The average person gets interrupted every 8 minutes. It's no secret that time management is difficult.
Real estate agents are no exception.
One of the biggest challenges real estate agents has controlled their time.
Week after week, we work days, evenings, and weekends.
I remember having to show homes to a first-time buyer during my wife’s baby shower. She wanted me to be in the shower with her. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say no to the client. I needed the commission.
I spent the entire afternoon showing them homes. Guess what? They never bought a house with me. I’m still, to this day, irritated about them.
It's the reason why I learned how to get prospects and clients to operate on my terms and how I learned about sales prospecting techniques.
Why We Cannot Control Our Clients
First, let’s take a few minutes and analyze why we cannot control our clients and, therefore, our schedules.
I believe this happens for many reasons. Here are a few:
1. Our Clients Can Easily Replace Us
We realize that many other agents are competing for our client's business. These agents would gladly cater to our clients’ schedules. If we don’t say yes every time a client asks for something, we feel like we could lose them.
The feelings are real and justified. We do lose clients all of the time. Clients are not loyal to one agent anymore.
2. We Need the Commission
Every sale and every commission is vital to us. Most agents do not have the luxury of letting a sale slip through their fingers. We have bills to pay, and we need the money.
Because we need the money, we do what we have to do to keep our clients happy.
3. We Have Trouble Saying No
Most agents work extremely hard to get a new client. Because they work so hard to get the client, they don’t want to do anything that would cause them to be unhappy. To keep the “hard to get” client happy, we say, “Yes, I will show you homes on Friday night from 5 to 9 pm.”
There are many other reasons we have trouble controlling our schedules, but these would probably be the top three. The good news is that there is a strategy you can employ that will help you completely control your schedule and turn the table on your clients.
The strategy is to become irreplaceable in your client’s eyes. If you were irreplaceable, your client would happily work on your terms.
Write a Book
The easiest way to achieve expert positioning is to write a book. How do you think prospects would view you if you were a recognized author? Do you think you might become irreplaceable?
You bet they would.
You have to write a real estate book. You can’t write a children’s book and get the same positioning. You should also focus the book on the niche that you selected for your business.
Writing a Book Helps You Obtain Expert Positioning
Remember, your purpose for writing your book is not to be a bestseller.
Your sole purpose is to obtain expert positioning. As soon as you finish your book, you can add “author” next to your name in all of your advertisements, business cards, website, and correspondence.
Can you now see how writing a book would position you as the expert? Can you now see how your book will set you apart from your competition? Can you now see how your book will increase your sales and allow you to control your schedule?
Can you now see how your book will make you irreplaceable? Here are some secrets about your new book:
1. Prospects Must Know About Your Book Before You Meet With Them
This means you should have your book sent to them before your first meeting. This would be before your listing appointment or your first buyer meeting. It would help if you also focused your advertisements around the fact that you’re an author.
You have to become like a television personality and shamelessly promote your book. Books don’t promote themselves. Please don’t make the mistake of writing a book and then keeping it a secret. Your book will not be profitable in and of itself.
2. Your Book Should Be One Long Sales Letter for Your Real Estate Business
You should study other authors who promote their businesses in their books. Author Michael Gerber wrote a fantastic book titled “The E Myth.” Michael owns a consulting firm that helps small business owners run their businesses based upon systems. It is a great book, and I highly recommend it.
Please pay attention to how he writes about one of his consulting clients as you read the book. He indirectly lets you, the reader, know that he can help you with your small business. I guarantee that his book has delivered thousands of clients to his business’s door.
3. Your Book Must Look and Feel Like a Book. Prospects Can’t Perceive it as a Long Report or Pamphlet
Pamphlets and reports do not give you expert positioning. Anyone can write a report. This means that your book has to be thick. You can change the font and page layout to give you extra pages. Don’t get cheap and try to save printing costs by eliminating pages. Your goal is to add pages. Your goal is to have a book.
4. Your Book Does Not Have to Be Perfect.
Most people waste so much time trying to make their book perfect. I remember interviewing a person for an administrative job on my team. During the interview, he told me he was writing a book. He went on to describe his book.
Different Ways to Have Your Book
The first way is to do it the old-fashioned way. The old-fashioned way is to sit down and write. You need to block time in your calendar and get it done.
When I wrote my first book, I would take my laptop to a local coffee shop for two hours every other day until I finished it. I completed it in 4 weeks.
You can have a local graphic artist design your cover—most good printing companies employ graphic artists. Check with your printer and see if they can design and layout your cover. Just make sure that you own and control the rights to the cover they create for you.
Or you can have the self-publishing company design the cover for you. 100 Covers designed the cover of my book.
Very Effective Co-Author Strategy:
Make a list of professionals that you work with for your real estate transactions. This list would more than likely include:
- Mortgage professional
- Tile agent
- Home inspector
- Attorney
- Accountant
- Insurance Agent
- Professional decorator
Set up a meeting with these professionals and explain that you would like to put together a multi-authored book. Each professional needs to write a chapter for this new book. They will each be featured as a co-author. You will self-publish this new book for speed. You will also make one larger combined order to drop the price of the book down dramatically.
Think about how powerful this multi-authored book strategy could be for your business. First off, you should be able to get free publicity for this book very quickly in your local newspapers and media. This would make an exciting story for the news. The publicity would give you free exposure throughout your entire marketplace. This is good, but it gets better.
I would recommend that your professionals send a free copy of your new multi-authored book to their databases. You would do the same to your database. On the surface, this might not seem like a big idea, but it is. You would automatically be perceived as the expert agent by each person in each professional’s database. You would get a free ride to thousands of new clients. The other professionals would get the same free ride too. This is a big idea. It also saves you time from writing the entire book yourself: less work, more exposure.
Your co-authors could finish the book very quickly. You would need to give each author a deadline for his or her chapter. If they miss the deadline, let them know you’re going to pursue other professionals in their field. This will keep them accountable for your project.
Now You Know How to Get Your Clients & Prospects to Operate on Your Terms
Expert positioning can happen quickly.
The speed with which you can obtain this positioning depends on how quickly you can have your book. You should evaluate your writing skills, content, and time commitments to determine if you should write your book.
Besides writing your book, you will need to spend time editing, formatting, and laying out the final version. You will also need to have a cover designed or design one yourself.
If you want help with getting clients and prospects to operate on your terms, you can contact us here.
Need more local marketing tips? Check out The Essential Marketing Guide for Real Estate Professionals
