In This Issue...
Words of a Champion
Dirk Zeller
CEO
The key to improving your customer service is to clearly understand what your customer views as good customer service.
Everyone has a very different view of what constitutes customer service. Some people are far more demanding in what they want from people they do business with than they are with others in non-business relationships.
Joseph Mancuso wrote in his great book, Winning With The Power Of Persuasion, “The most powerful three letter word is ‘ask’.” He further said that most children ask about sixty questions a day. After they graduate from college, they’re asking two questions a day, and one of them is, “When do we eat?” The question is, what happened between the ages of three and twenty-three? How do we change back?
The most successful people ask a lot of questions. They are well prepared to ask the questions that make the greatest difference. Don’t assume that you know the answers before you ask the questions. We need to know the standard of service our prospects and clients want from us. We need to know how our prospects and clients want to be communicated with and what they expect. The questions are the key in this process. Let me give you some great questions to ask:
- What would have to happen for me to be the best Agent you have ever worked with?
- What is your expectation of me as your Agent?
- What are the most important criteria when selecting an Agent?
- How are you going to judge success when working with me?
These questions are powerful and will set you apart from all other Agents that a potential client might interview. They will also give you a very strategic standard of service you will need to follow if you want to create a “raving fan” through this transaction.
Lastly, take stock of yourself. Do a clear self-evaluation of the service that you are providing. Ask yourself this all-important question, “What is the one thing we could start doing or stop doing that would dramatically impact our customer relationships?”
It is essential for you to spend time evaluating this question. If you have other team members, ask them. Ask your Closing Coordinator. Ask your Listing Coordinator. You might even ask other Agents in your office to create some new insight for you.
Take the time to understand each client’s definition of customer service. Don’t miss the opportunity to create a “raving fan” every time.
To Your Achievement of GREATER success,
Dirk Zeller, CEO
RealEstateChampions.com
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Advice For Partnering With Other Agents In Negotiations
You and the other agent in your transaction are obligated to cooperate with each other; that’s why you’re called co-op brokers. At the same time, you are both obligated to represent the interests of your own clients, which works wonderfully when you both seek a win/win outcome, but which is troublesome when the other agent comes to the deal with a we win/you lose mentality.
Before talking with the other agent at length, I suggest you do some homework. I always made it a point to learn in advance about the agent I’d be dealing with. Unless I already knew the agent personally, my staff would conduct some research. They’d start at the MLS computer where they’d look at the number of listings and sales the agent had completed over the last few years. This provided an indication of the agent’s experience, which enabled me to understand the role I would play in the negotiation. I’d figure we would likely share power equally if the other agent was experienced, successful, and skilled. If the other agent was very new to the field, I knew I’d have to take the lead and guide the negotiation along.
When you’re ready to talk with the other agent, cover these points:
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Explain your desire to create a win/win transaction. Say that you will be relying on the other agent to create a win for both the buyers and sellers, and that you intend to do the same. Some agents believe their job is to achieve a win only for their own clients. This discussion will help you spot these people.
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If you’re the listing agent, let the other agent know that the home is competitively priced; that it’s at fair market value with no padding in the asking price. By having this discussion upfront, if your client counters a low offer at full price or close to it, the response won’t be a surprise to the agent or prospective buyers.
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If you reach a snag, challenge, or impasse with the other agent or with the agent’s clients, test the situation by asking one of these questions:
“If you were representing my clients, would you counsel them to accept this offer?”
“If you were in my shoes, would you want your clients to accept these terms and conditions?”
If the answer is yes, then ask: “Why?” or “How would you sell this to my clients if you were in my shoes?”
If the agent can’t give you an answer, the silence will let you know that they know their offer is unreasonable.
If they can defend their position with cogent arguments, you know you must convince your client of the validity of the buyers’ offer.
The easiest other agent to work with is you. You know you. You know you want win/win outcomes. You know whether your listing has padding or whether your purchase offer has room for negotiation. You know how you work and that your skills are up to the task. You probably know it’s easier for you to work with you than with any other agent.
Make your real estate sales life easier by selling more of your own listings. Represent both the buyer and the seller and avoid the challenges of working with another agent to complete the transaction.
The biggest bonus: You don’t have to split fees and will earn more for the sale.
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Business Vision - Is Where It All Starts
Being able to establish a business vision for your company separates you from the other agents who are in real estate. When building a team, you must pause and work to define your business vision. Enduring, successful people and successful companies establish their core values and core purpose. They then remain fixed on those core values and purpose throughout their business life. The changing elements are their business strategy and tactics due to the marketplace changes and competition influences.
Successful people and companies know that it is critically important to know who you are and what you stand for. In many cases, knowing who you are, as a team, will be more important than where you are going. We all will change and adapt as our world changes and adapts. This change is inevitable. The only part about change that is in question is whether it will be evolution or revolution.
Evolution is defined by Webster as: A process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage). We want to engage in the small, gradual movement or change over a period of time. This type of change only comes from clarity of values and purpose. More effort, energy, and resources can be used to increase success, sales, and production in an evolutionary mode, rather than a revolutionary mode.
Revolution is defined by Webster as: A drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving. The change in revolution is more violent, sudden, and potentially damaging. The vast majority of resources will be used to keep up with the revolution at hand or trying to get out of the revolutionary process. The stress level is significantly higher, and the probability of success is much lower in revolution. By having well-defined core values and core purpose, you can avoid the forces of revolution more effectively.
There has been a prevailing thought for sometime on the value of mission statements. The thought is that you have to build a mission statement for your team. When I ask many experts why they have that view, their answers are less than stellar: “Because good companies have them”; “You just do”; “Your people need something to guide them.” There are a host of others that I have heard regularly.
I have personally coached hundreds of the most successful agents in the last almost ten years. I always ask if they have a mission statement. When they say “oh yes”, I ask them what it is. The phone always goes dead silent. Then you have this rustling of papers as they try to find the document that has their mission statement on it. Once they can’t find it, they try to recite from memory some garbled version of it.
I personally feel that mission statements have little value, and we should abolish their use. Most small business owners’ (like real estate agents) mission statements are treated as something you have to have or do, but you don’t know why you have to have it or do it. The most common practice of building a mission statement for small business owners is to scalp what they like from a large company, like Nordstrom if you have a service mentality or Nike if you like competition or Wal-Mart if you want to serve the ordinary or disadvantaged consumer.
We aren’t building it from within our own views, tenets, and principles of excellence in life and business. For most, we are building the mission statement based on what sounds good, looks good on a brochure or marketing piece, or is made up of the components that another successful company articulates in their mission statement. My best advice is to scrap the whole exercise and start focusing on what you stand for.
What do you stand for?
We can’t look for what we stand for in others. We have to discover it in ourselves. It is not outside in the world around you; it is in your inner world, in your mind and heart. In order for what you stand for to be authentic, you have to search for it. You aren’t asking yourself what you should stand for; you are asking yourself what you passionately stand for.
Let me share with you an example of what I mean. At Real Estate Champions, we stand for hard work and continuous self-improvement. We believe passionately that the quest of self-improvement, both personally and professionally, is one of the noblest callings in life. I personally toil long hours weekly in the quest of self-improvement and building tools, training systems, scripts, materials, strategies, tactics, theories, coaching – the list is endless. I spend additional hours reading, writing, praying, and listening to CDs to keep my personal development in high gear. I have other people on my team, as well, who contribute to this effort.
There is no one in the real estate field who has produced more quality systems, tools, strategies, skill improvement, and business master systems in the last ten years than we have at Real Estate Champions. You can pick any name, speaker, trainer, or coach, and most are still selling the same material they were ten years ago! We have six distinctly different coaching programs, over fifty different training programs and audio CDs, DVD training, internet subscription-based training, five books written on sales success with four of them out in the last eighteen months. We don’t do it because it’s good business; we create new intellectual property and deliver it in many different ways because it’s what we stand for. It is born out of my personal core values and beliefs.
We passionately believe that we need to engage in our own journey of personal self-improvement to impact the world. Once we take on that challenge, we will be able to impact the world around us.
What do you stand for?
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The Importance of Selling Benefits
When we evaluate selling our views on why someone would hire us, we really only have two options to sell. We can sell features of our service, or we can sell the benefits the client will receive.
When I listen to Agents sell their services, most spend far more time discussing features than the benefits or the outcome the client will receive: the features of years in the business, membership in the Million-dollar Club, a certain company production award, number of homes sold, sales value, and all features of the Agent’s service. Most Agents use these exclusively to answer the nagging question, why should I hire you? The problem is these are merely features of your service. A certain level of production or years in the business doesn’t leap out at the prospect as a benefit.
We have to be able to connect the benefit of security, reduced risk, smooth transaction, higher probability of sale, and high sales price to the feature we provide. Then, and only then, will we be the Agent who is able to defend and increase our value and answer the question of why someone should hire me.
Benefits of working with an Agent
Most Agents will talk about their marketing services, ads, and Websites. Those are merely features of their service. Many even describe the hits, unique visitors, or ranking of their or their company’s websites, for example. The problem is, for most Sellers, you are speaking a foreign language. You might as well be speaking in French. What does this mean to them? What is the benefit they receive? How does that create an advantage for them? Why is this information so important? Most Agents talk about features of their service rather than the benefits the clients receive.
I frequently ask two questions at seminars. The first is: Why should I hire you? I get immediate feedback of thought on this question. I usually get responses like: customer services, size of company, communication, follow up, experience, and honesty and integrity. I want you to look at this list. How do you feel about them? Do they separate you from the others who are interviewing for the job to represent someone’s interest? What do you think?
Let me share a story with you. When I was writing Success As A Real Estate Agent For Dummies®, I had a couple of tussles with the technical editor they hired to review the manuscript. I didn’t mention honesty and integrity as something to say when on a listing presentation or Buyer interview. The reason is because I don’t think it is a competitive advantage or a reason why someone should hire you. Now, before you draw the wrong conclusion, read on. I do think that honesty and integrity are paramount characteristics to being a Champion Agent. When does a customer or client really find out that the Agent they selected lacks honesty and integrity? I believe it’s usually after it’s too late. It’s after an agency relationship has been consummated. They have to be working with the Agent to really find out.
Another reason is many people have differing views or standards about honesty and integrity. The threshold is different for each one of us. We had a President in the past who claimed, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” For many of us, myself included, that whole fiasco in our history was caused by a lack of honesty and integrity on his part. I can say that my definition of what sex means is clearly different than his was. I think his wife had a different definition, as well. I am not making a political statement here. I am merely trying to illustrate a truth – that honesty and integrity are interpreted terms.
My last point, which I made to my technical editor, is you would not be making a presentation to the Buyer or Seller if they didn’t feel you had honesty and integrity. To exclaim during the presentation that they should hire you because you have honesty and integrity is a wasted argument. If a prospect thought you lacked those characteristics, they wouldn’t have allowed you to make a presentation. Would you knowingly interview someone to represent you like an attorney, financial planner, accountant, or Real Estate Agent if you knew they lacked honesty and integrity? Of course not, and neither would your prospects.
If you try to express that your honesty and integrity is greater than another Agent they are considering, you have just denigrated your argument that you have honesty and integrity. The honey and integrity argument is weak, and you will lose this position more often than not.
I want to share with you one last piece of counsel in this area. Having been a business owner of different businesses for more than twenty years, I have created a rule that has proven truthful throughout my career. I have discovered the more someone talks about their honesty and integrity, the lower the level of honesty and integrity they posses. People who do business and live life with honesty and integrity don’t go around talking about it. They just go out and do it.
The problem with all these reasons that most Agents list is, they are nebulous. There is no proof and no real tangible benefit to the Seller. They are also what all other Agents are saying. To be a Champion Agent and join the Champion Performer ranks, you have to be different. Being the same only means that you have no reason for them to hire you over the cheaper option. Being the same allows them to select Uncle Fred, the referred Agent from their boss, or the discount guy down the street. If you are the same, your value is reduced. The reason that Pavarotti, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong, Jack Welch, Jim Carey, and Oprah are paid at the highest level in their fields is because they are different. They can explain why they are different and why they are worth the extra investment of money. They are not ordinary or the same as the rest of the people in their fields.
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