John Duncan MBA BCA Licensed Real Estate Salesperson (REAA 2008) Key 1.2: Be there and be there early – they can’t choose you if they have never heard of you. Many agency owners in the industry carefully ensure all participants follow specific rules about placement of signs and the time period they can be on view with sold stickers on them. Signs and the open home lists in your local papers are designed to sell the firm and the salesperson, together with the property. In many areas the salesperson with the most signs will be likely to get more calls from potential vendors just for being there. With SalesPartner you are readily able to send more information to more people more often. Flyers, emails, letters, DL cards and web links can be generated quickly with your personal contact details and company branding, no matter who listed the property. For new salespeople this process is a vital step in establishing your credibility as a real estate resource with people you have dealt with in the past. These people, who know you already, may be comfortable on the emotional level with having you involved, and even keen to share their moving experiences with you, but need assurance that you have real estate skills to support the relationship already in place between you.
0 Comments
John Duncan MBA BCA Licensed Real Estate Salesperson (REAA 2008) Key 1.1 Secure more invitations to appraisals with pro-active marketing. Say out loud to yourself. “I want to be their real estate resource before they know they need one!” This is your goal for your pro-active marketing. Becoming perceived as the local real estate resource by potential vendors is the key to a satisfying career as a real estate professional and is also the primary goal of the processes built into SalesPartner real estate software systems. We have discovered that even new salespeople can achieve a high level of profile as a real estate resource in just a few months of work with SalesPartner. So you have a salesperson license and a licensed agency to work from. How do you get your own listings? Why does it seem so easy for some colleagues and such a challenge for others? When I have a training group that includes salespeople who have been in the industry for 10 years or more I regularly ask; “Where do your listings come from?” The veteran salespeople report that most of their vendors are people they have helped with a real estate transaction in the past. They have dealt with them before as a real estate professional. All the participants in the course usually readily accept that as the natural order of things. The more experienced you are as a salesperson the more referral and repeat business you should be getting. The question that follows to the whole group is: “How many of the intending vendors in your area have made a previous real estate decision?” And we ask “How many of those have dealt with a real estate salesperson or agency still active in the industry today?” (The answer is nearly all. Only a very few current owners among those who inherited or partnered with a property owner might be the exception.) You can immediately see how vital it is for new salespeople that many veteran salespeople and existing real estate agencies have come to ignore their past clients soon after they have completed their property purchase. Salespeople are always busy and without good systems can quickly lose touch with past clients. We believe many purchasers never hear from their agent again after settlement is complete. A quote to remember: “Each phone call before settlement shows how much you care about getting paid, each phone call after settlement shows how much you care”. (Phone calls after settlement are also a good source of testimonials, referrals and relisting.) If veteran salespeople and their agencies were better at keeping in touch it would be much harder for new salespeople to be successful when they enter the industry. The fact is they often are not very good at it. This represents a huge opportunity for new salespeople to build quality relationships with these real estate “orphans” right now. We know real estate transactions are hand made and to be successful you need excellent people skills. Databasing however is about opportunity, being there early and often, and about building relationships and trust with potential clients, both buyers and vendors. It also helps when the processes you use for keeping in touch achieve a couple of other key objectives. These are;
We will provide more details of these processes and systems in later chapters. But it’s important to note that the processes you have available for pro-active marketing from a SalesPartner database are designed to both illustrate the current market and have your potential vendors say to themselves. “I want this to happen when I list my property.” Talking about marketing allows us to bring up this question. “What do real estate salespeople sell?” The answers we get during our seminars include – properties, themselves, their agency and their services. If we ask more clearly “What is the service that you the salespeople sell to vendors?” we can still get a wide variety of answers like marketing plans, support and expertise during an emotional period, negotiating skills, or the ability to get their property sold. We agree with all these answers but believe they are not the primary service real estate salespeople are commissioned to provide. Our answer to this question, “What do real estate salespeople sell?” is that the primary services real estate salespeople sell are the processes they will use to find the best buyer for the vendor’s property and then secure the best net price. Other people have provided similar answers with different emphasis and here are a couple we like with apologies for any paraphrasing: “My role is to find the people with the most emotional involvement in your property and make sure they compete with each other to buy it” Which is attributed to Ian Keightly and Michael Bulgaris. “To introduce your property to as many people as possible who are currently in a position to proceed” – Robert Bevan From The Millionaire Real Estate Agent by Gary Keller “For Sellers, their (the top real estate agent’s) goal is to net them the most amount of money, in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of problems”. See the “Seller Value Proposition” P95 There are many skills involved and techniques which can be learned to determine a buyers’ walk away offer level for any property (in SalesPartner we emphasise CMAs for buyers) but we believe the primary processes which motivate the ultimate buyer to pay the best price (call upon their fighting funds) include competition with other real or potential buyers. Think of Auctions, Tenders, multiple offer situations and buyers making offers before the first open home. Mastery of SalesPartner databasing helps attract multiple offers. We believe most vendors will try and list their property with the salesperson they expect will ultimately achieve the best net result for them. (Net means after fees, marketing contribution and property presentation costs have been taken into account.) The goal of achieving the best possible net sale price is foremost in the mind of vendors when bringing their property to market. Put even more bluntly we believe any salesperson could sell all the available property in your area tomorrow if price didn’t matter. The emotional aspect of the listing decision cannot be ignored. Tom Hopkins “ There probably aren’t two clients in a hundred who will admit it, but one of the main reasons some people pay real estate fees is to get attention and sympathy while a matter of great importance to them is being resolved”. We agree but then the question is; “Why would they choose you rather than one of your colleagues in the industry?” “How can you be different, win more listings and protect your fees?”
John Duncan MBA BCA Licensed Real Estate Salesperson (REAA 2008) Key 1: Pro-Active Marketing Our first goal is to enable you to use the processes in SalesPartner to increase your pro-active marketing. We believe pro-active marketing is the number one key to success for a real estate salesperson. For many products being marketed today, e.g: vehicles or farm equipment, the salespeople need clients to visit, kick the tyres and discuss the finance. They put up signs, advertise in the paper, in magazines and online and wait for the phone to ring. Does that sound like real estate marketing to you? It is re-active marketing in the sense that the activity of the salespeople responds to the reaction of clients to the products being sold. In other industries (the classic example is life insurance) if the salespeople wait until the client rings to say they need it, it could well be too late. When someone rings a life insurance salesperson to say they need some, the natural question is “What did your doctor say?” Salespeople in that industry know they have to be building relationships and be marketing to their clients long before the clients need to use their product. This is a good example of an industry that relies on pro-active marketing. Pro-active marketing can be defined as “The processes that keep you in touch with clients to establish credibility and rapport before they know they need your services.” “I’m working signboards today.” It took me a while to plumb the depths of this expression. It originates from a David Knox seminar. If a salesperson is working “The Property Press”, “The Blue Book”, the coffee machine or the local paper and spending time driving lots of people around in their car they are heavily into re-active marketing. That salesperson will spend a lot of time looking for keys to take contacts to properties but will be missing the keys that truly open the doors to success in Real Estate. We know buyers almost always need to visit a property to get emotionally involved so as salespeople you are encouraged to take clients to properties. It’s worth noting that in New Zealand the first salesperson to take a client to a property can usually claim the selling commission share if that client subsequently buys it. You also know that to meet a vendor’s best expectations the buyer has to get emotionally keen on the property. But experienced and successful salespeople know that vendors (not buyers) are the long term key to their success. And it follows that vendors are the key to success for their office. Achieving a long list of properties for sale is not any guarantee of success either. We will discuss later how to determine which vendors are in the market as distinct from only being on the market. An important skill for experienced salespeople is to recognise the difference and have processes to ensure that their vendors are in the market.
John Duncan MBA BCA Licensed Real Estate Salesperson (REAA 2008) Introduction SalesPartner is a software package that is successful in helping real estate salespeople realise the goals of their database contacts, whether vendors or purchasers. For years we have worked on the premise that when salespeople see that it works for their colleagues they will believe it and take steps to incorporate SalesPartner into their own businesses. Now we understand that people don’t believe things when they see them so much as see things when they believe them. The evidence from history is all around us. For centuries people believed the world was flat and could not see the abundant evidence that it wasn’t. Indeed even sailors who could see a ship climbing the horizon with its masts and sails showing first, which was a pretty good indication that the world was round, feared sailing off the edge in uncharted waters. For those who studied the stars elaborate schemes were constructed to confirm that the sun moved around the earth, despite eclipses and other evidence to the contrary. The idea that the earth moved around the sun was a hard sell. We discovered that the idea SalesPartner worked could also be a hard sell despite abundant evidence and endorsements from existing users. So how do you get people to reconsider their beliefs? Again we find the evidence is all about us – you should write a book. So here we go. We sold our first Real Estate software system in March 1985 (to Andrew Harcourt at Butlers) and have been designing systems for real estate firms and salespeople ever since. One of the fascinating aspects of this for us is that over the years we have been able to learn from many of the top professionals in the business. We have had extensive access to a variety of firms and marketing approaches. We have had more open access to different firms than most salespeople and business owners. We have also taken advantage of the internet for research and visited with many firms in New Zealand and overseas. One of the first of these visits was with David Pilling in Adelaide who wrote “The Systems Revolution in Real Estate” among many other achievements and marketing innovations. He suggested I visit a number of local firms doing pioneering work in computer systems and I was able to take advantage of the introductions. Most of the work that was going on was directed at the accounting side and processing sales and advertising expenses for firms, not the marketing side which most interested me. This preoccupation with back office systems and features to suit both office administrators and system suppliers still characterises many of the systems available today. However in those days David Pilling worked with another top thinker and trainer for real estate, Gregg Toyama and it was at a seminar Gregg gave in Palmerston North around 1990 that inspiration struck. Talking about databases Gregg said; “What salespeople want is a system or machine where you put names in one end and out of the machine would come invitations to appraisals”. From its inception SalesPartner has been designed to be that machine. Some of our most successful clients have been running that machine since the 1990s. It soon became clear to us however that getting the invitation to the appraisal was just the start. We needed a couple more machines in the production line; one to convert the appraisals to listings and another to achieve effective sales. So we added activity tracking and databasing properties to the mix. The fuel or power source that got the system turning was clearly provided by the salespeople and the work they did to discover and utilise the changing motivations of buyers and vendors. From the very earliest times it was clear to us that systems or computer software alone can’t sell real estate. Real estate sales are handmade. The salesperson with enough contacts and the stomach to share twelve cups of tea or coffee a day will still do well but it is also clear that those people who believe computer database systems have no place are being proven to be completely wrong in today’s market. Good software will not replace salespeople but it will help salespeople become more effective, more efficient and earn a lot more commissions by helping more clients achieve their real estate goals. How much more? Over the years we have had feedback like “In my first year it was worth over twenty five thousand dollars to me and in my second year it was embarrassing” - Ron. “After eight years in the industry, I started with SalesPartner and in the following year doubled my income and the year after that added another fifty percent”- Bev. “If I could choose between a free billboard right in the middle of town or my weekly email database - I'd choose the database every single time. It simply gets results.” - Andrew It became clear that the processes we had identified that were being used by experienced salespeople and we had incorporated into SalesPartner were the key to the success our clients were having. As systems designers and suppliers we have an on-going mission to overcome technical issues. But the primary effort we invest is to understand and capture the concepts and processes used by the best salespeople and make them easier and more readily achieved in a timely fashion by all our SalesPartner users. For new subscribers you can take advantage of all the pioneering work sponsored by our earlier users and gain access, for a low monthly rental, to all the features and benefits built in to the package over the years. Our earlier subscribers have had the advantage of guiding the design of the system to meet their needs at very low cost and gaining the benefits from applying these processes when few others had been equipped to compete with them. SalesPartner is a form of knowledge-system with processes and techniques embedded into it which have stood the test of the market place. Not only does it give you and your sales team access to the best processes that we can find for achieving successful listings and sales but it also provides for these processes to be done more quickly. It is worth noting, and we will repeat this later, we don’t expect any one salesperson or office to use all features of SalesPartner. We also recommend that you as a salesperson do not spend more than an hour a day on SalesPartner. If you encounter an issue or process that looks like it is going to take much longer than that give us a call for advice and support. However if ignorant salespeople tease you for spending too much time on your computer, check out how many successful salespeople use SalesPartner and persevere. In the next chapters we will discuss how to find the primary keys to success in Real Estate with SalesPartner. Continue Reading: Part II
Today the final remaining forest of SalesPartner-Cloud version 12 users have been migrated to version 14. This group includes a number of offices, multi-user teams and iOS clients. Several of the large converted databases contained historical records dating back nearly twenty years. This milestone marks a shift in the future of SalesPartner heading into the fourth quarter of 2020:
|
Admin
|