John Duncan MBA BCA Licensed Real Estate Salesperson (REAA 2008)
Key 1: Pro-Active Marketing
Our first goal is to enable you to use the processes in SalesPartner to increase your pro-active marketing. We believe pro-active marketing is the number one key to success for a real estate salesperson.
For many products being marketed today, e.g: vehicles or farm equipment, the salespeople need clients to visit, kick the tyres and discuss the finance. They put up signs, advertise in the paper, in magazines and online and wait for the phone to ring. Does that sound like real estate marketing to you?
It is re-active marketing in the sense that the activity of the salespeople responds to the reaction of clients to the products being sold.
In other industries (the classic example is life insurance) if the salespeople wait until the client rings to say they need it, it could well be too late. When someone rings a life insurance salesperson to say they need some, the natural question is “What did your doctor say?” Salespeople in that industry know they have to be building relationships and be marketing to their clients long before the clients need to use their product. This is a good example of an industry that relies on pro-active marketing.
Pro-active marketing can be defined as “The processes that keep you in touch with clients to establish credibility and rapport before they know they need your services.”
“I’m working signboards today.” It took me a while to plumb the depths of this expression. It originates from a David Knox seminar. If a salesperson is working “The Property Press”, “The Blue Book”, the coffee machine or the local paper and spending time driving lots of people around in their car they are heavily into re-active marketing. That salesperson will spend a lot of time looking for keys to take contacts to properties but will be missing the keys that truly open the doors to success in Real Estate.
We know buyers almost always need to visit a property to get emotionally involved so as salespeople you are encouraged to take clients to properties. It’s worth noting that in New Zealand the first salesperson to take a client to a property can usually claim the selling commission share if that client subsequently buys it. You also know that to meet a vendor’s best expectations the buyer has to get emotionally keen on the property. But experienced and successful salespeople know that vendors (not buyers) are the long term key to their success. And it follows that vendors are the key to success for their office.
Achieving a long list of properties for sale is not any guarantee of success either. We will discuss later how to determine which vendors are in the market as distinct from only being on the market. An important skill for experienced salespeople is to recognise the difference and have processes to ensure that their vendors are in the market.
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