Oct
19
Need a Damn Good Referral System to Save Your Career?
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Ever wonder why you seem to run into the same deal-destroying problems with prospects? Or hear the same bridge-burning complaints from your clients?
Or maybe you’d simply be happy to learn how to find clients who always walk away satisfied after a transaction with you…
Think about it: what’s it worth to you to find and nurture a handful–say, I don’t know, 100–clients who love you to death?
Who can’t stop talking about you…
And who send you so much business that you often wonder if there’s some kind of law against getting so many leads?
This would make you happy, yes?
Deep inside you and I both know that this kind of arrangement–referrals to the max–is the most sublime way to earn a living.
But here’s the sad part: you haven’t bribed or manipulated that situation into being doing things you are currently doing.
And probably won’t anytime soon. Man, that’s frustrating.
See, one of the chronic problems with sales, advertising, business and marketing–whether in real estate or not–is bad information.
Bad information in the sense that what you know about your client is off.
Way off.
And when you have bad information on prospects and clients, you will constantly concoct strategies that sail clear over their mark…
Or peter out well before they reach their destination.
Here’s the good news, though. You can overcome this failure.
How? Easy. Think like your prospect and client.
Learn everything you can about them. Better yet, spend a year or two in their shoes. Confront the issues and problems they see. Burn into your mind a feeling of what it’s like to live like them.
A 2004 Chicago Sun-Times article gives a vivid example of this in the auto industry…
Yuji Yokoya, a Toyota engineer, responsible for revamping the Toyota Sienna minivan for the North American market drove from Anchorage, Alaska to Mexico…
And from Florida to California…in a Sienna mini-van.
The Chicago Sun-Times says:
Crossing the Mississippi River by bridge, he [Yokoya] noted that the Sienna’s crosswind stability needed improvement. He observed excessive steering drift while traversing gravel roads in Alaska, and the need for a tighter turning radius along the crowded streets in Santa Fe. Driving through Glacier National Park, he decided the handling needed to be crisper. He also made an all-wheel-drive option a priority, along with more interior space and cargo flexibility.
Finally, he decided that the new Sienna would have to be a minivan that families, and especially kids, could live in for extended periods of time. Upgrading seat quality became a priority, along with “kid friendly” features such as a roll-down window for second-row passengers, an optional DVD entertainment centre and a conversation mirror so parents could monitor what was going on in the back seat.
As you probably know, the Sienna has “an excellent reputation for overall quality” and “long-term dependability”. Edmunds says as much.
And Toyota is simply a brand with hot cars and hot technology. Year after year it fires on all cylinders.
Getting into the heads of your prospects and clients will allow you to give prospects the best possible solution for whatever problem they’re facing…
To persuade effortlessly, bringing to the table vast hands-on experience with all kinds of markets. In all kinds of economic conditions.
But you’ll need to go beyond traditional market research.
Instead of just combing through numbers and plowing through a stack of reports, you’ll need to get off your duff and speak to your prospects and clients.
Do it with no other agenda than trying to figure out what they like. And why.
In other words, create a persona.
Watch how they work. See what a typical day looks like for them. Find out how they interact with their families. How a home integrates into their lives.
As you can imagine, this will take a little work. But it will pay dividends. It will make you a murderously good real estate pro who will book up quickly…
Because people like to work with wise, friendly people.
And once you lock into the ebb and flow of your prospects and clients, you’re business will be on the fast track.
That’s a good place to be, right? Right. And when you get to the point where you want more…where you want to slam the pedal to the metal…check out one of the plainest, but potent referral systems around.
It might be a good idea to just check it out now. Get familiar with it so you’ll be ready when you need it.
Leave a comment if this post was helpful or if you have anything you’d like to add. And if you like what you read, subscribe to the real estate marketing Blog by email or news feed.
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Oct
9
How to Become Highly Prosperous in a Shaky Market
Filed Under Real Estate Prospecting Ideas | Leave a Comment
Up to this point your ways of working may have been successful. But here’s something to think about:
What can you, as a real estate agent, do that would challenge the status quo, overturn your market or even persuade a competitor’s client to work with you?
See, out of the 43 businesses that were showcased in the book In Search of Excellence 14 were out of business in two years. BusinessWeek then studied these 14 failed companies…and do you know what they found out?
“Failure to change” was the main theme for going out of business with these companies.
What does that say to you?
Are you in a position to change? To challenge the status quo? To shake up your market and be a trend setter instead of a passive causality?
6 Unconventional Questions to Help You Become a Market Shaker
Forget widely accepted principles such as blind optimism and arrogant self-promotion. Instead, break out of the box by asking yourself these unconventional questions that will lead you down a different, unused, but highly prosperous, path to success.
- What worse case scenario could happen, that seems impossible, but if it did happen, what would I do?
- What alternatives to marketing, technology, industry, prospecting, organization are out there…alternatives people are not thinking about?
- What pain are my client’s and prospects GOING to experience in the near future? And how can I provide a solution to that pain?
- What am I personally doing in my business or life that if I don’t change now could provide significant pain in the near future?
- What did other companies do during a recession or sagging growth to survive? How did they change? How did they adapt?
- Finally, what rules can I break? What rules can I rewrite?
The best performers in any industry are the agitators, the pioneers, the rule breakers and the game-changers.
In essence, it’s about staying fresh. So ask your self theses questions. Forecast the future. The ability to peer around corners will pay off big for you.
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Oct
8
Go ahead. Admit. You’ve got great dreams of being a fanatical success in real estate.
You want to make seven figures a year. You want the eight car garage. A second house on the sea. The boat.
You want enough money in the bank to run a small country. Send your children to the best schools. Buy a 747 so you can fly all of your friends to your private island off the coast of South Africa.
Okay. Maybe that last one was a stretch.
But you catch my drift. We’ve all got wild dreams. Big ones, to boot. And this includes your clients.
So often we forget that the people we want to attract have dreams. We forget that they are are dreaming and scheming.
Scheming in a good way. But scheming nonetheless. They want to be successful. Prestigious. Healthy. Liked.
Or perhaps they just want a roof over their family’s head. A roof they can call their own.
We call that the “American Dream.”
So, with this in mind, let’s look at three ways you can help beef up just about anything you do–whether it’s writing an ad or pitching during a listing presentation–and help your prospects and clients understand that you can help them reach their wildest dream.
1. Paint the Vision for the Prospect.
Within the headline or the opening copy or at the start of your presentation, tell them about the benefit they’ll get from doing what you want them to do: living well, saving money, entertaining grandly. This is the big promise.
2. Offer the “Prize” Inside.
Either within the same headline or within the first few lines of copy or just minutes into a presentation, introduce your offer as the means for obtaining the desired end: the infinity pool that makes you to live well, the low property taxes that allow you to save money, or the finished basement with wet bar and 50 inch plasma screen that allows you to entertain grandly.
3. Go On the Quest.
This is the fun part. Here you get to tell the story of how and why your offer, in Step 2, fulfills the desire in Step 1. You’re pulling all the pieces together here.
For example:
Living well means owning an infinity pool. Posh hotels in Singapore with infinity pools attract actors and presidents and singers. And actors like to live well, don’t they? They like to relax in a landscape that’s unique and something only a few people can afford to enjoy. Infinity pools are all about living well.
By the way, if you need help creating pictures like that, we have great resources here to help you. But also consider picking up a travel magazine like Conde Nast Traveller.