In This Issue...

• Success of a Champion
• Avoiding Time-Blocking Mistakes
• Advancing or Accepting a Buyer's Low Offer
• Increasing Sales Production Through Method of Contacts

Success of a Champion

Life gives you many opportunities to ponder; to evaluate your progress and see the results of your labor.
           
I was recently reflecting on the question, “What is the one characteristic that makes someone successful?”   It is in these moments that you struggle to boil all of your knowledge down into one distilled thought; to remove all the dross of your thoughts to one true nugget of incredible value to all who come in contact with it.  My mind zeroed in on the concept of how our effort dictates our reward in life . . . our effort being our work or what we do.  In life, we create our reward, whether it is financial or relational, by what we do.  It’s not based on intent or what we plan to do but, ultimately, what we actually do.

While pondering, I realized that we do many things, and some of those things have more value than others.  We can often select the wrong thing to do and complete, thereby creating a lot of effort but very little result.  Ultimately, results are the name of the game.  We can easily get faked out with regard to what has the most value.  The key characteristic of successful people is the skill and ability to focus intensely on the most important task and do it to completion with excellence before moving on to the next task.  If you work at mastering this one skill, or ability, it will transform your life.  This skill will also transform your relationships in your life.  Your business will explode to new heights.  There will be no limits to the exceptional life that you can create.

There is an ancient saying, “Don’t put all of your eggs into one basket.”  My mother would use that old axiom quite a bit when I was growing up.  She would also say to me, “You must keep your options open.”  Today, I realize that these sayings are dated and inappropriate to one who seeks success.  You must put your focus and effort into the “one basket.”   You must zero in on the one task (or most important task) that must be done right now.  Single-mindedly doing what will have the biggest impact and taking it to completion is essential to success.  What is the one basket that you need to work on right now?  What is the one thing that will create the biggest impact on your business?  Only when it is done can you look for another “basket” to work on.

Too often, we have 10-15 baskets open with our hands, efforts, and focus going into all of them at once.  We can often move them along, but we never get them done or completed and then moved off our agenda.  The skill to select the most important task right now and take it to completion is the difference between massive success and failure.

So, I ask again, what is your one basket right now?  What is the one task or activity that you need laser-minded focus on to complete?  What must be done and completed today?  What can’t wait and will bring you the biggest return?  Set some time aside to do it now.  Then, before you leave today, select the one thing to focus on for tomorrow.  Prepare your day for tomorrow before you leave today.  Create the order of how tomorrow will unfold in the calmness of today.  Select the one thing you will focus on right now.  Then, resolve to not quit until it’s done!

Focus on success today,

Dirk Zeller
CEO
Real Estate Champions, Inc

P.S. This week we'll begin highlighting case studies of successful Agents who are succeeding in today's marketplace this week. I hope that they serve to encourage and inspire you to press on... click here to see this week's case study now!

Avoiding Time-Blocking Mistakes

Sales professionals in the top 10% of their industries share a common trait: They control, use, and invest their time more wisely and effectively than their lower-performing associates. Among sales professionals, time usage determines income.

The most significant challenge for most sales professionals is time control. Through years of study and coaching sales professionals, I’ve compiled the following list of challenges that most sales people experience when trying to master their time-block schedule.

Mistake #1: Making yourself too available. The biggest error that sales people make is getting sucked into the interruption game. You need times in your schedule that are free of interruptions, during which you bar access to all but those to whom you grant exceptions. Follow this advice:

• Use an effective gatekeeper to screen your calls, redirecting all minor issues, problems, challenges, and interruptions that can be handled by an assistant or some other person.

• Limit the number of people who have unfiltered access to you. Create a short list of the important few people who can interrupt your schedule at any time of the day, and don’t let anyone else in during time blocked for interruption-free activities. My short list includes my wife, my father, my attorney, and a few key associates. Period. As you make your own list, include only those who are extremely important to your personal life. Very few clients find their way onto the short lists of truly successful people.

Mistake #2: Choosing the wrong office location and set-up. The nature of your physical office has a dramatic effect on your time management and productivity. Give serious consideration to the following two issues:

• See that the size of your work environment matches the size of your practice. If you don’t have enough square footage for yourself and your staff, your production will be stunted.

  I had a coaching client a few years back who worked out of 150 square feet of office space with three associates. Amazingly, even as they were tripping over each other they managed to do 150 transactions a year.

  But when they moved into a new 500 square-foot office, they watched their production soar. Each team member could control time better, limit interruptions, access files, hold meetings. The expanded space allowed for an increase in discipline, talent, skill, and production.

  Don’t let your physical space limit your growth opportunities. If you are crowded by your staff, you’re in the wrong physical location.

• Your personal office must be private. There are too many focused activities in a day for a top producing agent to be in the bullpen of activity. If you’re surrounded by the buzz of the staff, inbound phone calls, problems, and challenges, it’s too easy to be tempted to jump in and help, tackling the issues of servicing at the expense of new business creation. The only way to control your planning and prospecting environment is to locate your practice in a private office away from distractions, other agents and staff.

Mistake #3: Failing to operate on an appointment-only basis. Too many Agents are willing to meet at all hours of the day and night and on a moment’s notice. By time blocking, you can create appointment slots and drive prospects into those slots, just as your doctor, dentist or attorney does.

• Studies show that 80% of all prospects are willing to fit into the schedules of their professional advisors. But when they aren’t alerted to a schedule, they take control on their own, dictating the appointment time and leaving an agent like you juggling your schedule to adapt to their needs. Realtors accept this knee-jerk scheduling approach as a necessary aspect of a “service oriented” business. As if total availability equals service.

• Operate as a professional on an appointment-only basis, with all appointments scheduled during time-blocked periods when you know you will be available, focused and uninterrupted by any issue other than the one your client is sharing.

Mistake #4: Bowing to distractions. Real estate sales is among the most interrupted and distracted professions on the face of the planet. Realtors are distracted by the constant jangle of desk phones, home phones, and cell phones.

If the phone isn’t ringing, you have the distraction of e-mail, usually interrupting you with some unsolicited miracle offer or, less often, with a new lead opportunity. Here’s a tip: Don’t derail your day just because your computer tells you that you’ve got mail. The conversion ratio of Internet leads is less than 1%. If you’re engaged in productive activities, don’t stop what you’re doing for a 1% opportunity. 

Control distractions following this advice:

• Block time in your day for the distractions you know you will encounter. If you want to socialize with other agents, plan a set time to do that. Just remember to keep it short and to limit the coffee klatch to the time you allocated for it.

• Create a list of no more than five people that are granted instant access during your workday. Have your assistant memorize the names. If you don’t have an assistant then work with your receptionist so that only those few people are granted unfiltered access.

If you'd like more help on how to master Time-Blocking, check out my book "The Champion Real Estate Agent™"... here.

Advancing or Accepting a Buyer's Low Offer

When representing sellers, I always requested that offers be faxed rather than  the buyers agent personally presenting the offer to my clients. I was one of the first agents in the country to take this approach nearly 15 years ago. Today it is commonplace. It allows the agent and the sellers time to consider the offer before responding to it.

When representing buyers, I preferred to present the offer personally. I wanted to deliver and clearly express my buyers’ intentions rather than have them relayed through the seller’s agent. By presenting personally, I could gauge the response of the sellers by watching facial expressions. I could express my view of the property value. Also, I could share information about the prospective buyers in an effort to build the human connection that so often sways the sellers’ acceptance decision.

When you extend an offer that is under the asking price, be prepared to present offsetting benefits in an effort to make the offer attractive and valuable to the sellers. Alternate redeeming qualities include: 

• Solid earnest money
• Buyers with impeccable credit
• Buyers with good, solid employment history
• Buyers with ample funds and a low loan-to-value ratio
• Buyers with the flexibility to close quickly or to wait as long as 90 days

When presenting the offer:

• Discuss the overall offer before revealing the price. First work through and find common ground on the other stipulations in the offer. Then work on the price after you have agreed to or adjusted the other items that aren’t related to price.

• When discussing price, identify the difference between the asking and offered prices and focus the discussion only on that number.  Ask the sellers, “If the buyers had come in here with cash and closing was in a couple of weeks, would the offer have been acceptable?” Take that number and subtract it from the asking price.  Don’t deal with the big numbers like a $350,000 asking price and a $335,000 offer.  Break it down to a comparison between the $345,000 they would take now if a buyer walked in with cash and the $335,000 offer.  The real difference is $10,000.  Talk and plan in terms of a $10,000 difference between the seller and buyer.

• Break the cost of the difference down to a daily rate. The effect of this technique is to reduce the difference to a ridiculously small amount. Say the difference is $10,000. Ask the sellers to consider the actual impact of the difference. The majority of sellers end up as buyers, so what you’re really asking them to consider is the cost of borrowing $10,000 more for their next house. In fact, the cost of that $10,000 is about $750 a year or $62.50 a month or $2.08 a day. With this information in hand, you can ask: Is it worth $2.08 a day to know that your home is sold and that you have the freedom to move into your next home? This same technique works well to raise the offer on the buyer’s side, or even to reach a mid-point agreement. Maybe each party can pay $1.04 a day to create a win/win outcome for the buyer and seller.

• Explain how the buyers arrived at their offer price. Show current comps to validate their thinking. The property may have been listed months ago and in the meantime the market environment may have changed considerably. Presenting a current market analysis can help justify and win acceptance of the offer.

• If appropriate, explain that the buyers have another home in mind, saying something like, “They wanted to try to work with you first.”

• If the offer is the highest one the buyers can make, then express that fact, saying something like, “The buyers would really love the home, but they understand if there is not an opportunity for a win for everyone.” This kind of statement defuses emotions before they arise.

Receiving a buyer’s low offer

If you did your job way back at the conclusion of the listing presentation your sellers will be well aware of the likelihood of a low offer. When one comes in, here’s what to do:

• Call the buyers’ agent to learn more about the buyers Ask whether they have the funds to close, whether they’ve selected a lending institution, and where they are in regards to securing a loan. Learn whether they’re just starting and haven’t even met with a lender yet, or whether they have loan approval and are just working to find the right house.

• If the buyers have already initiated the loan process ask the agent what loan amount the buyers have been approved for.

• You may learn that the buyers can obtain a loan higher than the amount shown on their offer contract. This alerts you to the fact that they are qualified to pay more but are choosing not to. Your job then is to demonstrate that the home has a higher value than the price offered.

• If you learn that the buyers have been approved for exactly the loan amount listed on the contract, ask, “Is this the maximum they qualify for?” If they qualify for more, you want to know that fact.

• If the agent can’t provide the loan answers you need, present the same questions to the mortgage originators the buyers are working with. An upcoming section in this chapter gives advice for working with lending and other partners in the transaction.

If you'd like a complete step-by-step Buyer Conversion System check out "Convert & Commit the Buyer Every Time!™" go here.

Increasing Sales Production Through Method of Contacts

When you break a real estate agents business down, there are only four ways to increase production.  There are four proven avenues toward increased gross revenue.  The four ways to increase production are:

• Number of contacts
• Method of contacts
• Quality of the prospect
• Quality of the presentation

When you begin working on any one of these, you have taken the step to becoming a Champion Agent.  Once you have raised your level of the performance in each of these areas, you can call yourself a Champion!

How we choose to make contact with people will determine our success level or the outcome.  Having been in the real estate business for the better part of sixteen years, I can say that, in the last eight years, we have shifted away from the face-to-face, belly-to-belly, phone-to-phone business that I started in.  I would contend that we are less personal today in business than ever before.

We rely more on communication via e-mail and mail than ever before.   We are relying on the Internet to create leads, convert prospects, and sell homes.  I believe the Internet and e-mail are wonderful tools.  They create an ease of communication in marketing.  They fall far short, however, of the standard for making sales.  If we believe that we are going to drip our way to high volume sales and high net profit, then our thinking is pure folly.  The personal service, counsel, expertise, and especially sales will never be removed from the business.

In the late ‘90s, we had a large volume of Internet prognosticators who cast a future vision of real estate sales via the Internet.  Through websites, pay-per-click ads, organic traffic, and virtual tours, we were all going to sell homes easily.  They would come to these magical web sites, watch the virtual tours of the homes, and click the “buy it” button at the bottom of the page.  We would have just then sold a home!  What all the Internet prognosticators missed was the fact that people would never make such a large personal and financial decision for their family through a few digital pictures and a click.  The public still wants the personal service, expert counsel, market knowledge, and market interpretation of trends that a Champion Agent provides.

The problem is we bought into some of the malarkey that was being presented to us as an industry.  We have become less personal, less intimate with our clients and prospects since that time.

When you look at the method coupled with the number of contacts, the pathway to success seems obvious.  The number of contacts you need to make decreases as the method you select becomes more warm and personal.  You would need better than 1,000 mail pieces to create a few leads.  In direct mail, companies are only looking for a couple of percentage points of return.  When using the telephone, you drop down in the low hundreds level for cold calling.  I am not an advocate of cold calling; the odds are still too long to achieve a satisfactory result.  (I define cold calling as using a criss cross dictionary or other list that is untargeted to call people randomly.)  At best, you might work geographically to improve your odds.

When the method changes to target groups, the ratios improve to around fifty contacts to produce a few leads.  Calling absentee owners, a geographic area you mail to, school directory list, orphaned past clients of other agents who have left your company, or any group that you can create where you can combine a target for mail and phone works.  The results improve when you combine the mail and phone and maintain contact over a period of time.  This is not a one and done strategy.  You want to select targets you can work with profitably over the long run.

The last category is warm prospects.  When you work to create revenue through this method of contact, you increase your odds to twenty-five contacts for a few leads.  The contact points are your current clients, past clients, and sphere of influence people in your database.  Most agents merely mail these people something periodically but never call them.  When method of contact is exclusively mail, the results move back up to the thousands level when it should be in the teens.  I would also place expireds and FSBOs in this twenty-five or less category.  Because of their pre-demonstrated motivation, you are at least making contact with a more motivated individual, so your odds of lead generation and lead conversion to appointments is markedly better.

If you'd like more information on how you can dominate how you make contacts by phone, check out my new book (now in stock) "Telephone Sales for Dummies®"... here.

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