In This Issue...

• Get Back the Focus - Finish Strong
• The Success of a Listing Presentation - Qualifying
• Success Requires Discipline - The Missing Link

Get Back the Focus - Finish Strong

After the vacations that most people take in August, we can feel out of sync.  It is often difficult to get back the focus for the final push to win the game.  We can easily fall asleep at the wheel at the most crucial time of the year. 

This reminds me of one of the greatest matches I ever played in professional racquetball.  I was playing in the Seattle Open.  I was in the semi-finals, and my opponent and I split the first 2 games.  We were in the tiebreaker to 11.  I started out the tiebreaker asleep at the wheel.  It was the most important part of the match, and I was out to lunch.  I remember taking a few time-outs and wondering, “What the heck is going on?”  Before I knew it, the score was 10-0; I was in deep trouble. 

It’s really easy, at that point, to lose focus.  It would have been easy to pack it in for the day, take the semi-final check, and go home.  The truth is, it’s never too late to quit.  We can quit at 10-0, or we can quit at 10-10 in a game to 11.  Most of us quit too easily and too early.  We even quit in the last quarter.  You have one quarter of the year left.  What are you going to do with it?  Are you going to play all out and make the big comeback if you are behind?  Are you going to finish strong?  Or are you going to pack it in?  I decided to play all out in the match.  I had nothing to lose.  Some of you may be so far behind that you have nothing to lose either by playing all out.  Some of you are on track, and it will be easy to let up.  You have the big 10-0 lead in the match to 11.  You figure you can coast in and make it. 

The key is earning one point at a time.  You need to make each motion, each point, each day, each call, and each appointment count.  That’s the way you mount a comeback.  That’s the way you finish strong.  The key is commitment to the cause and persistence.  I made a decision to win the match.  I committed to win the match.  I committed to an all-out effort, and then I slowly regained control of the match.  It was 10-3, then 10-5, 10-6, 10-8, and 10-9.  Once I got to 10-9, I knew I was going to win.  I had re-established momentum.  I had established fear in my opponent.  Even when we went back and forth on 10-10 a few times, I knew I would win.

To your Success,

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

The Success of a Listing Presentation - Qualifying

The success of a listing presentation is determined by what you do before you even walk through the door. Most agents enter the meeting flying blind, ill prepared, and oblivious to the needs, wants, desires, and expectations of the prospect.

Make this pledge to yourself right now: Before you enter another listing presentation, qualify your prospects in advance.

Ask questions that allow you to obtain important information about the customer’s desires, timeframe, and expectations. Without this information, you can’t possibly serve the client well.

Many salespeople, especially in real estate sales, think they’ll offend the customer if they ask questions. Here’s an analogy that should put your mind at ease. Imagine you’re sick and schedule a doctor’s appointment. You arrive, the doctor enters the examining room, and you look up and say, “Guess what sickness I have today?” From across the room, the doctor is supposed to assess your symptoms, diagnose your ailment, and prescribe a cure without checking your ears or throat, listening to your lungs and heart, and, most importantly, asking you questions about what is wrong and how you feel. It sounds ridiculous; yet it’s what Realtors do when they try to serve clients without first asking questions to qualify their wants, needs, and expectations.

Without good client information, a listing presentation becomes an explanation of your services and service delivery system. But what if the prospect sitting in front of you wants to be served differently? Then what?

The customer ultimately determines whether your service is good or poor. Since the customer rules on the quality of service received, the only way to start the service process is to learn what customers want, rather than trying to guess their desires and expectation.

You need to qualify prospects for two main reasons:

• Qualify prospects to safeguard your time. By qualifying prospects, you assess their motivation, desire, need to take action, ability to act, and authority to make buying or selling decisions. You also assess the odds that the prospect will result in income-producing activity. The qualifying process increases your probability of sales success by determining which prospects are likely to result in commission revenue and which are likely to consume hours without results.

• Qualify prospects to determine their service expectations. What kind of service do they expect? What buying or selling approach do they follow? Is there a match between your philosophy and theirs? If not, can you convince them through persuasion that your approach is better than their preconceived notion of what and how you should represent their interests? If not, are you willing to turn down the business? The only way to address these issues is to learn what your prospects are thinking before you make your presentation.

Before you enter a listing presentation, diagnose the situation you’re entering and the opportunity it presents by learning the prospect’s answers to qualifying questions. I recommend you acquire this base of knowledge over the phone when you’re scheduling the presentation appointment. If you wait until you are face-to-face with the prospect, it’s too late. By then you want to be offering a tailored presentation, not acquiring baseline information.

Focus your qualifying questions around the following four topics:

1. Motivation and Timeframe:  Ask questions that allow you to learn how badly the prospect wants to buy or sell, and in what timeframe. Sample questions include:

• Where are you hoping to move?
• How soon do you need to be there?
• Tell me about your perfect timeframe. When do you want this move to happen?
• Is there anything that would cause you not to make this move?

2. Experience:  A prospect’s view of the real estate profession is filtered through personal previous experience and experiences related by friends and family members. The following questions help you learn your prospect’s real estate background and preconceptions:

• How many properties have you sold in the past?
• When was your last sales experience?
• What was your experience with that sale?
• How did you select the agent you worked with?
• What did you like best and least about what that agent did?

3. Pricing: The following questions will help you to gauge the prospect’s motivation. They’ll also help you determine whether the prospect is realistic about current real estate values. 

Let me share an old real estate sales truth: The higher the list price, the lower the motivation; the lower the list price, the higher the motivation.

Listen carefully to the answers to the following two questions. They’ll reveal whether your prospect is ready to sell or just fishing for a price:

• How much do you want to list your home for tonight?
• If a buyer came in today, what would you consider to be an acceptable offer for your home?

4. Service Expectation: Learning your prospect’s service expectation is absolutely essential to a good working relationship, but I’ll caution you that when you begin to ask the service-related questions, you will likely hear silence on the phone.  Likely, your prospect has never met a service provider concerned enough to ask what the customer wants, values, and expects. As a result, you might have to probe and ask follow-up questions to help the prospect open up and enter a dialog.

• What do you expect from the real estate agent you choose to work with?
• What are the top three things you are looking for from an agent?
• What would it take for you to be confident that my service will meet your requirements?

For more information on listing presentations... Click Here

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Success Requires Discipline - The Missing Link

It’s amazing to watch the world through the eyes of a child.  The exposure we gain is immeasurable.  The evaluation skills we can take and the questioning of everything by the child gives pause to our often routine, busy lives.

Wesley, my son, does all that and more for me.  He causes me to really evaluate and question the most important skills, abilities, attitudes, and actions that must be undertaken to create greater success.

Most of us look at success as a very complex combination of skills, abilities, attitudes, and actions joined together in a magical or secret formula to achieve grand results.  Recently, in evaluating success, I realized that one thing reigns supreme.  It struck me that if I could instill that one thing in Wesley in his lifetime, his success in anything was assured.  That one thing is discipline.

Discipline is the fundamental building block that most people utilize to achieve greater success in life.  Once you have acquired the skill of discipline, it doesn’t matter what the economy is doing or what business you are in, your success is within reach at all times.  You possess the most important tool to help you through the storms and changes of life. 

Discipline is a crucial missing piece for many people.  I believe that, because our country has become so prosperous, we take the need for discipline for granted.  Older people in our society remember the sacrifices they had to make to achieve a greater measure of success.

People like myself, who were born in the 1960’s and beyond, have grown up in a vacuum compared to older generations.  We are too far removed from the World War I generation, Depression generation, World War II generation, and even the Korean War generation.  Those generations needed discipline just to survive.  In modern day America, you don’t need discipline to survive.  We have slowed the train down, so undisciplined people can stay on the train.  Discipline is the “secret weapon” of successful people.  It is the one big tool that separates them from all others.

If we can control and discipline three key areas of our life, we can control and discipline anything.  These three areas are the toughest for most people to discipline themselves to take control of:

1. Our Finances:
   
   I meet too many high production salespeople who can’t control their money.  Their hands are like a colander with lots of holes . . . the money just runs right through, and it all runs out.  In the end, it’s not what you gross – it’s what you net.  It’s not what you make – it’s what you keep.
   
   I always tell salespeople that I can easily teach them how to make another $100,000 in less than a year, but if they only net 20 cents on the dollar I haven’t really helped them that much.  We have to learn the skill of increase, coupled with the skill of discipline and control, to dramatically change our financial picture.

2. The Cleanliness of Our Home:
   
   It takes discipline and hard work to maintain your home.  For Joan and I, the battle increased exponentially with Wesley.  Those of you with children know what a challenge this is daily.  It’s easy to let the laundry pile up, to not make the beds, to not control the kitchen.  It’s harder to have the discipline to keep the house in order.

3. Our Weight:
   
   For many of us, controlling what we eat and how much we move daily is a tremendous battle.  I made a decision in the fall of 2003 that I was too short for my weight.  Given the low probability of an increase in height, I decided I needed to be more disciplined about my weight . . . what I ate and how much I moved.  Through regular exercise and better eating, I was able to shed twenty pounds in a few months.  Now the discipline part really kicks in on keeping it off.

Anyone who desires success must have discipline.  Success is attracted to you because of the person you become.  It comes to you due to the plan you are working and the specific actions you take to implement the plan.

It takes discipline to plan; to set the necessary time aside to evaluate the conditions; to construct the plan that takes advantage of the current conditions and skills that you possess.  You also must evaluate the weaknesses that must be addressed to increase the probability of your success.

It takes discipline to plan, and it also takes discipline to implement the plan.  Most people quit before the plan can take full root and work.  We live in a society where we all want instant success without significant effort.  If we really knew the grand future that awaits us, if we could really see it, touch it, and feel it, we would be ready to implement disciplined activity to achieve it.  In short, we would be willing to pay the price to get there.

An effective strategic plan should inject emotion and passion into you.  You should be able to feel that emotion and passion.  And that feeling, coupled with discipline, will move you to take action.  Taking action is really the goal for a successful person.

Resolve today to decide on one disciplined action you should take, and do it.  Don’t wait until tomorrow; do it today.  Don’t wait until you feel like it, because you probably never will.  Make the decision right now to do it!

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