering Questions: The Secret to Better Conversations
• 00:44:01 – Role Play Magic: Strategies for Effective Practice
• 00:46:30 – Inspecting Performance: Fine-Tuning for Success
• 00:51:40 – Final Tips and Q&A: Wrapping Up with Mie

Links and Resources

• Mie on LinkedIn
• Coach with Mie
• Mie on Instagram
• Mie on Facebook
• Reside Platform
• Suneet Agarwal on LinkedIn
• Reside Platform Website

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Episode breakdown: getting stuck agents back into production

This episode is a replay of a Reside webinar in which Mie Yamashita, Reside’s head of team productivity, lays out how team leaders can get stalled agents talking to more people, setting more appointments and signing more agreements. Her starting point is the leader, not the agent. She once grew a productivity coaching program from five people to more than 180 in about nine months, with over 60 percent of those agents in production, and she credits most of that to staying engaged.

Model the standard instead of setting the pace

Many team owners produce half or more of their team’s business and expect everyone to match their pace. Mie’s point is that a top producer is running a different race, so “I showed you, why don’t you know it?” doesn’t build skill. What agents copy is behavior. Do you lead generate, show up on time, honor their time and follow up on your own leads?

Being the top agent on your team is not an effective tutorial for your agents.

Mie Yamashita

She also asks leaders to make generous assumptions. When an agent stops showing up, her first move is a check-in asking if everything is okay, followed by looking at her own part in it. In her first program she followed up with everyone who missed the morning call, and that is why 50 to 60 people kept showing up.

Keep standards simple, repeated and measured

Mie treats standards as agreements between the leader and agents who are business owners themselves. They should be short enough to recite, such as how many people to talk to each week, how many met appointments to hold and how often to enter numbers. Saying them once at onboarding isn’t enough. She opens one-on-ones and small groups by reviewing the week’s numbers and celebrating who hit them.

She deliberately does not spotlight agents with zeros. In her experience it drags low performers into a spiral, hurts collaboration and signals that the leader accepts zeros. That ties to Suneet’s argument that team culture is what you tolerate. Number entry also got easier once she gave agents flexibility. Some enter at 7 p.m. to close the day, while parents with busy evenings do it first thing in the morning.

The more you highlight the zeros, the more you highlight the fact that you accept zeros.

Mie Yamashita

Run a short morning connection with a fixed structure

Mie recommends a morning connection at least four days a week. Hers opens with wins and gratitudes, then goals and affirmations, a reading, reporting, the day’s agenda, content and role play, in the same order every time. Keeping the format familiar makes the session feel shorter, and finishing on time builds trust.

Skill work in these sessions is often a game. In an objection battle, agents answer an objection with a better question instead of a rebuttal, and anyone who takes more than three seconds is out. For larger teams she adds pods and small groups, and she has leaders answer questions with “yes, and here’s who” so senior agents or pod leaders field them.

Turn agents into master question askers

Mie reads from Exactly What to Say for Real Estate Agents in every training, then has two agents give live examples and submit a question afterward. She sends agents out with field assignments too. In their next five conversations, they ask three questions before making a statement. In their next three to five purchases, they ask “Can I get a discount on that?” and nothing more, which she calls rejection therapy.

One-on-one role plays happen three to five times a week and stay within 15 minutes. Each agent gets six or seven minutes, then one minute of feedback, starting with what went well and then what to work on. There’s no small talk and no stories. The agent’s only reply to feedback is “thank you.”

I have high standards, but I don’t operate with rigidity because rigidity is not a sustainable behavior for people to operate inside of.

Mie Yamashita

Inspect the database for the real gap

Mie spends an hour a day in the database. She looks at dials, two-minute conversations, dial-to-contact and contact-to-appointment rates, and aims for 20 to 35 two-minute conversations a week per agent. Twenty conversations a day, in her view, is a burnout recipe if it becomes the standard. She wants to see conversion move from 1 percent to 2 percent and then 5 percent.

For appointment skills, she teaches the buyer or seller consultation as a five-to-seven-step structure. She reviews each step before adding the next, explains why each step exists, has agents demonstrate it back and then tests them out. Video can help, but she says the human part of training can’t be removed.

Key takeaways for team leaders

• Model the behavior you expect. Your own production doesn’t teach anyone the skill.
• Keep a short, recitable set of standards and review the numbers in every meeting.
• Celebrate who hit the goal. Don’t spotlight the zeros.
• Follow up with absent agents from curiosity before you assume they don’t care.
• Keep role plays to 15 minutes, three to five times a week, with feedback built in.
• Inspect conversations and conversion rates in the CRM, not just closed deals.