Sales teams that buy new data platforms often see logins surge in the first weeks, then quietly fade. Results stay flat, and attention turns to whether the tool was worth the money. Mike Simon, founder and CEO of AgentBrief, has watched that pattern from the vendor side, and he argues the problem is rarely the data or the technology.
AgentBrief is built for title, escrow, insurance and home warranty professionals who grow business through relationships with real estate agents. The platform tracks real estate activity around the clock and alerts users the moment an agent they follow has new business, along with an AI-crafted message they can edit and send. Simon said early customers showed intense interest and very high engagement before usage dropped off a cliff. The product, modeled on familiar social media apps, was easy to learn. What users had not done was change how they worked once they had it.
Simon compares the habit to buying a sports car and driving it like a family van. When results do not change, he said, users blame the data, blame the technology, and revert to old habits. AgentBrief responded by shifting its training away from buttons and features toward what Simon calls why training, asking customers what they have to think differently to make the product work. The why rests on three things: timing, relevance and relationship building. Alerts handle timing, so a representative hears about an opportunity as it happens. The attached message handles relevance, giving a real reason to reach out instead of a cold call, which Simon said produces horrendous results. The relationship stays with the representative by design. Technology, he said, will never develop a relationship for you.
Simon separates two causes when a team stops seeing results. Sometimes the data is the issue, and a feature called See Something, Say Something lets users flag a problem in one click with a screenshot attached. Fixing data is very different from getting someone to adopt a new process, he said. He asks managers what they really want their salespeople doing and why they are not doing it, then pulls the usage report. He reads it as three escalating problems: representatives are not logging in, they log in but do not follow enough agents for the platform to surface opportunities, or they receive alerts and do not respond. The third is the worst, he said, because opportunities go to waste.
The stakes extend across the industries AgentBrief serves, whether a team sells title and escrow services, homeowners insurance or a home warranty. Simon said customers who ask how many new orders the platform will bring sometimes get a surprising answer: without consistent action on the alerts, none, no matter how good the data is. Consistency, he said, is the deciding factor. For teams about to buy their next platform, the question worth asking first is not what the tool can do, but what the team will do differently every day once it has it.
