In This Issue...
Words of a Champion
Dirk Zeller
CEO
There is a fine line between process and results. These two key words battle in our mind on a regular basis. We want the result now without going through the process. That’s the society we live in – everything fixed easily and quickly with no pain. If you don’t believe me, let me prove it.
In the last fifteen years late night infomercials have become common. There are hundreds of them on every night in every town and every city across the country. When you evaluate them, you see that 80% of them fit into two categories:
- Get rich quick with no effort.
- Lose weight without effort (no controlling of food intake or exercise)
Our society loves these instant success models in life . . . where there is no price to be paid for the success we desire. As REALTORS®, we are no different. We want results without creating a good process. The line between results and process is a razor’s edge. It’s a very difficult place to walk and keep your balance. If we get too focused on the result, we become completely attached to the outcome. We let the unmotivated client control our time because we need the deal. We hold onto something that we should let go of. We keep the leads, appointments, and listings that have little chance of success because we have nothing else. Often, the process of new lead creation is weak, so we attach completely to the results.
For some of us, we focus on the process: the perfect lead definition, the perfect mail piece, the perfect system for this or that. Sometimes, we think too much, and we don’t have enough action. Sometimes, we spend so much time aiming the gun that we never fire it. Sometimes, we’ve just got to step up and pull the trigger. Nike created a great slogan ten years ago: Just do it! That should be our mantra!
We need to blend these two concepts together. We need to build the process that works well. It just doesn’t have to be perfect. Then we need to focus on action to get the result. If we have the result fixed clearly in our minds, we can achieve the desired goal. Make sure you evaluate which you have trouble with. We each have trouble with either the result or the process. Your behavioral style will determine your problem area. Generally, high Dominants and Influencers are results-oriented people and struggle with the process. These types of people want the results; they don’t have time for the system. Results are all that matter. The high Steady and high Compliant people are process oriented and struggle with the results. They love developing the systems to perfection. They can’t work on getting results until the systems are perfect.
Make sure to identify your strengths and weaknesses in these areas. The first step to mastery is awareness; then create time daily for systems building and results activities like prospecting and lead follow-up.
To Your Achievement of GREATER success,
Dirk Zeller, CEO
RealEstateChampions.com
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Daily Deposits In Yourself
What is the most important asset you own? Is it that wonderful home you live in? Is it the beautiful car that you drive to and from your listing appointments? Is it your investment account of stocks?
We spend so much time investing in money and the tangible things we are trying to acquire in life that we fail to recognize the most important asset we own. Your most important asset is not your money . . . it’s you.
How much time and money are you investing in you? Do you have a set time every day to invest in yourself? Are you making daily deposits in you?
There are a couple of key areas in your life that you should make daily deposits into. Each of these areas is essential to building a better you.
Physical: We need to move physically daily to be at peak performance. There have been quite a few studies showing that our American society is more over weight than ever in our history. We ultimately eat too much and move too little.
How do you rate yourself physically? Are you on track or off track? What do you need to do to get back where you should be? What do you need to cut out? What do you need to add to your diet and exercise routine? Make a decision and a commitment right now to begin. Write down right now when and what you are going to do to change your physical attributes.
Relational: This asset of being able to interact with other people is truly a blessing. We often fail to invest the necessary time, energy, and love to create growth and abundance. Even the plants in our yard need attention to bring forth the explosive blooms we enjoy. Unfortunately, sometimes we can pay more attention to our plants than we do to our children, spouse, or significant relationships in our lives. My question is, are you on the mark with your relationships? Is there someone who needs more water and fertilizer in your life? What are you going to do about it? When?
Spiritual: I truly believe we are spiritual beings. Our spirituality can be the first part of our life to become neglected. The reason is we don’t have someone saying, “Pay attention to me.” Your body will often tell you when your clothes don’t fit. Your spouse or children often speak up when they are neglected. Many times spiritual beliefs will just let us stray. They don’t cry out, “Pay attention to me!” When we wake up later dramatically off the track in our spiritual life, we will say, “How did I get here?”
Mental: The asset of our mind is incredible. We have been blessed with incredible capacity. Most of us are just using a small percentage of our capacity. I truly believe the goal for each of us is to play the game of life to the level of potential that we possess. We have all been gifted with vast untapped resources. What are you doing to mine those resources regularly?
The barrier for all of us to achieve the abundance in all accounts of our life is lack of commitment. That lack of commitment is what stops each of us from achieving our goals and the life we desire. We have to be prepared to pay the price to achieve what we want in each of these categories: physical, relational, spiritual, and mental. We must be prepared to make that absolute stand and commitment that nothing is going to stop us from achieving our goals and dreams in life. Are you ready to start today?
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Disciplines of a Champion
Start each day focused on the daily success of your business. You want to begin each day by reviewing your business plan. Focus in on the daily activities that will lead you to the successful result you have set forth in your plan. Long-term success is built on top of achieving daily performance standards – for weeks and months at a time. If your business plan is not broken down to the daily activities or daily performance standards, you should take the time to do so now. I call these daily activities “The Disciplines of a Champion”. We each have activities that, if left undone daily, will cause our business to suffer.
Some of the Disciplines of a Champion could be:
- Prospecting for a specific time period daily
- Doing lead follow-up
- Contacting a certain number of past clients
- Spending time in personal development
- Practicing scripts and dialogs
The Disciplines of a Champion are quantifiable and trackable. They are a specific amount of time or a specific number that must be achieved. To have power, the disciplines must set the time frame or the quality. It is too easy for us to opt out and not accomplish our goals without concrete parameters.
Next, you need to evaluate whether you are ahead or behind for this week. Then create the strategy to catch up if you are behind or focus on maintaining the current strategy and direction that has kept you on plan or ahead. Too often, we know we are behind and let it go for too long without a change. You must react and change quickly to catch up. We often do not raise the level of our intensity or increase our work output until it is too late. If you get too far behind and are spending tremendous amounts of time inflicting wounds on yourself, change the plan.
Always have a Plan B. There is no embarrassment to working a Plan B. Often Plan B is the better plan because you can invest the mistakes you made in Plan A. Edison tried over 10,000 different elements in his light bulb before one worked. What would have happened had he stopped after Plan A?
Zero in on your area of success. People are paid very well on the few things they do very well. That is one of the best things about the field of selling real estate. There are so many ways to earn an outstanding income. Do what you do very well. We coach our clients to develop three to four areas of specialization in the real estate field and work to project their skills in these areas. Do not be a generalist in a specialized world. The jack-of-all-trades is also the master of none. You are highly skilled in a few specific areas of real estate sales. If you have only one or two areas, you need to begin to learn and add another area or two to give you balance. The possibilities are truly endless when you become a specialist. Here are some ideas of specialization:
- Expired Listings
- Out of Area Owners
- FSBO’s
- Relocation
- Tenant Occupied Properties
- REO Bank Owned
- Multiplexes
- New Construction
- Investment Property
- Empty Nesters
- 1st Time Home Buyers
- Prospect Divorce Attorneys
There is an endless supply of opportunities to become the recognized expert in your area in a few categories. I could list three pages of categories, but you get the idea.
Your success in your real estate career must be built from the ground up. Pour a solid foundation of daily disciplined goals and activities. These daily disciplines, or Disciplines of a Champion, will set you on the path to success in your career. Review and analyze your progress daily. Do not be afraid to adopt a Plan B if needed. Create a few areas of specialty. Decide what you enjoy doing and do well. Then zero in and take dead aim for the target of being the recognized expert in your area.
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Increasing Sales Production Through Quality of the Prospect
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!
Quality of the prospect
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.
The quality of the prospect dramatically influences your margins in your business.
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