Jared James
By Jared James
As many of you know, I make my living as a speaker/trainer and have had the opportunity to speak to tens of thousands of REALTORS® and entrepreneurs over the last 12 months. My job is not just to communicate effectively, but to entertain and make the audience feel something. As Maya Angelo put it, “People will not remember what you do or say, but they will remember how you made them feel.”
About six months ago, I had the opportunity to keynote a large event in Texas, and it was one of those times when you feel completely connected with the audience and everything was going well. At the end of the event I had a younger guy come up to me and tell me how he loved my speech so much that he was ready to run through a brick wall. (Not a practice I recommend or condone.) He said that he loved everything I had to say, but there was just no business in his area. He said it didn’t matter what he did, there just weren’t any transactions.
I don’t usually have the time to do this, but on this day I did, so asked him to grab his computer and pull up for me every transaction that had happened over the last 30 days in his area according to his MLS. He did this and it turned out that there were 337 transactions! So much for NO transactions…
I looked him dead in the eye and I said that it seems that the problem was not a lack of transactions, the problem was that his name is not on those transactions! *friendly smile*
I am not mentioning this agent by name because he is not the point of the story. I bring up this point because I think this mindset is running rampant among many REALTORS® today. Continue reading »
Jared James
By Jared James
We are only a few days removed from the Navy Seals finally tracking down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, and while so many are focused on the world reaction, I would like to take a different view as to what this event can teach us as sales people in regards to proper follow-up with prospective clients.
I believe that we have become very much an Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) society that wants immediate gratification or we move on to whatever is next. We are trained as REALTORS® to ask qualifying questions of our prospects with the ultimate goal of determining how serious and qualified they are, but in the back of our minds what we really want to know is if we are wasting our time working with them. Asking qualifying questions is not only smart, it is also good business. But there is a danger in it as well.
Many times if we determine that a prospect is not ready to buy or sell in the next 60 days, we may follow up with them one or two more times, but we end up chasing whatever new prospect comes along and tickles our fancy, thinking it might be a more immediate sale. Take a look at the statistics below and see why this may be an unhealthy practice to adopt for the long-term health of your business.
• 48% of sales people never follow up with a prospect
• 25% of sales people make a second contact and stop
• 12% of sales people make more than three contacts
And yet 26.6% of all inquiries result in a sale
This should motivate you. Continue reading »
Recent Comments