In This Issue...

• Words from the President
• Customizing Your Customer Service Messages - To the Platinum Level
• Just Do It - Right the First Time
• The Birth of Real Estate Teams - Key to Your Future?

Words from the President

Thanks for joining me today on your journey toward success as a Real Estate Agent.

The three areas that we'll focus our time on today are Customizing Your Customer Service Messages, Just Doing It, and the Birth of Real Estate Teams. Any of these articles could help you change your life in 2007 if you'll read, absorb, and use the information.

Before you get started, I'd like to take a moment and highlight one small change to Coaches Corner™ that we'll be making today. This will likely carry on through out this year. We're increasing our article content by 33% by adding another article to the newsletter.

Why the change?...you might ask.

Well, there's been a lot of buzz in the industry over the last several weeks about Real Estate Teams. One thing you may not be aware of is that we here at Real Estate Champions, Inc have been coaching clients to build Real Estate Teams since 1998.

We've coached them on how to build them (sometimes from scratch), grow them, sell them, and how to use them as a path to retirement. So, we've got more than enough experience in this area to be called an authority on real estate teams.

Also, I've recently contracted with McGraw-Hill to publish a new book, "The Champion Real Estate Team" (due out Fall 2007). I'm actually wrapping it up right now and will be submitting it to the editor shortly.

In an effort to help meet the need for information regarding building a Real Estate Team, I've instructed my team to 1) assemble a pre-release version of a chapter out of my new book as the "The Champion Real Estate Team Guide" and 2) begin releasing article excerpts from the book here in Coaches Corner™. You can get an instant download of the guide here.

I hope that you'll invest a few minutes of your life with me today and that the information you gain from Coaches Corner™ proves to be a blessing to you and your career.

To your achievement of success in life,


Dirk Zeller
CEO
Real Estate Champions, Inc

"Swanepoel Real Estate
Trends Report"

During the past year, the real estate industry has experienced unprecedented change and significant innovation. You’ve no doubt experienced it first hand.

The key to being successful in real estate, or any other career for that matter, is staying apprised of the trends in your industry. If you can see where things are heading, you can utilize new opportunities before your competition.

• Beating your competition to the next wave of opportunities
• Avoiding fads that could set your business back years
• Gaining valuable insights about revealing strategies you can use right now

Learn More Here

Customizing Your Customer Service Messages - To Platinum Level

From an early age, every child learns the Golden Rule: Treat others the way you want to be treated. Customer service pros replace the Golden Rule with the Platinum Rule: Treat others the way they wish to be treated.

The Platinum Rule was coined by speaker/trainer Tony Alessandra, who explains that a salesperson’s job is not to treat and serve clients as you want to be treated but as they want to be treated.

The only way to know how a person wants to be treated is to ask and observe. Different kinds of customers have different values and service expectations. A one-time transaction client expects a different level of attention than is expected by a long-time relationship client. A busy executive expects more efficiency than is expected or even desired by a person with a fairly empty calendar.

By discovering and recognizing a person’s communication style, decision-making style, and expectations, you can supercharge your business.

The difference between junk mail and personal mail boils down to a single question: Is the message targeted and tailored to the interests of the recipient, or could it just as easily be sent out with an address label that reads “occupant”.

The more you segment your database, the better you’ll be able to customize the messages you send. Prospects, clients, and those in your sphere have different information needs. Likewise, those with various interests will respond to different kinds of messages.

Segment your mailing list by the nature of your relationship with the contact and also by the recipients’ lifestyle facts such as children or no children, age group, special interests, and spiritual faith, to name a few categories. Then, with a few keystrokes, you can pull up address lists of people with shared interests and information needs. You can send a great article on golf to all the golfing enthusiasts in your database. You can send an invitation to a family-oriented event to all prospects with children. You can be sure every mailer that leaves your office conveys the fact that you know and care enough about the recipient’s interests to send appropriately tailored information

A transactional client isn’t looking for a long-term relationship with a business or service provider. Transactional clients simply want to complete a deal. They’re eye is on the bottom line, and their decisions are based on dollars and sense. When the real estate marketplace is robust, expect to encounter a good many transactional clients.

In his book, Re-thinking the Sales Force, Neil Rackham outlines the key characteristics of transactional clients: 

• Transactional clients view service as standard and readily substitutable. 

• The transactional buyer’s primary concerns are the price and ease of acquisition.

• The timing of a transactional purchase is triggered by a specific event, rather than by a whim.

• The key nature of the relationship is cost-based, and the relationship can be contractual. 

In serving transactional clients, you need to ask yourself whether or not you can turn enough of a profit off this single transaction to make the effort worthwhile, because the chance of repeat business is slim. You might, by your stellar service, turn a transactional client into a relationship client, but the odds are long. This kind of buyer is primarily motivated by the cost of your service.  If the numbers don’t fly, the level of your relationship won’t matter.

Relationship clients are clients who give you the opportunity to serve them on a repeated basis. Unlike transactional clients, relationship clients view their contact with you as part of an ongoing relationship. Unlike their transactional brethren, relationship clients expect to do business with you again. You can also expect referrals to their friends.

When dealing with relationship clients, be aware of what matters most:

• They are focused on how your characteristics are different from others and how your services are customized and unique. They want the benefits that you provide to help them solve their problem.

• The price of your service is not their highest concern. The solution you provide carries equal or more weight than the cost.

• They are willing to consider price and performance trade offs to arrive at a lower risk, higher probability outcome.

• They respond favorably to the service and communication aspects of your business.

• They expect and require a high level of customer service.

• They have a cooperative attitude and want to work together with you toward a common goal. 

You can wish all you want, but the truth is not all clients fit into the relationship client category. You’ll meet agent trainers who tell you to work only with people in this category, but I think that you’d be foolish to limit your business so significantly.

If you'd like more help with how to treat buyers the way they want to be treated, so that you can convert & commit them to close with you, see my program "Convert & Commit the Buyer Every Time!"... check it out here.

The Champion
Real Estate Agent - Book

Now on the Shelves

A proven plan for peak sales performance—and a better life!

In The Champion Real Estate Agent, renowned sales trainer Dirk Zeller shows you how to dramatically boost sales and achieve all your professional goals. But there’s much more to being a champion Agent than just selling. Zeller’s proven program not only turns you into a top sales performer, it gives you all the tools to build your real estate business and guaranteed to create a secure and prosperous future for yourself.

Full of insider tips, expert advice, and real-world examples from Zeller’s many years as a champion Agent and trainer, this comprehensive career guide presents a complete system for managing your business and time—so you can earn more money and enjoy more of life.

Don’t just get into the real estate game; become an all-star when you learn how to:

• Supercharge your sales and commissions
• Use Zeller’s unique referral strategy to turn effort into income
• Develop trust and credibility with customers
• Design a custom business plan that fits your life and goals
• Generate multiple streams of income

Click Here to Get My Personal
Tour Through the Book!

Just Do It - Right the First Time

I have talked with a handful of clients who have dealt with the same issues, and I want to address those issues with all of you.  You may not be experiencing these issues right now, but you will at some point in your career.  The base issues I want to cover are the market changing to a buyer-controlled or buyer-driven market, multiple offers on properties, and bidding up of the price.  My advice to all of you who are in this situation is from Nike: “Just do it” - Right the first time.  In other words, don’t re-earn your commission.  Sell them the house the first time.

I think we owe it to our clients to educate them as to the realities of the marketplace.  They will need to understand that, if they want a house now, they need to step to the plate.  I was always amazed in my career when I represented the seller, and we were getting multiple offers and the offers were low.  This truly made no sense to me.  These buyer’s agents had invested large amounts of time.  Their client invested energy and emotion into that home.  Then they would write an offer that really had no chance of acceptance against the other offers.  They weren’t playing the odds in their client’s favor.

Your first step is to educate your client to understand what is going on in your market.  Here is an action plan for all of you, even if you are not in a buyer’s market; you need to research your market.  Understand what the homes are selling for compared to the asking price in all the price ranges.  You need to know the actual percentage of sale price versus asking price.  If homes are selling at 97%, 95%, or 105% of the asking price, then it is crucial for you to know that percentage.  Move yourself into the trusted advisor role as opposed to the salesperson role.  Counsel them on what they need to do to get the house they want.  They will start to lose confidence in your ability to get the job done if you are writing multiple offers.  You will lose the deal eventually for yourself and your mortgage partner if you struggle to get an offer accepted.

You should also look at the situation from your business standpoint.  You have spent all this time to show property, write the contract, and try to negotiate for them.  All that time will be unpaid if you don’t get the home for them.  Make sure that you get paid for your time invested in a client.  You will also put your mortgage partner through the wringer with you.  They will appreciate your conversion of this buyer quickly and efficiently.  The quicker you are able to convert the buyer, the less time, if any time at all, your mortgage partner and you will have to ride the interest rate roller coaster.  If this begins to happen, as it usually does in the spring and summer months, you will both get motion sickness, and so will your clients.

Remember, the longer you have to administrate a buyer or seller, the less profit you make in net dollars.  People cost you time and money in the client status.  They are a wealth center when they pass onto the past client status.  Get them there fast!  The longer they stay in client status, the more that can go wrong.  You need to move them through the process to escrow as quickly as possible.  Clients are not a potential profit center until they get into escrow.  Now I want to be very clear.  I am not saying slam them indiscriminately into a home for your benefit.  I am also not saying put aside your fiduciary responsibility to the client.  If the bidding process gets ridiculous, you owe it to your client to pass on the home.

If you'd like step-by-step training complete with 45 scripts and tools on "How to Create & Deliver a Dynamic Listing Presentation"... check out my program here.

The Birth of Real Estate Teams - Key to Your Future?

The buzzword in real estate today is “teams”.  I see more agents today trying to establish teams in their practices than ever before, and they are trying to create them much earlier in their careers.  I even see agents with less than one year in the business who are marginally successful trying to attract others to work with them in that unstable environment. 

I have a few theories about why this is all happening now but not much more than that.  For too many people, their team building days are premature.  Many agents don’t have the sales, marketing, leadership, and business skills to find their way out of a wet paper bag but are still trying to create teams.  If sales and lead generation are inconsistent, a team will not solve those problems.  If you don’t have a powerful administrative assistant, hiring a bunch of inexperienced buyer’s agents won’t solve the revenue problem.  The real truth is it will make the revenue problem worse.  The buyer’s agents will divert your attention from the revenue generating activities that you must do.  You will end up helping the buyer’s agents manage and shepherd their transactions to closing.  You will gain a portion of their production but will lose most of yours to do it.  That certainly isn’t the pathway to becoming a Champion Team.

The birth of real estate teams really began in the early 90’s.  Agents looked to leverage themselves through other people who could help them serve their clients better.  By removing some of the more repetitious activities of the business that generated little new revenue, the administrative assistant was born.  A few years later, successful agents were beginning to expand or leverage themselves by hiring sales assistants on the buyer side of the transaction.  These successful lead agents would have buyer’s agents (or buyer’s specialists) to handle the buyer side of the business, which is more labor intensive.

I hired my first administrative assistant in 1991.  I had no idea what I was doing, and neither did she.  In those early days, there wasn’t a blueprint to follow.  Most everyone, including me, learned the hardest way – through trial and error.  I messed up a lot but eventually figured it out.  I created a mountain of success on top of piles of failure.  Fortunately, you won’t have to learn that way.  You can be the beneficiary of my experience to vastly lower your mistakes.  Before you dive into birthing your new team, I really believe you have to answer some key questions about yourself and your business.

1. Am I really prepared to lead people?
2. Do I have enough leads to support a team?
3. What size of team do I see five years from now?
4. What sales volume do I expect in five years?
5. Am I willing to increase my prospecting now?

The pros of a team

The positives are easy to spot for most agents who are considering expanding their business through a team.  It’s easy to put on the rose colored glasses to evaluate the possibility of establishing a team. 

The positives are certainly that you will have more people working to service your clients and prospects . . . even if you are just adding an administrative assistant.  Your level of service with a well trained, professional administrative assistant is higher than a singular agent can provide.  All of the administrative functions such as feedback from agent showings, sending copies of advertisements to sellers, and creating marketing flyers and brochures can be done quicker, better, and more efficiently through an assistant than by a single agent.

Certainly, you will also be able to achieve greater balance between your business and family time by leveraging yourself through a team.  Being able to have weekends off for your family is a large benefit in my view.  I truly believe my effectiveness as a salesperson and business owner was enhanced because I didn’t work Friday, Saturday, or Sunday – as most agents did.  It allowed me to be “on vacation” each weekend to enjoy the fruits of my labor with my wife, Joan.  It would be even more important for me today with children to raise and enjoy.

As the lead agent, you will have a larger amount of time to invest in Direct Income Producing Activities (DIPA).  That’s where most lead agents who are building teams fall off the path to success.  They fail to increase their DIPA time to increase their revenue.

With a team, you gain the ability to delegate what I view as the worst segment of real estate sales, which is dealing with the emotional roller coaster ride that clients often take you on.  The roller coaster of emotion can last through the entire listing process and includes hand holding, extra service, and the high expectations of many clients.  These clients are often on the razor’s edge of emotion.  We need to service them well, but often, their worst fears and problems can set even the most seasoned, experienced agent into an activity funk.  When you achieve a sale, you can often start back up the roller coaster again.  Having a skilled team can protect you from these emotional swings, peaks, and valleys.  A great team or great assistant can help protect you from a client’s challenges that could wipe you out and keep you from revenue producing activities for a few days.

One trait of a Champion Lead Agent is their ability to avoid being taken off the track toward their goals.  The arrows of running a service-based business don’t cause them to go down for the rest of the week or day.  The mark of a Champion is someone who, when they go off track, doesn’t allow that time of frustration or lack of focus and intensity to be more than a few minutes, rather than hours, days, or weeks.

The biggest con of a team is the inevitable trial and error that change creates.  Even with a complete blueprint to success, errors will occur.  Change is a constant.

There are certainly cons that are created through hiring more people.  The management, motivation, and coaching of staff is a blessing and a curse.  There is nothing more gratifying in life than assisting and guiding people in growth.  There is nothing more frustrating in life than assisting and guiding people in growth.  The management challenges grow exponentially with each person you add to the team.  Your skills as the leader, coach, and motivator need to grow, as well.

If you'd like more information on how you can build your own real estate team, get your free copy of "The Champion Real Estate Team Guide"... here.

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