Over the past 12 years, I've looked behind the curtain of many brokerages and spearheaded countless tech innovations and developments. One thing remains constant: If your agents don't see value in the technology and adopt it, your efforts and money are essentially wasted.

Training and effective roll-out strategies are crucial for adoption, but there's a critical early step that is often overlooked. This step will determine whether your idea translates into a brilliant and useful tool or serves as just another bell and whistle that sounds great at conferences.

You must ask:

"Do your agents know they want or need this technology?"

The most successful technology ideas I've seen implemented haven't come from industry blogs or innovative conference speakers. These ideas have come from within the organization, directly from the agents, and focus on helping them do MORE transactions in LESS time. Unfortunately, in many cases, the brokerage doesn't consult its sales force.

You must engage your agents to evaluate their current needs, then use these findings to understand exactly what technology can help overcome these challenges. Doing so will allow your brokerage to present itself as the leader and ally in your agents' success.

The Litmus Test

Understanding your agents' needs and engaging their feedback has been made easy with the development of online survey platforms. Below are some simple action steps to evaluate your current technology platform and understand what future investments will serve your agents' business needs:

1. Using an online survey program (SurveyMonkey, Fluidsurveys, etc.), create a technology evaluation for your current offerings. Include the following questions into your survey:

On a scale of 1-10 please rate the following:

• Agent technology/business development/marketing (Samples: Agent websites, email marketing, online leads)
• Listing technology offerings (Samples: Syndication, showing tools, pricing data)
• Business Administration technology offerings (Samples: Paperless software, transaction management)
• Overall brokerage technology offerings (Samples: Company website, mobile, social media)

2. Please provide suggestions as to what technology would support you as an agent and why?

• Sample: (what) Transaction Management; (why) "I do a ton of transactions from home and find it very difficult to make my way into the office to complete them"

3. Optional: If you would like to be considered to partake in our beta group for evaluating future technology, please include your name below.

Notice that I have broken technology into unique buckets where most technology fails: Agent Business Development; Listing Technology; Business Administration and Brokerage. This will help you decide what your strengths and weaknesses are for future evaluation.

By engaging your agents in the decision making process, you can increase their future program adoption. By involving them in the evaluation process, companies are able to position themselves as true partners, providing valuable resources that will benefit all.

This article originally appeared on the REAL Trends Blog. Reprinted with permission of REAL Trends Inc. Copyright © 2013