In This Issue...

• Words From a Champion
• Four Steps to a Great Listing Presentation Delivery
• Increasing Your Slice of the Market
• Hiring Family to be Part of the Team

Words From a Champion

One of the biggest challenges for agents is to objectively look at their real estate business as a business and to evaluate the investment of resources against the return on the investment. 

The resources for an agent are obvious:  Time, knowledge, and money.  How well are you controlling them to increase the return of commission dollars earned?  Are you building a business that needs all your time and energy to produce the desired results?  The objective as agents should be to create a business that works for us not because of us.  That is the mark of a truly exceptional business.  A business that generates profits and not merely wages is a healthy business indeed. 

The first step to generating profits is to adopt the mindset of a CEO.  A CEO has the skill to step back and evaluate the business objectively.  They see the problem areas and work toward solutions.  A CEO has the ability to work on the business not in the business.   A realtor working “in” the business faces day-to-day challenges.  These challenges include prospecting, taking listings, working on the files, and getting the deals closed.  Most agents spend 100% of their time on these challenges every day.  A successful CEO allocates time to work “in” the business.  They develop strategies to improve efficiency.  They practice the skills to be more effective.  A successful CEO would work to gain knowledge of sales ratios and trends in the marketplace while looking for ways to add value to the customer base.  You are all CEO’s of multimillion-dollar sales companies.  If you don’t think of your business that way, you should.

Here is a question.  As the owner of a multimillion-dollar sales company, would you hire yourself?  Would you hire yourself as the CEO to run the company?  If you would, do you need to be re-trained?  Is there training or skills that are missing?  What are you doing about improving them?  Are you close to being fired?  Should the owner fire you as CEO because of lack of skill?  If you answered yes to the last question, you must act now!!

Resolve to spend at least 30 minutes of “on” time daily working on your business.  Take time in the evening after work to study leadership, sales skills and success.  There is no time to waste.  Start your growth towards CEO today.

Focus on success today,

Dirk Zeller
CEO
Real Estate Champions, Inc

P.S. We've left Case Study #160-07 up of Agent "X", so if you haven't viewed it yet go check it out now. ... click here

Four Steps to a Great Listing Presentation Delivery

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.

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 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!”

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 level 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.

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.

If you'd like a complete step-by-step system on how to not only interview buyers, but to "Convert & Commit the Buyer Every Time!" go here.

Increasing Your Slice of the Market

There is nothing that attracts business more easily than dominant market share. When you have increased your slice of the pie to the point that it dwarfs your competition, the prospects begin to seek you out. 

I coach an agent on the east coast who, in the two towns she dominates, single handedly sells more homes than the number two and number three companies in sales and unit volume.  Last year she listed and sold 66 properties in her market areas, over which time the top competing companies together sold 59.  And the balance just keeps tipping in her favor, because success breeds success and nothing indicates success better than dominant market share.

What is market share?  Market share is the percentage of sales that you control in your marketplace.  Market share can be based on listings taken, listings sold, buyer sales, sales volume, or sales by units.  In any case, your share reflects the portion of total market activity that is represented by you or your company.

To calculate your market share, simply divide your or your company’s production against the overall production of your marketplace.  For example, if 575 homes sold last year in your market area, and if your company sold 215 of those 575, then your company handled 37% of all transactions and controls 37% of the market activity (215 ÷ 575 = .37).

Also, calculate market share in various market segments.  You might find that your overall market share is low but that you have a commanding market share in a certain neighborhood or price category.

Market penetration is another way to describe market share.  If you command large share of your market, you’ve achieved significant market penetration.  If your market share is minimal, your penetration is minimal as well.

A single agent can’t expect to penetrate a broad market overnight, if ever.  For years, I worked the east side of Portland, Oregon – a geographic area that was home to 750,000 people.  Even as productive as I was, with 150 home sales a year, my market share when compared to the size of the marketplace was miniscule.  I barely scratched the market surface, let alone penetrate it.  But within the market niche I’d carved, I was a dominant force.

A niche is a segment of the overall market.  Niche marketers serve a select group of consumers whose interests and needs are distinctly different from the needs of the market in general.  Think of niche marketers as big fish in small ponds.

You can create a market niche by serving consumers in a particular geographic area, consumers seeking a certain property type, a certain type of buyer or seller, a certain income category, the list is goes on and on.  You can create a niche by focusing your efforts and increasing your penetration of FSBOs, expireds, non-owner occupied properties, or small multiplexes. 

The key to gaining penetration in a niche is focus.  You have to decide which smaller section of the marketplace you want to work and quit trying to be all things to all people.  Then, once you identify your niche, you need to create presence, penetration, and dominance, following these steps:

• Make contact with prospects in your niche not just once but repeatedly over a compact period of time.

  Studies show that it takes six impressions for a consumer simply to recognize or retain who you are. By increasing both the number and frequency of contacts with prospects, you can increase your market awareness, which is a first step in achieving market penetration.

• Make personal contact.  For most agents, the preferred method of contact with people located in a geographic segment is mail. They mail and mail and mail their prospects to death.  They send refrigerator magnets, note pads featuring the agent’s name and face, local football, baseball, or basketball game schedules, annual calendars, and more.  Guess what?  That’s not enough to achieve market penetration.

  A few years ago, I started working with a client named Sue who wanted to penetrate a large gated community where the turnover of homes was brisk and the sales prices were high. She’d given herself a tall order because another agent dominated the market and controlled more than a third of all the community’s real estate business.  Luckily, though, the dominant agent had gotten lazy and reverted to easier contact approaches than face-to-face visits.  Sue moved in with well-designed marketing pieces for use in mailing, but also with a well-crafted personal contact strategy.  When all was said and done and her market share goal was met and exceeded, she determined that her success didn’t stem from marketing pieces that were better than the other agent’s pieces.  Her success came from the fact that the people who lived in the gated community saw her frequently.

  Whenever anyone in her firm listed a property in the community, she’d ask and receive permission from the listing agent to hold it open.  Then, prior to the open house, she’d walk around the neighborhood personally inviting the neighbors.  In between open houses, she provided the neighborhood with regular market updates.  And on a constant basis she was personally very visible in the community, spending a few hours each week meeting and greeting her prospective clients.

  When an expired listing came off the market, she showed up at the owners’ front door.  When a FSBO sign appeared in a front yard, she was there, as well.  In fewer than 20 months she went from a single-digit market share to a share of over 30%.  Meanwhile, the once-dominant agent went from 37% to less than 20%.  She had been beaten by the effectiveness of personal contact. 

To become a dominant market force, you need to take market share from someone else. Dominance involves growing your percentage of the overall marketplace until you control a greater share of market business than any competitor. In some markets, which are shared by a great number of competitors, a 10% share might be dominant. In other situations, where fewer competitors exist, you might need 30% or even a higher share in order to be the dominant player.

To gain market share and dominance, first you need to gain recognition, which results almost automatically from simply doing more than you are expected to do:

• Do more personal prospecting.
• Create more useable market and industry information.
• Have more communication with your clients.
• Do more for your community, by sponsoring picnics, baseball or soccer teams, or community events as a few examples.

Then, with the confidence you build through your awareness-development efforts go one step further. Dare to do things that no one else is willing to do.

Sue, my client in the preceding anecdote, was willing to take the risk of rejection by calling on people and meeting then face-to-face.  Her competitor, even though she was the market’s dominant force at the time, was unwilling to subject herself to the potential rejection. Of all the approaches I’ve seen, I believe that establishing more personal contact is the easiest, most cost-effective way to move to a position of dominance in a real estate market.

If you'd like a complete step-by-step system on close seller in listing presentations, check out "How to Deliver a Dynamic Listing Presentation" go here.

Hiring Family to be Part of the Team

This is a very common practice in team building.  It could be a spouse who is joining a successful practice or a growing practice.  More and more, we are seeing second and third generations working together on real estate teams.  The “family business” is a very challenging dynamic in real estate today.  I have seen teams that work wonderfully and others that implode from family squabbling to the point that they lose the business and the family, as well.

Champion Team Rule – Nothing is worth losing your family over!  When in doubt, don’t do it.

Joan, my wife, has worked off and on with me in my business over the last seventeen years of marriage.  The first time was almost disastrous both personally and professionally.  It wasn’t her fault; it was mine.  It was from a lack of maturity on my part that the disaster almost happened.  The short story is I treated her more like an employee than my wife and equal partner.  It’s easy to get in that mindset when you have an established business, and you are trying to integrate family either for a season of growth or permanently.  If we had talked more about how we would work together; if we had taken the time to establish boundaries, both for home and business and standards of performance, we would have been more successful the first time.

Fortunately for me, we caught the disaster before it became permanent.  It also wasn’t damaging enough that, when I really needed her again when we established a new company, Real Estate Champions, in 1998, she was instrumental.  Real Estate Champions would not be the company it is today without her involvement in those early years.  We still use many of the systems she designed years ago.

I can safely say that Joan was never passionate about any of the businesses that we have established together in our seventeen years of marriage.  She was and is passionate about helping me and her family succeed.  The best arrangement for long-term success is to be sure that whoever the family member is, they must be passionate about more than just you or the money.  They need to be passionate about the business of real estate, as well.  I know that I can count on Joan to help anytime or anywhere.  She will be there right by my side in the trenches when I need it most.  When the crisis is over and the problem is solved or the project is completed, she will go back to doing the other valuable things she does and enjoys in life.  Her passion is not real estate, training, education, coaching, speaking, or creating intellectual property.

Champion Team Rule – Long-term success of family hires comes out of passion for the business of real estate.

Generational hiring for a real estate team can often happen because of the money and lifestyle.  The son or daughter can see the money that their parent makes and the lifestyle they have and want that for themselves.  The child will usually see all the good and little of the bad or the work.  They will see, in many cases, the finished product of years of business toil and not the path their parent had to tread to get there.  The child will need to grasp that concept, even if that child is an adult, to avoid problems.

I wanted to be a dentist and take over my father’s dental practice.  It wasn’t that I had a passion for dentistry; I had a passion to replicate a lifestyle that I enjoyed as a child:  the ability to work a four-day workweek; the business to create enough income to fund vacation homes, investments, and early retirement.  That was what I was passionate about, and dentistry was the most logical vehicle I could tangibly see to get there.

We all know it didn’t work out that way.  My passion for dentistry wasn’t great enough to push me to apply myself in college to acquire the grades to be able to gain admission to dental school.  In fact, my passion wasn’t great enough for me to finish college.  My life took another path besides the path of dentistry to achieve a four-day workweek, vacation homes, investments, and early retirement.

Family businesses, in any field, have the chance of being good, bad, or ugly.  I have seen every combination in my years of training and coaching in real estate. 

I have a client in Orlando who has three of her children in her business.  Her son handles all the technology, websites, and computers for her practice.  He does a masterful job.  Her two daughters handle all the administration, marketing, accounting, scheduling, and client care.  One of them is also the office manager and leads the team.  I have another client in Long Island, NY who has her daughter in her practice in administration.  Her daughter is growing in strength as a young woman and really makes strong changes in her business.  The loyalty and trust factor is the glue that holds these teams together in spite of challenges that will arise.  The respect these children have for their parents as leaders of the family and leaders of the business makes it work.

I have another client in Southern California who has the bad and, at times, ugly example.  Her son has been in her practice for a number of years.  He has an entitlement mentality.  His production as a salesperson is marginal.  His wife now works in the business, as well, and the situation has no solution except sending the kids out on their own to find our how the real world works.  My client struggles with that decision because she knows they won’t make it on their own.  It is truly an example of the bad and ugly that can happen.

It’s easy, especially when it’s your children, to flex when you wouldn’t with anyone else.  Even as young as my children are (Wesley is 5 and Annabelle is 20 months), they are starting to learn how to pull the emotional strings with me.  After eighteen years of living with me, they will really know how to do it!

When one of your children, who is a member of your team, continually uses emotional arguments or maneuvers that no other team member would ever be allowed to use, or when the standards of performance are continually relaxed for the children over what you do or would do for another member of the team, you are in too deep.

When having a family team, the boundaries and standards need to be discussed, defined, established in writing, and committed to in writing before joining the team.  You can’t decide as you go with family.  The stakes are just too high.  Any time a promotion, advancement, or job change happens, the process must be started all over again:

1. The boundaries of personal life and business life
2. Work hours, breaks, time in and out
3. Work ethic and standards
4. Business vision of core value, core purpose, and envisioned future
5. Organizational structure
6. Adherence to checklists, systems, and procedures already in place

If you are hiring a family member to a sales position, there are additional standards:

1. Sales expectations in terms of how much and how soon
2. Prospecting expectations daily, weekly, and monthly
3. Sales ratios that should be attained in what time frame: contacts to leads, leads to appointments, appointments to closings
4. Adherence to your approved scripts and dialogues
5. Amount of time committed to role playing and practicing their sales scripts
6. Personal education requirements: reading, listening to CDs, seminars attended, designations achieved

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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