Is Your Profession Real Estate or Sales?
If you are an individual whose income is derived from the listing and selling or leasing of real estate you might think of and visualize yourself as being in the real estate business. However, this is not correct. You are a sales person and real estate is your product line. The sooner you recognize and accept this, and act accordingly, the sooner you will start to become more successful and your income will begin to increase.
The real estate industry has traditionally preformed poorly when training new agents to be effective sales people. Most agents getting licensed and into the business, have little or no sales background or training. Once licensed, they usually rely on their agency trainer or broker for their training.
You have probably received lots of training about real estate and the laws and rules you must follow. Every sales person needs to be thoroughly trained about the product or service they sell. You were also trained to get a listing, show a property and write an offer and follow the process through to a successful conclusion, and you need to know how to do this. All sales people need to know how to present their company and product or service to a potential customer and how to finalize the sales process.
But actual sales training, from goal setting to proper planning, to consistent daily prospecting, the actual sales process and proper follow-up after the sale, including getting referrals, is poorly taught, if at all. Little wonder the high failure rates and low incomes of many in the business.
Sales training is much too extensive to cover here, but I will pass along a few thoughts on what successful sales people do. Many of you do some or all of these things already. Some of you do them without even recognizing what you are doing. You are the successful people within this industry.
There is an adage in the sales world that says “If you don’t plan to succeed, you plan to fail”. Do you take a few minutes at the end of each day to plan the next day and is it in hard-copy (written down, in your PDA, or on your computer)? Do you have a list of everyone you need to contact the next day, the purpose of the contact and are you prepared for that contact? Do you know, as a result of your goal setting and long term planning, how many new prospects you need to acquire each day and how you are going to find those prospects? Do you know how many people you need to contact for each new prospect acquired, for each prospecting method you use? Do you recognize that you have or need different prospecting methods to reach different segments of your market?
If you don’t know how many contacts you need to make for each new prospect acquired, how do you know how much work will be required and how much time to allot to that activity?
Sales people are some of the highest paid and some of the lowest paid of all professionals. If you learn good sales skills, take advantage of the available productivity and marketing tools, plan daily to reach your goals, then you will become one of the highest paid. If when you got out of bed this morning, your plan for the day is to sit in the office and wait for the phone to ring, have no idea of where or how to find the number of new prospects you need today or don’t know how many you need and don’t know who you’re going to talk to, then you will be one of the lowest paid.
If you day is well planned, based on your short and long term goals, if you have studied and learned good skills, if you have multiple defined prospecting programs in place and work those programs to make sure you reach your daily goals, have a good program in place to stay in contact with your past and future clients, you will always have clients to work with and you will be one of the highest paid.
We all have the same number of hours in a day. How are you going to use yours? Sitting around being bored, worried about bills? Or being productive and successful? It’s all up to you.
Richard Green is President/CEO of U.S. Cybertek, Inc., an eleven year old technology company supplying marketing services to real estate and other industries. He has more than 35 years of experience in sales training and management, motivational speaking and real estate.
