In This Issue...
Words of a Champion
Dirk Zeller
CEO
One of the secrets to success is the ability to hold on a little longer than the next guy. To be willing to take a little more rejection, a little more hardship, and a little more temporary failure over time.
Ultimately, to be successful you have to know how to survive setbacks and failure. In the end, failure is not fatal. Lying there and wallowing in it is fatal, but getting up and accepting it as a temporary setback forges a new beginning. Failure can sometimes feel fatal, but it never is.
In my sales career I have had far more “No’s” than “Yes’s”; the “No’s” outnumber the “Yes’s” twenty or thirty to one. If I had focused on the twenty or thirty “No’s” instead of the one “Yes” I would have quit. Too often we focus on the wrong thing. We fixate on the “No” rather than anticipate the “Yes”. We must position ourselves with people to give them every opportunity to say “Yes” to us. We have to ask and ask, and then ask again, so we gain the “Yes” we want. We have to be willing to attend and graduate the “University of Failure” to eventually receive our doctorate in success. No one has ever achieved long lasting success without the “University of Failure” degree. We don’t begin as a success.
Let me give you a few rules of failure. Learning and applying these will better prepare you for your success.
Temporary failures are not bad: If we mentally focus on bad events, that is what we will create more of. In the end, failure is neither good nor bad. When Thomas Edison’s wonderful compound of laboratories and buildings burnt to the ground he did two things. First he told his sons to get his wife because she would never see another fire like this in her lifetime. Second, he realized that all his failures had been burned away. He had a clean slate in front of him.
At the end of the day, week, month, or year it’s what you do with the setback that makes it good or bad. Failure is merely a lesson.
To take advantage of a lesson, you must fully learn it. That means that we must review and analyze all the failures and setbacks we experience. Most of us want to merely forget them or cover them up. This puts us in a pattern to repeat them again. Treat each failure as a lesson. In school if you don’t learn your lesson you don’t graduate. Make sure you learn the lessons that failure is trying to teach you.
Treat each failure as a lesson bringing you closer to success. By learning how not to do something, you are exponentially closer to learning how to do it.
In the end, failure is never final. We all fail and fall down. We all come up short of the mark in life. It’s whether we decide to stay there or learn and move forward that make us a success. Tackle the opportunity that your setbacks and failures bring you everyday. Create a daily mindset of opportunity in each setback. Your choice is to either stay down or get up. Champions get up each and every day.
To Your Achievement of Greater Success in 2009,
Dirk Zeller, CEO
RealEstateChampions.com
P.S. If you haven't already signed up, make sure you reserve your spot today for my new webinar, "How to Become a Champion by Thriving, and Not Just Surviving in Today's Tough Marketplaces". I'll be giving you some of the most important tools, strategies, and tactics that you need to be implementing in today's tougher marketplaces so you can effectively thrive and increase your income while other Agents are struggling. We only have 500 spots available, so make sure to reserve your spot today!
If you’re tired of struggling to keep up with the changes in your marketplace, it’s time that you find out…
Over the past year, I've made it my main goal and have been working extremely hard to give all my faithful Coaches Corner™ subscribers and customers the exact tools they need to thrive in today's down marketplaces, rather than just survive in them.
It's very important to have a clear focus and to implement strategies that have been proven to work in times like these. You don't want to be like the majority of Agents who are simply doing the same things over and over again and expecting better results. When the markets change, you have to change with them!
So today, I'd like to add another important piece to the puzzle with an exciting new Webinar that gives you some of the most critical tools, strategies, and tactics you need to be able to:
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Develop the key mindsets necessary to successfully navigate and thrive in a slow marketplace |
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Identify the Buying and Selling trends in a tough market |
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Acquire and use the tools necessary to attain and sell listing inventory in a slowing marketplace |
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Learn new effective lead generation strategies that you can begin to tap into right away |
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Realize and utilize the many opportunities that you can take advantage of (and that your competition doesn't know about) in a tough marketplace |
Date and Time:
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Wednesday - October 29th , 2008
1:30pm - 3:00pm Eastern
12:30pm - 2:00pm Central
11:30am - 1:00pm Mountain
10:30am - 12:00pm Pacific |
Click Here to Find Out How You Can
Thrive in Your Market Today
Accept Nothing Less Than Excellence
A Champion accepts nothing less than excellence. When you look at successful individuals and successful companies, good is not good enough. They are clearly striving for excellence. In Jim Collins’ best selling book, Good to Great, one of his premises is that good is really the enemy of great; that if we are willing to settle for good, we will never achieve greatness. I agree that to hit the Champion level as an Agent, you can’t be satisfied with mid-level skills, abilities, and mindset. You must resolve to raise your level of expectation and performance, first for yourself and then for your staff, to the predetermined Champion level.
While a company must be exceptional in all facets of a business (sales, marketing, accounting, client care); it would be impossible for an individual to be exceptional in all those facets of business. Knowing the real estate business and knowing the areas that are most important to be personally skilled at can raise your performance. Then delegating the areas that you will never achieve excellence in to others who have the capacity to excel in those areas is paramount.
It is easy to confuse perfection with the pursuit of excellence. To many, they look the same. In further analysis, one can see the distinction between obsessions to the most minor details, which is perfection, and wanting to hit the upper echelon of the zone of success, which is excellence. One is trying to achieve a 100% standard (perfectionism), while the other says that 95% is clearly in the excellent range. We must ask ourselves if 90% is still an A in our business. Can I live with 90% to 95%, or must I get to 100%? If your response is 100%, you have a perfectionist problem that is holding you back from becoming a Champion.
The truth is that to achieve that last 5% from 95% to 100% takes a considerable amount of resources. You can produce a lot more sales and income by looking for other opportunities, rather than perfecting that 95% to a 100%. A Champion knows the fine line between excellence and perfection. They work to stay on the right side of that line.
I frequently see Agents working to perfect their systems. They spend hours and weeks designing flyer templates, follow-up procedures, letters, marketing pieces, closing check lists, buyer check lists, seller check lists, seller activity reports; the list is endless. Before you assume I am anti-systems, let me say that you must have these systems to provide quality customer service, good follow-up, and the ability to make sales. If the systems are at 90% to 95%, you don’t need to invest hours of time to make them perfect. You need to invest your time generating more leads to run through your systems. A system for service is valuable, but revenue growth comes from running more people through your service system, not from working on it.
Becoming a Champion Agent is easier than most people believe. Most people believe you have to provide this WOW service model; that you must go above and beyond for every client. I take a more fundamental approach.
You can become a Champion easily through exceptional execution of the fundamentals. Most people fall short in the fundamentals of their core business. The reason is that the fundamentals are harder to master. They aren’t really exciting, sexy, or full of public accolades when you do them. They just work and produce significant results.
As a professional racquetball player in my 20’s, I was not the flashiest player with the most diverse shot arsenal. I had a couple of shots from a handful of positions on the court. When I got myself positioned and set in those areas, it was point over. If I got into those zones more often than my opponent, it was game over.
In racquetball the objective is to control the center of the court a few feet behind the service line. If you are in that zone for more of the time than your opponent, you have a 90% probability of winning the match. My objective was to control that center court area. When my opponent had it, I wanted to hit a shot that moved him out of it and me into it. That is fundamental racquetball. That approach, while not as flashy as some of the spectacular shots my opponents would sometimes execute, allowed me to win a number of prestigious titles during my career. There is nothing that beats winning.
As a Champion Real Estate Agent, the fundamentals are prospecting, lead follow-up, presentation, objection handling, and closing skills in the sales process. In client care, it’s the communication frequency and systems. In marketing, it’s copy writing, strategy, tactics, and implementation. Throw in two more fundamentals: time management and money management (both in business and personal life), and you will be a Champion. Now, when you evaluate that list, it’s not very exciting to look at . . . especially the sales processes. What I find is that most Agents are better at the marketing and client care than the sales processes, time management, and money management. I would rank those three (sales processes, time management, and money management) as the top three in a Champion Agent’s business. To become a Champion Agent, you have to be a Champion at those three. If you don’t have impeccable skills in those three core areas, you won’t be a Champion!
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Spending Less Time To Accomplish More
Many real estate Agents invest too much time and too little urgency in their businesses. They commit well over 40 hours to the job, and they put themselves on call seven days a week. They spread themselves thin, and then, in order to sustain themselves over this endless schedule, they dilute their intensity. No other professional works so many hours. Even doctors have a lighter on-call schedule than most Agents choose to accept.
I suggest that you commit right now to become more effective in way less time each week. Consider this advice:
Set aside at least one day a week to recharge and refresh yourself: Before you say you can’t afford the day off, realize this truth: Work expands to fill the time you give it. Reduce your work hours, and you’ll automatically squeeze more productivity into shorter spans of time.
Increase your productivity by increasing your intensity: Give yourself deadlines with no procrastination options. If you know you need to accomplish a lineup of goals over the course of a five-day workweek, your focus will automatically zoom in; you’ll sweep away distractions, and you’ll get the job done in the time allowed.
I watched my own focus and productivity intensify as I went from a seven-day workweek to a six-day workweek to a five-day workweek. The largest production increase I experienced, though, was when I moved to a schedule of four days of work followed by three days off, with no correlating reduction in my income or success objectives. Given my goals, I knew I had to work with incredibly high intensity and no options for procrastination. What’s more, I couldn’t change my mind and add a work day to my schedule because my wife, Joan, and I were constructing a vacation home some three hours away in Bend, Oregon, and we had to be on site every Friday to check the progress. Joan was the general contractor, so there was no reneging over the eight-month construction schedule. The amazing outcome? Once the home was done, I saw no need to revert to a five-day workweek.
Take away your time-wasting options: Commit to time off and force yourself to work during established, reasonable work hours. Automatically, you’ll force yourself to eliminate time-wasting activities.
Give yourself no option to add hours back to your workweek: If you allow yourself the option to add time back to your workweek, you leave yourself open to time-wasting choices.
Begin to treat time as your most valuable asset. Realtors are too casual with their time, leading to career, relationship, or bank account casualties that could have been avoided by treating time as the most precious resource in life.
A resource is something that is available in a limited or finite supply. Money and energy are among your personal resources, but time is your most precious resource of all. You can judge your resource supply in all other areas. You know or can easily learn how much money is in your accounts. You know or sense your energy levels and what you have left to use. But there are no guarantees on the 86,400 seconds in each day. I defer absolute control of my time to the guy upstairs, and, in the meantime, I increase the probability of longevity through healthy eating, physical exercise, and adequate amounts of rest, and I increase the probably of productive use of my day through careful time management.
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Determing Commission Plans Based on Your key Numbers
The secret to an effective commission plan for Buyer’s Agents is your ability to calculate the split arrangement from your seven key numbers. You must determine what amount of the net profit you are willing to share after all costs are paid for. The costs must also factor in your time invested to manage, coach, and train to improve performance. And the costs must reflect the amount of time you will personally have to invest in each transaction to guarantee it’s closing for the team and your Buyer’s Agent.
For example, if your average commissions check through a Buyer’s Agent was $6,000 gross, and you are on an 80/20 split with your Broker, the revenue you receive would be $4,800. Then your average cost per transaction is $1,500 to cover your car, cell phone, Administrative Assistants, advertising, marketing, etc. You are now down to $3,300 before you factor your time in as a cost. You make $250 an hour, and you factor in three hours of training, education, and coaching for each transaction your Buyer’s Agent does. You now have a final net profit of only $2,550 left to split with the Buyer’s Agent. How do you split that up? If you are too low, you can’t attract skillful Buyer’s Agents to work for you. If you aren’t going to make something, why bother?
| Gross Commission |
$6,000 |
| Broker Split |
$1,200 |
| |
$4,800 |
| Cost per Transaction |
$1,500 |
| |
$3,300 |
| Champion Lead Agent’s |
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| Time Invested per Transaction |
$750 |
| Net Profit |
$2,550 |
The truth is unless your average commissions check exceeds $10,000, it is challenging to generate any more than a small, short-term net profit. You will usually be in the range of $500 to $1,500 per transaction after the associated costs are covered in terms of your time and cost per transaction.
You must know the performance standards that you want to achieve in net profit for the company before you enter into a transaction with a prospect. It could determine whether you service that prospect or refer them to another Agent in your office or someone on your Buyer’s Agent team.
Your ability, as a Champion Lead Agent, to set complete and compelling performance standards will create the opportunity for your team to reach the Champion Team level. Without these concrete performance standards, your team will always fall short of the mark for Champion Team status.
Dirk Zeller
CEO |
Dear Champion Real Estate Broker,
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