In This Issue...

• Words from the President
• Why Host an Open House? - Prospecting!
• Seven Secrets of Prospecting - For Long-Term Success!
• What Makes a Champion Team - Really?

Words from the President

I watched an interesting interview with Tiger Woods one time where he was fielding questions from the audience. One person asked Tiger what he thought about in his routine when he was setting up a shot. Tiger paused, you could see the gears turning and he responded quite simply. Tiger said that his process was not at all elaborate, like most people. He said he really only thinks about two things. First, he thinks about exactly where he wants the ball to go and fixates that clearly in his mind. Then, once he has the target clearly identified and locked in, he thinks about how he is going to get the ball there.

The simplicity of those thoughts are the brilliant element to them. When he said those words, I leapt out of my chair to write them down. The question is, do we have the clarity of thought on the target that we are aiming for right now? Do you know, absolutely, at every moment of everyday what the target is for you at that moment?

We must realize that there are not multiple targets, merely one. You can only hold one target clearly in your mind at a time. You can't have five different targets at once, you can only have one. What is the target for this very moment? That is a question that we should be asking ourselves hundreds of times during the course of our day.

Once we know the target, we can move onto the second part of Tiger's strategy. How am I going to get to my target? Which begs the question, what do I need to do to get there? We need to clearly know the actions that must happen to reach our target. We have to be able to make the direct connection between the activity we must do at this moment to achieve the results we want.

For too many of us we have not made the commitment to the activities we must do daily to achieve success. We have to eliminate the activities that are not part of how we are going to get there. I truly believe you have the ability and the power to eliminate these out of your life. You can get rid of the non-productive activities. We often create elaborate creative avoidance activities that we engage in that stop us from hitting the target. We need to keep this process simple. Success is not complicated it is a simple process that is available to all.

Make the commitment today, to set the target and focus on how you are getting there. You too will become a Champion performer like Tiger.

To your achievement of success in life,

Dirk Zeller
CEO
Real Estate Champions, Inc

P.S. The three areas that we'll focus our time on today are Why Host an Open House, Seven Secrets of Prospecting, and What Makes a Champion Team. Any of these articles could help you change your life in 2007 if you'll read, absorb, and use the information. I challenge you to take a few minutes of your time to read this material. If you don't have time now, print them out and take them with you to read between appointments.

"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

Why Host an Open House? - Prospecting!

Open houses are not the best vehicles for selling homes. So why do real estate agents bother with them? For the following reason: Open houses are a great means for prospecting.

An open house provides a real estate agent with a neighborhood store front from which to do business for a day. Each time you host an open house, you set up shop in a client’s home and open the doors to the opportunity to meet prospects, establish relationships, and expand your real estate clientele.

If your real estate business could benefit from an influx of buyer or seller prospects, start staging more open houses. You can hardly find a more effective way to generate leads face-to-face. And, as a bonus, occasionally your efforts will net a sale. Not a bad bonus for a solid prospecting tool.

Think of the open house as the REALTOR®’s equivalent to the retailer’s “loss leader”. It attracts people into your business. In the same way that a store manager offers milk at a discounted price in order to draw shoppers into the store, a real estate agent invests time and money in an open house in order to build traffic, attract prospects, and cultivate sales of other products.

When I was selling real estate, I wasn’t a big fan of open houses. I wanted to keep Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays free, so I could take a scenic three-hour drive and enjoy the weekend with my family in our vacation home. Obviously, I couldn’t have it both ways, so I opted out of open houses. But that was then, and this is now, and a lot has happened to change the way real estate agents work. The impact of the Internet, the time-draining effects of dual-income families, and the record levels of homes for sale have combined to put an all-new emphasis on the importance of open houses and why you should host them. They rarely lead directly to sales, but they present many other benefits.

The explosion of online real estate marketing and shopping activity has led to a dramatic drop in the number of phone-to-phone and face-to-face meetings between real estate agents and their prospects. The open house provides a proven way to gain clear and easy real-time access to prospects that are ready to buy or sell homes.

In addition to the many home shoppers who drop in, an open house provides the opportunity to meet neighbors and friends of the home’s owners – all of whom may end up in the real estate buyer or seller market in the future. Take time to learn the needs, wants, time frame, and motivation behind each person’s home-shopping experience. Form a connection. It’s harder for someone to reject you as “just a salesperson” once they’ve met and visited with you.

The ever-growing number of dual-income families has put leisure time at an absolute premium. Getting a prospect into your office is a feat. Yet motivated buyers frequently attend open houses – on their own, as couples, or as families. When they do, you have the advantage of watching them react to a home. You can learn a lot by observing them in the house, noting the features that interest them, overhearing their concerns, and visually tracking their reactions. You also have the chance to visit with them, which is the beginning of turning a casual open house visit into a lasting business relationship.

Over recent years, much of the U.S. has experienced a record low inventory of homes for sale. As a result, consumers are programmed to believe that finding a good home for sale is a tough task and that, when a good home comes on the market, it won’t last long.

For that reason, more and more prospects have taken their home searches into their own hands in the following ways:

• They actively search out listings online.
• They aggressively shop the swelled ranks of homes for sale by owner, known as FSBOs.
• They spend their weekends doing home shopping “leg work”.
• They attend open houses in droves.

When do-it-yourself home shoppers drop into your open house, you’re safe to bet on two things:

• They’re serious about finding a home for sale
• An agent doesn’t represent them

In other words, they’re great buyer prospects.

One of the big challenges facing real estate agents in today’s wired world is learning the identities of their prospective clients. Home shoppers cruise and click their way around hundreds of real estate websites, requesting information via e-mail from scores of agents without ever revealing more than an e-mail address.

As an agent, you can you hit “reply” and respond with an e-mail response that provides the requested information, but it hardly allows you the chance to provide your professional counsel and to establish a personal relationship.

For one thing, it’s almost impossible to distinguish yourself from other agents via e-mail. For another, while e-mail allows you to communicate promptly, it does not let you determine the desire, need, ability, and buying authority of the prospect or to determine the prospect’s motivation and time frame or to customize your advice to the prospect’s unique situation.

If you'd like step-by-step strategies & tactics for Buyer Conversion (including over 45 Scripts & Dialouges) check out my training program "Convert & Commit the Buyer Every Time!™"... check it out here For help with Sellers and setting their expectations see "How to Create & Deliver a Dynamic Listing Presentation!™"... check it out here.

If you're tired of fighting for every listing and would rather have a system that takes you completely through the entire Listing Process, so that you walk out with the listing contract signed, you've got to check out...

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Get the Listing Every Time with these Step-By-Step Instructions, Forms, Handouts, and Scripts.

The difference between getting the listing and walking out with "We'll think it over and get back to you" is all in your listing presentation. If you walk in with Dirk’s time-tested & proven (by 1000's of Agents) listing presentation, you’ll walk out with the listing.

What would your life be like if you had all the winning scripts and dialogues to help you nail the listing presentation every time? Even better than that, what if you had the right seller handouts and scripts to help you get the listing presentation appointment?

The 'How to Create and Deliver a Dynamic Listing Presentation™' Series will teach you how to:
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I Want to Learn How to Get The Listing on the First Appointment Every Time!

Seven Secrets of Prospecting - For Long-Term Success!

For many salespeople, prospecting is the most difficult activity they do.  They dread the thought of picking up the phone to make a living.  Long-term success in sales is built through solid prospecting.  In order to be successful and profitable, sales people need to apply these seven secrets of prospecting daily.

1. It gets easier after the first call.  The first call is always the most difficult.  I prospected solidly for over eight years in real estate.  I never got over the difficulty of making the first call.  Getting yourself to make the first call is the highest hurdle.  The only solution is to just do it.  After you make the first call, you realize it was not as difficult as you had imagined.  The person on the other end of the line was not as difficult as your mind had created them to be.  In many cases, calling begins to get fun after a few calls.  The problem is most people just never break through the initial barrier.
   
   
2. Establish a routine.  To be successful, you should have a scheduled time for prospecting daily when that is the only activity that is being done.  Treat prospecting as an appointment.  Do not allow anything to interfere with it.  We often allow distractions to creep into our prospecting time.  The salesperson who has a set daily routine of making prospecting calls at a specific time and adheres to his schedule without distraction is guaranteed to succeed.  This person will not only succeed, but he will be a Champion Agent . . . the best of the best.
   
   
3. Big “Mo”.  At first, prospecting will be very difficult.  Your skills will not be developed to the level of an expert.  Once you start the process, do not stop.  Momentum is critical to prospecting.  Once you get the process going, your skills will improve to generate more leads and to set more appointments.  Do not break your momentum.

   Another Agent in the real estate office where I worked once issued me a challenge.  He wanted to see who could list more homes in a month.  I knew that I would win, since I had momentum, and he did not.  He had not been consistently prospecting, so he had no momentum.  I must say that he did have the best month he had ever had.  But that was because he was consistently prospecting and had been following-up on the leads he was generating.  At the end of the month, my team had taken eighteen listings, and he took six.  Do not bet against Big “Mo”.

4. Exploding the best time to prospect myth.  The best time to make prospecting calls is when you have the most energy and when you actually will call.  There have been tremendous arguments over this point by Agents and trainers.  Set a time to prospect, and call at that time.  Do not worry about things you cannot control, such as someone being home or not.  Focus on your skill level, avoiding distractions, and prospecting.  These factors you can control.  I always prospected early in the morning because that was when I had the most energy.  It also got my day off to a great start, which would carry me through the rest of the day.  I always thought that if I had a good, disciplined day of prospecting I had a good day regardless of the number of leads, number of appointments set, or anything else that happened that day.
   
   
5. Focus on the goal or objective.  Set a specific goal of what you want to happen on each call.  Know what you want that prospect to do.  It is hard to achieve success in prospecting without a clearly defined objective.

   The true objective is to set a qualified appointment with the prospect.  If you are unable to accomplish that objective, the next best objective is to get an agreed upon action by the prospect within a specific time frame.  For example, the prospect is going to be interviewing Agents next week.  You and the prospect agree to speak on Thursday about getting the appointment scheduled for next week.  The last objective is to generate a lead that will buy or sell in the future.  This objective depends on your definition of what a lead is for a buyer or seller.

6. The power of scripts.  Highly successful sales people use scripts.  For effective prospecting, it is crucial to know what to say before you start to prospect.  Scripts provide a guide and logical sequence of questions to follow.  They allow you to focus on the response of the prospect, rather than fumbling around to find the words.

   The only way to move to the highest form of communication is to know what you are going to say to the prospect.  The words you say only account for 7% of the communication.  If you know the words, you can begin to focus on your tonality and body language.  Tonality accounts for 38% of all communication, and body language accounts for 55% of all communication.  If you are focusing and stumbling through 7% of the words, you will be ineffective in prospecting.  We have all heard an unskilled telemarketer stumble through their scripts and dialogues.  Develop, learn, and practice your scripts, so you can effectively communicate and reach your prospect through your tonality and body language.

7. It is a numbers game.  Prospecting is truly a numbers game – for two valid reasons.  The first is the more prospecting you do, the less rejection bothers you.  The best way to deal with rejection is to get as much as you can as soon as you can to reduce its effect on you.  Most people you call are very nice and pleasant.  They may not need your services at this time, which is fine.  Rejection is rarely as bad as you imagine.  The only way to understand this fact is to make more calls.

   The second reason is you can replicate your business via numbers.  Prospecting will allow you to plan your income and results.  If you track your prospecting efforts, you will find you have ratios in your business.  I would make 25 expired listing contacts and get a listing signed.  If I wanted to list a property a day, I needed to make 25 expired contacts daily, which would then create the desired income for my family.  Contacts are defined as a prospecting call that results in talking to one of the decision makers in the household. 

   What is your desired income?  How many prospecting contacts do you need to make to achieve it?  As you get more skilled, the number of contacts needed will decrease.  When I first began prospecting, I needed to contact over 100 people to get a listing.  Start tracking your numbers, so you can play the game.  To play the game well is to know and understand the game.

Michael Jordan was the best player of all time because of his abilities, and because cerebrally, he knows the game better than any other player.  His physical skills were not at his highest levels late in his career, but his mental skills were beyond compare.  Develop your verbal and mental skills. 

If you'd like to learn more prospecting techniques, buy my book "The Champion Real Estate Agent^®"... check it out here.

What Makes a Champion Team - Really?

I have shared many times in print and from the platform my belief that I was blessed at an early age to be filled with the passion, desire, and discipline to become a Champion.  Many people have not had the advantage I did by being surrounded by role models like my parents, teachers, coaches, and a few special people who arrived in my life at the exact moment that I needed the guidance.  Call that happenstance, luck, karma, the breaks, fortuitous, whatever you might believe.  It’s very clear in my belief system that God has graciously smiled on me many times by sending the exact right people at the right time.  I don’t personally view that as luck, but as being blessed.

Few agents achieve the status of being a Champion Agent in real estate.  By that I mean few have reached the place where they have established a well run, balanced business; where they know how to produce a regular stream of leads sufficient to fund their business plans and goals; where they understand the commission ratios of these leads to appointments, appointments to clients created, clients created to contracts, contracts to closings, closings to income, income to net profit, and net profit to personal wealth or financial independence.   A true Champion Agent with a Champion Agent’s practice knows the cost of their business in each major category like advertising, promotion, car expenses, phone expenses, client care, office supplies, assistant costs, and brokerage fees.  These allow the Champion Agent to project, in advance, income and expenses and monitor cash flow in the business.

Once you have personally climbed to the ranks of becoming a Champion Agent, you have the opportunity to build a Champion Team.  If you haven’t ascended to the Champion level as an agent, you won’t be able to build a Champion Team.

Champion Team Rule – You can’t build a Champion Team without first being a Champion Agent!

My definition of a Champion Team is not dramatically different from that of a Champion Agent.  A Champion Team still must know all the sales ratios and business ratios that I shared earlier.  They must have those ratios for each and every sales member on the team.  The difference in the team versus individual definition of a Champion is that revenue, sales, processing, client care, closings, servicing, income, and net profit still happen even when the lead agent is away for a week or a month.  Even in a Champion Team, however, the gross commission revenue will drop while the lead agent is away.  To assume that you can take the most skilled player on the team away and maintain the same level of sales is foolish.

The Chicago Bulls, in all their championship years with Michael Jordan, would have still been a very good team without Michael.  They would have won a lot of games and made the playoffs.  There is no one who would believe that they would have won even one championship, let alone six, without Air Jordan.

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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