In This Issue...

• Success of a Champion
• Three Characteristics of Top Sales Producers
• Turning Concessions Into Victories
• Increasing Sales Production Through Quality of the Prospect

Success of a Champion

I watched an interesting interview with Tiger Woods a while ago 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 is 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 and achieving 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.

Focus on success today,

Dirk Zeller
CEO
Real Estate Champions, Inc

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

Three Characteristics of Top Sales Producers

Being a successful producer in any aspect of life is more than having high production.  Production or money or wealth is only one measuring stick.  There are many other measures in life: family life, relationships, spouse, children, physical health, spiritual well being, mental state.  One who is fulfilled in these ways, and is also a financial success, has great abundance.  I know a lot of people who trade it all for money.  Is that really the measure of success?  I am far more impressed with people who craft a fabulous lifestyle and are also financially successful.  These people share three common traits.

First, they are the explorers.  They explore everything and question everybody who could help them to reach the next level.  The next level is not always a financial level.  It could be a better relationship with a spouse, a higher level of physical fitness, or deeper spiritual convictions.  The truth is there are many things more attractive at the next level than money.  These things also carry more meaning than money.  The ultimate accomplishment is to be an explorer who explores for the joy that growth and creation bring, not just for the cash. 

Jim Rohn had a wonderful saying:  “It’s not the money that makes the millionaire, it’s what that person had to become.”  That millionaire could lose the money tomorrow.  The money carries little importance in the long run.  What matters is how a person had to change to become the person who had the value of a millionaire.

The opposite of an explorer is a cynic.  The cynic looks for reasons why it will not work, for ways to maintain the status quo and continue to do nothing.  The explorer is seeking new information and ideas that will lead to the next level.

Second, the successful producers are investors.  Successful producers invest in their most important asset:  themselves.  Just as finding the best real estate deal has no value if you don’t buy it, realizing your true value requires that you invest in yourself.  You need to work continually to find the best path to achievement, and then put in what it takes in order to start down that path.  Investors buy the best deal, the best book, and the best tape series.  They are the people who are constantly reading, who are listening to audiotapes in their cars.  They look for others who have been where they want to go, or who are going in their direction but are farther down the path.  They stop and ask for directions when they get lost in life.

The opposite of an investor is an excuse maker.  Excuse makers are always looking back and covering their tracks.  Their vocabularies are littered with “if only” and “but”.  Being successful is far more rewarding than achieving mediocrity while having a good excuse.  We all have the choice to have what we want in life, being all that God created us to be, or to spend our lives coming up with excuses for having fallen short.  The choice is up to you.

Third, the most successful people are implementers.  Exploring and investing do not produce success without implementation. Implementation draws the bold line between massive success and failure.  We all have found great ideas and done nothing with them.  We have all implemented a few small changes and seen staggering results.  Resolve today to implement one idea that you have been thinking about, researching and evaluating.  Do it now.  The implementer is the only one who achieves massive success.  How many ideas or thoughts have you had in your real estate sales career that would have been windfalls if you had just disciplined yourself to implement them?

If you're tired of bouncing through your Real Estate Career with Yo-Yo Production Numbers and finally want to take control of your own Real Estate Success, it’s time that you check out:

The REALTOR®'s Ultimate
Business Planning Kit™

I am really excited about this brand-new program for two reasons...

#1) Most agents (less than 5% of the several thousand I’ve met) never construct a firm business plan to execute in their business. That’s right! A majority of agents only have a few loosely held goals, wants, or even just dreams of what they hope to do with their business.

#2) The second (and my favorite reason) is that I've teamed up on this program with one of the best minds in real estate. This man (who I'll reveal to you in the program) is truly one of the best real estate agents and business owners in the world!

When he and I met about eight years ago... Click Here.

The 'REALTOR® Ultimate Business Planning Kit™' Series will teach you how to:
	• How you can build your Real Estate Business into an asset that can be sold in the future • How to play the odds in your favor like a casino - you too can become the house •Why spinning the lead generation odds will lead to better income, results, and time off with your family • How to determine & then double your hourly rate which in turn will reduce the number of hours you have to work to make the same amount of money • The #1 way to change the odds of success in your Real Estate Business • Why most agents suffer from “lead bulimia” • 3 Keys to overcoming the hurdles that litter the small, narrow, rocky pathway to super success • 4 Rules of Business Expansion and how to apply them to your business • The largest opportunity in Real Estate today that 87% of Agents completely missed last year • How one simple strategy increased my client’s market share by over 49% in the toughest real estate market in 10 years. • How you can transform your thinking, actions, execution and planning to the level of a successful business person • Three steps to easing the rapid process of real estate market change • The right way to plan your own financial independence
You'll receive:
	• 6 CDs - Audio Training (7+ Hours) • 1 CD-ROM Workbook

Find Out How To Grow 313% &
Reduce Costs Per Transaction By 40% Now

Turning Concessions Into Victories

Buyer offers are usually accompanied by home inspection conditions that require the seller to make concessions before the deal is closed. Usually these concessions take the form of repairs that the seller needs to make before the buyer takes possession. The presentation of repair concessions is one of the toughest steps in the negotiation process. Buyers often use the home inspection step to wring a bit more value out of their offer. Sellers, who feel they already gave at the office when they accepted the price offer, aren’t in the mood to give more.

No matter whether you’re representing the buyers or sellers, bring the focus down to the value of the requests. By itemizing the concessions and assigning value in terms of dollars, hassle factor, and time invested, you can maneuver a transaction to the end.

Follow these steps:

• If there are ten items on the list, select the six or seven easiest, least expensive issues to act upon. By dealing with more than half the requested items, you demonstrate your clients’ goodwill effort to meet the other party more than halfway.

• Call the other agent and say, “I doubt that I can be persuasive enough to get the seller to handle all ten requests. If your client had to have a few of these concessions to keep the deal together, which ones would they be?” This strategy enables you to know which requests represent potential deal-killers.

• Explain to the other agent that while you can’t guarantee you will get your seller to agree, you will see what you can do.

• Focus the sellers on what they are gaining out of the deal.  If they’re pocketing a huge equity increase, focus them on that fact. Urge them not to let $1,500 worth of repairs stand in the way of $300,000 cash in their pockets. Or, if they are moving to a terrific home in the perfect neighborhood for their family, focus them on that. Use a script like this:

  “Mr. and Mrs. Buyer, we spent days and looked at over 40 homes to find this one that you described as perfect.  Do you really want to start that process over again?”

To turn concessions into victories, focus your clients on what they are gaining rather than on what they are giving up.

Some clients, and some agents for that matter, only feel satisfied if they win and someone else loses.
The best way to handle I win/you lose situations is to avoid them. If you can’t, then deal with them professionally, powerfully, and from a position of control. No matter what, don’t back down. Most I win/you lose clients are perpetually testing the water to see how much they can get away with. I once took on an expired listing for a seller I knew had an I win/you lose personality. I thought I could overcome her tendencies so I took the listing anyway. I got the price right and was confident I could sell and close quickly. What I didn’t know was that I was dealing with what I call a toxic client.

I managed to sell her home to one of my own buyer clients in a reasonable time for full price and free rent back. She got a great deal. Then she called me three days before closing to inform me that she would not close the transaction unless I cut my fee by $4,000.

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 Quality of the Prospect

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!

The quality of the prospect is an area that really separates non-champion performers from Champion Performers.  Our ability to separate the wheat from the chaff will lead to a dramatic increase of our value per hour, gross income, low frustration level, better clients, and more and better referrals.

The natural tendency for most salespeople is to work with leads, rather than prospect for new leads.  Most sales people, in real estate especially, do primarily lead follow-up, rather than prospecting or lead creation.  The problem with that approach is what happens if your leads aren’t any good.  Most agents have a group of bad leads they are trying to convince to be good leads, so they don’t have to prospect.  Let me give you a hint; you can be the greatest salesperson in the world, and you will rarely convince a bad lead to convert to a good lead.  You are far better off investing your time to find better leads.  We hold onto these marginal or bad leads, so we can avoid prospecting.  We know that if we don’t have enough leads, we will be forced to prospect.

It also takes less effort, time, emotion, and frustration to convert and serve high quality leads.  The question is how do we determine whether the prospect we just created is a high quality lead?  I frequently ask agents that question.  I get a variety of answers including asking prospects qualifying questions, evaluating the source of the lead, and many others.  The Champion’s technique is to ask them for a face-to-face appointment.  By asking them for an appointment, you cut through the smoke to see if they are real.  The last place on earth a low-motivation prospect wants to be is in front of a sales person.

If you didn’t have a reasonable level of motivation to purchase a car, what is the last place you would want to be?  Correct, at a car dealership, getting “hot boxed” by a salesperson and their sales manager.  The same is true with a real estate prospect.  The best way to determine quality and motivation of the lead is to ask for an appointment.  What I just described will be the choke point for your buyer’s agents.  Their ability to drive prospects to face-to-face presentations will be the biggest determining factor of their success.  The buyer’s agents who do that will sell three to four homes a month or more.  The ones who are ineffective will sell one or two homes a month. There will be an increase of 100% in sales when using the same quality of leads.

There are many prospects whose sales resistance goes up in direct proportion to the length of your litany of pre-qualifying questions goes up.  Questions, even well scripted and directed ones, can lead to sales resistance problems.  I am not saying don’t ask questions; we need to use them to keep the discussion flowing, so you can ask for an appointment again in a minute or two.  The most efficient way to determine the viability of the prospect is their willingness to meet with you.

There is an age-old rule that governs success and people.  This rule was created in 1895 by a man in Italy named Wilfred Pareto.  He observed, at that time, that most people had little influence, power, or money in the marketplace.  He called this group of people the “trivial many”.  He decided that these people made up about 80% of the population.  He then theorized that the remaining 20% had all of the influence, power, and capital of society.  He called them the “vital few”.  He created the 80/20 Rule that has governed success for more than 100 years.  The 80/20 Rule applies to your prospects, as well.

80% of the prospects you work with will create 20% of your income.  The amount of time, effort, and energy is disproportionately not in your favor.  The odds of becoming a Champion Agent when working with this group are long indeed.  The devastating part of working with this group is that you spend 80% of your time, capital, effort, energy, and emotion to create a 20% return on investment.  The numbers are not in line with a successful business.

A Champion works with the elite 20% of the population that creates an 80% return on investment because they gain an added return or unequal return on their investment.  This elite 20% doesn’t mean that you have to work only with those who would be defined as the upper crust of society.  Although, working with high priced buyers and sellers certainly can have a positive effect on your income.  In evaluating the quality of the prospect, we determine their level of motivation, financial capacity, ease to work with, realistic expectations of service, and what they can purchase.  I have met high priced buyers and sellers who were also high maintenance; I fairly placed them in the 80% category, not the 20% category.  The question you must wrestle with quickly is does this prospect fit into the 80% or the 20%?

You have limited resources to invest in terms of your time, effort, energy, emotions, and dollars spent.  Our objective is to select clients who utilize low levels of resources with high levels of return.  That is what a 20% prospect allows us to do.  The common school of thought in real estate sales is that sales is a volume game; that if we raise the volume of production, we raise the income.  I believe that school of thought is poorly conceived and simplistic thinking for a sales oriented business.  One of my competitors, who is a “magic marketing” guy, has a saying, “You can’t go broke making money.”   He is absolutely wrong.  Many successful companies and real estate agents have gone broke making money.  Gross sales volume increase has merit but not at the expense of cost of sale and net profit.

What we must focus on is the sales margins, not just the sales volume.  Our objective is to enhance or expand the margin between the resources we expend and the return we get.  When working with a team, your expenses are higher.  You might create more sales, but those sales have a higher cost because you have to pay the buyer’s agents to create them.  One way to influence the margins is by selecting better prospects to serve.  We must reduce the resources of our time, effort, energy, emotion, and dollars we invest against the return of money, job satisfaction, and future revenue in the form of referrals and repeat business.  Better prospects create better margins.  Don’t be fooled by the sales volume game.  The margins in business and life are what really count.

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.

Help Your Friends

If you have friends and colleagues who would enjoy the Coaches Corner™ please forward it and invite them to subscribe. We appreciate your help since your recommendation is how we grow.

Real Estate Champions is committed to partner with you to create abundance in your business and life.

REALTOR^® is a Registered Trademark of National Association of Realtors, Inc.

Learn More Here

Teleseminars
• TBA

Get Dirk Zeller’s Award Winning Books and Download Real Estate Champions PDF Ebooks!

Telephone Sales For Dummies® Now In-Stock!
Here First!

by Dirk Zeller

The Champion Real Estate Team Now In-Stock!
Here First!

by Dirk Zeller

The Champion Real Estate Agen

by Dirk Zeller

Success As a Real Estate Agent For Dummies® Dummies Now In-Stock!
Here First!

by Dirk Zeller

Your 1st Year in Real Estate: Making the Transition from Total Novice to Successful Professional

by Dirk Zeller

• Prospecting?

• Lead Generation?

• Listing Presentations?

• Scripts & Dialogues?

• Objection Handling?

• Converting?