Over the years many leaders have said, “My team loves me. They would die for me.” This was said when the office’s month-to-date results were pathetic. Your team does not have to die for you, but is it too much for you to expect it to sell for you?
Expenses are incurred by a business daily. You cannot ring your landlord and say, “My business is closed for twelve hours each day. Therefore I will pay only half the rent.” While this concept is laughable, there are many offices that, in spite of the fact they accrue Expenses on a daily basis, fail to accrue Results daily.
Commit to one listing result per day. Any office can achieve this. Once this result standard has become a habit, the next stage is to make a sale each day. If you have the stock, this too is possible.
Time Focal Points are critical to a leader’s results planning. One listing a day. One sale a day. Time Focal Points can even be extended to hiring. You should set a minimum number of first interviews. Just five first interviews per week or 20 per month, will give you two winners per year, which is a half million dollars income per year.
Daily Results
Your office should be hooked on the concept of at least one great result per day. One of the best ways to do this is to achieve early results. Get into the habit of making sure your office’s results are in before noon. Make results happen before noon.
Your office must never close without a result. A business will lose focus without iron-fisted control from the top. Now, please, understand the paradox of that. Iron-fisted control does not mean abusing your team. You are firm but fair and, on certain things, you will not compromise. One of these things is that your office never closes without at least one result each day.
Asking Price Adjustments
Good leaders know that when a seller presentation has been done correctly and the listed property is not sold within two weeks of coming onto the market, the chances are that the asking price should be reduced in order to maximise the selling price. Your team should aim to sell at least 30 per cent of your stock each month.
Some team members avoid addressing the issue of their overpriced stock. They didn’t have to worry about Asking Price Adjustments when the market was booming. In most areas it isn’t booming any more, so we now have to pay special attention to the asking prices of our stock.
Salespeople tend to look on talking with sellers about adjusting their asking price, or as one leader put it, ‘;Giving the price a haircut’, as delivering bad news. This attitude prevents them from doing their job, which is to:
GET THE PROPERTY SOLD.
And we know that the longer we leave a property at a high price, the lower the price the sellers may eventually have to accept. Therefore, as leaders, we cannot allow our salespeople to shirk visiting sellers and asking them to reduce their asking prices.
How they do this is the difference between a good result and an angry client, and this is another matter entirely. We cover this in great detail in our sales program Winning Ways – Real Estate Sales. But the least we should do is insist that our salespeople stop leaving their stock on the market at unsaleable prices.
Fail to address the price issue and your agency could be your competitors’ best asset . While your salespeople leave sellers sitting unsold with your agency, your salespeople could be conditioning those sellers to sell with your competitor. Have you had a property withdraw from sale with your agency and list with another agency at a lower price lately? Now you see what I mean.
For many leaders, it has become all too easy for mediocrity to fester in their offices. In such businesses, while the payment of expenses always seems to occur, the extra profit necessary for the leader to enjoy a good life is absent. The bills are paid but the leader struggles.
By simply setting goals and putting the focus on what is necessary to achieve those goals, by focusing on the actions required EACH DAY to achieve those goals, and setting some basic ground rules, such as one result per day, results will occur if the team is trained and committed. It begins with the leader’s understanding of a fundamental truth:
Expenses occur daily. From today, so do results.