Today, I’m going to address one big reason why some realtors thrive at building a business while others scrape to survive. Hint: it’s not how good you are at sales.
If you aspire to continue to grow and build a true real estate business – not just a practice – you must understand and learn how to overcome the same obstacles that stand in front of every small business. Must is an absolute word, it’s powerful. I don’t use it lightly, what I’m going to share with you here is not optional.
Most Realtors never break through a natural plateau that prevents them from scaling and reaching their true potential. The good news is, this plateau is predictable, we know what it looks like and how to break through it.
Be your CEO of sales, not your own VP of Operations. Hire one for a cost of zero.
Successful Realtors figure out the same basic principles that every successful business follows. They break through a trap I call the plateau cycle.
- Start off as a one-person show, spending most of your time selling and marketing
- Get so busy you have no time for sales and marketing
- Get caught up in the nuts and bolts of operations, too much time there and not enough selling. Sales slow down
- Less to operate, go back to selling. Sales increase again. Rinse and repeat.
It was easy when deals were falling from the sky and open houses looked like Walmart at 4AM on Black Friday.
But that’s over now, and we need to get back to the skill work. If you’re here for the long haul, this is great news for you. If you roll up your sleeves and do the work, you’ll grow tremendously in the next 7 -10 years.
Here are some must-do things to focus on:
- Be consistent in the time you spend on sales and marketing and always be selling and marketing.
- Your client’s impression of working with you has a lot to do with their transaction experience after the agreement is signed. Be fanatical about this.
- Lean into your strengths and let experts handle your weaknesses.
- Vet your experts well. Be fanatical about this.
Now let’s talk about how you can do these things consistently and well. How you can break the the plateau cycle.
Always be selling and marketing
In 2020/2021, a listing was guaranteed money in the bank for you. Buyers were literally everywhere and finding one to work with you didn’t take much effort.
In 2023, back on planet Earth, Realtors need fundamentals and hard work to be successful. Selling real estate means selling real estate. It means finding sellers and buyers and getting them to choose you. So your time has to be spent doing this as much as possible.
Consistency beats talent in the long run, everytime. If you’re talented and consistent, of course that’s better. Networking, posting and prospecting in spurts doesn’t work. It may get you fed, but you won’t break the plateau cycle.
Your brand, your network, interest in you will grow only if you do something to advance it, every single day. Last year at some point, you probably had a lot going on at once: Five deals closing in the next two weeks, writing three contracts, multiple bidding wars with buyers… finding the time was hard and if ‘best practices’ slipped, you may not have felt it. Now the process really matters and it’s time to focus and lay groundwork for long-term growth in real markets.
Everything large and successful has specialists. Breakthroughs and treatments in medicine only happen with specialists. The biggest, most well run companies have specialists in each department. Breaking the plateau is about figuring out how to get from wearing all the hats, to having specialists in all the key areas. You’re the sales and marketing specialist. Sell everyday.
What’s your product?
Every business has to do two things all the time:
- Make the product or deliver the service
- Get new customers for tomorrow
Above we talked about your job – above all else – should be to get new customers for tomorrow.
So, what’s your actual product?
Past clients are gold, they should become referral sources that generate +50% of your business eventually. That won’t happen by osmosis. Of course, you have to have a specific strategy around extracting those referrals (that’s another conversation), but before you even get there you have to have HAPPY CLIENTS. Not just happy, ecstatic, raving fan clients.
Don’t forget, the happiness of your clients won’t come from your sales skills. It will come from the experience they have throughout the entire transaction. From the moment the agreement is signed, there’s a lot of stress for any buyer or seller. They will talk and work with many people that aren’t you: title companies, lenders, attorneys, appraisers, inspectors; all of them contribute to an experience that will be reflected upon you. Yes, you’re the trusted source here for your buyers and sellers. They chose you. They didn’t choose the appraisers, inspectors and many others. Most importantly, they don’t know what to expect. This is a critical point.
To get tons of referrals and be a Realtor Ninja, your buyers and sellers have to rave about you everywhere.
To get them to rave about you, you have to ask them.
To get them to agree, they have to love you.
To get them to love you, they have to be thrilled with their experience buying or selling with you. To get them to be thrilled, they have to actually have an incredible experience.
Don’t play games with this. Your career will pay for it.
Your product isn’t the proceeds check for sellers or the keys for buyers. It’s their experience that starts with meeting you and ends with moving in or out.
Hire experts so you can focus on your strengths
If you’re busy selling consistently, who will be accountable for the experience of your buyers and sellers?
This is where your transaction coordinator comes in.
If you don’t have a TC, you are one. And if you don’t have a great one, you’re losing probably more than you realize.
Just like a VP of Operations for a business, a great TC will help you accelerate growth and a bad one will govern it. As CEO of your Real Estate business, it’s on you to find, vet and hire the absolute best you can find.
This isn’t easy, there are a lot of bad ones out there. We’ve designed a program to deliver you the most vetted and high performing TC’s available.
[insert some pitch from Sherri Green about why. Sherri: what makes a great TC?]