AgentBrief CEO: Why Sales Tech Fails Without New Habits

Most sales teams know the pattern: a company buys a new data platform, logins spike, and then usage quietly falls off. Mike Simon, founder and CEO of AgentBrief, knows that pattern from the vendor’s side. AgentBrief is a platform built for title, escrow, insurance, and home warranty professionals who grow their business through relationships with real estate agents. It tracks real estate activity 24/7 and alerts users the moment an agent they follow has new business, along with an AI-crafted message they can edit and send. In AgentBrief’s early days, Simon watched new customers get excited, engage heavily, and then drop off a cliff. The product was easy to learn, but people hadn’t changed how they worked.

Simon compares the habit to buying a sports car and driving it like a minivan. When results don’t change, users blame the data or technology and revert to old habits. AgentBrief’s answer was to stop centering training on buttons and features and instead offer “why” training focused on timing, relevance, and relationship building. The alerts handle timing, the AI-crafted message handles relevance, and the rep must handle the relationship. “You must not rely on technology to do the one thing that you are skilled as a human being, which is to develop a relationship with somebody else,” Simon said. He also separates habit problems from data problems. A feature called See Something, Say Something lets users flag data issues in one click with a screenshot. To diagnose a team, Simon asks managers what they want salespeople to do and why they aren’t doing it, then pulls the usage report. He reads it as three escalating problems: reps aren’t logging in; reps log in but don’t follow enough agents; or reps receive alerts but don’t respond—the worst problem, because opportunities go to waste. The reps who respond most often tend to be top producers, making the habit gap visible.

Consistency is the deciding factor. Simon treats consistency as the key to making the new habit stick, and he tells customers who ask how many new orders AgentBrief will bring that without consistent action on the alerts, none—no matter how good the data is. “Your job is to sell your product,” Simon said. “My job is to tell you the people who want to buy it and when they want to buy it before anybody else.” That holds whether the product is title and escrow services, homeowners insurance, or a home warranty. For any team about to buy its next platform, the question worth asking first isn’t what the tool can do—it’s what the team will do differently every day once it has it.