--- title: "How I Got Sales Agents Who Hate Writing to Build Our Best Pages" url: "https://smallbizleader.com/insight/how-i-got-sales-agents-who-hate-writing-to-build-our-best-pages/" author: "Nassira Sennoune" published: "2026-09-25" updated: "2026-09-25" --- # How I Got Sales Agents Who Hate Writing to Build Our Best Pages **TLDR:** The people who know what buyers actually ask are the agents who spend their days in cars and courtyards with them, and they will not write a word. I tried a shared document and a weekly writing hour, and both failed within a month. What worked was a 15-minute voice note after each viewing, a question log at the front desk, and a rule that agents review pages rather than draft them, until the head of sales heard his own sentences on the website and became the system's loudest defender. The first area guide I wrote for the brokerage was accurate, and it was useless. I know because one of our agents read it on his phone in the car park, handed it back to me, and said, "A buyer would never ask that. They ask about the school run." I work in-house on the digital side of a luxury real estate brokerage in Marrakech, alongside a head of sales and a small team of agents. Our buyers mostly live abroad, and the questions they ask before they buy are specific: whether a foreigner can own the property outright, what the notary does, how the money comes home after a sale, whether a villa in the Palmeraie or a riad in the medina suits a family that visits six weeks a year, and how far each is from the airport and the international schools. The agents know the answers. They hear them asked every day. Getting those answers out of their heads and onto the website was, for most of a year, the hardest management problem I had. ### **What Failed First** My first attempt was the obvious one. I built a shared document with a template for each neighbourhood, added headings for the questions I wanted answered, and asked each agent to fill in their section by the end of the month. The document was opened eleven times in four weeks. Two sections were started. One of them was a paragraph pasted from a portal listing. The second attempt was a weekly writing hour, Friday afternoons, with coffee. The first week, three agents came and wrote. The second week, one came and took calls. The third week the head of sales asked me, politely, whether I understood that Friday afternoon was when buyers arriving for the weekend confirmed their viewings. Both attempts made the same mistake. I had asked people who sell for a living to become people who write for a living, in their own time, for a benefit they could not yet see. Nobody refused. They just did the job they were paid to do instead, which was the correct decision on their part. ### **Voice Notes, Fifteen Minutes, No Editing** The fix came from the agent in the car park. He said he could talk about a viewing for an hour but he could not write two lines about it. So I stopped asking for lines. The new rule was this: after each viewing, before driving off, the agent records a voice note of up to fifteen minutes and sends it to me. No structure, no preparation. What did the buyer ask? What did they seem worried about? What did they compare the property to? What surprised them about the neighbourhood? I transcribe it, and the transcription becomes the raw material for the pages. The first week I received four notes. The second week, nine. The notes were nothing like the shared document. They were full of the things a buyer says when they are standing in a kitchen: how long the drive from the airport really took at six in the evening, whether the school bus comes out this far, what happens to the garden in August, whether the neighbour's guesthouse is loud. None of that was in any portal listing, and all of it was what the next buyer would type into a search box. Harvard Business Review's guide to [writing with military precision](https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-precision) argues for putting the bottom line first and cutting everything else. The voice notes did that by accident. Agents talk in bottom lines, because buyers only listen to bottom lines. ### **The Question Log at the Front Desk** The second source was cheaper still. The front desk takes the first call from most new buyers, and the person there hears the first question before any agent does. I put a notebook on the desk with one instruction written inside the cover: write down the question, the language it was asked in, and the country code of the caller. Nothing else. Within two months that notebook was the best keyword research I had. It told me which questions came first, which came in French and which in English, and which countries asked which things. Buyers from the Gulf asked about ownership through a company. Buyers from Belgium asked about the notary. Buyers from West Africa asked about currency and payment schedules. When I later audited the brokerage's website, I found that of the 126 topic clusters the keyword map said we needed and did not have, a large share had already been asked for, by name, in that notebook. ### **Agents Review, They Do Not Draft** The third change was the one that made the system last. I draft every page from the voice notes and the question log. Then the agent whose viewing produced the material gets the draft, on their phone, with one request: read it as if you were the buyer, and tell me where I am wrong. Reviewing takes them ten minutes and they are good at it, because it is the same skill they use when a buyer says something inaccurate about a neighbourhood. They correct distances. They cut adjectives. They add the sentence about the school bus that I had left out because it seemed too small. A page never goes live until the agent who knows the area has signed it, and their name goes on it as the contributor, which they care about more than I expected. Ahrefs' guide to [how to write a blog post](https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-write-a-blog-post/) makes the point that the outline is where the real work happens. In our case the outline was the voice note, the draft was mine, and the judgment was the agent's. Three people, three jobs, none of them asked to do the job they hate. ### **Winning Over the Head of Sales** The head of sales was not against any of this. He simply had a team to run and viewings to fill, and every hour I asked of his agents was an hour taken from that. The shared document and the writing hour had cost him time and produced nothing, so his scepticism was earned. Two things changed his mind, and neither was an argument I made. The first was a page. One of the neighbourhood guides drew heavily on his own voice notes, because he still takes viewings for the largest properties. When it went live I sent it to him without comment. He read his own sentences on the page, the ones about the evening traffic and the guesthouse next door, and he came to my desk and asked whether buyers could actually find that. They could. The second was a call. A buyer from Brussels phoned the office having read the ownership explainer and two of the area guides, and opened with a question about a specific street rather than with "can a foreigner buy here". The head of sales took the call. Afterwards he said it was the shortest first conversation he had had in months. He had spent none of it on the basics, because the basics were on [the brokerage's website](https://originnproperties.com/), in the buyer's own language, built from his own team's notes. After that he did the thing I could not do. He made the voice note part of the viewing routine, the way the follow-up message already was, and he asked for it in the Monday meeting. When the head of sales asks for the note, the note arrives. ### **What I Would Tell Another Small Team** Harvard Business Review's research on [the secrets of great teamwork](https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-secrets-of-great-teamwork) points at a shared understanding of who does what as one of the conditions that hold. That is the whole lesson of the year. The agents were never going to write, and I was never going to know what a buyer asks in a kitchen. Once the jobs were split honestly, the pages got written. - Ask for the format people already use. Agents talk; a voice note costs them nothing they were not already spending. - Put the collection point where the information first arrives, in our case the front desk, and make the instruction fit on one line. - Let the expert judge the draft rather than produce it. Review is fast, drafting is slow, and the expert's value is in the correction. - Win the manager with their own words on the page and a shorter first call. A slide will not do it. The agent from the car park still sends the longest voice notes on the team. He has never written a page. Four of the best pages on the site are his. --- Nassira Sennoune is the SEO consultant at Originn Properties, a luxury real estate brokerage based in Marrakech, working with buyers and owners across Morocco and the Gulf. The area guides and buyer explainers on the site are built from what our agents hear at viewings, and if you are buying from abroad, the team at [Originn Properties](https://originnproperties.com/) will start with your questions rather than with a listing.