I had the honor to meet and become friends with a very special couple while I was in Houston Texas several years ago.  Bernie and Donalda were from Calgary Alberta in Canada and had come to Texas to work with a local oil company.  Bernie is a very intelligent and witty type of person and Donalda has the loving care that only a gentle spirit can have.  One night we spent time watching the sun go do as we all enjoyed the hot tub at the oasis when Bernie started to tell his “biking story”.  I learned lessons about life, business and sales; but mostly about what it takes to succeed!

It seems a few years before when Bernie was close to 50 he decided to see “what he was made of.”  He got a vision in his mind of riding his peddle bike into the Ocean.  Now this was not just about taking your bike to the beach, this was a road trip from Calgary over the Rocky Mountains through some of the toughest highway and city conditions to end up some 660 miles or 1100 kilometers away.  I personally know how difficult this terrain is having driven my motor home over the mountain pass a few years ago and blowing the transmission.  This is tough terrain!

The story has many lessons in it and all of them peeked my attention.   Everything from having a used 10 speed bicycle loaded with a portable radio, leather saddlebags and a seat that was too narrow for any human to sit on, to struggling through the delirium due to de-hydration.  There was an almost fatal crash as he was going up a mountain pass when a station wagon with wide mirrors forced him to dive for safety.

The one part of the story that sits close to my heart was of the training he did to get ready for this event.  He began training for this event only a few months before he was going to do it.  He first started on some hills on the west side of Calgary.  After cycling to a local small town he turned around to come back.  The hill was so step that it proved too much for him and Donalda picked him up in their car to take him home.  I believe he even tried it again to have the same results.  Bennie next tried to bike his way to Banff about 60 miles away through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  He took a Friend along and set up a contingency plan to have Donalda pick him up just in case he wasn’t able to continue. And once again he was unable to make it up the long climb up the foothills and had to wait for his ride to come.  Having booked his holidays in advance the time quickly came for him to give it his all and chase this dream.  He loaded up his 10-speed bike and gave Donalda a hug.  Bernie told her that she wouldn’t be able to find him on the road and she didn’t have to come to pick him up.  He through away his safety net, he was on his own!

Listen to the rest of the story to see how things turned out and the wisdom of success that was uncovered!

Planning For a Better Year in Real Estate Sales

If you have been in real estate sales a few years you have seen the “Roller-Coaster Selling Cycle” or possibly have even fallen victim to it. You know the difficulty it causes, how it erodes your confidence and how hard it is to pull out of the sales slump.  How does this start?  Better yet, how can you prevent this from happening?

The real estate sales roller-coaster usually happens just after the spring real estate rush.  What happens to start the problem is that you will find yourself working hard helping all the buyers and sellers, putting in more and more hours at work.  You won’t need to plan your days because there will be several buyers and sellers standing in line waiting to work with you. In fact, you may find yourself just trying to keep up. Then the pace of your work will level off and you will take a much needed break.  That’s when the problems begin.

While you are resting and catching your breath from a busy spring real estate market, your sale pipeline is quickly drying up.  And since it takes 90 to 120 days to start to fill your real estate sales pipeline again, by the time you realize it’s drying up it’s too late. Then you will wake up one morning with nothing to do, no money coming in and panic sets in.

Real Estate Sales Coaches Keep You Performing

Real estate sales coaches help keep you on track when the market fluctuation take place. Knowing how to plan your year and where to focus your energy  can help you produce the results you dream of.

It’s important to remember that every sales cycle can be broken down into a series of steps that are interlocked together to produce the sales results you are looking for. From the first time you contact someone to the opening of a relationship there could be 4-6 major steps. Knowing these steps and how long each one will take can help you stay focused on what you have to do. In real estate the action that you do today will produce results in 2 or 3 months time.

If you are doing well right now (sales are flowing in and you’re busy), keep your head down and focus on daily activities that will keep your prospect funnel filled. Working with prospects on “now” business is exciting and exhilarating for all sales people. Unfortunately if you do only that you will be buying a ticket for a future roller-coaster ride.  Keep planning your efforts 3 months in advance so you are always focused in the future.

Skip The Real Estate Sales Roller-Coaster!

Here are some real estate sales coaching tips that can help you off of your own roller-coaster:

Real Estate Sales Coaching Tip #1 - Don’t overspend when you close a deal that money will need to hold you over for several months. Get your finances worked out to take the pressure off of yourself for the next three months or so. In this way you can focus on doing what you need to do instead of worrying about the money you need to live.

Real Estate Sales Coaching Tip #2 - Write down your goals and follow a business plan.  Break it down into 4 quarters so you know what you will be focusing on each step of the way.

Real Estate Sales Coaching Tip #3 -Get a accountability partner to help keep you focused. A good friend, coach, mentor or boss can help you when you are struggling. Make sure to be in contact with them daily so that you don’t get side tracked.

Real Estate Sales Coaching Tip #4 -Spend 80% of your time on the most productive activities for your real estate business and stay focused on them only. This is no time to be lost in researching a future project or do bookkeeping.

Real Estate Sales Coaching Tip #5-Set a goal for the prospecting action that you will do each day in the form of people you will talk to or contact. Remember, you have to meet a client for them to become one!

Have you ever wondered what information the top sales coaching and training companies know that can make you successful?  It seems like they know what they are doing and can produce the results you are looking for.  They understand that education is not the problem that holds people back; it’s not even about motivation; it’s about implementation.  Yes getting it done is the hard part!  And real estate coaches are the experts at helping Agents “get stuff done”.

So let me give you another Real Estate Coaching Tip;

To get good at finding new Real Estate clients you will have to improve

your prospect enrollment efficiency model.

What’s a Real Estate Efficiency Model You Ask?

A real estate efficiency model is the series of steps that it takes to accomplish a task, when each affects the other.  It’s like the math questions we were tested on in school that had a number of different calculations in which you had to get the prior equation right to even work on the next.  Unlike math where you can get marks for the right steps, if you have a step that you are having poor results in your real estate sales process it will spoil the outcome of all your efforts.  Simply said if you don’t know how to effectively accomplish each step of the client enrollment process, you will find yourself without real estate clients and working real hard!

The Steps of Real Estate Sales Process

Here are some of the steps you will want to consider in your sales process:

• Discovery Process
• The Real Estate Prospect Interview
• Establishing Leadership
• Your Real Estate Sales Process
  • Discovering the real estate need
  • Assessing and building motivation
  • Educating the real estate prospect
  • Offering a Solution
  • Handling buying signals
  • Effective follow-up
  • Developing client agreements
  • Starting the Agent and Client relationship

To get the type of sales conversion results that can change your Real Estate sales business over night, you will need a new perspective.

Imagine that every sales interaction is a series of predictable steps leading the client towards the goal of making a real estate purchase.  If you were to watch and study several sales interactions on a hidden video camera it would look like each sales person is performing the same steps. However, when you look closer, it becomes apparent that the successful salesperson was doing something slightly ‘different’ than those who seem to struggle through the sales process.

You might not be able to identify what was different between one real estate sales interaction and another, yet you would sense that something different was happening.  Since sales or the decision to buy is considered to be an emotional interaction, you would ‘feel’ it rather than ‘know’ it.  And that is exactly what the sales client is experiencing.  They “feel” it and respond at an unconscious level.  Because…

Buying is both a logical and an emotional process!

Doing something slightly ‘different’ in your sales process will give you the sales conversion results you are looking for.  Our coaching members who use The Unstoppable Sales Conversion System can attest to how making these small tweaks make all the difference in the world.  So how do you start?

Improving Your Real Estate Sales Process is Easy

The best way to start improving your real estate sales conversion is to begin to record what you are doing in each step of the sales process.  By writing out what you are already doing you can begin to see what is working and also what you struggle with.  The first step is always to become aware of what needs to change.  Without that knowledge making any changes will be nothing more than an uneducated guess.

So prepare to learn how to boost your sales by recording each step of your real estate sales process.  You will need to track what sales results you are having along the way and also if you notice any indicators that your prospect may be starting to struggle.  These types of clues can be used later to help you fine tune your sales process to make the changes that can convert 2 or 3 times as much as what you may be doing with now, and that’s worth doing!

As a real estate sales person, I’m sure you’ve been working hard offering great value and service to your existing clients through the real estate purchase or sale process and hoping that your efforts would help you acquire new clients.   Although great service gives you an edge in getting referrals, you have probably noticed that you are not starting as many new clients as you would like.

Knowing how to produce results in your business and sales is what every real estate sales agent wants.   Reaching your goal in sales requires a focused and effective approach to your client sales conversion process.  Having a finely tuned seller and buyer sales process will give your real estate business momentum and consistent predictable results.

The Cost of Poor Sales Conversion

If your real estate business is not built on a strong real estate Sales Conversion System then you will be on the Client Acquisition Treadmill for the rest of your career suffering with poor sales conversion and constantly chasing another deal or client.

Keep in mind that it takes 5 times the time, money and energy to find and develop a new prospect relationship than it does to maintain a relationship that you already have and land the sale. This enormous amount of effort drains your drive and can stall your business. So it is really important to keep the client all through the sales process.

Are You Missing Real Estate Sales Opportunities?

When you don’t focus on your sales conversion in the real estate sales process you will miss the opportunity to start working with potentially great real estate prospects.  All too often, I see real estate sales people discount prospects as tire kickers or prospects who are just not interested because they have heard something they don’t like.  This sloppy form of client discovery kills your sales conversion and potential sales.

So develop a Discovery Process that has a series of well thought out qualifying questions that will help you make a realistic evaluation as to the real estate sales prospects motivation, time line and potential.

What You Need To Know As a Real Estate Agent

If you’re new to the real estate sales industry you are more than likely experiencing your first market fluctuation.  Any time that the market cycles we experience trends in purchasing and changes in the buyer’s motivation and style.  Some of the more experienced real estate sales pro’s in your office have weathered at least one of these cycles.  If you were to be a fly on the wall in the coffee room or hallway you might hear two different types of conversations.

The first is the “sky is falling” doomsday conversation that if you were part of might leave you so de-motivated that you would be questioning why you even got started in the real estate industry leaving you considering making a career change.  You know this type of conversation and you might even know those people around you that have this mentality.

The second is the “opportunist” discussion from the extreme optimist.  This fellow is looking for the opportunity in this adversity.  Sometimes the power of the positively can be overwhelming and make you sick.  So who’s right?

The fact is that both types of responses to real estate market fluctuation are right.  Yes, they are!  I know you think I don’t know what I’m talking about but before you jump to conclusions let me explain.  They are both correct for each individual because what they believe makes their reality!  As they think so they become and in the end both will achieve what they set their mind to.  So let me give you an idea of a productive way to look at real estate market up’s and downs.

 4 Coaching Tips for Winning in The Real Estate Market Up’s And Downs

First, get all the facts, not just the sensationalized paranoia from the media, the real numbers.  Check with your local, provincial/state and country real estate board and get the real information and statistics. That way you will be able to see how the market is responding year to year and due to seasonal fluctuations.

Secondly, watch what the general public is saying in to response to the media accounts of the problems.  I heard it said many years ago that if you wanted to know what to do in changing times go to the local coffee shop and listen to the conversations people are having about the ‘crisis’ and then do the opposite.  When the general population has a fear it will drive the real estate markets in a very powerful way.  So the media and general opinion of the man on the street does affect what will be happening in the market.  We usually refer to it as market confidence.

Then, listen to what the average sales professional is saying and doing, notice their struggles.  Ask yourself if they are responding like the average consumer or if they have noticed what their clients are doing and saying.

Lastly, stop what you have been doing that works if it doesn’t line up with what is needed right now.  Learn what new approaches and markets that you need to excel.  In every market change there are huge opportunities if you look for them.  So while all the others are complaining about the change, position yourself in the area that will catapult you forward into your best year ever.

Now that’s really frustrating.

What if we could eliminate most of this frustration? Wouldn’t that be wonderful!

I believe that it’s possible for you to accomplish this…if you consistently use a tried-and-true system.   That takes a plan and an understanding of what is needed to be done to make it work. So let me give you some insight that can help from the concepts I talk about in The Unstoppable Sales Conversion System.

Let’s start by understanding some sales basics!

The Sales Process is a Series of Steps

To get the type of sales conversion results that can change your business over night, you will need a new perspective.

Imagine that every sales interaction is a series of predictable steps leading your buyer towards the goal of making a purchase.  If you were to watch and study several sales interactions on a hidden video camera it would look like each salesperson is performing the same steps.  However, when you look closer, it becomes apparent that the successful real estate salesperson was doing something slightly ‘different’ than those who seem to struggle through the sales process.

You might not be able to identify what was different between one sales interaction and another, yet you would sense that something different was happening.  Since real estate sales or the decision to buy is considered to be an emotional interaction, you would ‘feel’ it rather than ‘know’ it.  And that is exactly what the client is experiencing.  They “feel” it and respond at an unconscious level.  Because…

Buying is both a logical and an emotional process!

Doing something slightly ‘different’ in your real estate sales process will give you the sales conversion results you are looking for.

You Need to Understand Your Sales Conversion

If your sales business is not built on a strong Sales Conversion System then you will be on the Client Acquisition Tread mill for the rest of your career suffering with poor sales conversion and constantly chasing another deal or client.

Keep in mind that it takes 5 times the time, money and energy to find and develop a new sales prospect relationship than it does to maintain a relationship that you already have and land the sale. This enormous amount of effort drains your drive and can stall your business.

http://www.RichGrof.com/ Does it feel like you are working all the time? Does your family complain that they aren’t seeing you? We all know that there are times in your business that are busier than others. How do you handle the peak times? Rich Grof, business and sales coach teaches us how to manage ourselves and perform better.

Working hard? Burning the candle at both ends? Do you find that you’re running out of energy and relying on coffee or Red Bull to pull you through the day? If so, you’re headed for burnout. Rich Grof, performance, business and sales coach reveals his top strategies to maintain peak energy in business and reduce stress in your life and business.
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