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Ryan O'Neill leads The Minnesota Real Estate Team, a group of a little over 200 agents working buyers, sellers, and investors across the Twin Cities and into Wisconsin. He started the team in 2003 and sold actively as an agent for the first decade, then shifted into his current role as sales manager and broker, supporting agents who range from brand new to decades in the business.
Ryan has been a CINC client for more than twelve years. The connection started through one of his own agents, who signed up with CINC years ago when the team was already looking to generate more leads. Ryan didn't know much about the platform at the time. He just knew the team needed more opportunities, so they signed up, and they never left.
“You can genuinely tell that CINC actually cares. It’s not just, let’s sell another platform.”
We sat down with Ryan to talk about his long history with CINC, how he handles onboarding across a 200-person team, and the philosophy that’s shaped how he thinks about leads, agents, and long-term success.
Q&A with Ryan O’Neill
So you are a long-time client. I’m curious how you learned about CINC or got connected in the first place. Walk me through that journey if you can.
We’ve always kind of been in the lead game as a team. Early on, I had a friend who’d done a lot of SEO work and built a great local website, so we worked a lot of leads off that. One of the agents on our team actually signed up with CINC originally. This was years ago, and I didn’t know a lot about it at the time. I just knew that as a team we were looking to generate more leads, so we signed up. That’s been years now, and we’ve been a client for a really long time since.
You’ve seen a lot of tech changes, team changes, changes in how we do lead gen. What keeps you partnering with us?
The first thing I’d say is, when you’re working with a company, you want to be more than just a credit card or a check. I’ve met with people from CINC multiple times. They’ve come to the Twin Cities, we’ve grabbed coffee at Starbucks. I’ve worked with a number of great representatives over the years, and you can genuinely tell CINC cares.
I think any good organization has to take care of their existing customers. That’s one of my philosophies with our own team too. It’s not just about recruiting a hundred new people. It’s about taking care of the people you already have, and that’s how you grow. I’d say that’s been a big part of our team’s growth, and I think it’s been a big part of what CINC has done too.
I can think of Harry, for example. He’s helped us with our social media spend, our Google spend, looking at our ads and figuring out if they’re effective, what our cost per lead was, whether we generated more or fewer leads that month. Having someone like that who’s actually reviewing things and making recommendations is something I really appreciate. There are a lot of people I could name. Harry, Michael, Hadley, just a few great folks who’ve helped us. When you’re working with a vendor, you want to work with people you know care.
You’ve obviously brought new people onto your team since being with CINC. How does onboarding work? Is it an easy process?
One of my core philosophies is fairness. So when an agent joins the Minnesota Real Estate Team, they’re automatically onboarded onto the platform. Sally Gill, who works with me, does a wonderful job sitting down with each agent, going through their laptop with them, walking through how leads come in, how to accept them, what the best practices are, what the next steps look like.
For the first six months to a year, it’s a lot of answering questions and sharing best practices. We’ve done best practice meetings with our CINC rep over the years, recording the training, going through the platform specifically, sharing tips. CINC also has its own education and coaching that agents can plug into. My goal is to help agents convert and build relationships with these leads, and sometimes when technology gets too complicated, people tune out. What I like about this platform is it has a lot of features, but it’s not so complicated that people can’t figure it out. That extra training has been really helpful.
Is there a feature that you particularly enjoy, or that you hear your agents talk about more than others, that’s helped their daily workflow?
In the last few years, the AI messaging has really been helpful. Agents are busy. Everybody’s busy. They only have so much time to talk with one person, meet with another, show homes to someone else. So any additional help that moves a buyer further down the funnel is valuable. We’ve noticed a lot of positive interaction with the messaging, moving buyers along to an actual showing or meeting.
When I started in this business in the early 2000s, the immediate showing lead wasn’t really a thing. You were grinding, reaching out by phone, by text, building a relationship, meeting for coffee, nurturing people along. I think nurturing is still very critical to long-term success with online lead generation. But any tool that saves a little time helps. The AI feature and the messaging have done that for us. Agents like that it’s getting people moving toward the showing, the coffee meeting, the potential offer.
I’d love to talk about what difference CINC has made in your business. In the twelve years you’ve been with CINC, what kind of impact has it had?
My business philosophy has always been pretty simple. How can I help our agents find more humans? Find those humans, and then our job is to build a relationship, take an interest in them, get to know them, show them we care, be low pressure, work on their timeline. Good things happen through that, not just the immediate conversion of the lead.
I get it, people want results. If you give an agent 50 leads, they need to sell something that month. They’ve got rent to pay. I’m a practical person. But I’ve also seen the magic of what happens when you give people opportunities. I have plenty of stories of agents who met a buyer nobody else wanted to bother calling, helped them with their first little condo, and that person ended up referring them to two, three, four, fifteen different people over the next ten years.
We have numerous cases of agents on our team who’ve built mature, referral-based businesses just from taking these leads, building relationships, and trying their best to help. It’s harder for people who think A has to lead directly to B. It’s easier for the people who see this as an opportunity, a human you get to know, a relationship that could lead to a lot of good things. We try to encourage our agents to keep an open mind and focus on what they can control: their attitude, their effort, how they treat the person in front of them. Good things happen over time.
From a return standpoint, it’s absolutely paid for itself many times over. I don’t look at it as strictly “I spend X dollars and need to make two or three times X back.” I look at it more as: people join our team because they want opportunities, so I need to provide that. I want them to succeed long term. Ten years from now, I want to be having coffee with an agent who’s gotten 40 referrals from one person I handed them years ago. That’s part of what CINC does for a team leader who’s looking to help people succeed long term.
We get consistent monthly leads, both online and social. Some aren’t great, some are lukewarm, some want to see a house today. The agents who do best with us are consistent. They make a good daily effort, they have a positive attitude, and they show up. Half of life is just showing up.
You’ve worked through a couple of different market cycles and continued to use CINC and spend on online leads. Besides mindset, is there any more tangible advice you’d give to agents who might be thinking about pulling back instead of consistently building their pipeline?
What’s interesting is I have friends in our market who run their platforms differently than I do. My style is I’m kind of a soft-hearted Minnesotan. I want the agent to want to do it. I’m not totally hands off, but I lean toward trust. I know team leaders who put more process and structure around managing each lead and each agent’s performance, and their return is very, very high too.
Even with everything changing around AI, I feel like the business hasn’t changed in many ways. The human element is more important than ever. I’m a big fan of AI, I use it daily in lots of ways. But the human element of this business matters more now, not less. A good agent is going to look to their team leader for opportunities, and CINC is a simple way to plug into that. Whether you take an approach like mine, giving agents more trust, or run a tighter ship like some of my friends do, there isn’t a right or wrong philosophy. I know through conversations with our agents and through the sales I see that they’re getting a return many times over, both through conversion and through referrals.
A lot of it comes down to where you put your effort as a team leader or broker. If you’re not detail-oriented or great at managing the day-to-day, hire someone who can help with the platform, who does daily coaching with agents, goes through the pipeline, works on scripting and best practices, and plugs into the training CINC already offers. From an opportunity standpoint, it’s a home run. These are people searching online, searching on social media, for some reason. Your job is to figure out what that reason is and how you can help.
Ryan O’Neill leads the Minnesota Real Estate Team, based in the Twin Cities, and has been a CINC client for more than twelve years.