Success as a Real Estate Agent For Dummies. Zeller Dirk

have to gain the level of skill and comfort necessary to pick up the phone and call people you know (or even people you don’t know) to ask them for the opportunity to do business with them or to refer you to others who may be in the market for your service. It also requires a level of encouragement and interaction via social media avenues. You need to be able to engage with Facebook to connect with people you know. You also need to be effective in marketing your message online through targeted ads and boosted posts. Additionally, you must be watching for clues about life changes (think: new baby, kids going off to college, divorce) in those social-media interactions and platforms.

      ❯❯ If you attract the right kinds of customers into your business, your clients will match well with your expertise and abilities, and service will become an easier and more natural offering. If you attract the right type of customers, you’ll also reap greater quantity and quality of referrals.

       Developing sales ability to win customers

      

The single most important skill for a real estate agent is sales ability, and sales ability is how you win customers. Your sales ability is based on how effective you are in generating prospects, following up on those prospects to secure appointments, preparing for those appointments, conducting the appointments to secure an exclusive agency contract, and then providing service to that recently created client. People also base your ability on how quickly you can accomplish all of this.

      Because you’re holding this book, I’m willing to bet that you’ve either just come out of training to receive your real estate license or you’re in the early days of your career. In either case, decide right now to master the skills of selling in order to fuel your success.

      In my view, sales skills in the real estate industry are at the lowest level I’ve seen in 30 years. So much effort and emphasis has been placed on technology and social-media training in real estate that companies and agents have lost their way through the sales skills and sales strategies that are foundational to success in a sales-based industry.

      You might be a younger new real estate agent. That means you are more native to technology. It also means you naturally communicate through technology platforms, but may lack the face-to-face interpersonal skills that older real estate agents grew up with. Typically, selling in real estate is done, even in the technological world, face-to-face. According to NAR, 67 percent of buyers buy through the first agent they meet with.

      It’s hard to believe that probably 95 percent of agents lack top-level sales skills. In my career in training and coaching, I’ve met hundreds of thousands of agents. Very few, even at the top echelon of earnings, have had any formalized sales training. Whenever I speak to agents, I always ask the audience how many have taken any formalized sales training, and I usually see only a few hands out of the hundreds in the room.

      The other reason I know sales skills are lacking is that I coach some of the best and highest-earning agents in the world, and even they believe their sales skills can use improvement. Many agents record their prospecting sessions or listing presentations, but I have yet to meet one who feels that they’ve nailed their sales skills. The difference between these high-earning agents and other agents is that the high-earning agents realize that sales skills are vital to success, and they continuously seek excellence in this area.

HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED

      Years ago, salespeople were taught that a great presentation involved making the case, going for an early and repeated close, and then bullying the client into submission to secure the deal. Believe it or not, some trainers in the real estate industry still teach this antiquated sales model, which resembles verbal judo more than client development.

      Look at the following breakdown of a great presentation today, compared to what one looked like in days long past.

      The big difference: Today’s best agents spend nearly three-quarters of the presentation giving prospects a reason to say yes – by focusing on the prospect’s situation and needs and how the agent can provide the best solution. Yesterday’s agents spent virtually no time defining their clients’ situations or their own unique solutions. Instead, they spent nearly three-quarters of the presentation making the sale and going for a high-pressure close. We’ve come a long way!

      

To follow the high-earning agent’s example, make it your priority to develop and constantly improve your sales skills for the following reasons:

      ❯❯ To secure appointments: Chapter 8 provides practically everything you need to know about winning leads and appointments through prospecting and follow-up activities.

      ❯❯ To persuade expired and for-sale-by-owner listings to move their properties to your business: Chapter 10 is full of secrets and tips to follow as you pursue this lucrative and largely untouched field.

      ❯❯ To make persuasive presentations that result in positive buying decisions: Chapter 12 helps you with every step from pre-qualifying prospects to planning your presentation. It’s packed with tips for perfecting your skills, addressing and overcoming objections, and ending with a logical and successful close.

       A real estate market won’t dictate your success

      According to the National Association of Realtors, more than 40 percent of agents didn’t close a single transaction last year, and another 20 percent closed only one transaction. This clearly demonstrates the lack of sales and lead-generation skills in the industry.

      

In robust market conditions, leads are abundant and relatively easy to attract, especially buyer leads. But when the market slows, as it inevitably will, real estate success becomes less automatic. Only great sales skills guarantee that you – rather than some other agent – will win clients no matter the market conditions. The best agents make more money in a challenging market than they do in a robust market.

      

Regardless of economics, every market contains real estate buyers and sellers. No matter how slow the economy, people always need and want to change homes. Babies are born. Managers get transferred. Couples get married. People divorce. And with these transitions, real estate opportunities arise for those with the strategies to target those opportunities and the skills to sell their unique value.

      The way to build immunity to shifting market conditions is to arm yourself with skills in prospecting, lead follow-up, presentations, objection handling, and closing.

The Reasoning and Rationale for Being a Strong Listing Agent

      In real estate, there’s a saying that “you list to last.” In your early days, you’re likely to build your business by working primarily with buyers. But in time, you begin to develop your own listings, and after that you begin your climb to real estate’s pinnacle position, which is that of a listing agent.

      

Typically a larger percentage of referral business will be buyer based. This means that you need to eventually develop a method outside of referrals to create and attract listings.

      To create long-term success, a high quality of life, and a strong real estate business, set as your goal to eventually join the elite group – comprised of fewer than 5 percent of all agents – who are listing agents. The advantages are many:

      ❯❯ Multiple streams of income: Listings generate interest and trigger additional transactions. Almost the minute you announce your listing by putting a sign in the ground, uploading the property on your website, and placing the listing in the MLS – syndicating the listing to sites like Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, and thousands of others – you’ll start receiving calls, emails, and texts from active buyers; calls from neighbors; inquiries from drive-by traffic; and queries