Coldwell Banker sales associates generate on average $6,500 more in gross commission per year if they attend a strategic learning program.
by Site Staff
November 19, 2012
DAVID BIRNBAUM
Vice President of Learning, Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corp.
Coldwell Banker University (CBU), the learning arm of Coldwell Banker, supports 85,000 sales associates in more than 3,100 offices worldwide. For the past three years, training has been aligned with central business goals to achieve greater market share and increase company revenue. In a real estate setting, this is achieved by increasing gross commission income by changing sales associates and office brokers’ business behavior.
Developing learning modules for these goals is difficult because more than half of Coldwell Banker’s offices are independently owned franchises. Therefore, CBU includes both synchronous and asynchronous instruction, streamed videos, mobile learning, cloud-based computing and two social learning portals, one for managers and one for sales associates. The social learning aspects include blogs written by social media experts, user ratings of CBU courses, user comments on materials, the ability to post user-generated content and threaded discussion groups for collaborative learning. Also, CBU no longer has a learning management system with a cumbersome registration process. Instead, the self-paced courses are available anytime, anywhere, including versions for mobile compatibility.
In addition to making CBU’s learning modules more accessible, Coldwell Banker’s learning department, under the leadership of Vice President of Learning David Birnbaum, worked to link learning and training to three key performance indicators: return on value, return on investment and percent improvement in performance.
Resulting metrics say students can expect to generate, on average, $6,500 more in gross commissions if they take at least one strategic learning program in a given year. That means a $390 increase in revenue to the company per employee. Further, the learning department found for every dollar Coldwell Banker spends on learning, the company sees a 75 percent return in increased revenue.