What if rearranging your sales team—without hiring anyone new—could boost deal closures by more than 25 per cent? The latest study from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School has uncovered a smarter way to build high-performing teams, using an example in the real estate industry, to offer a simple yet highly effective strategy to increase revenue in tough market conditions.

Key insights:

• Best collaborators: The best-performing teams aren’t always made up of all-star performers. Instead, average solo performers emerge as the best collaborators, significantly enhancing the success rates of their teammates.

• Avoiding mismatches: Pairing high and low performers isn’t always effective. Teams with moderate differences in ability perform better than those with extreme gaps.

• Beyond demographics: While gender and education diversity have some impact, performance history is a far stronger predictor of success.

The study, titled Heterogeneous complementarity and team design: The case of real estate agents, was conducted by Professor Mandy Hu Mantian, Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing at CUHK Business School, in collaboration with researchers from Virginia Tech, the University of Hong Kong, and Johns Hopkins University. It introduces a data-driven model that optimises real estate sales team assignments based on agents’ past performance and collaborative effectiveness.

Analysing data from 484 sales agents at Lianjia, one of mainland China’s largest real estate firms, researchers developed a framework categorising agents into six performance types based on their ability to close deals.

The study’s findings challenge traditional assumptions about team building:

• Average solo performers are the best team players: They are better suited to a collaborative work environment. They improve team performance the most, making them the ideal partners for most other agent types.

• Top performers work best alone: The highest-performing agents tend to close more deals when working independently.

• Pairing agents with moderate skill differences works best: Extreme skill gaps lead to lower productivity, while moderate differences enhance collaboration.

• Demographics have limited impact: While having at least one female member and similar education levels can slightly improve success rates, these factors do not replace the power of performance-based team assignment.

By restructuring teams using the proposed model, real estate firms could increase successful transactions by 26.6 per cent without additional hiring. Therefore, the expected output gain translates to profits directly, which is especially valuable for firms facing staff shortages or hiring freezes.

Although this research focuses on real estate sales, its findings are highly applicable across industries where teamwork drives performance.

“When new hires join the company, managers can consider using observed demographic information to create teams with gender diversity or assign agents with similar educational backgrounds or ages to the same team,” says Professor Hu. “Once the new hires have been working at the company for enough time to assess their sales performance, managers can then gauge which type they belong to. With this information, team assignments can be further optimised.”