Keep Marketing

Some agents never learn. Erratic actions, erratic marketing, and then they whine about how tough the market is. It doesn’t matter whether you are an individual working in an office (Salesperson or Property Manager), or whether you own the business, if you want consistent incoming enquiry you must keep marketing.

By marketing I mean making you and your office known to your target market. You do this through a combination of face-to-face contact, telephone contact, hard copy marketing and electronic marketing.

Salespeople and Property Managers have to ‘beat the streets’. Constant prospecting for new business is an essential duty for both roles.

The office, too, is responsible for generating incoming enquiry through hard copy and electronic marketing. But for such marketing to be effective, it must be PERSONALLY ADDRESSED. “Dear John and Betty” is a greeting that increases the likelihood of the marketing being read because it is a personal greeting. Send a letter or email with the greeting “Dear Homeowner” and all you do is advertise that you are a lazy agent who cannot be bothered finding out potential clients’ names.

The primary responsibility of management is to build a database, but it cannot be management’s responsibility alone. Management can source database software and set it up, but it’s the people in the field – Salespeople and Property Managers – who must gather the names and contact details so that they can be loaded into the database. Management is not in the field, and so cannot do this.

Database software is a dime-a-dozen. Good data is not.

I’m sure you’d agree that you would get better results if you knocked on doors and spoke to 1,000 people than you’d get if you only spoke to 100. The same goes with leaflets, e-Leaflets, and letters. Send out a few and get next to no enquiry. Send out huge quantities and the returns are greater. It’s a numbers game.

And it’s in the numbers where offices, Salespeople and Property Managers let themselves down. They don’t do enough. They don’t keep at marketing. This is why results are poor. IT IS NOT THE MARKET.

A database returns magical results if you have around 20,000 clients in it.

One of our leaders provided me with these figures:

Database: 20,000

Listings per month: 10

Sales per month from the database: 5 (ultra conservative) at an average selling fee of $12,000

Income: $60,000 per month, or $720,000 per annum

Profit: Office operates at 30 percent gross profit – $216,000 profit per annum JUST OFF THE DATABASE

Once you have a database you can send large quantities of marketing to it.

High number of clients in database =
High number of letters and e-Leaflets OUT =
High number of listings and sales IN.

I cannot believe that in the 21st century we still have to nag leaders to build and maintain good databases. Likewise I find it fascinating that many leaders haven’t woken up to the fact that they have to keep marketing if they want large amounts of incoming business.

Agents have been using this line on sellers for years:

“You can’t afford to keep your property a secret!”

And then they do just that with their own businesses.