In This Issue...
Words of a Champion
Dirk Zeller
CEO
One of the battles that Agents struggle with constantly is maintaining focus. Focus is a skill or muscle to be trained and worked for increased strength. We all lose focus at times. Having coached hundreds of Agents across North America, I have come to realize that the number of times people lose focus is fairly constant. It’s the duration of the loss that makes the difference.
I had a call with a client a while ago. He had been out of focus because of something a client of his and another Agent did. He lost focus because of lost revenue. Have you ever been there? I asked him how many days he had been off track. He told me 3 days, and I knew it was at least that many. Here is a top Agent making well over 6 figures allowing his focus to slip for 3 days. Here is what it cost him:
He earns: $78.00 an hour
He works: 8 hours per day
He lost: 3 days of work
______________________________________________
$78.00/hr x 8 hrs x 3 days = $1,872.00
How many times monthly or yearly does this happen to us? If it happens just once per month, it could cost us $22,464 per year. For most people, it happens more frequently than that. The key is reducing the span of time from when you get out of focus till you get back on track. Some people take 3 days to get back on track and some take as little as 3 minutes. How much time does it take you to get back on track? Focus comes before success. Work to reduce the time you are out of focus.
To Your Achievement of GREATER success,
Dirk Zeller, CEO
RealEstateChampions.com
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Increasing Sales Production Through Method of Contacts
When you break a Real Estate Agent’s 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!
Method of contacts
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 eighteen years, I can say that, in the last ten 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.
As would-be Champion Agents, we need to understand how the method of contact directly relates to our success in real estate sales. We must work to create a business that takes advantage of the odds that can swing in our favor if we use our contact method appropriately.
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Motivation
Motivation! That key word that we all crave. Webster defines motivation as: 1. Something, as a reason or desire, acting as a spur to action. 2. Causing or capable of causing motion.
One of the big problems for Real Estate Agents, at one time or another, is having the motivation to do what we know we should do…when we should do it. I truly believe that is the mark of a true professional – doing what needs to be done no matter what the circumstances are at the time. I am sure there are times when the NBA player doesn’t feel like playing the game. For example, when Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls would play the Los Angeles Clippers. Competitively, I am sure MJ’s juices were not flowing like they were when they played the Lakers. The key is, he went out and played his best anyway. The question is, what’s our excuse?
Motivation increases with clarity. If we have clearly defined goals and objectives, it’s easier to maintain motivation. It’s very easy to slip out of focus and out of motivation without clarity of objectives. The question is, do we have clearly defined and written objectives? Are we reviewing them daily or at least weekly? Have we created the target for our life in the form of a Life Plan? Dennis Whately said, “We spend more time planning our vacations than we do our lives.” I think Dennis hit the mark with that quote. Have we invested the time and intensity to create the outcome in our marriage, children, health, and business as we have on that trip to Hawaii? We ultimately have to plan for the success we desire. By simply having a plan, the motivation will increase.
The second key is to establish a habit. Developing a routine will enable you to mentally prepare and gain motivation. Motivation is linked with discipline. These two are connected. People who are highly disciplined are highly motivated. The key is getting them in the right order. Most people desire motivation, so they can become disciplined. If you see yourself in that statement, you will be waiting a long time to get disciplined.
Part of success is knowing what to do. The other part is knowing the right order to do it in. Discipline comes before motivation. Too many of us have it backwards. Earl Nightingale used to tell a story of a man who would try to convince the wood stove to give him some heat before he put the wood in. No, No, No! That’s not the way it works. You must be disciplined enough to start. You must be disciplined enough to keep going. Motivation comes after we start the process. If we force ourselves to begin, the motivation will follow to help us finish. Let me give you an example in real estate where this is true:
When you have prospected, was it the first call or the last call that was the toughest? Of course, it’s the first one; by the last one, it’s easy. The first call is all discipline. It’s the decision that you are going to do it or else. Motivation has little to do with regular prospecting. Regular prospecting has to do with discipline. By the fourth call, motivation has kicked in because discipline took the first step. You must take the first step of discipline to gain the long-term benefits of motivation.
Your motivation is rooted in the clarity of the target, and the water to make motivation grow is discipline. If we don’t water motivation with discipline, there is no growth. It has to be discipline first, motivation second. Make sure the order is right. As my friend Zig Ziglar says, “Life is like a cafeteria line. First you pay, then you get to eat.” Motivation is the same. It starts with the action and discipline of doing something, and then the motivation kicks in.
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Time Blocking Your Way to Success
A time-blocked schedule reserves and protects slotted time segments for pre-planned, pre-determined activities. The objective of time blocking is to increase the amount of time you can invest in direct income-producing efforts.
In more than 20 years as a business owner, I’ve yet to run across a more reliable method for seizing control of time and boosting productivity than time blocking.
Many people have heard of time blocking, but few master its use. The challenge isn’t in creating the schedule; that’s the easy part. The challenge is keeping on the schedule. That’s the hard part, because most people set their time-blocking expectations very high, reserve large portions of time, and then can’t maintain the schedule. The good news, though, is that even if you need to compromise your time blocks a little, you still come out ahead.
One of my coaching clients, Sheila Gunderson, increased the number of units she sold by over 100 in one year, at the same time increasing her sales volume by more than seventeen million dollars; pretty amazing performance. I asked her how much of time she spent on her ideal time-blocking schedule. Her answer: “About 50% of the time.” She is proof that even maintaining half of your blocked-out time you can produce incredible results.
Good time blocking starts with a schedule grid. In the beginning, create a grid that breaks your schedule down into 30-minute segments. As your skill progresses, you might shift to a 15-minute grid format.
As you complete the grid, I strongly suggest that you block your entire daily schedule, not just your workday. Follow these steps:
Block time for your personal life first. If you don’t, you’ll be hard pressed to squeeze in personal time after scheduling everything else.
Decide what are the most important personal activities in your life and block them out before you allow any other obligations onto your calendar. Set aside a date night with your spouse or significant partner. Block time for working out, quiet time, prayer time, personal development time, and family time. If your daughter has soccer games on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, then put those in your schedule. If someone wants to see you during those times, say you are booked with a previous appointment.
For my personal schedule, I reserve a weekly date night with my wife, Joan. I block workout times. I set 30 minutes daily of floor time – time to play on the floor with my son, Wesley. I set aside Friday mornings for breakfast with my family.
Decide which full day you will take off each week. No ifs, ands or buts. You must take at least one off. The reaction of new Agents is, “Oh! I couldn’t do that.” Give me a break; God even took the seventh day off.
A few words on the definition of a day off: It means no real estate calls, no answering your cell phone, no negotiating offers, no taking ad calls, no taking sign calls, no meeting with clients or prospects. The minute you do any business activity, it’s a workday, even if it’s for five minutes. Honor yourself and your family with one day a week away from real estate. The 24/7 weekly approach to the real estate business leads to family frustrations and burn out. It’s hard to receive the love you need from a pile of money.
Decide which evenings you will and will not work. Again, set boundaries. I suggest that you make no more than three or four nights a week available to clients. Designate them during the time-blocking stage and then move prospects only into those evening time slots. I limited my own evening work to Tuesdays only. Every other night of the week my wife could expect me home no later than 6:30 for dinner if I had a 5:15 listing appointment.
Then begin blocking time for DIPA, or direct income-producing activities.
Block time for prospecting and lead follow-up first, and preferably early in the day. I know what you’re thinking, “Aren’t more people home in the afternoon and evening?” Probably so. But will you prospect consistently when you have to do it in the evening? After nearly two decades in real estate, I know for a fact that the answer is no. The fact that more people are home at night doesn’t matter if that’s not when you’re picking up the phone to call them. Schedule calls for morning hours when you can and will make the contacts.
Schedule time slots for appointments next. Determine how many appointments you need to hold and how long they need to run. How long do you need for a listing presentation? How much time do you need to show a Buyer homes in a specific area?
I scheduled appointment slots in one-hour increments, which worked because after my second year in the business I didn’t work with Buyers. When you work with Buyers, you need to plan on longer-lasting appointments. With Sellers, I figured that my typical listing presentation lasted about 30 to 45 minutes. The hour block gave me at least 15 minutes of drive time to reach my next appointment.
I scheduled appointments in the afternoons at 3:15, 4:15 and 5:15 Monday through Thursday. Tuesdays I worked late, and I scheduled appointments at 6:15, 7:15 and 8:15. Whenever I didn’t have a 5:15 appointment, I transferred that block to prospecting time, so I could catch up with people after work.
Once you block appointment slots, you can know exactly when to ask people to meet with you. You can emulate a Doctor’s nurse or Dentist’s receptionist, saying, “I have an opening at 5:15 on Tuesday or 4:15 on Wednesday. Which would be better for you?”
Schedule time for administrative tasks: Phone calls, office meetings, company property tours, and the like. Make a list of your regular, necessary activities and then put them into your time-blocked schedule.
Finally, block some flextime. Flextime helps you to stay on track. It allows you to put out fires, make emergency calls, handle unscheduled but necessary tasks, and still stay on your schedule.
Most Agents who are new to time blocking create schedules that are too rigid. The lack of flexibility causes them to be off their schedules before 10:30 in the morning. From that point, they are then off schedule for the rest of the day.
As you start out, block about thirty minutes of flextime for every two hours of scheduled time in your daily grid. You can always reduce or remove the flextime blocks as your skills and discipline increase.
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