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Real Estate Career Breakthrough
Imagine that you are on the verge of a Real Estate Career breakthrough. The goal is for you to achieve a breakthrough where your career will never be the same again and you know that you can apply pressure and achieve your next breakthrough any time you like. It is just a matter of consistent pressure and persistence.
To achieve a breakthrough you need to press forward and keep up a steady pressure. As a Real Estate professional, you keep up that steady pressure by making follow up calls on leads every day. This is a steady effort.
Breakthrough does not occur immediately. You have to have a method of measuring your progress so you can see if and when there is progress. So you can see whether any resistance is giving way to your pressure. In your career, you measure that progress by keeping track of your number of appointments each week.
You know that if you reduce the pressure the breakthrough will not happen. Just as you know that if you make fewer appointments or even the same number that you are used to, you will not reach higher levels. Just as if you are not consistent with making new appointments each week there will be no progress. If you are making new appointments one week, none the next, starting and stopping, you are not achieving anything permanent.
Then, you need to increase the pressure steadily until you make the permanent breakthrough. In other words you increase your Lead Management habits, generating, contacting and following up steadily until you reach a level of appointments per week that may be uncomfortable for a little while. That’s when you’ll know that it is the level at which the breakthrough will occur.
And it does. It happens. Business starts to flow. More leads begin to come in steadily. Your confidence will rise and then soars. Seeing you with more confidence based on a foundation of work is an exciting and awesome thought. Watch out World.
For this purpose we count appointments as the first substantive meeting with a buyer or seller, your listing presentation or your buyer presentation. If you don’t do a buyer presentation (and you should but many agents don’t) count the second time you take the buyer out. Keep track of your number of appointments each week.
I am often asked what psychological methods I use to help so many Agents achieve breakthroughs in their careers. How do I coach them to sell more than ever before, earn more, often double their best previous numbers in the first year of our work together? It is the same psychology I used on my children when they were doing something I didn’t like. I would get them interested in something else. The key to an Agent breakthrough is to get you interested in your numbers.
It begins with knowing how many new appointments per week will take you to higher production than you have ever achieved. In every case, the number is surprisingly reasonable. Then we measure that number. Record those appointments each week. Measure conversion to ensure that you are selling at least half of the buyers and sellers with whom you have initial appointments. Then continually work on increasing that rate of conversion so you can exceed your goals with even less appointments.
We measure your sales, your listings, and your cash flow, each month and the accumulation of your year to date numbers. We compare your current year’s numbers to your history of the past year’s numbers. You find that by paying attention to appointments each week you have your best February ever, then your best March, then April. It seems sudden that by June or August you have done more business than you have ever done in any entire year.
A friend of mine who battles depression told me that the best advice they’ve received from their psychologist was to focus on the next thirty seconds, then the next five minutes, soon you can think forward to an hour and without noticing they were once again in control of the world that seemed to be crushing in on them instead of immobilized by it.
A Real Estate business can be so much like that. There is so much to do, so many choices, so much responsibility. It is often difficult to focus on what is next. We coach you to know how many of those new appointments it will take to exceed your best ever production and pay attention to achieving those appointments first. Then you realize that the number of appointments you make is going to cause you to exceed your goals for the month. We measure that and as that naturally happens from attending to your appointments you are able to relax, think clearly and plan for your next levels.
Sure, we also tell our clients that they can accomplish their goals. We provide what we call unconditional support. When a client begins to question their ability we laugh and help them notice how their thoughts and feelings can seep in and try to sabotage the simple measures that are clearly indicating that your business is better than ever before. We even have a saying for that. “Don’t be so fascinated by your thoughts and feelings.” Or its corollary, “Have your thoughts and feelings but don’t let them have you.” And my personal mantra, that teaches you to respect your thoughts and feelings while minimizing their impact, “You can’t control what pops into your head or your heart. You can control how long you choose to hold it there.”
Bottom line we teach what every highly successful entrepreneur learns. We coach what every top athlete learns. We coach what every successful person in any field that requires effort and skill knows. We teach that you get what you measure. Measure your calories and you will lose weight. You also gain more ability to control the psychological barriers. The world renowned economist Steven D. Levitt in his business best seller, in a chapter titled, “The Hidden Side of Everything” says, “If you can learn how to look at data in the right way you can explain the riddles that otherwise might have seemed impossible.”
Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire in his business best seller, “Business at the Speed of Thought” wrote, “Data gives you the information you need so that as you ponder issues and make choices, you are alert to the most important things. Information enables you to act quickly, provide solutions, and take action on problems and opportunities that you were unaware of before. A company or a person cannot develop a successful strategy, undertake the right ventures, or effectively understand what to do next without building on insights from the facts and data.”
For over two decades I have been gathering and managing the data of Agents who achieved breakthroughs. It is just under the surface of what you are doing in your business right now and with the proper guidance and structure you, too, can reach levels that were previously only in your dreams.
