Archive for the ‘The Personal Edge’ Category
Take 5 – and Trust Your Email Marketing
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Take 5 – and Trust Your Email Marketing
Getting to know potential home buyers and sellers is one of the best things that you can do to grow your business. That’s a no-brainer. And the Internet—including email—is an essential way to communicate with prospective buyers and sellers. Again, a no-brainer. Where many agents get stuck, though, is how they use email.
Be Proactive
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Since nearly 3 out of 4 people think hitting the “This is Spam” button in their email is the way to unsubscribe, it’s wise to prevent complaints about you in the first place. Otherwise you may end up on an ISP’s list of suspected spammers. That’s right: spammers aren’t just big businesses. Even you could be listed as a spammer if you’re not careful with your email.
Here are 5 tips to take so you can trust that your email marketing is doing its work:
If one out of five postcards you sent wasn’t seen by its intended recipient, what would you do? You’d find out what went wrong, because you care about your marketing investment. You’d ask, “Did I forget the stamp? Did I have a legitimate address?” It’s important to pay just as much attention to your email marketing.
As real estate agents, we use every tool available to build relationships with prospective buyers and sellers. That’s how we grow our business. Today’s buyers and sellers use computers—so it makes sense for you to use the Internet and email to keep in touch. When you track effectiveness properly maintain your email communications, you can relax, because your online marketing stands the best possible chance for success.
1. Tell ’em what it’s about. Let people know what they can expect from your email by linking to a recent example of your newsletter on your sign-up page. Once they’ve subscribed, send a welcome email that reminds them of your newsletter frequency. Encourage them to add your email to their address book.
2. No means no. If a person requests to unsubscribe, immediately stop sending email. However, many wise agents use the unsubscribe to get in touch personally. Call and ask why they unsubscribed. I’ve heard stories of agents doing this—they find out that the “unsubscriber” only wanted to stop the emails temporarily while on vacation. Leverage this personal contact into an in-person meeting.
3. More is not always better. Yes, it’s essential to keep in touch. However, too much email contact is annoying. Email with an appropriate frequency, then send postcards and make calls from time to time.
4. Beware spam triggers. Certain combinations of words or layouts can trigger spam filters: “Dear friend” for example, or writing in ALL CAPS, using fonts bigger than 14 or bold and red. Avoid unusual fonts—Arial and Verdana common, safe fonts. You may get away with a few triggers, but the more triggers in your email, the more likely it will be filtered. Use a testing program before sending to check for triggers.
5. Watch trends. Establish email delivery benchmarks. Do you know the received rate and open rate for your last email? If you don’t, it’s time to find out and work to improve them. Study any complaints and unsubscribes, looking for patterns. Did you see a spike? When was it—after you sent an email that wasn’t about real estate? Are the unsubscribers new people? If so, maybe you’re not meeting the expectations you set when they signed up.
If one out of five postcards you sent wasn’t seen by its intended recipient, what would you do? You’d find out what went wrong, because you care about your marketing investment. You’d ask, “Did I forget the stamp? Did I have a legitimate address?” It’s important to pay just as much attention to your email marketing.
As real estate agents, we use every tool available to build relationships with prospective buyers and sellers. That’s how we grow our business. Today’s buyers and sellers use computers—so it makes sense for you to use the Internet and email to keep in touch. When you track effectiveness properly maintain your email communications, you can relax, because your online marketing stands the best possible chance for success.
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Smart time management is the secret to a thriving real estate business. Here are the top 10 ways to take control of your schedule so you can close more transactions:
1. Set goals: Create a yearly business plan, then break it down into the goals you’ll need to accomplish each month. This will ensure that you’re motivated to succeed!
2. Prioritize: Determine the tasks needed to accomplish each goal, then make a daily to-do list according to their importance.
3. Stop procrastinating: Today! When you have a prioritized to-do list, do the items in the order they appear—no cheating, no rationalizations. Period.
4. End perfectionism: Know when to stop! It’s tempting to keep fussing with a flyer or follow-up email, but there comes a point where the time spent working on a task is greater than the benefit of your efforts. That’s when you need to stop and move on to the next task.
5. Say no: If you feel a request is unreasonable, takes too much time, or prevents you from accomplishing your goals, politely refuse. If this is difficult for you, practice your refusal aloud to a friend or mirror.
6. Take a break: If you’re burned out or exhausted, you’re wasting your time and money. Better to take a few days of uninterrupted time off than drag on for weeks working half-heartedly.
7. Invest in your skills: Take a seminar, find a coach, read a book. Learning something new can save you time and make you more effective in your business.
8. Focus: Don’t let your mind wander. When you’re working on a task, put all your energy into it. This will help you finish the task more quickly so you can move on to the next one.
9. Ask questions: One of the biggest time-stealers is miscommunication. Make sure you have all the information you need to complete the task before you start.
10. Use technology tools: Spend your time on the face-to-face tasks that earn money. For everything else—such as finding new prospects or sending follow-up emails—use a full-service prospect capture and management system. HouseValues delivers a steady flow of motivated home buyers and sellers plus automated follow-up tools to help you close more business in less time.
When you use these tips to help you manage your schedule, you can achieve the success you want in no time!
Helping more than 10,000 agents across North America manage their time, HouseValues puts agents in touch with exclusive prospective home buyers and sellers, and even helps them manage their contacts, automatically keep in touch with prospects, and enhance their real estate sales and business skills. To find out more (and to get your FREE 2008 Agent Business Plan) go to www.REAgentBusinessPlan.com.
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How to Deal with the Difficult Client Using the Cow Patty Process
by Mark Rosenberger, CSP
It’s bound to happen! Sooner or later a client is going to take their no good, lousy, rotten attitude out on, you guessed it, YOU!
It’s happened (or will) to all of us at one time or another. You’re the target of a client that is determined to unload on you - personally! You pick up the receiver and get the "what for", being chewed from one end to the other. And most likely, you didn’t do a thing, except pick up the phone at the wrong moment. So what can one do to not take the experience personally and maintain a positive attitude?
Use the Cow Patty Process!
The Cow Patty Process is a simple, fun technique for taking the emotion out of the situation and thus permits you to go home without feeling like the center bulls eye of a dart board.
Let’s begin at the beginning:
"Cow": a large domesticated farm animal. You know - "moo, moo". Gives us milk.
"Cow Patty": a leave behind substance from said cow. Cow pie, Meadow muffin, prairie pizza. Something you’d prefer not to step in.
Got the picture? Now that we have the basics covered, let’s leap forward to the process.
Next time an upset client begins the attack and starts to give you the "what for", visualize that they have just thrown at you a - you guessed it - a cow patty! (Hold the phone! Before your skeptic minds discount this entire idea, read the complete article!)
If a cow patty is flying through the room at you, what could you do? You’re right, DUCK! Yet how often do we sit there watching and chanting- "Here comes a cow patty, here comes a cow patty, here comes a cow patty—- splat!" We then spend the rest of the day bent out of shape because one upset client hit us with a cow patty. No more, it’s now time to duck!
Visualize the client has thrown a cow patty at you and DUCK! Let the emotion go by and then take care of the client and the situation. Read that last line again. It’s the key to the process. Let the emotion go by and then take care of the client and the situation!
There is no reason to get hit by the cow patty! You simply mentally duck next time a client begins the emotional bombardment. You let the emotion hit the wall behind you and take care of the client, untouched and cow patty free!
It’s an easy, fun way to change the way you react to the attacks!
Help others avoid the cow patties! Next time you notice a co-worker or family member with their teeth clinched, knuckles white, shoulders up near their ears, eye balls bulging…show them the fake cow patty!
That’s right, hold your hand as if a cow patty were in your grasp and come toward your co-worker or family member! If they know the "Cow Patty" theory, they’ll see your hand and recognize it as the simulated patty. It’s a tremendous tool for helping others see the emotion; helping them let it go by, then taking care of the situation.
A word of caution: If the person is NOT familiar with the Cow Patty Process, DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT, come at them with your hand held in the designated position! They’ll really think you are off base and justifiably so!
So the next time you pick up the phone and hear that highly charged, angry client looking for someone’s hide, don’t get upset…simply DUCK! It’s much more effective than getting hit with another cow patty!
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How Dreams Make You a More Successful Agent
By Kate Kirby, HouseValues, Inc.
Have you ever kicked back in your chair and visualized what your ideal real estate business would look like? This isn’t a silly “New Age” exercise. When you picture what you want, even if it involves a personal jet and taking conference calls sitting on a veranda overlooking the Mediterranean, you are setting goals.
Just like a Fortune 500 business, top agents know they need to set specific, measurable goals to get them where they want to go at the end of the year. Now, yes, it’s true that “Owning a personal jet” isn’t a practical goal. But closing 30 transactions this year is an important step in the direction of owning that personal jet. And making 10 or 20 or 50 new contacts a month is an important step towards getting those 30 transactions a year.
If you think about it, then, each new contact is another rivet in your personal jet.
Here are some suggestions to consider when creating a practical plan for where you dream of your business going:
1. Set Realistic Goals
Decide what you want to accomplish based on a realistic assessment of your market — how many hours you want to work, how much money you want to make and/or transactions you want to close. Also keep in the drawer that list of “dream” goals as well. These dream goals are just as important as the realistic, practical ones. When you’re feeling down in the dumps, it helps to pull out your dream list and look at it—and remember why you chose to build your career around real estate.
2. Make an Action Plan
If you’ve ever taken a road trip into an unfamiliar area, you know that the fastest and easiest way to get to your destination is to map out the route in advance. Figure out what it will take to reach your goals, including a projected advertising budget and a timeline to accomplish each task. Then write it down and review your plan frequently.
3. Be the Big Name
Keep your name and your face in front of your customer as often as possible. Make sure yours is the first name your prospects think of when it’s time to choose an agent and you’ll give yourself the best chance of ultimately winning the business—and your dreams.
Here’s one simple, final suggestion: Stay accountable!
Businesses of every size and type have ups and downs, some of which are within their control and others which aren’t. Celebrate your successes, accept your mistakes and above all, remember that as leader of your business, you can—and must—follow your action plan, track your progress and stay committed to your strategy. It’s your business and your life. Dream big and start planning today to make every year the best year ever.
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The Essentials of Real-Estate Success, Part 3 Processes/Practices
by Doug Walker
Based on The Essentials of Success™ from A-Ha Performance: Building and Managing a Self-Motivated Workforce by Douglas Walker with Steven Sorkin
Sometimes success comes because we see an opportunity and strategically pursue it. We plan our work; work our plan. We create our own disciplined process and stay with it. Undeniably, strategic approaches have a good track record. But what if we’re just not strategic kind of people? Keep reading because we’ll focus in this piece on the Essential for Success™ that is our Process or Practices but we’ll discover that many non-strategic people have found enormous success too. How do they do it?
A number of years ago I was retained to consult with a company that was grossing about $28 million annually. The two owners had been written up as entrepreneurs of the year and now wanted to figure out how to become a $100 million company.
I started the engagement with something called the Seven-S assessment, a way to identify current realities in seven components of an organization:
1. Shared Vision
2. Strategy
3. Skills
4. Staffing
5. Systems
6. Synergies
7. Style
I asked what their vision was. “What would this company look like as a $100 mill. Company?”
“It would be bringing in $100 million dollars/year. Other than that, we’re not quite sure.”
“Well what’s your Strategy for getting to that $100 million dollars?”
“We’ll need to sell more and acquire some other companies.”
“Successful acquisitions are very difficult to pull off. The failure rate is over 75%. Do you have the Skill sets among your current Staff to profitably acquire and integrate other companies? And with current revenue at $28 million, your organization’s sales skills are strong enough for that level, but do you think you have the sales Skills to increase revenue to $100 million?”
“We don’t really have expertise in acquisitions and our sales people are working pretty flat out to keep us at the level we are now, so probably we’d need to improve that skill set.”
“How would your business Systems have to change in order to support that increase of business?”
“Don’t know.”
“You have 2 divisions in your company now, each in a different location and each focused on a different offering. Are there practices in place that maximize the Synergistic sharing of information and insights between those divisions?”
“Not really. The 2 divisions each function like autonomous companies.”
“Have you given any thought to the Style of your company, or companies if that’s really the more accurate picture, and how that’s going to change as you grow?”
“Nope.”
I was puzzled. How did these two guys get to be entrepreneurs of the year when it appeared they had no strategic bone in either of their bodies? I asked. (Asking, by the way, is a really good thing to do when you’re curious about something.) “How did you guys build your company?”
The story boiled down to luck. They were both working together on some minor projects when they learned that a company they knew and had worked with was going to shut down a $7 million dollar division for some reason. These guys managed to buy it at fire sale pricing. Then they heard that another company was going to cut-loose a $21 mill. division in another location… they managed to buy that, too. They had not built their company from scratch. They were in the right place at the right time and noticed an opportunity.
So what was I going to do to help them? They were successful, not strategically, but serendipitously. It contradicted my assumption at that point that success was the result of skillful strategizing.
That evening I put my pondering around what seemed like a paradox on hold and turned on the TV. Some successful rock band was being interviewed. The interviewer said, “Your accomplishment must be beyond your wildest dreams (Vision or Shared Vision).”
“What dreams?” said one. “We were just playing at a bar when in walked some guy with a big ol’ cigar. He heard us play, then came up to us and asked, ‘How would you boys like to be stars?’ We said, ‘What the hell?’ We didn’t have anything better to do.”
That’s when the A-ha came to me. There are 2 ways success comes; Strategically and opportunistically.
Some of us are strategic, like sharks; we pursue goals. Others of us are more leek eels, we wait in the rocks for something to swim by. There are successful sharks and eels in the ocean so both approaches must be valid.
How do we create the practices that maximize our success?
1. Determine our basic success style; Strategic? Opportunistic?
2. Ask our selves; “If I’m basically a strategic kind of person, could I increase my effectiveness by adding some Opportunistic practices… and if I’m basically an opportunistic kind of person, could I increase my effectiveness by adding some Strategic practices.”
3. Strategic:
- Set goals – what do you want?
i. 2 years out
ii. 1 year
iii. 6 months
iv. This month
v. Today
- Identify where you are relative to those goals – what have you got?
- Create “to do lists” to meet today’s goals. (Success IS, to some extent, a numbers game… make those calls.)
- Review what you did at the end of your day – what am I doing?
- Evaluate the effectiveness of your activity and your skills – how is it working?
- Figure out and implement improvements – make a plan for more effective doing as well as for developing and improving skills.
- Implement the new plan
4. Opportunistic:
- Be aware of what you want
- Talk to a lot of people – Participate in associations and events
- Give great service - Think ETS2
i. Eager to Serve
ii. Excited to Share
- Be real nice – Say “yes” as much as possible
- Notice the opportunity in every situation
- Be prepared to act in a principled way on that opportunity
- Synergize with others
Please let me know how you use these ideas. If you implement them on your own, or are already utilizing them, I’d love to learn how they’re working for you. Feedback is a wonderful thing.
Remember, doing doesn’t make the difference… effective doing does.
Doug Walker
A-ha! Performance
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2008 The Opportunity of Education
By Howard Brinton
I’m always energized by the power I feel when surrounded by like-minded top industry professionals who are willing to share business growth tips and strategies that have helped them attain the kinds of careers they never imagined.
When I was coming up as a young Realtor, I would have loved to hear and see what the best in the business were doing to succeed. Back then, such tools were not available and it took me many years to compile the knowledge and experience that I needed in my peak selling year to close more than 470 transactions.
Then one day it hit me. I was fortunate enough to have met many of the top-producing Realtors in the industry and I thought that if they would be willing to share some of their techniques, we could be on to something. In 1989, I interviewed the very first STAR POWER Star and REALTORS® everywhere had the ability to hear these interviews on tape.
Now, 19 years later STAR POWER® Systems issues it’s Star of the Month interview via the STAR POWER Club and eager-to-grow agents internationally benefit from this wealth of collective knowledge.
We all have choices, and one of the choices is what to do about improving business in 2008. Those involved in the STAR POWER network would agree that there is perhaps no better model than learning from those who have reached the pinnacle of industry success and who continue to develop.
Just ask Todd Buckley from Brighton, MI who once drove more than five hours to attend a STAR POWER event with his business partner, Karen Jolley, and two of their team members to hear a group of 13 STAR POWER Stars speak. They went with the intention of improving their systems, learning new marketing ideas, and hearing strategies and concepts they already knew but had forgotten. Four days later, Todd contacted me to say that the team had compiled a huge list of action items that they had prioritized and implemented.
Todd’s is a great success story. He was a single agent for years closing an average of 15 units annually. Then in 2003 he made the decision to attend his first STAR POWER event and his business took off. He adopted this idea of sharing and was recently selected as a 2008 STAR POWER Star himself.
These days, when I speak to audiences of Realtors, I often like to ask audiences some of my favorite questions: “Write down the number of transactions you expect to close in 2008. Do you have that figure? Look at it. Is it realistic? Now, double it. How does that make you feel?”
I then ask the audience members to raise their hands if they feel that the revised figure is achievable. Only select few hands typically appear. The point of the exercise is to break down the glass ceilings we have set for ourselves – to move away from our comfort zones and to undertake initiatives that can actually take us to places we cannot even imagine. Todd is a perfect example of somebody whose ceiling was set (15 units per year), yet when he made the effort to attend our event in 2003 and was surrounded by that empowering group of top agents, he realized that the only thing holding him back from Star-like success was himself.
Now as we prepare for 2008, we all have an opportunity to shatter our glass ceilings and blast ahead into new and unexplored frontiers. Remember, the keys to attaining such growth are:
1. Find someone already achieving the results you want.
2. Do what they do, and the results will come.
Libertyville, IL Star Leslie McDonnell shared that she too had hit a glass ceiling until she attended her first STAR POWER event in 1999 at the recommendation of a friend. The following year, her business doubled. She credits the increase to the implementation of ideas she picked up from the STAR POWER Club.
I am, and have always been, an advocate for education – whether it’s through us here at STAR POWER or another entity – as long as it works for you. The important element is to ensure that your mind embraces change, because there is no “magic pill” that’s going to take you to the business heights you want to attain. Simply hearing the Star interview or attending the event doesn’t cut it. You need to listen carefully and take notes. Develop your discipline, character, consistency, and be open to scrutiny by peers and others. Are you willing to be the leader in your market? Opportunity doesn’t operate in scarcity, but rather in abundance.
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