Ep 133 — What to Do When the Marketing Stops Working

In this High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips talk about what to do when the marketing stops working. Alex notes the current slow market in Sydney and describes some things he’s doing to generate leads. Josh describes the difference between transactional agents and those who focus on building relationships, and Alex explains buyer motivation and how to work through those relationships. They discuss the importance of contacting past clients and offering them information on current opportunities.

They share thoughts on altering timelines for auctions, campaign strategies, staying close to your buyers and understanding their motivations. Josh ends with an emphasis on doing great buyer work through consistency in communication and relationship-building.

Limiting Beliefs

Your business needs to scale, but if you’re going to start to write bigger numbers you’ve got to know how to do it. Today in my Coaching Tip I’m going to talk about how limiting beliefs hold you back from seeing the reality of the growth you can achieve.

It all starts when you’re an individual agent working your first open for inspections. At some point you’ll have auctions, too. Soon there will be more work than you can do alone, so you’ll put on an assistant. As your business grows you’ll have competing demands that you’ll feel you have to meet personally. But trying to do that will keep you from being able to grow successfully.

This is where you must learn how to scale. You do this by building a team of capable people who can do those open for inspections as individual agents underneath your banner. You’ll then be able to counter customer concerns and objections with complete confidence, even before they bring them up. I’ll give you some specific examples around how to make sure you have the right people working with the right clients in every capacity of your business.

Making your customers feel completely comfortable with your people is critically important. That’s why you have to hire a great team to represent your brand. I’m also going to give you some phone dialog for your people to use that will keep the focus on your brand without setting your agents up as individual sub-brands within your organisation.

Some of the best agents in the country are doing 100 transactions a year. You can scale your own business that way by building a quality team that steps you up to at least fifteen opens a week. Get past your limiting beliefs and think in terms of reaching those bigger numbers. Your sales process can then produce a much better result for your clients by giving you access to more buyers in more price ranges than any other agent.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

How to Charge More

You can focus on the competition, or you can focus on the customer. One of them will pay your invoice, and it isn’t the competitor.

Our industry is obsessed with what the competition is doing. We still follow what others do, and if someone breaks the mould, we wait and watch, if it looks successful we replicate it fast.

The disruptors are eating at the edges of our business, stripping away the value proposition and it leaves us complaining that the competition is stiff, that it’s hard to compete. The advent of lead generation websites, new models that charge lower fees and provide higher splits, leave us dazed and confused.

The reality, all of that is a distraction, because all of that focuses on the current environment, on the right now customer. Even the banks are entering with full artillery to provide consumers with the ‘real market value’ of their homes. The age-old market report, market appraisal and free assessment are done.

So how do you win? You put the customer at the centre of everything you do. It’s called customer-centric design. You work hard to identify the sticky points, the friction, the things that don’t work then work out a way to deliver it so that the customer finds you valuable.

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The customer has never argued for a lower fee, they’ve argued for value, and in a good market, the agency looks easy. You’ll never know the strength of an agent until a market turns, or they have to negotiate. Any agent that’s started in the last five years on the East Coast of Australia has a limited memory of GFC conditions, and we’re certainly not headed there, but we are reshaping what it is that great estate agents do to earn the right to the customer.

It comes down to your customer acquisition strategy and if you think socials the answer, watch your business fry. What makes a business move and turn quickly on its head, the type of thing that adds accelerant to your growth is the relationship.

When everyone is equal on digital, which is happening fast, it goes back to the relationship. That’s why those that focus on making the calls, getting in the doors, getting face to face always win.

It take’s guts to avoid an industry fad, an apparent trend. You must become more valuable. For excellent buyer work, it means making a pest, building and strata report (if applicable) available from day one to reduce the buying friction. For the seller it’s having a buying service to help them find where they are moving to, assisting with property preparation, even sending someone to help have the property ready every Saturday morning for the open.

People are time poor; we live in a fast-paced society, a mobile society that expects to press a button and just make it happen. You could focus on the champagne you give to the customer but isn’t it of more value to send a cleaner to clean in the hours before settlement, for both the buyer and the seller? To send the locksmith to replace the locks and key alike for the buyer just after settlement and provide a spare key at our office service, to continue that consumer relationship with the future customer?

The most successful businesses in this industry focus on the customer never on the competitor, so be careful about who you’re trying to replicate, who you hold up as a role model, because you may be following a path into lower fees, lower profitability and possible extinction.

The easiest way to drive service innovation is to go through a real estate transaction yourself from beginning to end. Look at every point, what are the things you have to do and how can an agent make that easier, faster, better? We use a service called Getfeedback.com to survey our clients and the ideas they have for innovation on what we can do, is astounding. Pick up the phone and talk with 30 customers a day, find out what their real challenges are, the blockages as to why they can’t move, whey they can’t sell etc., find a solution, and you’ll nail it.

The last thing we need is another market report, another just listed or sold in the letterbox. What we need is a relationship that matters, one that’s built on trust. You do that through being relevant, that relevancy determines the frequency and consistency always win in business. Set your service delivery standard, train on the customer lifecycle and what you do to add the value. The true purpose of any great agent is to help people have a much bigger future through property.

The industry is bright for those that choose the alternative path. Do the work and watch your business thrive.

This article first appeared on Elite Agent: https://eliteagent.com/josh-phegan-charge/

Reducing the Politics Inside of Your Organisation

When internal politics override governing values, then you’re no longer doing what’s best for the customer. In this month’s Growth, Leadership, and Management Tip I’m going to talk to you about reducing the politics inside of your organization and putting the customer’s needs first.

It all falls down when you have competing demands. Let’s say one of your sales agents lists a property in a street where another of your salespeople already has a client and a third one is handling a marketing appraisal, and there are landlords living in that area as well. When that new property gets listed, who’s going to call the customers to let them know what’s going on? Who’s going to call the landlords?

While your people are worried about who is in whose database and whether the property manager will call the landlords, they’ve all forgotten about working as a team. Their confusion is costing the business money, and your customer is outside the loop, wondering what’s happening.

You’ve got to remove the politics and get your people working together again. That starts with customer obsession, which means the customer has to be at the centre of everything you do. Next, you have to get clarity on your Everest – where you’re growing your business. What are your expectations for listings, sales and revenue?

For your business to grow, you must have clarity of purpose. And that purpose is to help your customer grow through property transactions. Here, your guiding principles, policies and procedures, and general way of doing things, are critical to keep politics from taking precedence. Reducing the politics inside of your organization means you must make a clear statement that, “We don’t have politics inside of this organization. We do what’s best for the customer.” The sooner you set that rule, the sooner your business can do what it needs to do.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s Growth, Leadership, and Management Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next month.

Ep 132 – Service Standards and Why They Matter

This High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents features Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips talking about service standards and why they matter. Alex advises setting high standards and delivering on your promises and client expectations. Josh breaks down and illustrates the service standard concept, and how that service generates listings. Alex explains the importance of getting clear on what your service standards are, and believing in those standards. They discuss scaling your team, and the requirement that your people also understand and uphold your business standards.

Josh notes how work ethic determines position and how your support positions allow you to do more of the work you need to do. Then Alex tells how he trains his new sales agents by exposing them firsthand to how the business works, and clarifies expectations by example.

Don’t Copy What They’re Doing

Rather than worrying about competitors, a great real estate agent is focused on ensuring a winning customer experience. Today my Coaching Tip will reinforce that you don’t copy what they’re doing at that other agency. Instead, decide exactly what it is you need to do for your customer.

If you really want to win in your marketplace, remember it’s your customers who pay your invoices, not your competition. Still, agents tend to work harder to compete with each other than to deliver what their customers will appreciate. Everybody copies what everyone else has done, and the industry becomes less smart in its approach to dealing with the customer’s needs.

In the book The Power of Moments authors, Dan and Heath Chip speak about specific things we can do to engineer the moments we experience. An example would be a trip to Disneyland where your children will experience moments of excitement as well as moments of low enthusiasm, especially as they reach exhaustion. The interesting effect is, at the end of the day they’ll likely be tired and at a low point. Three weeks later when someone asks them about Disneyland all they’ll remember are the high points and how much fun they had.

The same thing happens to your customers. If you send a feedback survey immediately after any customer transaction, you’ll tend to hear about the low points in their experience with you. The further you move away from that transaction, the more they’ll remember the high points of working with you. The key is to find ways to marry a high point of success closer to where the low point exists.

These are the important things that a great real estate agent considers, and the reason you don’t want to worry about your competitors and you don’t copy what they’re doing. Map out specifically what the high points and low points of your customer experience are, then decide exactly what it is you need to do to set an expectation where they’ll say, “That’s why I use you as my real estate agent.”

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

Ep 131 – Distraction, Disruption, and Competitors

In this High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips discuss distraction, disruption, and competitors, and how to keep yourself above those bad influences. Alex tells how his fees have remained high as other agents’s have dropped because he focuses on nurturing relationships. Josh notes that successful disruptors in all areas of business are promoting what they do for the customer rather than their own success rates. He also compares digital vs. relationship-driven models. Alex details how service sets his agency apart and wins the business for him.

Josh notes that market knowledge and quality relationships can’t be faked, and the agent who wins is the one who gets those 3rd-party referrals. Alex explains the importance of case studies for social proof, and being highly available and in touch with your vendors.

What’s the Job You Get Done?

As your business scales you’re in danger of treating your customer experience like a transaction. In my Coaching Tip today I want you to ask yourself, what’s the job you get done? I’ll show you the warning signs that you might not be effectively dealing with your clients’ human issues during the course of selling their property.

You need to understand what your customers find valuable in what you do for them. They want you to help them get to Sold, they want you to help them get moved, and they want you to help them get everything done as quickly as possible. To ensure your success in meeting their needs you need a great set of rules.

Some of my own rules include not taking a listing without vendor-paid marketing, setting the right sales process for the style of property and current market conditions, and making sure pricing is right and understood by the client. I also insist that my clients are genuinely nice people with the right style of property in the right market area for my brand to be representing. And my client has to want to sell even more than I want to make the sale for them.

If you meet these rules and conditions you’ll be set for success. But you must also ensure that you’re responding to your client as a human being. Some warning signs that you’re not paying attention include a sudden resistance to more open homes, reductions in price, or payments for more marketing.

A great agent knows that if a property isn’t sold it’s because they need to take control of the situation. Get clear around what’s the job you get done for the customer. Ask great questions around what they would like to see happen, how they would like to proceed, and what they would like for you to do. Their answers will help you identify and drive for actions that will produce results.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

Ep 130 – Rebuilding Momentum

In this High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips talk about rebuilding momentum going into 2018. Alex claims that too many agents are shortsighted and desperate, and that shows badly in front of the vendor. He says if you keep doing all your day-to-day activities whilst looking ahead 3 to 6 months, then listings and momentum will happen. Josh notes the necessity for customer acquisition, and Alex elaborates on lead generation plus ways momentum is built between agents and agencies. Josh tells how appointments lead to listings and sales, as face-to-face is most influential.

Alex notes that consistency prevents peaks and troughs, Josh advises managing focus rather than time, and listing ahead of the curve as cycles occur in life as well as the market. Alex then predicts where most agents will lose momentum with upcoming market trends.

Keep It Simple

Instead of getting distracted over what you think you’re supposed to do, let’s get clear about what you actually should do deliver the results your client needs. In my Coaching Tip today I’ll show you how to keep it simple to get more results for more customers.

Too many agents today are looking too hard at what everyone else is doing instead of concentrating on what they’re doing themselves. A great business starts with great systems. That can mean checklists, or forms, or dialogues, or visuals. The point of the system is to help you do the work, and teach other people how to do that with you.

Everything in life is about getting real clarity about your goals so you know what systems you’ll need to reach them. How many sales do you need, and how many properties? How will you generate leads and do appraisals? It’s your systems that will get you the results. And if you’re not getting there, then redesign the systems and put the right people in play to go get the result that you want.

Consider the type of business you want and design your system to produce it. Determine if you’re at a capacity issue right now, figure how many transactions a month you need to get to next, and decide what systems you need to get right in order to get that growth. You can also use time and motion studies to work ahead of the curve. How long does it take to produce, how simple is it, and is it getting the result you need? Time your processes and create systems to reduce time and work more efficiently.

You’ll actually get greater results if you simplify the process for the customer. A lot of agents produce large dossiers of information to impress their clients. Most clients want to hire an agent who can keep it simple, though. Boil down all of the key things you need to discuss with the client onto one page, keep it relevant and be direct, and they’ll trust and respect your opinion.

Like Zig Ziglar once said, if you help enough people get what they want then they’ll help you get what you want.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.