Sales teams often invest in new data platforms only to see usage spike and then fall away, with results unchanged. Mike Simon, founder and CEO of AgentBrief, a platform for title, escrow, insurance, and home warranty professionals, has watched that pattern from the vendor side. In the company’s early days, he saw new customers show intense initial interest followed by a steep drop-off. The product, modeled on familiar social media apps, was easy to learn, but users had not changed how they worked once they had it.
Simon compares the problem to buying a sports car and driving it like a family van. When results don’t change, he said, users blame the data or the technology and revert to old habits. AgentBrief’s response was to shift training from how-to instruction to why training, focusing on timing, relevance, and relationship building. The platform’s alerts tell a representative when an agent they follow has new business, and an AI-crafted message provides a reason to reach out. The third piece, Simon said, stays with the representative: developing a relationship is a human skill that technology will never perform.
When a team stops seeing results, Simon separates data problems from habit problems. He said real estate data is imperfect, and a feature called See Something, Say Something lets users flag issues with one click and a screenshot so the team can fix them. To diagnose a habit problem, he asks managers what they want salespeople to be doing and why they aren’t doing it, then pulls the usage report. He reads it as three escalating problems: representatives not logging in, logging in but not following enough agents for the platform to surface opportunities, or receiving alerts but not responding. The last is the worst, he said, because it means opportunities go to waste.
Simon treats consistency as the deciding factor. Customers who ask how many new orders AgentBrief will bring sometimes get a surprising answer: without consistent action on the alerts, none, no matter how good the data is. The same principle applies whether the product is title and escrow services, homeowners insurance, or a home warranty. For teams considering their next platform, Simon’s point is that the first question is not what the tool can do, but 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.
