MEDIOCRE; IT’S A WORD MOST people hate. For real estate agents it’s a time, a phase in their career, they want to skip past quickly. Josh Phegan explains how you can make the big leap from good to great.
SO HOW DO you leapfrog past the point in your career where things are moving along okay but not setting the world on fire?
What do you need to do to turn an average number of listings that sell for an average price in an average timeframe into mammoth listings that sell for record prices in quick succession?
In short, how do you take things to the next level and list more and sell more for more?
You need to have a goal.
You need to want to shift gears and go from being a good agent to being a great agent. Without a goal, and a plan to reach that goal, you have nothing to strive for and nothing to motivate you towards success.
Once you have a goal it’s time to set your mantra.
I always recommend to the agents I coach that they commit to doing one thing really well – serving the customer. It doesn’t matter whether you work in a prestige market or blue-collar suburbs; if you serve your clients well, success will follow.
There are three key areas you need to improve to propel yourself from being a good agent to being a great agent.
PROSPECTING
It’s vitally important to get your marketing in order so that you can ship specific content to specific customers and maximise your database value.
You need to be relevant, frequent and consistent when prospecting. Tailor your marketing to your clients instead of sending out the same pamphlet or email to everyone.
A vendor or a new homeowner will be more interested to know that the house around the corner sold for a record price than reading about a property 10 suburbs away. Think locally; tell clients about events in their street, their neighbourhood and their suburb.
Relevant marketing and prospecting naturally flows on to frequent prospecting. Prospecting isn’t a ‘sometimes’ thing; it’s an ‘all the time’ thing.
I urge my agents to use the ‘one day, one week, one month, one year’ approach to frequent marketing and prospecting. That means hop on the phone and have a chat with your client at each of these intervals. Any longer and it may have been too long between drinks.
You also need to be consistent in your marketing, so set a standard you want to achieve and stick to it. It often helps to set up a marketing calendar to determine what material goes out and when.
LISTING
A listing presentation is your chance to sell yourself and your skills and win the listing. But where a lot of agents go wrong is approaching the listing with one-dimensional glasses and only talk about themselves and their successes.
While it’s good to let potential vendors know you’ve set the record price for their suburb, it’s even more important to explain what this means for them. You need to know how to identify the needs of the customer and pitch specifically to those needs and desires.
It’s also critical to know how to use powerful visuals to sell your key concepts which set you apart from your competition. So instead of using an auction photo where you had two bidders, use the photo where six bidders were spread among a crowd of 60 interested onlookers.
It’s also important to present the right mix of urgency and empathy when dealing with your clients. Of course you want to win the listing quickly and get the property to market, but don’t run roughshod over your clients because you’ll never win.
Instead, temper the sense of urgency with understanding of your clients’ thought processes, concerns, questions and emotions. Meeting their needs will ultimately meet your needs.
CLEARANCE
Achieving more listings generally translates to more sales. But it’s hard to get more and more listings when you’re still working on achieving sales on properties that have been languishing on the market.
Great agents know how to reduce the days on market. This not only helps achieve the very best sale price; it improves stock turnover and allows you to meet more people more often.
Meeting more people more often means more listings more often. So put yourself in a position where more people can see you and meet you. Go to open homes, and follow up on every phone and internet enquiry. As your popularity grows, so will the number of people wanting to use your services.
Another tactic to sell more properties for more money is to create pre-market demand. Source buyers who have missed out on previous properties and draw their interest to one of your new properties. Buyers want to buy what others want.
Once you’ve moved from being a good agent to the top of your field, the key is to stay there.
Remember, you need to be humble and hungry.
