Click Here to subscribe to the feed version of this blog.In the last blog, we explored how to toughen up your agents. We know it takes an agent with more tenacity and more skill to make it in real estate sales than it did in the past. Now, the question is, how do you find these tough people in the first place? There are specific strategies we recruiters must gain to choose the right people for this newer, more unforgiving market.
One of the ways to pick winners is to ask questions in the interview that indicate your candidate has the tenacity and persistence it takes to thrive in this market. (See The Complete Recruiter and Your Blueprint for Selecting Winners for skills on how to construct best questions).
Best Questions to Identify Toughness
Here are a few questions to include your interview process:
- Tell me about a time in your life when you accomplished a great deal against all odds.
- Was there a time in your life when you had to accomplish something completely on your own? What happened?
- Have you ever performed in front of dozens, or even hundreds or thousands of people? How did you prepare to do that? What happened?
Asking this type of ‘past based’ questions, probing, listening, and evaluating will give you a great sense of the performance potential of your candidates in tough markets.
What are your favorite questions? What challenges are you having picking agents for this ‘new normal’ market? Let me hear from you!
How to Toughen’ Em Up for the ‘New Normal’
By · CommentsHow do you toughen your agents for the ‘new normal’—that much more challenging market? You’ve probably noted, as I have, that many agents have either gotten out of the business or have dropped to the sidelines, to ‘wait it out’. Why? Because they don’t have the will or the skill to tackle this market. But, there are some agents who are thriving in this market. What’s the difference? Self-confidence and self-esteem. To wildly paraphrase psychologist Maxwell Maltz, we can’t motivate ourselves to raise to a challenge without a concurrent raising of self-esteem.
What did he mean? We just aren’t willing to take risks unless we’re feeling pretty good about ourselves. I think we’d all agree that this is the kind of market that requires us to have a high level of self-confidence. How do managers find it and nurture it?
Symptoms of Self-Esteem Issues
Managers: Are there some agents you have now that just can’t seem to ask the closing questions? Just aren’t willing to lead generate? Run away when faced with objections? If so, read the tips below on helping your agents raise their self-esteem so they can thrive in this market.
Toughening Tips from Top Performers
Great performers MUST have high self-esteem. Just for a moment, pretend that you’ve been chosen to present your recruiting or listing presentation on a 100-foot stage before 30,000 real estate peers. How do you feel? Excited? Scared? Which way are you running? Toward or away from the stage? Because I’ve been on the stage as a musician from the time I was four years old, I’ve had the opportunity to feel those ‘stage’ feelings and have had to learn how to manage my ‘performance’ emotions. Here are three keys to gutsy performance in these challenging real estate markets:
- Practice, practice, practice. You wouldn’t get up in front of those 30,000 people without having practiced your presentation until you were a master. So, don’t go to a single presentation without a high level of practice, either.
Managers: Assume your agents can’t perform competently without practice. Build in practice to every training and coaching session.
- Role play with a coach! I am teaching an Up and Running in 30 Days small group right now. I found that several of the agents just didn’t have compelling reasons for a seller to meet with them. Why? Because they hadn’t practiced their dialogue with a coach. You know your dialogue isn’t very good when you don’t get the listing, but, isn’t it unfortunate that you didn’t have better dialogue to optimize that contact?
Managers: Make role play a part of your training and coaching. You’ll be stunned—and sometimes thrilled—with the creativity of your agents!
- Build your self-esteem with a Professional Portfolio. What is a Portfolio? It is a presentation about YOU–your strengths, your strategies, your differentiators, and, most important, what people have said about you. It’s used to help agents, sellers and buyers get to know the ‘best you’—fast. After all, if they don’t trust you and respect your knowledge, you can’t form a relationship with them.
Tip to managers: Create a version of your Portfolio for your office entry. For a complimentary list of the contents of your Office Portfolio, and suggested topic separators, click here.
The importance of the Portfolio to your self esteem: Because you’re going to put your testimonials in the Portfolio, it will infuse you with self-confidence to make you motivated to tackle those tough buyers, sellers, and transactions.
Armed with these ideas, and the subsequent action, you’ll be providing the toughness necessary for your agents to thrive in the ‘new normal’.
To get your list to create a Book of Greatness, click here.
Are you standing in front of your students to create better performance, or more knowledge? If you are want to train, it’s very important to clarify for yourself exactly what your role is. Why? Because it will determine the outcomes you get.
I learned this the hard way. After graduating in piano performance, I applied to and had been awarded a scholarship to UCLA as a graduate assistant in the music department. But, after I was at UCLA a few weeks, I became disillusioned, for I found out that the UCLA music department was all about ‘knowledge’, not performance. Professors earned tenure by publishing papers about sixteenth century Elizabethan madrigals–but they didn’t have to be able to play the madrigals…My interest and experience in music had been performance.
Are You After Better Performance or More Knowledge?
I’ve never forgotten that lesson about the difference in the knowledge about something–and the performance of it. Which is more important in what you’re teaching? What do you want your students to be able to do as a result of your presentation/training? Sure, just like musical performance, you must have some technique to perform. But, also like musical performance, lots of knowledge doesn’t make you a good performer.
If You Want Better Performers…..
Here are five areas to look at to assure you’re creating performers, not just know-it alls.
1. What percent of your program is instructor focused? That is, the instructor performs. If it’s more than 50%, you have a knowledge-heavy program. Model your program like the piano teacher teaches piano. He talks very little, demonstrates some, and listens to the student play and gives positive reinforcement and re-direction. The teacher knows he taught because the student can play.
2. Do you choose your instructors based on their knowledge and their ability to deliver the message attractively? Start choosing your instructors, instead, on their ability to facilitate performance. They should be able to demonstrate a role play, set up a role play, and draw conclusions. Like great piano teachers create increasingly difficult programs for their students, your instructors should be able to craft ever-increasing difficult rule plays. Think of them like creators of ‘virtual reality’.
3. Who is held accountable for the program–the instructors or the students? In most programs, we ‘relieve’ the instructor if he doesn’t get good reviews from the students. The instructor’s the only one accountable. Turn it around. 75% of the accountability should be on the students to demonstrate they have learned the skill. Why? Because, without student accountability, managers get your ‘graduates’ who can’t perform.
4. Is your focus on curriculum? Are you attempting to create value for the program to management or owners by providing more information than the other school? Most training programs could cut 50% of their curriculum and graduate better performers. Instead of focusing on curriculum, create your program as ‘virtual reality’. Have a system that provides a series of “performance building blocks”. Don’t tell them all about playing a concerto. Just tell them enough to let them ‘get their fingers on the keys’.
5. Are the objectives of your program knowledge-based? How do the students graduate from your program? Do they pass a written exam? Managers want a graduate who can perform the activities of a real estate salesperson to reasonably high performance standards. A good training program should identify, teach, observe, and coach performance in several critical performance areas until the student can perform well enough to graduate.
The Right Performance ‘Test’
As a piano performance major, each term, I had to play a ‘mini-recital’ in the music auditorium for an audience of four–all piano professors. I couldn’t just talk about music theory, or answer a multiple choice exam. I had to play. And, to pass the ‘course’, I had to play to certain set performance standards. The more your training program resembles the ‘virtual reality’ of your specific performance, the more valuable your program to the people who hired your students –and you.
10 High Pay-off Training Tips
By · CommentsHow many of these 10 high pay-off tips do you have in your training now? Too many times we provide training because it helps us attract people to our company. That’s getting only a partial benefit! If you apply the 10 tips for training below, you will see your training pay off in increased productivity, lessened expenses, and much higher customer satisfaction and retention levels.
1. Clarify what you want the student to do—during class, and after class.
2. How well do you expect the student to do that activity? Establish competency levels.
3. Make training a process, not an event. It takes 6-8 times of hearing something to begin to retain it!
4. Space your training for “spaced repetition”. Skills can’t be learned in one marathon session. If your objective is to develop skills, you must create layered, spaced, repetitious workshops.
5. There must be rest and reflection between practices. Scientists have proven that skills are not retained unless there is at least 4 hours between skill-developing sessions.
6. If it’s skills training, three quarters of the time in class should be practice—not teacher lecture.
7. Culturize as you train. The training should be from your point of view, your method of action, and your opportunity to create a strong culture within your training modules.
8. Get feedback from the skills training in your meetings. It reinforces the skills and encourages others to take part. Take your skills to a higher level with additional masterminding.
9. Use a facilitation approach, not a lecture approach. Instead of delivering the information via lecture during class, have the students read articles, interview beforehand, listen to audios, etc.
10. Expect accountability. The student should be highly accountable for practicing the skills and for competency learning.
How many of these 10 high pay-off training tips are you already using?
YOU CAN! ‘Move’ Your Ceiling of Achievement Upward
By · CommentsIt’s the new year. Are you ready to move that ceiling of achievement you’ve been batting your head against? 2010 is the year you can do it! Without new skills, we just keeping working harder, not smarter. The really bad thing about continuing to beat your head against that ceiling, is that it hurts more and more. You spend more energy just trying to accomplish the same thing.
Too Much Energy, Too Little Results
Worse yet, we bounce off that ceiling and hit a new low every thing we get up the energy to try to break through it. Not only that, the last few years have been discouraging for many in real estate. Don’t give up on yourself! You do have the talent, the skill, and the determination to succeed at a much higher level again.
All Performers Hit ‘Ceilings of Achievement’
As a long-time performing pianist and flutist (I spent the first thirty years of my life playing and teaching music), I had to learn how to constantly change up my playing for the better. In these next few blogs, I’m going to share what I learned as a musician that will change your 2010 performance dramatically—for the better.
You Aren’t as Good as You Can Be—I Promise
I just did a talk for our area’s Women’s Council, on how to have a much better 2010—how to smash through that ceiling of achievement. (Title: Everything I learned about Achievement I learned from Tickling’ the Ivories—also the title of my latest keynote).
As a four-year old, I climbed up on the piano bench and figured out, by ear, how to play “Sue City Sue”—with bass notes, chords, rhythm, melody—the whole shebang. I was acclaimed as a little kid. However, as I got a little older, I found that playing by ear just wasn’t getting me to be a better player. Here’s what I did to get to concert artistry level, and earn a bachelor’s in piano performance—and how you can translate these performance principles to your real estate business.
Get from ‘By Ear’ via your Talent to Conscious Systemization
As a musician, I know that no one can play very well when they try learning only by hearing (playing ‘by ear’). To progress pass a ‘whiz-bang, aren’t you wonderful’ amateur level, musicians must learn to read music, get a great teacher, and learn to practice perfectly. Generally, their teacher/coach will teach them how to practice, and provide the best editions of music. They will teach them will a specific system. The better the system, the coach, the music, and the practice, the higher the performance—the sky is the limit.
The First Time You Do Something Isn’t As Good as it Gets!
What does that mean to a real estate professional? Most of us started selling or managing ‘by ear’. Some of us were talented, and that carried us pretty well for quite a while. But, then, we hit our ‘ceiling of achievement’, and found we were working 24/7 and expending way too much energy—and money. The way out:
- Grasp systems (the best systems you can find)
- Follow processes and checklists
- Get a great coach
- Practice as perfectly as you can
Practitioners—Watch Those Actions, Not Just the Words
Unfortunately, we real estate professionals don’t realize that we are judged on our performance, not our knowledge. So, when you get all antsy because you think you need more classes, stop and think about your performance level, not your knowledge level. Spend more time evaluating your performance, and pay someone to coach to you get better (all performers, whether musicians or golfers, do this, by the way). Critique your systems, and keep refining them because they will subconsciously affect your performance levels.
If I had a piano, I’d demonstrate these points (I do use the piano in the keynote!).
What Do You Want to Work on This Year—from ‘By Ear’ to Systematic?
Do you have some business plan goals for yourself this year to raise your ceiling of achievement? What do you believe is most valuable for you to work on?
Have You ‘Inventoried’ Your Systems for 2010?
By · CommentsAre you all systematized and ready for next year? In this world of lightning change, we managers are struggling to stay even–much less get ahead. In our business, changes are occurring so quickly that, just as we start to organize a process, new considerations appear. These new considerations are not only occurring more quickly than ever, the technology to organize them is evolving at warp speed. Since you’re making your business plan for 2010 (you are, aren’t you….), it’s a perfect time to see whether you are ‘up to speed’ in your systemization.
A Different Definition of a Business Plan
I love Michael Gerber’s definition of a business plan: “The sum of your systems is your business plan.” (Gerber is the author of the awesome business books, The E-Myth and The E-Myth Revisited.)
Two Systems Challenges for managers
1. Create systems to manage processes through change
2. Choose methods (including technology) to manage these systems
Let’s talk about the systems first. Good agents today have systems for each process they manage. For example, an agent has a listing process system, which includes the materials, packages, and checklists to manage the process. With those systems, agents can not only the manage the process, they can delegate the right activities to their assistants.
Agent Systems vs. Management Systems
Think about the systems, processes, and checklists you, as manager, recommend that your agent create to accomplish the critical tasks, or activities, in his business. Now, compare that with the tasks you, as manager, have to accomplish in your position as “people” manager. Work from the tasks to systems to manage these tasks. To prioritize the systems you want to develop, first:
1. List the tasks you do as manager. Now, list the parallel the tasks agents do
An example: A critical task an agent does is to lead generate. Good agents have systematized that process into a marketing plan, complete with specific tactics, dates, and budget. Managers must prospect, too. They lead generate for agents.
Does your prospecting (recruiting) plan for agents resemble that of your best agent’s marketing plan? Is it as systematized? Does it have the materials, time frames, budgets, and delegations that good agents have in their plans?
2. Now, prioritize your tasks as they relate to accomplishing your main objectives. What are the most important tasks you do as manager to assure your office makes a profit?
An example: If recruiting is very important to reaching your objective, how complete is your recruiting system? How organized is it? Who is involved with you in your recruiting plan? How well are you delegating the systems?
Prioritize your Job Description to Prioritize your Systemization
Then, you must either create or purchase systems to manage these processes. One reason managers haven’t systematized their work is that managers have few resources for systems organization. To actually systematize their work, they must create these systems from scratch. Given the myriad of activities managers must accomplish, that’s a daunting assignment. Instead, many managers stay in “crisis” management, which admittedly takes up a lot of the day, but doesn’t allow the manager to move ahead as a leader. (Weirdly, that’s what I like to do—create recruiting, selecting, coaching, and training systems so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel).
Next post: I’ll give you a list of the systems I think you should work toward so you end up working smarter, not harder.
Motivating the ‘Tough Case’ Agent
By · CommentsDo you have any seasoned agents in your office who have lost their fire? There’s probably no challenge for a manager today greater than that of rejuvenating your experienced, valued agents. Even though your market is better than it was, these seasoned agents just don’t seem to be able to re-light those fires of desire. You’ve tried being supportive and empathetic. You’ve even given them leads. Nothing has seemed to work. What are you going to do to retain these agents, motivate these agents, and get them back into the fray?
Before We Start: What Doesn’t Work
As a coach, I’ve been working with management teams to save and re-generate the careers of experienced agents. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen managers make is to try to help these seasoned agents through support and empathy. That’s just not enough. And, it’s actually demeaning. Yes, some empathy is needed. But, my observation is that it too often drifts into sympathy. Instead of motivating these seasoned agents to get back at it, these well-meaning but misguided managers are sympathizing the agents into a deeper
You Can Fill the Motivational Void Left by the ‘On Fire’ Market
As a manager, you have the ability to not only provide an atmosphere, along with a platform, to motivate that agent back into the business, you can go much further than that, to “inspiration”.
Just think what would happen if you could get that seasoned, slumping, ‘stuck’ agent back into the business with fervor. The whole attitude of your office would improve. Your coaching would work. Your training would be well attended. Your bottom line would look much healthier.
Two Steps to Create an Awesome Motivational Office
I’ve created a two-step approach to re-ignite your seasoned agents. In the next few blogs, I’ll show you exactly how to not only motivate those agents, but go way beyond motivation to inspiration.
Before I give you my approach, let me ask you to think about what motivates you. What re-lights your fires of desire? How have you noticed your seasoned agents ‘checking out’? Do some observation and research before you read my next blog post.
Guiding Your Agents: Their Missions
By · CommentsDo your agents have mission statements as part of their business plans? Why is having a mission important? How should it guide agents? You’ve heard the talks about finding your passion. But, you see your agents being over-whelmed in their careers. It’s just too much to think big when they’re just trying to find that house or convince a buyer to work with them!
The Importance of Your Mission
This time of year, we’re encouraging everyone to create their business plans. One of the first things you’ll do in creating your own business plan is to define your mission. Why? Because, otherwise, you don’t know whether or not the actions you decide to take will fulfill your mission. This is also true of your agents.
Tackling and Bringing Down your Time Management Challenges
If agents have been in the sales business a little while, they’ve already discovered that their biggest challenge is time management. How can they get done in a business day everything that needs getting done? That’s where your mission comes in. Creating your mission helps you prioritize all the things you’re supposed to do. It helps you decide what not to do. Most important, it helps you figure out
how to put YOU into your management and sales business successfully
I have a gift for you right now, to help you assist your agents in defining their vision (where you want to ‘end up’ in your business) and their missions (it works for leadership, too). Click here to get these planning tools, which are excerpted form my resource The Business Planning System for the Real Estate Professional.
Want more business planning help? I’ll be doing a webinar for the NAR’s Learning Library Dec. 8, 2009 for agents: Not Your Grammy’s Business Plan.
Want a customized full webinar/coaching/consulting package to present business planning for your agents (and get coaching from me on how to get them to love it and use it)? Click here.
What’s In a Business Plan?
By · CommentsWhat’s in a business plan? Goals? Action plans? You’re right, as far as it goes. But…..Last week, I presented a webinar through the National Association of Realtors’ Learning Library, titled Not Your Grammy’s Business Plan. One of the points I made was that the old-style one-two page business planning templates just don’t make it these days. It’s not enough to either write a
Platitude-heavy mission/vision plan, with a lot of ‘we will be….’
Or
A goals-only plan
Why? Because neither version of a business plan does you much good if you want to create a business plan that is useable every day.
What’s in a Useable Business Plan
Click here to see the parts of a strategic business plan for a real estate agent (this would work for any salesperson). I created this ‘flow chart’ after being frustrated that there was no good business planning process or template for real estate salespeople. I found that there needed to be a clear ‘path’ from the big picture planning aspects (vision/mission/objectives) to the action plan. I also found there had to be a clear delineation of the parts of the action plan. Why? Agents will focus on what they find easy—the business support parts of the plan, not the lead generating parts of the plan.
Make Money—Or Not
By focusing on the review and action portions of your plan, you will have a real blueprint to follow to create success every day. Be very careful about which planning system you use. The way you think will determine the kind of plan you get. Follow the model I’ve provided her. Now, you have a useable business plan for 2010.
Want to see more on business planning? Check out The Business Planning System for the Real Estate Professional (for agents) or Business Planning for the Owner, Manager, and Team Builder.
Grab your Complimentary Audio CD
I really, really want each one of you to gain a workable, useable plan for 2010. So, I’m offering a bonus of an audio CD to help you in your business (offer good until Dec. 31, 2010).
What’s Your Mission?
By · CommentsWhat’s your mission? It’s time to begin writing your business plan for 2010. In the next few blogs, I want to give you a few tips on creating various parts of your business plan. One of the important, but often-left-out parts of a business plan is your mission statement. What it is? It’s literally your mission in your business.
Mission statements answer the questions:
Why are you in this business?
What do you want to accomplish?
How are you going to achieve your mission?
What’s important to you?
Why Have a Mission Statement?
To keep yourself on track.
To decide what you will and won’t do.
To state who you work with (and to think about who you wouldn’t work with).
For time management
For clarity and focus
To use as a springboard to your marketing
Mission statements should be:
• Well-defined
• Restrictive
• Complementary with your company statement (and the company statement should be reflected in any branch office/associate statements)
Mission statements are:
• Not lightly changed (usually stay the same through your
years’ business plans)
• Written in the present tense
• Do not contain objectives or goals
• Not tied to time
Mission Statements Are Not Objectives or Goals
Mission statements are not quantifiable. Leave out any numbers – they go into your objectives. Following is an example: A person may write, “I am a profitable agent. I will make a profit of $50,000 every year.” The first part of the statement, “I am a profitable agent” has a place in a mission statement. But the last part of the statement is an objective, or quantifiable end result, and should be placed in another section of your plan. The mission statement is broader; it guides you as you make long-term decisions. The above offers some valuable tips on writing mission statements.
Mission Statements Aren’t Changed Lightly
Because mission statements are really statements of you as a businessperson, these statements are not lightly changed – just as you would not lightly change yourself. That does not mean that you might not work over time on how your statement is constructed, but it does mean that you do not change the essence of the statement, the specialties, the ideals – without considerable thought.
Mission Statements – In the Present
Statements should be written in the present tense. These statements convey you at your best – how you see yourself as a real estate professional. Because you may not have actually attained the picture you have in mind, you may be writing about yourself as you see yourself in the future. To cement that thought in your mind, use present tense verbs as you create your statement.
How to Use your Mission Statement
• To reflect back and forth throughout your business plan (Are
your actions congruent with your plan?)
• In your office—framed in your entry
• In your marketing materials
• In your Professional Portfolio
• In your pre-first visiting listing and buyer packages
• In your email signatures
• On your website
Mission statements first clarify for you what’s important, your focus, and your limitations. Then, they help consumers choose you. Use the parameters above to create your mission statement.
Resources
There are several mission statements in both of my business planning resources:
For a comprehensive business planning system, with fill-in forms for each part of your plan, plus audio coaching from me, see The Business Planning System for the Owner, Manager, and Team Builder at www.carlacross.com.
Forms, process and audio coaching for analyzing and planning available for agents, too. See The Business Planning System for the Real Estate Professional.
And, watch and listen to my webinar for NAR’s Learning Library: Not Your Grammy’s Business Plan. I take you through these four steps, and, if you’re watching it ‘live’, provide you some detailed planning pages from my planning resources.