Elijah Zahler
Market Center Tech Trainer. I help our agents actually use the technology they already have, which turns out to be far less of a technology problem than people expect.
Market Center Tech Trainer
Keller Williams Classic Realty
Coon Rapids & Blaine, MN
I am the Market Center Tech Trainer at Keller Williams Classic Realty. In practice that means I am who an agent calls when something is not working, and also who decides what we ought to be using in the first place.
I joined Keller Williams Classic Realty in January 2026, and I did not come to it from software. I came from sales floors and training rooms. Before this I led teams for a marketing company across three states, ran a short-lived consulting practice of my own, and before either of those I trained baristas at Starbucks. Underneath, every one of those was the same job: get a group of people to do something new, and keep doing it, when they already have a way of working that feels fine to them.
That is most of what technology training actually is. The software is rarely the hard part.
Everything technical I know, I taught myself by building things and breaking them. That is still how I work. I would rather ship something rough that people use than plan something perfect that never lands, though I will admit perfectionism is the thing most likely to slow me down.
Agent adoption is not a technology problem. It breaks down at communication, at implementation, and at whether leadership actually holds the line.
Elijah ZahlerWhat agents actually come to me with
Anything from a password reset to a database that has not been touched in two years. Somebody wants to know whether a tool is worth paying for. Somebody has a listing going live tomorrow and the marketing is not built. Somebody has heard about AI and wants to know what is real and what is noise.
None of it is beneath asking. The agents who get the most out of this office are the ones who ask early, before the small problem has cost them a week.
What I have built here
Most of it falls into three piles. What agents learn: a technology curriculum written for this office rather than borrowed from corporate, with the instructor guides to actually teach it, and the class material that goes around it. What the office runs on: onboarding and offboarding that happens the same way every time, naming and tagging standards so things can be found a year later, policy and forms documentation, and the knowledge base and compliance guardrails behind our AI assistant.
And the visible half: listing marketing packages agents can buy into, event campaigns, the vendor programme, a podcast and media room at the Coon Rapids office so agents have somewhere to record without hiring a studio, and this website, which I designed and built.
Most of that has happened since January. I mention the timeline not because it is impressive on its own, but because none of it counts for anything if agents do not use it, and adoption is the part that takes longer than building.
How I think about training
Most technology training fails at adoption rather than instruction. People leave the class able to do the thing and never do it again, because nothing in their week changed and nobody followed up.
So I care more about what happens after the class than during it. Clear steps, something written down you can come back to, and a reason to use it before you forget. If a tool needs a forty minute explanation before it helps you, it is usually the wrong tool.
More of the team
Stuck on something?
If you are an agent here and something is not working, ask early rather than late. If you are thinking about joining, the technology and the training are a fair thing to ask hard questions about, and I am happy to answer them.