Real Estate Sales – The Big Results from this Big Challenge
Over the years we have worked with many independent business people – financial planners, insurance agents and both commercial and residential real estate agents. We have taken what has traditionally been a single person business and helped turn them into high functioning teams that sell like crazy! They often have had good product knowledge but next to no sales training or sales knowledge. We have armed them with good sales tools and then helped build the business into a team of capable experts who sell more and earn way more.
As an example is a former client and real estate agent named Dave. Dave was earning about $130-150K a year as a realtor. He was working roughly 50-60 hours a week and was often very busy at all hours of the day – impacting his family life. His goal was to increase his sales so he could bring on another partner or agent to help free up his time.
So Dave engaged me and we went to work. We looked all a variety of places we needed to improve and fix starting in his sales process. Here is a summary of what we focused on and tackled
- We created baseline levels of activity each week and started tracking that activity every week. It included calls, emails, proposals, client meetings and listing appointments held each week. (we had some more specific details to what qualified for each category)
- Dave was actually getting a good number of listing appointments each week but closing only a portion of them. So we went to work on re-vamping his presentation skills and his physical presentation materials so they were different than any other agent. We implemented the Ultimate Sales Call Process and conversion rates skyrocketed.
- We gather data on Dave’s performance as an agent and added it to the materials. We also got testimonials and support from clients to use in new listing presentations.
- We looked as his closing method and got him using the #1 Evolve Closing Technique to ensure he closed way more appointments and listings – without doing more work!
- We created a 25 point marketing plan when others were working off a 3-4 point plan
- We got him back to the Parky’s Principle of doing sales first thing every day. He even got back to cold calling who he, ironically, loved to do.
- We re-vamped the proposals to be more effective to read, easier to get the summary and more focused on differentiators in Dave, his team (as they joined) and service
- We created an incredible referral program driven from a full year of gratitude for clients who worked with Dave – this alone massively grew his business into the coming 2 years
- We setup new sales questions that went beyond just asking how much they wanted to list their home for. We got into service, their lifestyle goals, the experience they wanted to have and then finally their perceptions of pricing.
- We implemented over half of the 9 Secrets to Sales Mastery in the first 5 months and immediately saw more quality meetings, more referrals and a better closing rate
- We re-scripted their cold call approach so that people actually listened and we got more appointments setup for each representative
- We learned about personality profiles, risk adversity and buying styles to see how that was affecting every sales situation – especially important given that we were selling to couples that often had different profiles for all these decision influencing characteristics
There were countless other activity we added to their marketing, their image as a business within a business and to the long term relationship creation with clients (building a community around their business). Here were some of the results:
- Sales commissions increased from approximately $140,000 to over $422,000 in 12 months
- Conversion rate of listing presentation went from 18% to 54%
- Added an office administration and a condo specialist to the team in year one
- Added a buyers specialist agent in year two
- Increase in Proposals Out
- No baseline but average weekly output of 5.5 per week
- Increase in Cold Calls
- It was zero and it quickly moved to 40 and then 65 target calls per week
- Weekly Sales Appointments
- o Up from an average of just under 2 to over 3.8 meetings per week
- Maintained the same marketing and sales expenses year over year with the sales increase
- Referral sales in year two had grown by 318% over the previous two years
- No on call work every second weekend for Dave and no more night meetings
Soft Benefits
- Tracking of sales and personal performance – now they wanted to compete and win!
- Framing the mindset for the prospect and sales guys alike
- Stronger confidence and now the belief that they could be a top performer
- Belief that they could compete with anyone in the market
- Desire to start to invest in properties and build his own portfolio launched
