Michael Sheargold is a respected business coach and performance expert. He has completed thousands of coaching sessions in his career. How does your attitude and productivity stack up against the top 10 per cent in the industry?
I’d like to share with you the 10 success qualities of elite agents. As you review them, ask yourself, ‘How well am I applying this success quality?’ and give yourself a score out of 10 for each one.
From there, build yourself a simple action plan based on what you are going to start doing, stop doing and continue doing to make the biggest difference in your results.
- Building a winning attitude
One of the things to recognise is that you must have a great attitude – one that’s positive and motivating. Your attitude creates your world view; it’s what you put out before you get anything back. What is your winning attitude? Can you tweak it, hone it and improve it so it’s a can-do attitude? - Get super client-focused
The fastest way to get you what you want is to help your clients get what they want. When you’re client-focused, you tune in to them. Ask yourself, ‘How can I deliver great service and help my clients achieve their goals?’ In real estate, it’s the ultimate win-win-win situation. When the seller wins and the buyer wins, then you win. Good service also kicks into gear the best marketing in the world – word of mouth. - Become massively organised and follow through
Your level of organisational skills has a huge impact on your success. You might be a great communicator, but if you’re not great at following through on the commitments you make that’s going to get in the way of how people perceive you. It won’t be a communication issue; it will be an organisational issue. So how organised are you? Are you putting the right things in at the right time to produce the right results? It’s not the hours you put in that count; it’s what you put into the hours! - Grown your level of passion
Being passionate about helping people and passionate about this business is critical to your success. This allows you to explore and grow your knowledge. When it comes to talking to new clients or potential clients, an average agent might stop after the first question; but you’ll ask two or three more because you’re passionate about helping people and genuinely interested in their situation. - Develop a high level of confidence
This is about bringing your confidence into play. If you lose confidence in a property or client, I can pretty much guarantee that’s going to show in the way you communicate. So make sure you’re playing the confidence game. That means you have positive anticipation – you’re going to have a great open or a great auction.Confidence is driven by your level of knowledge and the skillset you have developed. A great strategy here is to explore areas of knowledge and skill improvements you know would make a difference to your confidence. - Maintain high standards of excellence
Without a doubt, the best agents in the business have high standards of excellence – the standards they choose to operate by. This communicates to those around them so they start to step up to the plate as well. A great strategy here is to ask yourself and the team ‘Where do my/our standards sit?’ If you haven’t done any work on this area, I strongly recommend you do. - Live with high energy
You might think this is similar to passion, but it does have a twist. More than anything else people buy your energy! Your energy is influenced on many levels, but do a review of your balance, sleep, exercise and food management. All of these have a significant impact on who you are and the energy levels you have. Interestingly, anyone can have high energy on a few calls, but elite agents have the ability to turn up their energy for the 120 calls they’ll make this week! - Be an influencing and communication legend
A great influencer doesn’t have only one way to communicate. It’s all about different strokes for different folks. Your style needs to adapt to your audience: a young professional couple, an elderly couple, or someone who’s gone through some hard times would all need handling differently. It’s about your ability to tune in to their wavelength. How much work have you done in improving your communication, influencing and negotiation skills? - Develop you outcome and deal focus
People tend to think that negotiations start when someone says, ‘I would like to buy this property’. But the best in the business understand that deal focus begins now; on an initial phone inquiry, for example. ‘I strongly recommend you put this property on your shopping list. It would absolutely be on the top of mine if I was looking for a property along these lines. Can I ask you a couple more questions to understand your situation a little better?’ You become engaging and help people marry the property – it really builds amazing momentum. - Upgrade your willingness to learn
Where can you improve? How can you tweak that strategy? This is about making learning essential, so you’re focused on getting smarter faster. The key here is not to attempt to improve everything at once. Focus on three to five improvement areas that will give you the biggest return on investment, then find someone who can help you build that skill. That could be attending a workshop, jumping online to grab a resource or bringing coaching into the mix of your success strategy.
These 10 success qualities are vital tools to have in your toolkit. Rate yourself (or if you’re game, have someone else rate you) to identify your greatest opportunities for improvement. You’ll also see where you’re strong and look at how you could build on that even further.
