Why New Agents and Busy Agents Lose Deals for the Same Reason: Jennifer Staats on the Real Estate Pros Podcast
New agents and busy agents miss deals for the same reason.
Most articles split them. New agents struggle because they don’t know what to do yet. Busy agents struggle because they have too much going on. Two different problems, two different fixes.
That’s wrong.
After running operations for dozens of brokerages and teams across the country, Jennifer Staats has watched both groups long enough to see the shared failure underneath. The trap is the same. The fix is the same. And once you see it, the fight stops being two fights.
The reason is not effort. It is not training. It is not lead volume.
It is the absence of a daily system that turns activity into the right activity.
The agent with two leads and the agent with two hundred end up working on the wrong things at the wrong times. Both feel busy. Both feel like they’re doing the work. Both watch deals leak. The shape of the failure looks different. The cause is identical.
Jennifer made this point on a recent episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast with hosts Scott Bersey and Mike Hambright. What follows is the trap at each career stage, why automation alone does not close it, and what a daily system actually has to do before it earns its place in the workflow.
The Same Trap, Two Career Stages
New agents almost always think the problem is supply. Not enough contacts. Not enough leads. Not enough volume coming through the door.
That’s not it.
Jennifer’s correction, after years of coaching agents through this exact moment:
“You do have a list of contacts. You just don’t have them organized yet.”
The contacts already exist. They are scattered across phones, email threads, business card piles, half-finished spreadsheets, and the back of a notebook from a closing six months ago. Some are friends. Some are former coworkers. Some are people who reached out once and never heard back. The work to gather them, organize them, and put them somewhere usable feels invisible because nobody has done it. So the new agent stares at an empty CRM and concludes the problem is supply. It isn’t. The problem is structure.
Busy agents arrive at the same outcome from the opposite direction. The leads come in. Calls happen. Some get logged. Most don’t. Voicemails pile up. Notes live in someone’s head until they don’t.
As Jennifer put it on the show: “We might see a lead come into our inbox, we might call them, but we have no way of tracking that.”
Two failure modes. One root cause.
New agents have unorganized data. Busy agents create unorganized data faster than they can manage it. In both cases, the agent works on the wrong things, misses the right ones, and bumps into a past client at the grocery store who just listed with someone else because they “hadn’t heard from you in a while.”
That moment is what unsystematic follow-up actually costs. The dollar value is one closing. The reputational cost is harder to put a number on, and it’s the bigger of the two.
Effort fills the gap until it can’t. Then deals leak.
Automation Is Not the System
A reader at this point is already pushing back silently. I have automation. Birthday emails go out. I have drip campaigns running. Isn’t that the system?
It’s part of one. It’s not the whole one.
Jennifer’s framing on the show: “It’s not just the automated email on their birthday. There’s so many layers to that where you can add more value.”
Automated touches are the floor. Not the ceiling.
A birthday email that goes to every contact tells the recipient nothing about whether the agent actually remembers them. A generic market update is indistinguishable from the one their five other agent contacts also sent. Both touches happened. Neither moved the relationship.
What closes the gap is automation paired with intelligence.
Which contacts deserve a real call this week. Which past clients are due for a personalized touch. Which leads are showing signals that warrant a different cadence. The CRM should be answering those questions for the agent, not waiting for the agent to figure them out.
This is where Jennifer pointed to how Sure Send approaches the same problem. Smart lists surface who should be contacted next, built off conversation history and engagement signals rather than just the date a contact was added. AI flags where the agent’s time is most likely to produce a return that week. Customization makes the outreach feel personal even when the underlying workflow is automated. The new agent gets pointed to where to start. The busy agent gets pointed to where the next dollar of effort is most likely to land.
The right question is not should I automate. Almost everyone reading this already does.
The right question is what the system does with the information automation alone cannot act on.
A birthday email knows the date. It does not know that the contact’s home value just crossed an equity threshold, that they opened the last three market updates and clicked on one, or that their mortgage rate is now 1.5 points above current market. A real follow-up system uses that kind of signal to decide what happens next. Automation alone does not.
The Past Client Problem
Past clients are the highest-ROI prospecting pool most agents have. They already know the agent. They already trust the agent. They are also the group most likely to be ignored.
Scott Bersey named the gap directly on the show. Agents need a system that prompts them to reach out on anniversaries or with relevant updates, and that’s exactly the thing legacy CRMs leave undone.
Most agents treat past clients like a mailing list.
Holiday card. Annual newsletter. Maybe a pop-by every couple of years if the agent happens to be in the neighborhood. The relationship that produced the original closing slowly cools because nobody is feeding it.
Jennifer’s recommendation: start with a 90-day to six-month cadence on past clients. Pick the rhythm the business can actually sustain, then hold to it.
Cadence does not mean every touch is a phone call.
As Jennifer put it:
“Communication to me can mean various things. It doesn’t have to be a phone call. It could be call, text, email, social media.”
Smart lists let the agent mix channels against the same cadence so the rhythm feels human instead of mechanized. A call this quarter. A personal text the next. An email with something genuinely useful the quarter after. The relationship gets fed without any single channel getting overused.
Beyond the recurring cadence, action plans handle the touches that should fire on a specific calendar trigger. A handwritten card on the home anniversary. A check-in 30 days before the annual property tax bill. A referral thank-you on the date a past client first introduced you to someone new.
Jennifer’s framing of action plans on the show: “You can set that up in the CRM to do whatever you want. And then as your business grows, you can edit some of those plans so it makes sense for your business.”
A modern CRM holds the rhythm so the agent doesn’t have to.
What separates this kind of follow-up from the generic version is what gets sent, not just when. Jennifer pointed to Sure Send’s AI-powered connector capabilities for customized market reports tailored to each client’s specific property.
That is the difference between a generic monthly newsletter and a touch that demonstrates the agent actually knows the client’s home, their neighborhood, what comparable properties recently sold, and what has changed since closing.
Past-client follow-up is not a frequency problem. It is a relevance problem.
The agents who get repeat business and referrals are not the ones sending the most touches. They are the ones whose touches feel like the agent actually remembered who they were sent to.
Win the Day: The Daily Operating Layer
When Scott Bersey asked Jennifer what makes Sure Send actually different at the basic level, before any of the deeper integrations, her answer was a single word.
Consistency.
Specifically, a daily place an agent can log in and see exactly what they need to do that day. Not a report. Not a dashboard built for the team leader. A daily view built for the person doing the work, designed to answer one question.
What does winning look like today?
Jennifer described how it operates on the show. The team sets activity-level targets for things like conversations and appointments. The individual agent layers their own activity goals on top. Then the agent adds personal items, the ones that have nothing to do with real estate but everything to do with showing up well. Did you work out. Did you drink enough water. Did you spend time on the things that keep you sharp.
Check everything off and the agent has won the day.
Strings of won days build into won weeks. Won weeks into won months. Over time, the agent looks back and sees whether the consistency is actually moving the business forward.
Jennifer’s framing:
“Is this consistency affecting my business in a positive way? I’m going to tell you, I absolutely guarantee it will. But you can tweak things either on the team lead side or the agent side to say, okay, maybe I need to up my conversations, maybe I need more appointments, maybe I need to work out more, whatever that looks like.”
That last point is what separates Win the Day from a habit tracker.
The data flows both directions. The agent sees what they did. The team leader sees the same picture, organized for coaching. When something is not working, the inputs get adjusted. More conversations. Different cadence on past clients. More appointments. Whatever the gap turns out to be. The system responds to the data instead of treating the targets as fixed.
The point most articles about productivity tools miss: big swings do not separate top performers. Steady days do.
The agents who close the most deals over a career are not the ones who had three legendary months. They are the ones who showed up consistently for sixty months in a row.
Win the Day is built around that. The platform’s job is to make consistency easier than the alternative.
Where This Goes: Industry-Agnostic and Referral-Native
The last segment of the conversation looked forward. Two specific points Jennifer raised shape how an agent should think about where the platform is heading, and both matter for anyone evaluating what their CRM should be doing twelve months from now, not just today.
First, industry-agnostic positioning.
Sure Send was built deepest for real estate and mortgage because that’s where Preston Guyton, the company’s founder, and most of the team came from, as well as from martech across industries. The lived experience is real estate. The architecture underneath was built without those guardrails.
As Jennifer put it:
“We’re really building it to be an industry agnostic CRM, meaning that everything is fully customizable so it doesn’t have to be based off real estate. All of these stages, all the workflows are really meant to be able to run a business however you want it to run.”
For an agent reading this, the relevance is that the integrations, marketplace partners, and feature roadmap growing on the platform extend beyond real estate-only tools. The CRM gets stronger as that ecosystem widens.
Second, the referral capability Jennifer called out at a huge opportunity for agents.
Most agents run a referral business, formally or informally. Most CRMs treat referrals as an afterthought. Sure Send is approaching it the opposite way.
Agent-to-agent referrals across markets, with the ability to find another Sure Send user in a destination market and hand off a contact directly. Lender-to-agent and agent-to-lender referrals. Agent-to-service-provider for roofers, flooring, contractors, and other trades that show up in nearly every transaction. With agreements attached where appropriate and full RESPA compliance where it applies.
Jennifer’s specific note: “I’m a heavy referral business agent. That’s going to give you that solution there.”
The throughline of both points landed in one of the sharpest lines from the conversation: “You would no longer need 50 tabs open to run your business. You would go into Sure Send and be able to do the majority of everything that you need to do right in one dashboard.”
Most agents recognize that workflow chaos. Different tools for different parts of the same transaction. None of them talking to each other. All of them charging monthly. The direction Jennifer described is consolidation, not for its own sake, but because the data and the relationships should live in one place if they are going to actually be useful.
The Takeaway
The trap that catches new agents and busy agents is the same trap. Effort fills the gap until it can’t. Then deals leak.
The fix is the same fix.
A daily system that turns activity into the right activity. That holds the rhythm on past clients. That makes the next move obvious in the morning. That lives in one place instead of fifty.
Jennifer’s closing line on the show captured the practical version better than any reframing could: “If you are growing your business, make sure that you have a really solid CRM and that could be the basis of a lot of your SOPs and a lot of your checklists that you’re probably living in your head.”
The CRM is the system. If it isn’t doing this for you, it isn’t doing the job.
Real estate is not won by endless automation or by chasing the newest tool. It is won by being remembered, being reliable, and being the resource your clients actually trust when they have a question they care about.
The right daily system makes that possible without requiring more effort than you already have.
The full conversation with Jennifer Staats is on the Real Estate Pros podcast with hosts Scott Bersey and Mike Hambright. More on the daily system Jennifer described, including Win the Day, smart lists, action plans, and the integrations she discussed, is at suresend.ai.
