In This Issue...

• Lead Your Way to Success
• How a Shy Agent in North Carolina Sold 100 Units per Year - Four Steps to a Great Listing Presentation
• How to Get MORE Prospects Today by Charging More, Not Less

Lead Your Way to Success

Leadership – The lost art! I realize that is an interesting thought for most people. The truth is there are too many managers in the world and not enough leaders. Great leaders are always great managers, but great managers are rarely great leaders. A manager often tells you what to do, but a leader will also show you how to do it. Your staff, clients, prospects, and other agents are looking for you to lead them. They are looking for guidance, vision, and solutions to the problems they are facing in their lives.

This is especially true with prospects and clients. We often shy away from the leadership model when dealing with prospects and clients. We are afraid of losing the potential business and relationship with them over control. They are looking for us to take that control to lead them to a successful outcome. How would you feel about the doctor that let you take total control of your cancer treatment? We must establish the role of leader from the first moment with the prospect or client.

Here are a few steps to take to establish the leadership role:

1. Plan out your qualifying questions.

Make sure your prospect qualifying calls are well scripted. Remember, whoever is asking the most questions is in control of the conversation. The questioner has the ability and skill to lead the other person to the desired result. Are you talking more than your prospects or clients?

2. Set specific boundaries.

Set boundaries on your availability. Let your prospects and clients clearly understand when you are available or not available, what your expectations of them are regarding meeting times, how offers are done, and the reality of the current market. If your client is not prepared for the current market conditions…they are wasting your time. Remember, you are investing your time…your most precious resource.

Let me share with you two great books on leadership; they have specific strategies on how to achieve mastery in leadership.

1. Leadership by the Book, written by Ken Blanchard
2. The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, written by John Maxwell

These two books will help you build your skills to lead others to the desired outcome.

To your Success,

Dirk Zeller
CEO
Real Estate Champions

P.S. For more help with leading your prospects, click here.

How a Shy Agent in North Carolina Sold 100 Units per Year - Four Steps to a Great Listing Presentation

One study after another has shown that your body language and tonality account for over 90% of your presentation’s effectiveness. What you actually say accounts for less than 10% of the delivery. If you’re scrambling to find the right words, as most salespeople are, you’re spending your energy in inverse proportion to what impacts your effectiveness.

The solution is to plan what you are going to say beforehand, so that during the presentation you can focus on language, tonality, and the following four steps to a great delivery.

Conviction
Webster defines conviction as “a fixed or firm belief.” I’d add that there is nothing more compelling than conviction. Your belief that you can get the job done draws the client to you. Your belief in the value of their home or how their home should be sold earns their trust. Your firm belief about where the marketplace is headed backed by statistics that prove your point sells you and your recommendations.

Before you go face to face with sellers, determine the three things that you are going to express with absolute conviction. If your sellers share your views (you’ll know based on your prospect qualifying work), that’s a bonus. If their views are opposite yours, be doubly persuasive and resolute in order to win them over to your point of your view and gain their signature on the listing contract.

Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm sells in spades. People want to work with those who are enthusiastic about their home and the market. If the market is tough, you have to be frank and honest; you can’t just hide market realities. But you can still be enthusiastic and show that you are excited about the opportunity to “beat the odds” of the marketplace.

Your listing presentation will be more interesting if you are enthusiastic about your career, your business, their home, and the sellers as people. There is an old sales adage: “Enthusiasm is to selling as yeast is to bread. It makes the dough rise!”

Confidence
I believe that in my early sales career, confidence was my secret edge. Even when I was new to the game, I was confident I was the best agent for the seller . . . the result of a deeply grooved expectation of victory that came from athletics.

Where have you experienced victories? Tap into those past experiences as you pump up your confidence in preparation for prospect presentations.

If you lack confidence, determine what you need to do to up the level of your belief in yourself and your ability to achieve success. What activities would help increase your confidence? What skills do you need to master to dramatically affect your confidence? What one thing, if you did it with excellence, would change your self-confidence?

Webster defines confidence as “a belief in one’s powers or abilities.” The great success motivator Napoleon Hill says, “What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

I saw evidence of this truth a few years ago while working with a great agent in North Carolina. She didn’t have confidence in herself, nor did she think she was a great agent. Even when she closed 100 units a year, she was still self-sabotaging her success.

I asked her to write out her standard of a great agent. She did so with great and specific clarity. Six months later, she had met the standard to a tee but was still in self-sabotage mode. Fortunately, I’d saved her written document and could re-present it to her as proof of her success. She has never looked back.

Assertiveness
Agents don’t want to come off as pushy or aggressive in their sales approach, and, by mistake, they shy away from assertiveness, as well.

The definition of a great salesperson is 'a person who convinces someone to do something that is beneficial to them or convinces them to do it faster.' Going for the close or asking for the order is not pushy. It’s assertive. As a real estate agent, your job is to persuade prospects that you have the best service, the best value, and the highest probability for their success and to convince them to sign up for the benefits you provide, now!

One of the easiest ways to exert your assertiveness is to tell the prospect what’s coming. Early in the presentation explain, “At the end of my presentation tonight, provided we’re all in agreement, we’ll finalize the paperwork, so I can begin to work for you right away.” This bit of foreshadowing may come in useful should you encounter resistance at the time of the close, at which time you can use one of these scripts:

“This should be no surprise. I told you I would ask for your business. You want me to follow through on what I commit to you, don’t you?”

Or

“I’m proving to you right now that I follow through, right? Listen, Mr. and Mrs. Seller, homes are sold, not bought. The reason conversion of leads is so low is because many agents lack assertiveness with the buyer. So my question is: Do you want an agent that you know will for sure ask every buyer to buy or an agent that you hope will do that? Which gives you more comfort?”

Being assertive in selling is a good thing.

So plan what you are going to say beforehand by following the four steps of conviction, enthusiasm, confidence, and assertiveness. Then you can focus on what is going to be the most effective and have the greatest impact your presentation – body language and tone.

Need more help qualifying and closing listing prospects? Click Here or See Below

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How to Get MORE Prospects Today by Charging More, Not Less

The business environment is getting more competitive every day. New companies and new concepts are being born daily. There is always someone trying to do it better and cheaper than what has been done previously.

There is more competition in today’s global economy than ever before. Do you remember when the US Postal Service was the only way to send documents? Now that age-old institution has to compete with delivery services such as Fed-EX, Airborne, UPS, as well as fax machines and the Internet with e-mail. Competition is everywhere and in every business segment.

The real estate business is no different. The new companies and the remaking of the old ones challenges us. There are two key questions that must be answered if we are going to thrive, not just survive, in the future.

1. How do we make our business (ourselves) the obvious choice for the consumer?

2. How can we be different than the other competitive choices, so we can better attract customers?

These two questions are at the center of success in attracting new prospects and clients to your business.

Many companies and Agents have taken the discount route to answer these questions. Still others are adopting a fee-for-service model. Both of these philosophies are trying to attract consumers solely based on the cost of the service. I believe that this tactic is a losing proposition for the Agent, the company, the real estate community at large, as well as the consumer. Cheaper is not always better…better is better. For some reason, we are fixated on the commission we charge. We often have tunnel vision as to how to compete. Because we lost a listing to a lower fee broker, we assume that we must lower our fee to compete.

We have been working diligently with all our coaching clients specifically on their sales skills, presentation skills, qualifying skills, and objection handling. We have scripted, rehearsed, practiced, and role-played with them to increase their levels of skills. Here is what we found, after studying their commission structure and fees. Most have actually raised their fees because of their confidence and delivery in their sales and objection handling skills. They have consistently received the highest commissions in their respective marketplaces. Many have even added a processing fee, between $295 and $495, to all their transactions. This processing fee has further increased their profit on each transaction.

The key in all this is the skills that you possess – the ability to handle the commission objection or the statement that another Agent will do it for less. Your sales skills will make you the obvious choice for the consumer. We all should have reasons that the consumer should select us. However, you must stop and ask yourself these three questions:

· Are your reasons well thought out?
· Are they well laid out in scripts that you know cold?
· Are you able to convey them with power and conviction?

If you can’t answer “yes” to all these questions, you have work to do!

Step 1: List all your competitive advantages. They could be your company, your service commitment, or your statistics (listings to sales, days on market, or average list to sale price). Write down as much as possible.

Step 2: Look at the list from the customer’s perspective. What do they really care about, besides lower commission? What would really set you apart in their eyes? Pick the five key services you think they want. If you are struggling, go back to a dozen past clients. Call them, and ask them why they selected you over the other Agents. You now have the consumer’s perspective.

Step 3: Select five competitive advantages and script a response to them. Your ability to drive these five points home can mean the difference between a powerful listing presentation and a weak one, and could well determine if you get the contract signed that night or have to wait a week. Be prepared to say to the customer what is most important.

We then need to analyze the next question: How can we be different to attract new customers? First, you must know your business and spend your time there. We often do activities at work that don’t bring a large return. I coached a lady who did thirty-five open houses in one year and made $9,000 from all that work. Once she redistributed her time to calling her past clients, her production skyrocketed. She added over $50,000 to her gross commissions earned, in less than six months. It was a matter of understanding where her revenue was coming from and investing her time there. Why invest your time in activities that generate little income?

Another technique to attract more customers is expansion of your leads by using call capture, or IVR systems, to expand the number of leads you receive. You can expand the number of leads you get daily and weekly by 50 to 100%, by using call capture technology. There are numerous companies out there that provide this service. In my opinion, the most user friendly, with the best marketing minds behind the system, is 24/7 Call Capture(www.CallCaptureSuccess.com). They have mastered the use and implementation of this product and made it easy. As Agents, the ability to generate more leads allows us to be highly selective with the people we work with. Being selective leads to more revenue. Take the time to implement your call capture system today.

Take some time this week to reflect upon (and answer) these key questions. You are running a multi-million dollar sales company. Make sure you invest the time in planning your own course to a successful career. If you need help building your career, join my Group Coaching Program. See Below.


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