Every time he drove by a For Sale by Owner, he would first stop his car. This is perhaps the most difficult part of this technique, because most agents do the exact opposite: We accelerate past the sign and pretend we never saw it.
The next step was to drop what he was doing. This means that he would clear his mind of whatever was happening in his day, setting aside any of the numerous projects and crises that he had on his to-do list. Then, most importantly, he would knock on the door. Stop, drop, and knock – complicated, isn’t it?
Make Millions Selling Real Estate: Earning Secrets of Top Agents
by Jim Remley
Jim Remley describes a salesperson who wants to be great, a person on a journey to Excellence. Not a journey everybody undertakes, I fear.
In their book, ‘The Psychology of Call Reluctance’, authors George W. Dudley and Shannon Goodson cite studies showing that 80 percent of salespeople who fail within their first year do so because of insufficient prospecting activity. It is fair to conclude that none of those salespeople pursued Excellence.
Sales success begins with desire: you must define what success means to you and have the character to work toward it. You must be motivated over the long term – as long as it takes for you to reach your definition of success.
Dudley and Goodson said, “Salespeople who secretly don’t care about better performance are unreachable“. They continued: “To the unmotivated, there are never urgent performance problems, and unexpected opportunities never beckon“. What an unsatisfying way to work!
Doing your best work is rewarding, in more ways than with just a high income. People who do their best feel more fulfilled, in work and in life. Quality work, and hard work, is satisfying.
Lazy people never experience the joy of work. A love of quality work and a willingness to work hard defines successful people, people who are not interested in being ‘average’ or marginally better.
Jim Remley cautions about trying to beat ‘average’:
“There is nothing overtly wrong with studying the averages; the danger lies in what the numbers may represent to a real estate agent. Both new and experienced agents can often find false comfort in the fact they are out-producing the ‘average’ agent.”
The average production of a salesperson in Australia and New Zealand is approximately $135,000. Despite rapidly improving selling fees, this figure has not improved in more than twenty years. This means that endeavouring to out-produce the ‘average agent’ could still leave you with a pathetic performance and, even though you are above average, you can still earn a low income.
Winners forget ‘average’ and focus on being the best. They make this a mission. A lifetime focus.
I cannot understand lazy people, especially in the Sales business. When you do just enough to avoid being fired, you live in a constant state of stress. When you consistently settle for low performance, you are one step ahead of a sales slump, and most often you are in a slump.
And when you are in a slump, you are on your boss’s mind. You know this and it gives you more stress. Imagine how terrible it would be to wake up every morning wondering if this was the day you were going to be asked to leave! Yet this is how many mediocre performers feel.
The Sales business is a hard way for mediocre people to earn a low income.
Jim Remley said:
“Real estate agents are notorious for believing that something miraculous is going to happen to them if they just wait long enough. So they sit patiently by the phone waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Some believe that if they just wait long enough, a rich cash buyer will burst through the doors and announce that he must invest $10 million today! It never happens”.
Wouldn’t it be easier to simply choose some actions that lead to results and then get to work?
He suggests that the first step in moving from Mediocre toward Excellence is to take off the mental knapsack we carry around. He said that we all have one: it’s where we put all of our excuses for our lack of success. Because of these excuses we subconsciously tell ourselves that it’s OK to be mediocre.
Remley suggests:
“All of us can move from a mediocre life to an exceptional life with the snap of a finger. It’s true! The decision takes only an instant. If you look at all great leaders, you find that at some point in their lives, they made a pivotal, life-altering decision.
What can take a lifetime is gathering enough steam to make that decision. For many, that decision requires an external force, a push over the cliff, before they can find the inner resolve to become committed to excellence.”
Desperation can be that external force, but why wait?
- There is not one person reading this – whether a salesperson or a leader – who is not capable of writing a list of the most important tasks they need to accomplish if they are to have a successful day, and then working on those tasks.
- There is not one person reading this who is not capable of repeating this process every working day.
- This means that there is not one person reading this who is incapable of pursuing Excellence.
Not to do so is a waste of a good life, trading happiness and prosperity for excuses and mediocrity.
Good article. In Psychology we refer to a self fulfilling hypotheses – that is, the potential for both success and failure are built into human psychology, so that if we allow negativity to overwhelm us, we effectively choose failure and that reinforces more negativity. The trick is to recognise the negative messages we harbour within ourselves, challenge them and replace them with positive messages about ourselves. Then we translate this into real behaviour. This becomes the impact we have upon others. They can see either negativity or positivity, and energy and enthusiasm and want to be part of it. Some gravitate to those who whinge and blame but these are not the people who will help sustain success. These people will drag us down. The question for them is, what are they going to do to replace the negativity with positivity. These are choices we all make every day in our lives and we need to first identify what we are doing that is generating the negativity. And we can take control of these feelings in the way we actually behave, through awareness and building upon positive choices and behaviour. Its not a con game. It has real effects and is based upon real behaviour. There are specific behavioural techniques we can use to work through this process to develop new positive skills.
Alan Harrison
Psychologist
Hi Alan, thank you for your kind words. I’m sorry it took me so long to reply, but I only now realised that I needed to look in this section of our blog site. Anyway, I like your term self fulfilling hypotheses. It says much in few words. Best wishes, Gary.