For Real Estate Sales Professionals

January 17, 2005 E-zine

 

January 17, 2005
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read by more than 30,000 agents

Always be determined to become the
best real estate agent in your territory!

In this Issue:

1. Join Me for Two Live Teleseminars to Plan Your Success

2. Direct Mail and Getting Your Prospects to Call You

3. Making Effective Presentations With Your Team

1. Join Me for Two Live Teleseminars to Plan Your Success

I'll be hosting two live telephone seminars to help you plan and organize your real estate business, so you can achieve all the goals that are important to you in 2005. The first of these two teleseminars will be tomorrow night, Tuesday, January 18, 2005, at 8:00 p.m. EST. This first teleseminar is designed specifically for residential agents.

The second of these two teleseminars will be on Tuesday, January 25, 2005, at 8:00 p.m. EST, and this teleseminar is designed specifically for commercial agents.

If organizing a solid business plan to utilize and follow during 2005 would be a great idea for you, enrolling in one of these teleseminars is something you'll want to do. I normally find that agents who fail to achieve their income goals do this because they don't have a business plan, they have a bad business plan, or they fail to work their business plan throughout the year. In these teleseminars you'll learn how to design a solid business plan for yourself, and more importantly you'll learn how to stay on track and work your business plan throughout the year. This combination will ensure your success in your real estate business in a big way in 2005.

If designing a great business plan and learning how to effectively work this plan throughout 2005 sounds like a good idea for you, click on one of these links:

Click here for more information on my teleseminar for residential agents.

Click here for more information on my teleseminar for commercial agents.

And, if for some reason you can't join me live on the call, just enroll in the teleseminar and I'll send you a link where you can listen to a recording of it whenever it's convenient for you afterwards. You'll then be able to design your business plan for 2005 when you listen to the recording.

Click here for downloadable E-books and live audio interviews with top-producing real estate agents. These interviews are with industry experts who show you exactly what they do to continually make hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year.

2. Direct Mail and Getting Your Prospects to Call You

There are, generally speaking, two basic approaches to prospecting. The first and most traditional approach in our industry is where the agent gets on the phone and calls their prospects or goes door knocking to speak with their prospects face-to-face. Both of these approaches can be very effective if done consistently.

The other general approach is to locate prospects by either direct mail or the Internet, and, depending on how effective your campaigns are in this arena, these approaches can bring you solid results also. And of course you can always implement a prospecting campaign that incorporates some or all of these approaches just mentioned, too.

But for the moment, I'd like to speak to you about direct mail. Once you've identified your target market, you can virtually guarantee all of your prospects receiving your direct mail pieces whenever you send them out to them. All you need is an accurate database of names and addresses to make this happen. On the Internet, however, while you can certainly develop a good number of prospects there, you can't guarantee that every prospect in your area will find their way to your Web site. So a lot of your ideal prospects may never locate you on the Internet.

When it comes to direct mail, most of the mailers that agents send out seem to be relatively boring. And they're very limiting, too, in terms of maximizing the probability that your prospect will be inspired to call you when they read what you've written. For example, it's very normal for agents to send out "Just Listed" or "Just Sold" postcards. But oftentimes when you give too much information about the properties on these mailers, your ideal prospects now have no reason to call you. You've already told them everything, and prospects will normally only call a real estate agent for the first time if they want new information they don't already know about. This can be particularly costly when someone who is looking to buy, sell, or lease a property decides not to call you because the property you described on your postcard is smaller than the one they'd be interested in closing a transaction on. You'd still like this person to call you off of your mailer, but the information you sent them is not relevant to the size of real estate transaction they intend to consummate.

As an example of a mailer that can generate phone calls from a higher percentage of prospects in your area, let me tell you about the only mailer I've ever received from an agent that got me to immediately pickup the phone and call him. This agent sent me a postcard offering me a free report he had put together showing all the comparable sales in my area for the past six months. All I had to do was call him, give him my name and address, and he'd send me the report.

When I called the agent, we understandably ended up talking for a few minutes about what was going on with real estate values in my area. I figured as long as I had him on the line with me I might as well ask him about his observations and opinions on my area.

Well, he sent me the report, and he immediately then went to the top of my list of agents I would contact if I was interested in buying or selling in the area. This opened up a brand new channel of communication between the two of us, and since then I've talked with him once or twice a year about what is going on in my marketplace. And during this time I've also had no other conversations with any of his competitors either.

I'm mentioning this to you because you may want to offer a similar report to your own prospects. Doesn't it make sense that people who will be looking to buy, sell, or lease in the weeks and months ahead would love to have a report like this one? This is because people who will be entering into a real estate transaction in the near future normally want information, and a report containing six months of recent comp information is very often exactly the type of report they'd like to receive.

So when these people contact you and ask you to send them your report, they could very well be identifying themselves as one of your ideal prospects. You just need to find out a little more information during your first conversation with them. And if they're not looking to do anything right now, you've just opened up a new relationship and a direct line of communication that never existed before. So in effect you're now one step closer to working with these people whenever they do have a real estate need in the future.

But, you may ask, "Will creating a report like this and sending out a polished, professional mailer offering it to all my prospects get them to call me?"

All I can tell you is that in my 25 years of being a licensed real estate broker, this is the only real estate mailer that's had me pickup the phone and call the agent who sent it to me.

Click here if you'd like more information on my one-on-one coaching program to take your real estate productivity to the next level. One-on-one coaching is available for both real estate agents and company management.

3. Making Effective Presentations With Your Team

Working as a team can increase the number of times you successfully obtain exclusive agreements from your prospects. If your team is ever competing against an individual agent for an exclusive, just the fact that there are 2-4 team members there during your presentation can have the prospect be more inclined to choose your team. This is simply because the feeling of having more people one can count on in a business relationship can be very convincing.

But I've noticed over the years that sometimes teams of agents don't maximize their effectiveness during presentations with their prospects. Oftentimes the team member who is the senior agent leads the entire presentation, and the other team members are just kind of taking up space in their chairs. These other agents may occasionally look for opportunities to contribute a few words of their own during the presentation, but they're often given the role of being minimally involved in the presentation. And while their presence may add value by them simply being at the meeting, there's really much more that these team members can bring to any presentation in front of your prospects.

A simple yet highly effective approach to remedy this situation is to have each team member be fully responsible for their own portion of each presentation. So while one agent may be the leader, each team member will then rotate throughout the presentation in delivering their own segment of it.

For example, one agent can discuss comparable sales (or leasing) information and what this translates into in terms of the value of the prospect's property. And another agent can deliver the information on the team's game plan for marketing the property and all the different approaches the team will be implementing to move the property. Or that particular agent could simply select one or two individual areas of the team's marketing program and go into greater detail on how these will be implemented.

The point is you ideally want to get all team members actively involved in the presentation so the prospect feels that everyone on the team is solid, dynamic, and an integral part of the team. This conveys a much more impressive message to the prospect than having one team member run most or all of the presentation, while the other team members just stay in the background.

And since we're talking about each team member being responsible for maybe only 3-10 minutes of the overall presentation, this would be very easy for almost any team member to master with some basic preparation and advance rehearsal. In addition, each team member could then deliver the exact same segment in all future presentations to new prospects, too. All that would need to be modified is the data and information as it applies to each individual property, and each individual prospect.

With a little advance planning and preparation, your team can learn to present much more effectively and impressively than it may be presenting right now. Let each team member completely own their own segment of your presentations, and your prospects will be even more impressed with your team's presentations whenever you meet with them.

 
Click here to visit my Web site. There you'll find many articles and previous editions of my E-zine to assist you in taking your real estate career to the next level.

Your subscription to my real estate E-zine entitles you to receive FREE online training. My training course is designed to take you to the next level in your real estate sales career regardless of where you are currently at in your career right now. To receive my FREE 7-Day Online Real Estate Training Course send a blank e-mail to the following E-mail address:

realestate101@RealEstateSalesCoach.com

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Find out why one-on-one real estate coaching produces much better results for you than both traditional real estate training and continually trying to do your real estate business on your own. If you'd like to find out how much more money you'll make in your real estate business by working with me one-on-one, send me an E-mail or give me a call at (951) 694-6655.

"Through working with Jim I've developed new strategies and approaches that are getting me more market share with the type of companies I want to be doing business with."

Guy Eisner
Grubb & Ellis


If you arrange for me to lead a seminar or training for your real estate company you qualify for FREE coaching! Call me or email me for more information.


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America's Premier Real Estate Coach®
Advanced Real Estate Sales Coaching

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