How A Simple, Visible Process Can Lift Fees And Client Trust - Samantha Rowland

We reveal how a ten‑milestone, listed‑to‑settled framework turns chaos into a repeatable, high‑trust sales engine. Samantha Rowland shares the wall‑to‑workflow shift, from colour‑coded accountability to a Trello build that teams actually use.

• rebuilding the sales process every two years to match tools, laws and speed
• ten milestones from activation to settlement with clear ownership
• colour‑coded roles linking essential services, vendor care and sales activity
• mapping the wall to reveal gaps and remove assumptions
• keeping tools simple so agents adopt them under pressure
• using Trello for horizontal and vertical visibility across campaigns
• front‑loading compliance and creative to launch faster with fewer errors
• communicating invisible work to justify premium fees
• onboarding agents with one shared source of truth
• embracing feedback to fix gaps and grow capacity

Sam's Details

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Transcript

Meet Operations Leader Samantha Rowland

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome back to the podcast We Are Selling. My name's Lee Woodward, your coach and host, and the author of the Complete Salesperson course. Today I'm going to take the program in a completely different direction. We're going to be talking about structure, how the process of selling a house has to be reinvented every two years so that we can not only keep up with the changes of all the tools, tech, and technique of a real estate business, but to make sure it's the most effective and efficient way of doing it. And in the last few months, I've had a lot of effective business units reach out and say things aren't quite going right. Things are missing. I thought that person was doing it and they didn't, and this didn't happen. And then at the pace we are running at, it's very easy for things to fall apart. When I was thinking of who is today's guest, who is the ninja level operations person with a property management background and sales, yet connected to one of the greatest salespeople in the country right now, I would have to bring on to the airwaves, Samantha Rowland. Samantha, welcome aboard.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Hi Lee, thank you for the invite to join you today.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Now tell me, or tell the entire nation and our people overseas, give us your background in real estate.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

It started, dare I say it, back at Bray White many years ago as a receptionist. And I continue to progress through from there into property management, where I've spent over 20 years working on processes and systems to ensure the customer experience, whether you were a landlord or a tenant, was a happy experience. And I progressed into working as a team coordinator with my husband, Tristan Rowland, and managing his team over the years, which has seen him number one in national brands. Today I up I operate and implement the innovations behind the scenes of our business at Bright Estate Agents. It has been a journey. Along the way, I've learned a lot of skills and techniques to allow me to project manage both a business but the process behind a successful business.

Team Structure That Powers High Sales

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Excellent. And take us into Team Roland. What is the structure and setup of that and your role in that?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

So Tristan Rowland is the lead agent. He does list sell negotiate, and he is the only lister in that team. And then alongside him, he has three selling associates, and their role is to work with buyers, but also they help Tristan with the day-to-days with selling property. In addition to that, we've got two other associates that work alongside Tristam. One does more overflow and overlap with me, assisting with the coordination and the structure behind the teen. And we have an agent who is dedicated to onboarding clients. They do the coordination of pre-sale works, they work with our clients in getting their form two, they're building pest inspections and just making sure that all of those compliances that we need to meet here in Queensland are all ticked off, ready for us to hit the market. So, and then I coordinate all of those agents and making sure that they get to the right places when they need when they need to be there.

Why Go Independent With Bright Estate Agents

SPEAKER_00 3:19

Wow. One of the most structured, effective business units that we have. And regardless of brand, you guys have had the opportunity to be with multiple brands and always been at the top of the chain as the leading agent and quite ahead of the other people doing their numbers. And then just recently, you've now become Bright Real Estate. Take us into that.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

As you said, Tristan and I have worked with some large businesses working as sales agents and property managers over our careers. More recently, we decided to take our journey independent and w we started Bright Estate Agents here in Brisbane. The driving factor behind that is anyone who knows Tristan knows he moves at a million miles an hour. But that also goes hand in hand with the expectation of the world we currently live in, where everybody wants everything now. They don't want to wait for information to become available. So we need to be adapting and evolving very quickly to keep up with the client demand. And we just found that sometimes there was a disconnect when working with those larger franchises because you have to follow a particular process, which, you know, and that works for some people. It just didn't work for us, which is why we went independent. And now we are heavily focused on the framework and making sure that that is replicatable across the entire business so that we can support agents and help them to have the same successes that we have both had in our careers.

Training Reset And Compliance Gaps

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Absolutely brilliant. So that gives everyone a clear understanding of the context of how we're going to approach today's topic, which is a very important topic. Now, last week was a bit of an experience. Sam, what did you do last week? Where where were you on the team?

SPEAKER_01 5:02

So we attended the Complete Salespersons course here in Brisbane. I have attended it a number of times over the years, but I thought it was time for us to do a refresh and a reset and pick up on some of those things that we've been doing, but there's making sure that there's an accountability somewhere in the process that somebody is definitely doing it and nothing slips through the cracks, as well as the fact that there's been a lot of changes over the years. The largest one being at the moment the Form Two Seller's Disclosure Statement. You know, we're all doing, we're all doing the necessary steps to make sure that we have that, but updating process to make sure that there is actually a step for that is something that we were missing.

The 10 Milestones From List To Settle

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Many people come to the Complete Salesperson course to do a bit of an audit. We say it on this program all the time, but you can't read the label from inside the jar. One of the pages or one of the diagrams that took to your interest was the listed desettled process. And no one can see it right now, but there's 10 milestones to everyone's listing to selling process in the country. And the way of the property has to be activated is milestone one. Then it moves on to the processing stage, design. It can then be released for the pre-market, soft market, and then launched through the portals. We then go on a marketing period of time, be it two, three, four weeks, and that's milestone six. Milestone seven is review, which is at improving the price moment. So we can progress to milestone eight, which is negotiate, nine is sold, and ten is settled. And Sam, I mentioned this on stage last week, but the reason we have the 10 milestones is I can come in at any time and say to you, how are we going with High Street? And you'll say, We're 40% there, which means it's just been released because it's milestone four. And if we're 70% there, that means review, and I've got to go and improve the price. What struck you about gaining visibility and seeing that and then applying that to your own business?

Accountability, Colour Coding And Roles

SPEAKER_01 6:55

For me, it's a process that we follow every day in real estate. It's you don't need to reinvent the wheel, we'll do it. Whether you have a checklist or not, you're all doing it. For me, it was drawing that line of accountability. We work with high-performing agents, and then we've also got some agents that are first day in real estate. And outlining the steps and all of the parts in between is a key that I think is important to the success of any new agent coming through. But it was also a good refresher for our top-performing agents because if you look at the process, I think sometimes they forget how much the essential services team does. And, you know, even as I map this out for Tristan, there's a lot, and we we color code everything. So essential services is red on our planning, purple is vendor management, and blue is sales activities. As we map this out on the wall, there's a lot of red that happens behind the scenes. But without the red, the blue can't happen. So the agent support team and essential services drop the ball and we don't have a compliant form six or we don't have a marketing proof, then the agent can't go out and go to the market and they can't sell a property. Everybody has a critical role in the process. And I think outlining that so that everybody has an appreciation and an accountability of where they fit in that process is what attracted me to refocusing this for the business. And it also allows me to get some time back because even though we're all doing this and I know the process from start to finish because I've been doing it for so long. If I'm not in the business today, God forbid, something happened to me. As you just said, if you walked into business and said, What's happening with Pie Street? you can look at this chart and go, Yeah, okay, well, I know that that's up to release because everybody's working on the same process.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Samantha, beautifully explained. And there's something about sitting in the complete salesperson course, away from your office, away from your staff, surrounded by some amazing agents in the room. Brisbane was a great one as an example. There was some top performing agents sitting there and people thinking, I didn't think they'd be here. The top performing agents train more than anyone. I think people miss that, that they actually train harder and are prepared to break it and refix it and make it. So you return back home, and then I'm looking at this beautiful, massive wall with all your butcher's paper, and I can see activate and then all the tasking. Then I can see process and I can see all the tasking. You've broken it all down. How is the experience, because everyone should do this, of going through the big wall with butcher's paper and redesigning or updating and modifying your process?

Mapping The Wall: From Idea To System

SPEAKER_01 9:41

For me, it was great because I know a lot of these steps are happening and we are tracking it through our CRM system, but there is a better way of doing it, which is part of the reason why I set this out. But I actually sat down with Tristan to go through this process and it took us two days going through without distractions and working through that process. And it allowed me the opportunity to, you know, as we go through some of the steps, you know, I'd look at Tristan and go, Do we do that? Uh is someone actually doing that? And for me, I had thought we were, but as I was working through your map, I was like, I don't think we do that. So we've gone and put these things in there because they are actually happening. But as a business owner, I didn't know whether they were or they weren't. And I guess from that perspective, then how does a new agent come into the business and know that they need to do it?

SPEAKER_00 10:32

I just love this topic. A new agent starts, and people think, Oh, they're not going too well. Well, it's very hard to do well when you're in the it's like going through a a big room with the lights off and you don't know the furniture. How can you see it if you can't see it? And many places I go into now, and some of them very famous, been around for 30 years, and I say, How do we sell a house? And you hear 12 different versions of that answer of that question. And I say, Well, let's map this out. And just as you've done here, and this is a brilliant one to look at, you're actually making decisions on the fly. And now you've got tools that have come in, be it AI or marketing tools or whatever you're doing in creative in that design stage, that you make a decision of we need to do that, especially yourselves, because unlike most agents, you're charging the highest fees in the country, without doubt. And just on that, what what's a great month of sales in Team Tristan?

SPEAKER_01 11:24

Tristan can usually sit anywhere from 10 to 15 sales in a month with good stock levels. So I know we've taken our foot off the gas a little bit when we did the rebrand to allow us time to obviously focus on the rebrand and the reset of the process to ensure that we had the right systems and tools as we continue to grow, because one of our focuses this year is to continue to grow our team. But I don't want to bring on agents and not have the right tools for them because then they're only going to leave. Whereas if we've got the right tools, they're more likely to stay, and their journey is a bigger success because at the end of the day, their success is how I measure my own success.

Capacity, Fees And Sustainable Growth

SPEAKER_00 12:06

So good. And the fact you came from property management is a massive advantage because property management is detail. The listed to settle process and this how do we sell a house is a sequence. It's predictable, and these things need to happen. Now you've been through the painful experience of one checklist moment at a time based on milestones. What will you do now? I wanted to record you today because you were mid-flight. Tristan sent me a photo on Sunday. You sent me the finished wall, and I'm like, you've got to record now. What what's the next steps for you, Sam, to bring this all together?

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Everyone's got a different way of tracking their activities and their pipelines. So we were tracking a lot of the steps through Vault, which is our CRM system. Most people would come to understand and know that the checklists that you use in CRM systems in real estate, there's no look pretty about it. It's literally just a checklist. What I have found is that if it looks complicated and it doesn't look pretty, the agents won't use it. Our team use Trello quite a lot across their across each of the individual teams. It's how I track their property campaigns. They use it for pipeline tracking and they use it for, like for example, I use it for event tracking. We have a corporate box to the Broncos that we use for clients and friends and family throughout the year. I literally have a board for every single game. It has all the seats, and we just start slotting in names to those seats. So having that as an event manager, I looked at that and went, you know what, we can use this as a listed to settled process as well and do the same thing. But it's going to look pretty. And if the agents are already using it, then it's going to be easy for them to use this process. There's no point in having a system or a structure that nobody uses.

Choosing Tools: CRM Limits And Trello

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Yeah, couldn't agree more. And the problem with the traditional checklist in software is it's linear. You need a framework that's got horizontal and vertical management to it. Now, some people don't know what their software does. Maybe they miss it and then they introduce too much technology. But I've seen people use Trello perfectly for this. Chelsea, who runs our marketing department, uses Trello and I get my notifications, I go in, but I can see horizontally and vertically of where we're up to, where the steps are, what's needed. And I can also see the campaigns behind, the campaigns in front that are going off to settlement using that terminology. But you're right, this is project management. And when a house goes on the market, it is an event, and that event's got a start, middle, and an end. It's got a settlement date, and then that event is settled. But using the traditional checklist of tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick doesn't quite work. And I've mentioned this on air before that a lot of companies were better off when they had the manila folder with the checklist on the front. It was segmented into the various areas, and then everything lived in the folder. Then the manila folder went to Manila. Everybody has to see it now due to the offshore work that happens, which is all good. But now, what's the source of truth? The manila folder in the office in the filing cabinet was the source of truth, but no one was allowed to take it away. You had to stand near the filing cabinet because anyone could need it at any given time. But the concept was right, but digitizing that, Trello is going to allow you that horizontal and vertical management. Everyone can see it anywhere in the world. You've got the production line of the process all in line. And I think one of the most important things that you and I are discussing today is there is a milestone, there is a step, and then there is tasks. So activate is a milestone. We've signed the aid's agreement, but although we've signed the aid's agreement, there's like eight little steps behind that that need to be ticked off, and then it can tuck away. So you've got milestones, steps, and actions. How is that for you working through that type of thinking?

Horizontal And Vertical Visibility

SPEAKER_01 15:58

You're exactly right. It is. There is, you know, to simplify it, you have got those those steps there. And I think having these uh, you know, as you see, you know, you've got your activate, and there are those steps there that need to happen before the tasks can start with the essential services team. You know, having a system where you can tuck those away because you don't need to be staring at those in your face all the time, or you want to simplify it. And Trello does allow you to do the horizontal and vertical snapshots. And if you're a very visual person, you want the look pretty photo of the house on the top. But then your essential services teams, they're a very detail-oriented person. So they're going to want that entire checklist. They can either see the entire checklist or they can see the bits that are still yet to do at a quick glance. But having those highlighted alerts is a really quick grab for the agent because the agent doesn't really need to see the rest of the tasks that sit behind each step. They just want to know what bits do I need to move on to the next stage. So that's been that's really good. And, you know, I reached out to Andy Brownhill from River Realty on your recommendation. And um, I had a great chat with him yesterday. I've started building out the framework here for the listed to settle in Trello. And, you know, I said to him, is there any power-ups that I should be considering to use in this? You've obviously you're you're using this because Andy is using Trello in their business. And the best advice he could give me is keep it simple. If you overcomplicate it, people won't use it. And I was like, you know what, it just brings me back to what I learnt back many years ago when my career started is the the KISS philosophy of keep it simple.

Keep It Simple: Adoption Over Features

SPEAKER_00 17:42

So true. It's not hard. If I'm a top-performing agent, I'm gonna look at Trello and I just want to see the pretty photo of the front of the house floating through one, two, three, four. So without asking you any questions, I could say, look at the pretty photo there. It's reached number five. That means I know it's on REA. I can now reach out to my owners and say, we've hit the internet, and I know you had a notification from Sam this morning, but just want to let you know it looks great up there, and I'm looking forward to the inquiry. But the fact five is launch and the pretty pitch is on that part of the production line, and Trello's great for that. It's one sequence that goes through. There's my pretty picture, I can see my production line, which means if I'm carrying 15 listings, they're not all the one place at the one time, they're all spread out across the 10 movements at any given time. And I think that is the most important part of gaining visibility, and I urge everyone listening to this program to go through this process. Sam, you're mid-flight to it, and thank you for following up with Andy. He is an absolute ninja level of operations and can I love connecting people that saves six months of trial and error and somebody else has done it. What advice would you give to anyone listening to this who's going to take on the project of the listed to settle checklist? What would you do?

Milestones, Steps And Tasks In Practice

SPEAKER_01 18:59

You need to be prepared to get comfortable with what you're not doing. I know nobody likes to get negative feedback, but for me, it is where you grow. So if you're not getting feedback, how do you adapt and change? You're gonna the definite very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. You actually need to make change in order to change that. You know, as I stepped through this process with Tristan and understanding from an agent's level what they're doing and what they expect of the essential services and vendor managers in the business, I had to get comfortable with knowledge that the essential services, as OCD as I am, as well structured as our business currently is, there are gaps that needed to be filled, which we have stepped out while going through this process. I think a lot of people don't like saying there's something wrong with it. How do I fix it? And I guess I learned that very early on. I was an 18-year-old running a sales team. My biggest thing that I learnt during that process is what could I do differently to affect the outcome? Adapt that every day in business. You've just got to get comfortable with knowing that it's not perfect. You can fix it.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

And especially in a team-based business, you know, I have a lot of people ask me about Tristan and how he's able to achieve the fees that he does in the marketplace when there's a dramatic difference between the competitors, what they're charging, and you know, you guys are over three percent in the marketplace. And when you're over three percent, people will then start to think, okay, why uh is there a difference? Why is that person 1.5 and you're over three? Explain the gap. But the gap is exactly the team that you've just explained, the process that's applied to it. One person can't do all that. And and before, when you mentioned, you know, they onboard the client, just how professional is that that it's onboarded? So Tristan knows I can't do anything till those first steps have all been done by everybody else. And then as soon as it reaches step four, it's been released. That's when I kick in. But for steps one, two, and three, which is activate, process, and design, or the creative, that's all others. And then I'm in at four. I I'm not really back in it till nine, when the property goes unconditional, then I'm out of it again. And I use this illustration, it's like a plane taking off and then a plane landing. The middle part of the journey is quite not a lot goes on. It's 70% of the checklist is in the first three steps.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Even as I look at this wall, like step two for me, it's three pages long.

Hard Truths: Finding And Fixing Gaps

SPEAKER_00 21:37

That's right. And then the owner says, Oh, you've only had it a week, but all the work was done up front to get that big aircraft off the ground with all the weight of the passengers and the and the luggage to get it up into the air, which means REA, it's now live on the portals, is 70% of the job. And as an industry, we don't communicate that through to the consumer. And then they start to think, uh, you guys are all the same, I'll just go with. The cheapest. When this is all done, and I can't wait for your final list to be completed, because Sam, you and I are going to get together when you've done this, and we're going to record it as a step-through audio. So anyone joining the company will understand there is 10 milestones. There is so many steps. The 70% checklist is up front. This is what you do. So you've got your to-do list, your to-dont list, and the Tristan list. But suddenly I could play a very significant role in this business by gaining visibility about what you've done here and achieved.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

I think it comes back to what I learned very early on when I first started working with you, Lee, is making the invisible visible. You know, as you step through these 10 milestones, you'll see that there's quite a number of steps throughout here where we're communicating back to the client to say, hey, I've got your building and pest report. Hey, your property's live to the market. We we need your insurance. We need like you're going through each of those steps with them. If you don't tell them what you're doing, they don't know that it's happening because you've got to remember that as agents, we do this every day. But your client for them, for a lot of clients, it is the first time, or it might be their second time, but they might have had a bad experience the first time. So you've got to make those invisible steps visible to build credit with the client so that they know that you're not just taking a big whack of their money at the end of the transaction. You're actually doing things to earn that fee along the way.

Communicating Value To Justify Fees

SPEAKER_00 23:29

It'll be an amazing process at the end of this to grab your average fee, divide it by the number of tasks over the number of time that a property's on the market. And I tell you what, there's a huge justification in that because people look at the total amount, but they don't look at the tasking. And if you were having to do all that and a team to do it, and the premises to do it and the technology to do it, what we offer as a platform in the real estate industry is incredible, but we communicate it so bad by saying we sold it first day off market, it was easy. And we send that signal out to the marketplace, and then I look at your incredible checklist here, and that's just not spoken about because it's not respected, because we can't see it. And for anyone listening to this audio, sort this out. Get yourself to the course, go through the structures, look at the sequences, and then do exactly what Samantha's done here. Have the courage to rebuild your business, progress it, and be the very best version you can be. Sam, I know you're very well behind the scenes. You know this is the pathway to the best listing stream you can have, which is the customer experience.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

You need to make that customer experience a positive experience so that they'll go and tell 10 other people about it. It is no mystery across the industry. Tristan does command a higher commission rate than anyone I know. But he also has a very high standard and expectation behind the scenes of the service that we deliver, which is matched to the client's expectations and why they keep coming back and referring business, because people are happy to pay for a service. If we weren't delivering on the service, then we definitely wouldn't be able to charge the fee that we do.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Absolutely brilliant interview. Samantha, thank you so much for joining us mid-flight of what everyone in this country needs to be doing every two years to make sure we're on top of what we do. I look forward to the finished result coming in and recording with you and having that internal training for your team. Samantha Rowland, thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

Thanks for having me, Leigh.