Today’s blog post is written by Gabrielle Jeans, a leading Real Estate Internet Marketing Trainer and an icon in the North American real estate industry. Gabrielle, the Founder and CEO of e2000 Training Institute Inc. and WebTech Dezine Inc., has been training real estate professionals since 1974 across North America. She has taught thousands to take their business to new levels of profitability, market penetration and brand recognition.
Today, Gabrielle Jeans is widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on business development in the North American real estate industry. Participants in her programs rank among the top 5% revenue earners in their offices and districts, and are the recipients of a multitude of national and regional awards for sales excellence.
Effective Real Estate Prospecting
Some real estate sales professionals who work in the industry for a few years achieve moderate success, but eventually hit a bottleneck and can’t seem to take their business to the next level. Many think they could do it if they had more clients. But if you’re a single real estate sales person, there’s a limit to how many clients you can properly serve simultaneously. The problem isn’t so much lack of clients as your ability to close the ones you have now.
Real estate prospecting really is a key component to your success, so you must find a strategy that works for you and master it. In my 36 years in real estate I’ve tried many prospecting strategies and techniques myself and recommended them to top producers. Even if you’re a top producer now you’ll probably find them useful. Here are three things you need to know about real estate prospecting:
What You Need to Know About Real Estate Prospecting
1. Get Organized and Use a Real Estate Contact Management Software
You should approach your prospecting in a systematic fashion, and the best way of doing that is having a real estate contact management software. If you’re always writing prospects’ contact info on scraps of paper or sticky notes, you’ll lose or forget leads and never really have a proper, time efficient prospecting system.
If you don’t have a system to follow, you’ll find yourself spending your time inefficiently and not doing tasks in order of priority. When you have a system for your business, you’ll find you have a greater sense of purpose and your results will improve greatly.
The best agents all use a real estate contact management system of some sort. Whenever they make a new contact, they always get specific pieces of information from them such as full name, spouses name, mailing address, email address and phone number (home and cell). I can’t stress the importance of getting all of this information as soon as possible. Without it all, you’ll find yourself hampered in your ability to build relationships with these people at certain junctures.
One of the biggest ways real estate professionals lose out on potential business and fail to create weak tie relationships is by neglecting to keep in touch with all real estate prospects and clients. A relationship is either growing or dying. The longer you neglect it, the more it dies. The more you nurture it, the more it grows. So top performers regularly keep in touch with all their contacts, and the best way of doing that is with a system. This is how they create ‘weak tie’ relationships.
2. Treat Prospecting as Your Real Estate Career’s Lifeblood
Increasing your real estate prospecting effectiveness is the single fastest way of boosting your sales. Focus your efforts on the quality of your real estate prospects, not so much the quantity. It’ll ensure you spend most of your time with qualified prospects. Top producing real estate professionals don’t spend much time with bad real estate prospects because it taxes their most valuable resource: time.
You should also focus on consistency. A steady stream of qualified real estate prospects helps avoid slumps and plateaus. Consistency also eliminates fear and procrastination, two things preventing you from keeping current with your prospects and customers.
3. Effectively Leveraging Your Time
Leveraging your time is difficult but critical to your success. Your prospecting abilities are your best time management tool because they sort the ‘wheat’ prospects from the ‘chaff’ prospects, helping you avoid wasting time on people who aren’t decision makers or aren’t serious about buying or selling. Unfocused or sloppy prospecting wastes time because you wind up spending time with useless prospects.
Think how much of a difference this can make: the wear on your morale when you’re regularly dealing with bad prospects vs. the boost to your self confidence and determination when you’re regularly dealing with qualified prospects. So get a prospecting routine you’re comfortable with and work it every day!