Success as a Real Estate Agent For Dummies. Zeller Dirk
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Success as a Real Estate Agent For Dummies - Zeller Dirk страница 5

Название: Success as a Real Estate Agent For Dummies

Автор: Zeller Dirk

Издательство: Автор

Жанр: Зарубежная образовательная литература

Серия:

isbn: 9781119371854

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ that more than 95 percent of new agents give. In fact, more than 90 percent of experienced agents don’t win points with their answers, either. Only a rare few agents see customer creation as the golden approach that it is.

       Rule #1: It’s about lead generation

      You have to be excellent at customer development and customer service. However, in terms of priority, you have to first be exemplary at lead generation. Following are a few reasons:

      ❯❯ You can’t serve customers if you don’t create customers in the first place. And because customer-service excellence results from customer-service experience, customer development is a necessary prerequisite to outstanding customer service.

      ❯❯

Most consumers have been provided with such poor service that their expectations are remarkably low. When service providers do what they say they’ll do in the agreed-upon timeframe, consumers are generally content with the service they receive. An Internet-based customer, which is a growing segment, wants ease of service, faster service, and lower-cost service. The truth is that competing on the first two is better than the lower-cost service model. The real estate industry is more personalized in the service it renders than many other Internet-based businesses. Responsiveness is one of the keys to success in the Internet realm. Certainly you want to develop the kind of expertise that delivers exemplary, outstanding service, but if you commit from the get-go to do what you said you’d do when you said you’d do it, your delivery will be better than most.

      ❯❯ Between creating customers and delivering service, customer creation is the more complex task. Customer creation requires sales skills and ongoing, consistent, persistent prospecting for clients. It requires marketing, promotion, and branding of yourself and your service offerings. To develop customers inexpensively and effectively, you have to gain the level of skill and comfort necessary to pick up the phone and call people you know (or even people you don’t know) to ask them for the opportunity to do business with them or to refer you to others who may be in the market for your service. It also requires a level of encouragement and interaction via social media avenues. You need to be able to engage with Facebook to connect with people you know. You also need to be effective in marketing your message online through targeted ads and boosted posts. Additionally, you must be watching for clues about life changes (think: new baby, kids going off to college, divorce) in those social-media interactions and platforms.

      ❯❯ If you attract the right kinds of customers into your business, your clients will match well with your expertise and abilities, and service will become an easier and more natural offering. If you attract the right type of customers, you’ll also reap greater quantity and quality of referrals.

       Developing sales ability to win customers

      

The single most important skill for a real estate agent is sales ability, and sales ability is how you win customers. Your sales ability is based on how effective you are in generating prospects, following up on those prospects to secure appointments, preparing for those appointments, conducting the appointments to secure an exclusive agency contract, and then providing service to that recently created client. People also base your ability on how quickly you can accomplish all of this.

      Because you’re holding this book, I’m willing to bet that you’ve either just come out of training to receive your real estate license or you’re in the early days of your career. In either case, decide right now to master the skills of selling in order to fuel your success.

      In my view, sales skills in the real estate industry are at the lowest level I’ve seen in 30 years. So much effort and emphasis has been placed on technology and social-media training in real estate that companies and agents have lost their way through the sales skills and sales strategies that are foundational to success in a sales-based industry.

      You might be a younger new real estate agent. That means you are more native to technology. It also means you naturally communicate through technology platforms, but may lack the face-to-face interpersonal skills that older real estate agents grew up with. Typically, selling in real estate is done, even in the technological world, face-to-face. According to NAR, 67 percent of buyers buy through the first agent they meet with.

      It’s hard to believe that probably 95 percent of agents lack top-level sales skills. In my career in training and coaching, I’ve met hundreds of thousands of agents. Very few, even at the top echelon of earnings, have had any formalized sales training. Whenever I speak to agents, I always ask the audience how many have taken any formalized sales training, and I usually see only a few hands out of the hundreds in the room.

      The other reason I know sales skills are lacking is that I coach some of the best and highest-earning agents in the world, and even they believe their sales skills can use improvement. Many agents record their prospecting sessions or listing presentations, but I have yet to meet one who feels that they’ve nailed their sales skills. The difference between these high-earning agents and other agents is that the high-earning agents realize that sales skills are vital to success, and they continuously seek excellence in this area.

HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED

      Years ago, salespeople were taught that a great presentation involved making the case, going for an early and repeated close, and then bullying the client into submission to secure the deal. Believe it or not, some trainers in the real estate industry still teach this antiquated sales model, which resembles verbal judo more than client development.

      Look at the following breakdown of a great presentation today, compared to what one looked like in days long past.

      The big difference: Today’s best agents spend nearly three-quarters of the presentation giving prospects a reason to say yes – by focusing on the prospect’s situation and needs and how the agent can provide the best solution. Yesterday’s agents spent virtually no time defining their clients’ situations or their own unique solutions. Instead, they spent nearly three-quarters of the presentation making the sale and going for a high-pressure close. We’ve come a long way!

      

To follow the high-earning agent’s example, make it your priority to develop and constantly improve your sales skills for the following reasons:

      ❯❯ To secure appointments: Chapter 8 provides practically everything you need to know about winning leads and appointments through prospecting and follow-up activities.

      ❯❯ To persuade expired and for-sale-by-owner listings to move their properties to your business: Chapter 10 is full of secrets and tips to follow as you pursue this lucrative and largely untouched field.

      ❯❯ To make persuasive presentations that result in positive buying decisions: Chapter 12 helps you with every step from pre-qualifying prospects to planning your presentation. It’s packed with tips for perfecting your skills, addressing and overcoming objections, and ending with a logical and successful close.

       A real estate market won’t dictate your success

      According to the National Association of Realtors, more than 40 percent of agents didn’t close a single transaction last year, and another 20 percent closed only one transaction. This clearly demonstrates the lack of sales and lead-generation skills in the industry.

      СКАЧАТЬ