Iliass Okaf Iliass OkafFully committed to making the jump to tech sales now. But first, the last three years, unfiltered:
Real estate in Melbourne, commission-only. Every deal is really two sales.
First I win the listing: prospect. find vendors. build trust. stay in touch. sometimes for years. "Hey Mia, Zoe's first week at kindergarten. How are you holding up?" pitch. list. "No I won't do it for less than 1.8%."
Then the sale itself starts: opens. calls. "The kitchen's a bit small." match the right buyer. "Would they take $100K below?" laugh awkwardly. negotiate. hard. "Congrats Emma, champagne." 30-35 of these, every year.
Networking: more calls. brokers. conveyancers. "Hey Jake, how about coffee on Tuesday?". other agents. referrals from past clients. "Sh**, I forgot school pick up time again."
Assistant
101 transactions, $81.6M+ in career sales volume, three years. Accelerating pipeline to:
The expectation would be applying the same research-driven habits developed in real estate to shorten the ramp: learning how the product is positioned and priced, and identifying decision makers and key players in the market.
Currently pitching for new business at least three times a week. Establishing rapport and building trust with clients always comes first. Then the services or product on offer and the competitive advantages it delivers, as well as the company's unique positioning. About half of these presentations run over Microsoft Teams, for vendors based anywhere in the world. Winning the business starts by creating a good connection, as a first step to putting a deal together.
Currently operating within a very close-knit team of four at Jellis Craig. About half of the business we generate is run in collaboration with one another, negotiation and client management included. Working well within a team is a competitive advantage in itself, a way to combine strengths and get more wins together.
Everything an AE role asks for, forged in a different sales environment with a self-generated pipeline.
What looks like one sale is actually two.
Every deal is really two sales. Step one: an inbound or outbound lead, qualifying the opportunity, pitching, and winning the mandate (listing). Step two: going to market, meeting and qualifying the buyer, then negotiating and closing the deal, almost exclusively done remotely by phone, FaceTime, or Teams. The one exception is auction day, where it happens live. Each stage feeds the next, one person accountable from first contact to signed deal.
The database gets managed like a book of accounts.
Every contact in the database is managed on an ongoing basis across three layers. First, tiered cadence: every contact is segmented by engagement, warm contacts followed up every one to two weeks, mid-tier quarterly, dormant contacts twice a year, so nothing goes cold by accident. Second, signal-based outreach: market developments relevant to a specific contact, plus known personal or business events, trigger a touchpoint outside the regular cadence. Third, network maintenance: monthly contact with the referral and industry network, and twice-yearly (or more, depending on circumstance) check-ins with past clients, keeping every relationship live long after the deal closes.
Timing matters as much as the pitch.
Not every qualified opportunity should be closed immediately. Reading a client's actual circumstances, timing, budget, competing priorities, means sometimes the right advice is to wait for the right moment rather than push for a signature. Trust earned that way is what keeps clients coming back and referring others instead of being sold to once.
Some closes happen without a second take.
Comfortable performing live: in person, on a call, or in a presentation, to win the mandate itself, whether that is a listing in the living room or a weekend auction. Managing competing bids, reading a room in real time, and no prep time between objections.
Identified a limitation in agency reach.
Identified a gap in agency reach: the existing database and lead flow were heavily concentrated in Victoria, with no real channel to interstate or international buyers and vendors. Co-founded Sold Off Market to close that gap directly, building a channel to reach the audience the existing pipeline couldn't, and growing addressable market share as a result.
Visit sold-offmarket.com.au →A shorter timeline is a byproduct of how each stage actually gets run.
Speed comes from three habits:
I'm an early adopter of AI and a genuine believer in where it's taking software. I don't buy the "SaaSpocalypse" narrative, if anything, I'm bullish on it. It's going to blow the SaaS market wide open: sharper go-to-market, companies grabbing more share faster, better products, and end users actually getting more efficient at their jobs. That's a massive market still being carved up, and I want in early.
I've already built a go-to-market channel from scratch once: Sold Off Market, an outbound lead-generation platform I founded and now run alongside the day job, born out of a gap I saw in my own real estate database. Nobody asked me to build it. I saw the opportunity and went and built it.
No formal tech sales background yet. What I do have is five years of asking people to trust me with the single biggest asset they own. Trust is what I've actually been selling this whole time — the product just changes.
Winning new business and growing an existing account come from the same instinct. Both live or die on trust, and building that has been the job for five years either way.
"He was calm and has good judgement. He handled all aspects of the sale process despite me living overseas."
"The property was on the market for 10 months with another agent and Illias sold it in 4 weeks."
"Being an interstate seller, Ilias made the entire sales process seamless and ran a very strong campaign. I achieved an excellent sale price."
"A more complex process than a standard sale given the ownership structure. Iliass and Sam handled everything with confidence... helping me achieve a strong result within a short timeframe."
"A trustworthy guide who knows his market well, and diligent when the time came for negotiation."
"When it came time to pivot and come up with a new strategy to maximise the result I let them take the reigns and the great result followed."
"Iliass sold us an apartment in mid-2024. We were so impressed, that we asked him to handle the sale of our house... Iliass also achieved a better than expected sale price!"
Let's jump on a call, whenever suits.