Take It and RunThe Blog
One specific move professionals can implement today.
Get the email every WednesdayYour best clients are grading you the hardest
Half of sellers say their agent marketed the home “very well.” Flip that number and look at who is in the other half — it is the clients you can least afford to underwhelm.
Last week I showed you what 1,000 recent sellers said your job actually is. This week, the uncomfortable part: how they graded the work.
Sellers were asked how well their agent marketed their home. Most agents see the headline number and feel good. Don’t.
51%
said their agent marketed the home very well
49%
said only somewhat well (42%) or poorly (7%)
47%
among sellers who called marketing the #1 job — the harshest graders
Flip the headline. For one of the jobs sellers care about most, nearly half your clients walk away underwhelmed.
And it gets sharper. Remember from last week: 30% of sellers said marketing was your number one job. They hired you for it specifically. Of those sellers — the ones who cared most — only 47% rated their agent “very well.”
Read that again. The sellers who care most about marketing grade you the hardest. They notice the gaps. The missed tactics. The quiet weeks. “Good enough” marketing loses your best clients first — and your best clients are your referral engine.
Here’s the twist
When sellers who rated their agent poorly explained why, almost none of it was about tactics. It was effort. Communication. Follow-through. The work usually isn’t the problem — the perception of it is. Agents do the work. Sellers don’t see it.
You don’t need a longer checklist. You need to make the invisible visible. (For my fellow Harry Potter fans: you need to take off that invisibility cloak.)
Your Claude hack to help you execute
Don’t write that weekly seller update from scratch. Have Claude translate your activity into impact. Every Friday, brain-dump what you actually did on the listing — bullet points, messy is fine: “posted 2 reels, 14 showing requests, open house had 22 groups, price feedback from 3 buyer agents, Zillow views up.”
Then paste it into Claude with this prompt:
“You’re helping me write a weekly update for my home seller. Rewrite my raw notes below into a short, warm update that translates every activity into reach, exposure, or buyer response. No fluff, no jargon. End with one line about what we’re doing next week and why. Here are my notes:”
Sixty seconds later you have an update that makes your invisible work visible — the exact thing that separates “somewhat well” from “very well.” Save the prompt, reuse it every Friday, and the quiet weeks disappear.
Questions I get about this one
Won’t a weekly update just give them more to criticize? The opposite. Sellers who rated their agent poorly cited silence and follow-through, not tactics. A short weekly note removes the thing they actually complain about.
What if there’s nothing to report that week? There is always reach, exposure, or buyer response — even “views held steady and we got no price objections” is data. A quiet week reported honestly beats a quiet week reported by nobody.
Run the honest self-audit.
If your last three sellers rated your marketing today, what would they say — and why? Be specific.
- Where would they say you went quiet?
- Where did you coast?
- Where did the promise outrun the delivery?
Then build one fix: a simple weekly seller update that translates what you did into reach, exposure, and buyer response. Not “I posted your home on social” — but what it reached and what it pulled. They can only value what they see.
This exercise is designed to do one thing: set appointments. Track your progress and pay attention to what is converting.
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A working session with Kristi or Merrill ends with a system running, not a list of notes.