In This Issue...
Words of a Champion
It’s time to take a look at your report card for 2008. We are right at the midway point. How are you doing? Have you taken the number of listings you needed to take? Do you have enough in escrow? Are you doing the daily disciplines that lead to success? This is the perfect time to stop and analyze how you are doing.
Take half a day in the next week to invest in replaying the tape of the first half of the year. Come up with your year-to-date numbers in the following categories:
- Listing appointments
- Listings taken
- Buyer appointments
- Buyer commitments
- Closed listings
- Closed buyers
- Under contract listings
- Under contract buyers
For some, you are right on track. This exercise will encourage you that you are doing the right things. For the people who are behind, you will now see reality. You need to create a Plan B to either catch up or adjust your finish line. Sometimes in life it’s not how we work Plan A. It’s how we implement and focus on Plan B that often makes the real difference.
Make sure to invest the time, know where you are, and how you got there. The more I coach, the more I realize that knowing your business and how it functions is a critical step to mastering your business.
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Take Action or Accept the Results
In all areas of life, taking action is the key to success. Most people who fail to achieve what they want, fail for lack of action. The ability to take action is the skill that ultimately separates the winners from the losers in the game of life. There are a number of truths that I have come across in my business and while coaching clients. These truths should be reviewed and lived by to produce the abundance in life that you desire.
Truth #1: It’s more essential to success to be consistent than to be precise.
The power of consistency is one of the most significant forces in the world. It far outstrips the power of exactness. If you are consistently doing enough things right, you will reap a huge reward. If you are waiting until you have it down to perfection, you are not going to take any action.
In sales, more than any other profession, consistency of your actions pays big dividends, while infrequent action, even when right, pays very little. The daily consistency of prospecting and lead follow-up is the gateway to sales success and high profitability. Again, it’s more essential to success to be consistent than to be precise.
Truth #2: A step toward your goal is a step in the right direction . . . even if it is a misstep.
Too often, we fail to act due to fear of failure. We can become paralyzed by the need to be right or correct in all our actions. My friend, Jim Rohn, says that to achieve your goal you need “measurable progress in reasonable time.” That doesn’t mean all the progress we make will be going in the right direction every time.
Earl Nightingale said, “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal.” To achieve a worthy goal, we have to progress toward it through the trials. We must proceed with consistent action. It also says there are times when we will be heading in the wrong direction and have to adjust our course of action.
In the end, success is a poor teacher. The real teacher in life is adversity and short-term failure. You will always learn more from your defeats than your victories. In sales, you will learn more from the sale lost than the sale made. Most salespeople think that when they make the sale, they did everything right. What happens if that assumption is not true? What if you did just enough right to beat out the other guy, but he wasn’t any good? What will happen when the competition gets tougher or the marketplace gets tougher? Will you have the skills you need to dominate then?
Too often, we fail to face reality. This comes back to us in unfulfilled potential. Unfulfilled potential eventually manifests itself as regret. We have to be fixated on taking steps to obtain our goals daily . . . even if they are the wrong steps. It’s better to make a decision and find out it was wrong than avoiding making a decision at all. At least you know what you should not do next time.
Truth #3: Even when you choose not to decide, you have still made a choice.
Far too many of us just hope things will get better. We hope to become healthier or thinner, or we hope we will earn more. We have wishes and dreams but no commitment or definitiveness to change what we are doing to ensure the desired result. We fail to take action on what we know we need to do now.
Many of us can vacillate over a decision for days, weeks, months, or even years. We must realize that by not making a decision, we have essentially made a choice. We end up making decisions by default because we did not decide and act. The decision was made for us.
As salespeople, by not preparing for a changing marketplace or changing economy, our choice is solidified. We have chosen, by default, to not do as well or earn as much when the marketplace change occurs. Would it be reasonable to assume that our marketplace will always remain the same or improve? Would we be protecting our families and assets if we assume that we don’t need to improve our skills and abilities in sales? Our decision to not act in truth means we still have made a choice.
Take ten minutes to evaluate these truths. Are you embracing these truths in how you run your business and life? Are there changes that need to be made? When do you need to make the changes? Here’s a hint…NOW!
Don’t get paralyzed by inactivity or perfection. Turn action into your asset. That’s what true Champions do!
“Together, these three programs give YOU the Secrets you need to Solve the Hardest Part in the Real Estate Sales Process."
- Dirk Zeller, CEO
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Not Enough Leads |
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"I'm a Lead Master Now - Too Many to Follow-up On" |
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Not Enough Listings |
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"I Give Dynamic Listing Presentations - More Listings Now Than Ever" |
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Buyers Won't Commit
- Can't Convert Them |
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"My
Buyers Convert and Commit Nearly Every Time - More
Commissions"
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“What are your three best training
programs?”
Well, if I gave you the Official
Dirk Zeller Recommendation for the three BEST programs for a REALTOR® to
invest in, without a doubt...these would be the three:
|
• Lead
Mastery
• How
to Create and Deliver a Dynamic Listing Presentation
• Convert
and Commit the Buyer... Every Time! |
If you could master lead generation, convert
and commit those leads to an appointment, deliver a dynamic listing presentation,
and then use our secrets to convert and commit the buyer every time... You'll
have all the pieces you need to solve the great success puzzle in
the Real Estate Sales Process.
These three programs give you the secrets,
YOU NEED, to make easy the three hardest parts of the Real Estate Sales Process!
Then you'll be three steps closer to becoming a Champion in YOUR marketplace.
• 12
Audio CDs
• +3 Multi-Media
CD-ROM Workbooks
Aligning Job Descriptions with Behavioral Style
What if you could predict, in advance, how a person would react to certain job performance tasks? What would the value of that knowledge be worth to you as a Lead Agent? What if you could predict how they will deal with challenges, make connections with others, deal with change, and respond to rules and procedures? What if you could align those key issues that we all face in the business world on a daily basis with the right individual and the right job? You would dramatically influence, in a positive way, someone’s job performance and the results achieved.
When you evaluate the individual jobs of the members of the team, each position needs different skills, attributes, behaviors, and actions. A Transaction Coordinator needs to be more rules and regulations focused. They need to be able to keep the other Agents adhering to the deadlines and timelines of the contract. They have to follow or establish certain systems and procedures, and clearly know the consequences of not following them and how that affects the quality of client service, stress load during the transaction, and smoothness of the transaction.
A Listing Coordinator needs to have the ability to interact well with clients more so than the Transaction Coordinator. They need to be organized, while at the same time, being creative. In order for them to accomplish the many tasks in front of them, they need to be stable, predictable, and steady in their work habits.
When you can observe the desired behaviors, temperaments, and needs of each of the positions on your team, clearly defining the type of natural thinking, actions, and behavioral tendencies a person would need to posses to excel in the job, you will be able to attract prospective candidates more effectively by designing ads that people with certain behavioral styles will respond to more frequently. You can then secure applicants more quickly and effectively. At that time, you will have achieved a pool of applicants that is small but of high quality based on the positions you have available.
Matching people to tasks
The best approach to finding the right people for the right job is to analyze the positions and the tasks of those positions. As the Lead Agent, you have to go below the job description level and look at tasks. What are the tasks that need to be done? Who is best suited to perform the tasks? How does an employee’s behavioral style align with those tasks?
In Jim Collins’ landmark book, Good to Great, he shared two clear concepts to consider when dealing with team members and teams. The first is, you have to get the right people on the bus. The bus in this analogy is your business. You have to get the right people as team members or employees. To be a great company, it takes great people. Getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus is essential to success with your company.
The second concept Collins trumpets is getting in the right seats on the bus. The truth is, even if you have the right people, but they are in the wrong seats, you will not achieve the explosive growth and other objectives you have for building a team. Having the right people is only half of the equation. You must get them doing the right tasks.
That’s why I believe you have to determine the tasks that need to be done first. Design the positions based on the tasks that need to be done, while aligning the behavioral profiles that would most likely be doing those individual tasks. Then you go out in the open employment market to select your candidates.
If you are a Lead Agent who already has team members, the approach to maximize performance and production is a little different. Again, you will need to start with a list of tasks that need to be done. Then analyze the behavioral styles of your current team members. Then match the tasks to the behavioral styles of those members. The time you will need to invest to get this area right is more than most Agents really invest in building their team. It’s important to get the people you have in the right seats. Right people plus wrong seats or positions still equals failure.
Right people + Wrong positions = Failure
Right people + Right positions = Success
Adapting lends to burnout
The reason people become frustrated in their job is because of adaptation. When people have to change who they are naturally to accomplish certain functions of their job, they become frustrated at work. They perform at lower levels. They use up large volumes of energy just to cope with their job. This sends them home burned out, frustrated, and ready to kick the dog, the cat, or even the kids when they get home. Just as I shared in The Champion Real Estate Agent™, the revolutionary discoveries we have developed in building the Lead Agent’s business around their behavioral style have to be taken a step further with your team.
We lose effectiveness and productivity when we or our staff members are in a constant state of adaptation. We will see staff turnover and low performance, which leads to additional challenges and, in extreme cases, the poisoning of all members of the team. Adaptation can kill a team. The objective is not perfection, however. It would be impossible in such a multi-task oriented business as real estate sales to perfectly align staff where they never engage in tasks that are outside the realm of their behavioral style. The objective is to achieve a high level of alignment to minimize the time that is spent adapting by us and our staff. If you can achieve an 80% threshold of alignment, you will have produced a high performance team.
Two Rules For Increasing Performance
To raise our own performance and that of others on our team, we must establish some type of activity management system. A system that monitors and reports the activities of each staff member based on their position or responsibility is best. For salespeople, the activity management system must count and report contacts, leads, appointments, and corresponding conversion ratios of their activities against the results of units sold and revenue generated. Even very good teams in the real estate field rarely do this type of reporting and monitoring. There are many reasons why; lack of knowledge, system set up, and time are frequently sited. One of the most obvious is because, as a new Agent entering real estate, the Broker never required it, so the measuring of activities was never taught from the early stages of one’s career.
When you are dealing with your support staff, you need to be able to monitor, report, and objectively establish standards and evaluate performance as well. Are they establishing the right priorities for the day or week? Are they completing the highest priorities before the close of business for the day? Are they getting enough done in quality, priority, and volume to advance your business? Are they helping you achieve your objectives and priorities for your day by protecting you from distractions and interruptions?
Champion Team Rule – When performance is measured, performance improves.
We must be willing to devise measuring systems for the performance of our staff and ourselves. This is especially true of our sales-focused staff, i.e. Buyer’s Agents, Listing Agents, and Telemarketers. Performance rarely improves without measurement to identify the where, how, and why of needed improvements. Improvements won’t be sustainable unless we know the specific how of the improvement. Knowing how it will be accomplished is essential for replication. Without the measurement, the how is merely a guess!
Champion Team Rule – When performance is measured and reported, performance improves faster.
When you require not only the measuring, but also the reporting of performance, you will see performance improvement speed up. What you thought would take six months to fully correct may only take three months. You may save yourself three months of lost revenue, lower sales, increased training in time and dollars, and have more satisfied employees at the same time.
Dirk Zeller
CEO |
Dear Champion Real Estate Broker,
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This series of monthly and semi-annual training programs is designed to deliver timely, time-tested & proven, meat-and-potatoes training that you and the Agents in your office can use right away to grow production numbers and overcome obstacles you may be facing in current market conditions... Learn More.
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