Some years ago, I presented a Field Challenges workshop in Perth. Participants submitted for discussion challenges they were facing in the field. A few topics were offered and dispatched quickly as the solutions were obvious.
I then read to the audience a field challenge submitted by email and asked the audience if that challenge affected anybody. All hands went up. Continue reading Free Shots
Salespeople spend a lot of time trying to convince sellers how good they are. They talk about the advertising they do, the awards they’ve won, the results they’ve had. The trouble is, too many salespeople make the presentation all about themselves.
Whether your clients are buyers, sellers, landlords or tenants, they are all out to look after themselves. Most are fair, but in their minds, their own interests are paramount. Continue reading Why You?
Any person who wants to succeed in their career must study their craft.
Self-improvement isn’t a luxury. Winners realise that every dollar they invest in themselves has the potential to boost their income and job satisfaction.
But there is another benefit to studying that often gets ignored – the improvement to your marketability. Continue reading Studying in the 21st Century
Everybody wants to be a better closer. Of all the skills salespeople say they want to improve, it’s closing. But there is more to a GOOD sale than just closing.
What is a good sale? It’s one where all parties – clients, salespeople and the agency – are satisfied with the transaction.
To make every sale a good sale, there are things to do before the major close, the close for the ‘order’. Continue reading There’s More To a Good Sale Than Just Closing
Relentless – I like that word. It means “unceasingly intense”.
I also like the word Persistent, which means “able to bounce, withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions”. And “continuing firmly or obstinately in an opinion or course of action despite difficulty of opposition”. These are good attributes for salespeople.
Sales is not for everybody, especially those who give up too easily or are easily discouraged. Salespeople need to press on, especially when things aren’t going their way, which is often. Continue reading Relentless
There can be many barriers to success, but one of the greatest challenges for some people is perfectionism.
Perfectionism is the enemy of success. People who suffer from it will not ‘launch’ until everything is ‘just so’. Most often, they fail to launch at all.
I find myself wondering if the problem really is perfectionism and not some kind of fear. I have seen salespeople getting ready to prospect spend so much time ‘getting ready’ that they run out of time to make the calls. Continue reading The Enemy of Success
Here we are at the beginning of a new year. But before we get too far into this new year, how were your results last year? Were you happy with what you achieved? If not, why not?
Far too many business people drift from year to year, without ever setting goals, determining the targets necessary to achieve those goals, and without planning. These people are unfocused and lack direction.
And so they drift – spurts of ‘busyness’ interspersed with long periods of unfocused work that does not produce results. Compound this over a full year and the lack of consistent, focused action manifests as low income.
For these people, unless their thinking and actions change, they are doomed to repeat their previous year’s results.
Habits
Habits can be good and bad. Unless we consciously work at developing good habits, we will, by default, develop bad habits.
Action, and lack of action, are habits. We can become used to high levels of focused, productive action, and we can become used to low levels of actions and unfocused drifting.
If you want your results in this new year to be better than last year’s results, you must break the cycle: do things differently than you did last year.
Goals
Without something to focus on – a clear goal that is important to you – you will almost certainly drift. What goals are you going to achieve in this coming year? Choose goals that you really want, and are willing to go the extra mile to achieve.
Targets determined from goals
Worthwhile goals require bigger targets. What targets will you need to achieve so that you earn the income necessary to reach your goals?
Plans
Targets that are higher than you are used to hitting must be planned. Don’t just plan for the number of listings and sales, plan for the number of people you will need to speak to each day. Hint: if you aren’t speaking to 200 potential sellers every week, your goals aren’t big enough!
Affirmations
If you want to focus, write Affirmations daily. Affirm your major dominant goal by writing it 15 times a day for 21 unbroken days.
You will find more information on affirmations and goal setting in my book, Why Winners Win.
Study
Unless you study your profession, you will not improve. By not studying, you rob yourself of the opportunity to get better results from the many great ideas offered by experts.
Practice
Knowing what to do isn’t enough – you have to perform actions competently. You can study all you want, but if you don’t practise what you learn, and keep practising until you get it right, you will never develop skill.
Study will give you knowledge, but knowledge alone is not sufficient to make you successful.
KNOWLEDGE + PRACTICE = SKILL
Study and improve your knowledge. Practise what you learn and develop your skill. Do this and your actions will become more competent.
All you have to do now is increase your level of actions and success is assured. And, provided that you have goals that you really want to achieve, you will stay focused.
You can make 2018 your best year ever – indeed, a very happy new year!
Show me an industry where you can earn six-figure incomes without knowing what you are doing. I’ll bet that you cannot name one. Yet this is what many real estate people – salespeople and leaders – seem to think. Many believe that they can earn high incomes without learning, study and practice.
The real estate industry demonstrates a low regard for training. The real estate industry is also one of the most lowly-regarded for honesty, competence and integrity. I do not think this is a coincidence. Continue reading The More You Learn
Good salespeople are always on the lookout for new lines and for new ways to deliver their messages, but there is one word that many should consider using more often. That word is ‘No’.
People-pleasing salespeople are too quick to say ‘yes’, and doing so causes them to agree to actions that are, or should be, of a lower priority.
Beware of questions that begin with: Continue reading A Little Word Salespeople Should Use More Often
An age-old question for presenters is, “Should I use visual aids?”.
While I agree that people can become overly reliant on visual aids, resulting in a boring presentation, I believe that good presenters use every tool at their disposal to foster understanding with their audiences. Visual aids do just that: they aid understanding.They don’t say, “A picture is worth a thousand words” for nothing. Continue reading Visual Aids
We often hear about disruptive change. Uber for taxis, Amazon for book stores… Now people are saying that a new player in the Australian market, Purplebricks, could be real estate’s ‘Uber Moment’. I have to say I’m a little over ‘Uber Moments’!
Whether Purplebricks is going to cause disruptive change in the real estate market remains to be seen. While the parent company is throwing millions of dollars into advertising campaigns and the market is booming, it’s easy to see why they may be a threat. Continue reading Has Sales Changed That Much?
The real estate agent’s prayer goes like this: “God grant me another boom and I promise I won’t stuff it up this time”. Such is the prayer of the mediocre salesperson.
Some salespeople are what I call ‘Market Victims’. When the market is booming, they do well, but when the market is falling, so too do their results.
Winners know how to thrive in any market. Sure, when the market corrects, there might be an adjustment period while they change tactics, but once they do, winners start selling properties again. Continue reading Can Booming Markets Conceal Mediocrity?
As a presenter, I often see attendees furiously taking notes, which may be flattering, but often leaves me wondering what they do with those notes. I think most of them are useless.
For more than 30 years I have been taking notes, but never on loose sheets of paper; I always take notes in journals. I number the book, each page number, and to date in am well into my 42nd book. Decades of valuable information gleaned from some of the best speakers in the world. Continue reading Useless Notes
Meet Brendan and Adam, chefs and proprietors of a new restaurant called 34bia in Redfern in Sydney.
Before this venture, Brendan and Adam owned a smaller café near my home which had a chequered history of success and failure before Brendan and Adam bought it.
The café was part of a block of serviced apartments so its clientele were apartment guests and residents. Continue reading Personality Matters
We are fast approaching the halfway mark of 2017. Now is a good time to reflect on your results so far. If correction is needed, the sooner you begin the better.
Are you happy with your present results and income?
If not, what will you do differently from this point onwards?
If you keep doing what you have been doing, your results for the second half of the year will be almost identical to the first half of the year. To achieve different results, you must do different actions and, often, more actions. Continue reading What Will You Do Differently?
If you aren’t studying your profession, it is only a matter of time before your competitors overtake you. A rusty salesperson is a broke salesperson.
What are you studying now? And how do you study?
Mix it up
There are mountains of good study material and my advice is to mix it up so we stay interested. The material we study for business purposes falls into three categories: Continue reading What and How Do You Study?
David Farrugia, from Macquarie Real Estate in Casula NSW, spoke at Pittard’s Real Estate Agents’ Convention in Brisbane, November 2016. He made many interesting points, including explaining how he plans his training. David trains ‘on purpose’.
Each month, David selects a topic and studies that topic only for the coming month.
For example, if he selects Communication, David will train for the month exclusively on communication. He will enter this into the search box on Pittard’s streaming portal, iTrain, and listen to or view every program he finds there on communication. He will go through his and his company’s extensive training libraries and find what he can on communication. His reading for the month will also be on this topic. Continue reading Plan Your Training
We hear much about Time Management, but can we really manage time? Every one of us has the same 1,440 minutes each day. Why, then, do some people do more with their time than others?
The answer is that those people manage themselves and not time: They manage themselves within the time they have available.
The basic tool for self-management is a diary. It doesn’t matter whether you use a hard copy diary or an electronic calendar, what matters is how you use it. Continue reading Self-Management
You don’t hear about manners much these days, but in addition to other benefits, good manners are a great selling tool. And they are a selling tool that cost nothing. They don’t say ‘mind your manners’ for nothing!
Don’t Get It
If you are a member of an online chat group, it won’t take long before bad manners and insensitivity becomes obvious to you. It usually begins with the line, “You don’t get it…”
I was a member of a group where an agent posted a comment, to which somebody else opened with the “You don’t get it” line, followed by paragraphs of ego-bloated diatribe about what the person who posted first didn’t ‘get’. Continue reading Mind Your Manners
“If our goal is to sell more, we must be valued more and considered as credible, so that when we advance ideas, buyers really listen to us.”
There is nothing wrong with wanting to make a sale. There is nothing wrong with focusing on making the sale. The question is, what ‘sale’ should we focus on first?
Wrong product
If you focus on selling your product (or service), you may be headed for no sale. According to Jerry Acuff and many other sales experts, we must be valued and seen as credible before people will listen to us. This is because clients don’t believe what salespeople say, at least in the early stages of the relationship. Continue reading Credibility in Selling
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