Coach’s Corner: Sales Make The World Turn

Mark Johnson 
Chief Executive Officer, JP and Associates Realtors

For many of our associates, a career in real estate sales wasn’t their first choice. For nearly 90 percent of you, this is a second career choice. 

Yet if you’re still looking for a career that gives you a good income and the chance to succeed truly, you owe it to yourself to consider real estate sales. 

As a real estate sales professional, you’ll enjoy personal satisfaction, growth, unmatched income potential, and financial stability.

“Learn the rules like a pro so that you can break them like an artist.” 

Pablo Picasso

Whether you are new to sales or a seasoned veteran, we believe that every real estate salesperson has room to grow in their role and improve their skills. That’s why at JPAR, we invest so much in our associates’ education, encourage them to take time out of their days to role play, and more. 

Here are our best tips to help you become a better salesperson.

Solve Problems For a Profit 

How often do you get a call from a salesperson, and all they talk about is the brand-new features of the product or service they’re offering? You listen politely but think to yourself, “Yeah, but how does this help me?”

You see, we solve problems for a profit. As an enterprise, we just released the “JPAR CEO Real Estate Team Leader Manual” that addresses the six most common mistakes agents make when creating a team. Separately, we also released the “JPAR Guide To Hiring Your First Assistant.” These are practical step by step guides which help or associates solve real problems. 

You can do the same with your clients with tools like www.jparsuresale.com powered by Zavvie and Knock, where consumers can pick from traditional selling, swapping the home (like a car), or instant cash offers. Or innovations like our IntroLend offering where lenders compete, and consumers choose. 

Understand Your Market

Above all else, you can’t be an effective salesperson if you don’t understand who you’re selling to and what the market landscape looks like. Tools like Altos and NAR research, along with Keeping Current Matters, and think tanks like the Texas A&M Real Estate Center, are options to help build market knowledge.

Focus on The Right Leads

Selling a professional service (you) is different from selling a product (the home), and it requires an advanced understanding of marketing to exceed your clients’ expectations. Let’s face it; the number one purpose of real estate marketing is to generate an appointment. Once you get that focus, everything starts to fall into place. 

NAR research shows that nearly 60 percent of consumers find their real estate professional through a referral from family, friends, or prior business associations or referral from another agent or broker. So, where are you going to spend your time, energy, and resources generating leads? 

Leverage Your CRM

Your database is the lifeblood of the business. I might say outside of your relationships; it is the number one asset of your business. To scale your business, you must have a system; you simply can’t keep all those details, follow-ups, and more in your head or on a calendar. 

At the bottom of this post, you will see an assessment of your business. The first three factors relate directly to your CRM, and many of the remaining 11 items are dependent on you’re the quality of your CRM. 

Build Trust

Research shows using the words “trust” and “honesty” in your marketing has the opposite effect. Yet consumers have said agents who use “Drone Photography” in their marketing generate more trust than those who don’t. Likewise, agents that did virtual video walk-throughs of a home or annotated virtual tours created more trust than agents who didn’t.

So, what you think builds trust may not be intuitive or just the opposite of your current thinking. 

Calls To Action

I see too many appointments end with no clear path and too many marketing pieces with no call to action. The number one purpose of all of your marketing is to create an appointment. And the purpose of any meeting should be to agree on the next best step. 

Four ways to gain clarity in your marketing and your meetings: 

1. Simplify Your Offer
2. Make it EASY to Schedule an Appointment 
3. Adopt a Culture of Always Be Testing – “#ABT”
4. ASK For The Next Step.

How Big Is Your Gap?

Below you will see 14 critical areas of your real estate practice. 

On a scale of 1 (low) and 10 (high), where do you rank?