Words of a Champion
Dirk Zeller
CEO
The quality of your business is contained in the quality of your prospecting. I am sorry I said the “P” word. The more I coach and train Agents, the more I realize there is one thing that separates the top producers who are profitable from the rest. The key word here is profitable. Anyone can bring in business through marketing; the difference is the consistency of their prospecting. These Agents make the conscious decision that they are going to get this prospecting done daily. They do not go home until they complete the most important task for the day.
With continual changes in the marketplace nationally, you cannot afford to neglect your prospecting. You will need to, at a minimum, call your past clients and sphere daily. Here is the real truth . . . it’s not that hard. We make it more difficult mentally than it is. All it takes is a little discipline and determination to daily achieve success.
I could give you examples of many of our clients who have put this into practice. They began contacting 5 past clients a day and, with the right approach, have increased their income by 100K. Some have even increased their income 200K or more. Why would you let 5 little contacts a day stop you from earning another $100,000 next year? In the end, that makes little sense.
We elevate the fear of rejection and decrease the feeling of success and self-worth. We make rejection too big and painful, which. in effect, makes the reward of success too small. What would you do with an extra $100,000 next year? What trip would you take? What new house would you buy? What investments would you make? For most Agents, their life would be transformed.
The only thing that is stopping you right now is you. You are stopping your success because of the fear of rejection. In the end, rejection isn’t final or fatal. Don’t treat it that way. It is merely a part of the game we play.
To Your Achievement of GREATER success,
Dirk Zeller, CEO
RealEstateChampions.com
Four Core Plans
There are four fundamental plans that any Agent needs to construct to increase their production and quality of life dramatically. It doesn’t matter where you are on the success continuum; you must construct and execute these four core plans or models. Whatever level of success you at in your career today is because of where you are in relation to the construction of these plans. If you are a new Agent, you have a lot of work ahead. If you are inconsistent in your production and income, you might have a rough outline but few details. If you are consistent in your earnings, you have filled in a few of the details, but the big growth for you will come when you complete the construction. If you are already a Champion, you are in the fine-tuning stage. You must be vigilant in your focus to execute and tweak your four core plans. The four plans each Agent must have are time management, business management, personal management, and activity management.
Time management is always ranked as one of the top three problems in surveys we conduct with Agents, Brokers, and Real Estate Companies. I get asked to speak on time management more than any other topic. The implementation of a solid time management plan alone will increase your revenue by well over 30% in the next year if you area new or inconsistent Agent.
A business management plan is essential to determine the results of your efforts. What does the financial score board say about your business? Too many Agents run businesses that are only marginally profitable. That’s bad enough. The worst part is that they don’t even know it. They don’t have a system of checks and balances to monitor the business results. As you expand your business and include more people, marketing, and advertising, you must be able to monitor the physical and financial results of your team’s efforts. You must have clear standards and practices to evaluate performance and results.
A personal management system is probably the hardest area to work on. This one takes dead aim at you. It is where you are personally in your journey of success. Are you investing in your largest business asset . . . you? Are you holding yourself accountable enough for the things you need to do? Are you able to look at yourself and your performance with a discerning eye?
Champion Rule: A Champion Agent is honest with themselves about where they fall short.
I am not saying that a Champion is in a constant state of self-depravation. They just have the willingness to be able to see their shortcomings and work to change them. If they feel they are not as strong on the listing presentation as they should be, they admit it and work to improve it. The people who are Champion Performers are most honest with themselves. They are able to ask themselves this series of questions on a regular basis to create urgency and change.
- What are my strengths?
- What are my weaknesses?
- What new behaviors do I need to embrace to achieve a higher level of success?
- What are the key abilities I need to possess to unlock my true potential?
- Why am I not taking the action I need to take?
These are all the questions a Champion would ask themselves at least quarterly to see how they are progressing. The goal in life is progression . . . moving forward. Earl Nightingale defined success as “the progressive realization of a worthy goal or worthy ideal.” Your progressive journey to the Champion level of income, quality of life, business, and family is worthy. It’s worthy of the investment of time and energy.
I want to share with you my favorite question for Champion Agents. It’s focused on improvement but also on the fact that there are priorities. The question is, “What’s the one thing that, if you mastered it right now, would make the biggest difference in your life?”. That is a Champion question for a Champion Agent. It focuses us on our most significant barrier to greater success. We have to look at what creates the biggest return for us if we are willing to change. This question makes us recognize that we could change but might select a less valuable area to change. This lower-priority area would produce a diminished result.
Champion Rule: A Champion focuses on removing the limiting step . . . now!
Through years of coaching top performing Agents, I have come to realize how powerful removal of the limiting step can be. Each one of us is faced with a bottle neck. It’s a choke point right in front of us that we need to remove. Until we remove the limiting step or choke point, our improvement and change will be minimal. You will make strides of improvement, but it won’t be explosive, exponential, or vast improvement. Major breakthroughs in business and life come from removal of our limiting step. We are all facing one right now. We have to be willing to find that one and remove it.
For example, a few years ago, I was working with a successful Agent in Champaign, IL. He was the top Agent in the marketplace. The challenge was his profitability could have been a lot better. He was a veteran Agent who worked mainly by referral for over twenty years. We traced his problem to over-expenditure in marketing, advertising, and personal time invested into each listing. We didn’t stop there because that wasn’t the limiting step. We traced it back to the fact that his days on the market average for properties was much higher than the board’s. This longer marketing time increased his expenses. It also influenced his average list price to sale price. On average, he had to do 2.35 price reductions on the 123 homes he listed each year before they sold.
His limiting step was his price counseling segment of his listing presentation. The Sellers talked him into taking the home for more, even though he was the #1 Agent in the market, worked for the #1 company, had over twenty years of experience, and did mostly referral business. Mastering that one area in the next few weeks dramatically changed his business and life. He netted over $5,000 a month more, cut his days on the market by 50%, and increased his list price to sale price ratio by 7% in just a few months. He also enjoyed the business more because he was spending less time getting price reductions and had happier clients because they were not set up for failure.
What is the one thing that, if you mastered it now, would make the biggest difference in your life?
Lastly, we must construct an activity management plan. This is where each day’s activities are monitored, counted, and measured compared to your results. There is clearly a cause and effect relationship between activity and results. The question is what are the ratios of connection. What can you expect the return to be?
I was working with a client in Detroit, Michigan. Because the local economy has been affected by the automobile industry, the market has toughened substantially. By reviewing his activity management plan, we determined that the number of leads he was generating through his marketing efforts and prospecting efforts had dropped. In three months, his leads per thousand mail pieces had declined by 33%. His conversion ratio on those leads had dropped another 18%. So he was getting fewer leads overall, but the lead quality and conversion rate had also declined. His telephone prospecting leads didn’t drop as much but still showed degradation at a 21% drop in lead generation and an 11% drop in conversion.
We concluded that he needed to double the amount of contacts he was making in the mail and telephone lead generation areas to make-up for the marketplace change. I can tell you he wasn’t excited about having to do it, but he could clearly understand why he needed to do it. That’s the value of a good activity management system.
Champion Rule: When performance is measured, performance improves.
If you want to become a Champion Agent, you need to measure your performance. You need to count, track, and calculate your daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly numbers for contacts, leads, appointments, listings, and sales. The sheer act of measuring raises the awareness and improves the results you achieve.
Champion Rule: When performance is measured and reported, performance improves faster!
As Champions, we want to move beyond the awareness level of improvement. By reporting your performance to your Broker, your spouse, another Agent, or your Coach, you increase the speed of change. You increase the speed of your income and earnings. You must have a way to report your performance and efforts to someone who will help you or hold you accountable for what you need to do.
That is certainly a role that we at Real Estate Champions know well since we are one of the longest running, most established coaching companies in the real estate industry. The vast majority of Champion Performers had coaches or at least mentors at one time or another. I firmly believe that, as an Agent trying to achieve Champion level performance, you need to consider a Coach. I would encourage you, before you make a decision on a Coach, whether internal (through a Coach inside your Real Estate Company) or external (through a coaching company), go to our website www.RealEstateChampions.com to really understand what coaching is and isn’t. There are many imposters who are selling basic training or marketing programs dressed up as coaching. We have the tools to help you construct the four fundamental plans to increase your production and quality of life significantly.
Pressure Proofing Your Business
We are all under the gun every day in real estate sales. Most of us get up every morning unemployed. We need to go out and find a person to buy and sell with everyday. How do we “pressure proof” our business? We must put ourselves in the position where we are always winning. When we are on a listing appointment, and we are struggling with the seller, we must believe they will sign the listing before we leave. We must know during our prospecting block that we will turn up a new listing or new buyer every day. Let me share with you a few ideas to make your business “pressure proof” and successful daily.
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Trust Your Skills and Abilities
We all go through droughts or slumps in our business. I see Agents who close big volume who stop cheering themselves on if they have not listed a home in a week. They start to doubt their abilities. They start to make dramatic changes in a panic. You have cultivated certain skills and abilities that work for you. Just because they did not work today or this week does not mean you should make wholesale changes. You should not give up on what brought you to the dance. People have a tendency to change course too often in life. Set a solid course and trust in your skills and abilities.
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Gain Greater Trust Through Practice
In my twenties, I competed in racquetball professionally all over the United States. When I was having problems with my passing shots, I didn’t give up. I would practice for hours hitting thousands of passing shots to every corner of the court. A few weeks later, I would be competing in a match, and the shot I had been practicing could win a point. I was on autopilot and would hit the shot for a win. The hours of practice allowed me to be “pressure proof” during the game. All good athletes know about this skill.
What if we applied this concept in real estate? What if we practiced game type situations? If we practiced the listing presentation daily, or we role-played objections that regularly came from buyers and sellers, would that lead us to “pressure proof” our business? Wouldn’t it be nice having the response come out on autopilot for almost every situation? What would that skill do for the trust you have in yourself? Your performance would increase, as would your results.
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We Need to have “Positive Addiction”
Psychology expert, William Glasen, had a concept called “Positive Addiction”. The concept was simply that the mind can become addicted to positive action and positive results. As an example, you can become positively addicted to running, working out, learning, reading, writing, or anything you do well.
His theory was when you do something well, and you enjoy doing it, you will experience a rush of endorphins in your body – the same kind of endorphin rush we have all heard about as a “runner’s high”. The endorphins in your brain create a feeling of well-being and happiness. Then your mind remembers this elevated state and motivates you to repeat the activities that gave you that feeling of well-being.
We truly can become addicted to taking listings, selling homes, prospecting, etc., etc. As long as your mind associates something you do well and enjoy doing with the endorphin rush, it will try to create the circumstances or activities with regularity. You truly can become addicted to positive, constructive activities. That certainly would be a valuable addiction to have.
To enhance that addiction, you need to develop a greater trust through practice. The practice phase leads to the other successes. Practice will help you gain greater trust even during a slump. You can achieve what you desire - just trust in yourself. Develop the “Positive Addiction” to success today.
Practice the skills you need to succeed daily. Doing so will lead you to being “Pressure Proof” in a very short time.
Primary Tool For Realtors
We have had tremendous advancement in our industry in the last ten years. Realtors have more tools at their disposal than ever before. We have Internet sites, MLS, contact managers, blast e-mails, and blackberries. These are all great sales tools, but they aren’t the best. The best sales tool, after all of these changes, is still the phone. It’s also the tool used most infrequently by the majority of agents for prospecting and lead follow-up.
For anyone in sales, there are only four ways to increase production. Those four are: number of contacts, method of contacts, quality of prospects, and quality of the message. The phone directly relates to number of contacts and method of contacts.
The phone allows a more efficient means of personal contact than other avenues. Agents need to understand . . . numbers matter in real estate sales! We are in a full contact sport. If we make more contacts, we make more money . . . period!
The method of contact also matters. In the early 2000s in real estate, agents used more mailers and e-mail blasts as their primary form of communication with prospects and clients. This decision to be less personal hadn’t shown up in the box score of sales, only because the market was incredible. Nothing ever remains the same – markets change. We must always increase the personal contact in our business - the personal contact of the phone and face-to-face appointments.
No matter what profession you analyze, there is one primary tool and a large group of secondary tools. My father was a Dentist for over 30 years. He had one primary tool and many secondary tools. The explorers, dental chair, gold, amalgam fillings, drills, polishers, and assistants were all secondary tools. His primary tool was his hands and the skill they contained.
As Realtors, we have laptops, pagers, blackberries, Internet sites, MLS, CMA’s, fax machines, e-mail, and marketing pieces. These are all secondary tools. Our primary tool is our words and how they are delivered.
The agents and companies that embrace a sales focus will dominate their market. The agents and companies that decide to take dead aim on sales skill improvement in prospecting, lead follow-up, appointment settings, and client consultation appointments will see growth in revenue and market share.
In our technology driven industry, the phone is still the greatest sales tool ever. It’s natural to hope that any new fangled gizmo will help us avoid the hard work of the phone, but we have lost sight of its importance.
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