Chasing Ducks through the Parking Lot

Chasing Ducks through the Parking Lot

Sat, Nov 9, 2013

Every real estate agent dreams of a world where customers do the chasing, flocking to your door to beg you to help them buy or sell a home. Well, let me focus on that word “flocking” for a minute and give you a recent example from nature that proves the point I teach agents which is that if you want to make a lot of money, and stop working so hard at this business, you need to offer your prospects something they desperately want and then make it easy and non-threatening for them to get it.

WATCH THIS VIDEO that shows this important principle in action

The story literally involves “flocking” because it concerns a bunch of ducks. Here’s the story. There’s this duck in a neighborhood about 45 minutes from my home in Ontario who insists, each year, on laying her eggs in the bushes outside a school.

She’s “a repeat offender. A duck that lays her eggs in the same high school courtyard in Scarborough every year. She probably feels safe in the area, but once her babies hatch, they can’t fly, and there is no food source. If the ducklings scatter and hide like last year, it will be terrible. Staff [watching the impending rescue] peer at the courtyard through windows, like that scene in A Christmas Story where Flick gets his tongue stuck to the pole.” [Toronto Star – May 29/13]

The first step is to capture the pretty angry mother duck. She’s not going anywhere because, being the good mother she is, she’s definitely not going to leave her babies. But how to get the ducklings to do what’s good for them when you don’t speak duck? When you watch the video, you’ll see that the solution is pretty ingenious and highly effective. With the irate and quacking mother duck safely in a cat carrier at the end of the bush, rescuers set up a wide-mouthed net between the bush (where the babies are hiding) and the cat carrier. Hearing their mother, and desperately wanting to get to her, the 12 baby ducklings scurry towards the sound of her voice and right into the net … allowing the rescuers to carefully deliver each and every one of them to Mom (by dropping them into the carrier) and then later releasing them in a much safer place.

“You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar

Do you ever have days where it feels like finding good clients to work with is a little like chasing a bunch of ducks across a parking lot? Well, you should feel ashamed of yourself if you do. Perhaps you’re still stuck in the mindset that says you have to trade your time for money. Maybe you’ve been exposed to other real estate trainers who, incredibly, still teach 1950’s cold-call and door-knock prospecting yet today. Still preaching the mindset that you HAVE to chase, chase, chase in order to land a live one.

Look, nobody’s using pigeons or smoke signals anymore to communicate. You’d feel foolish. If, by chance, you are cold-calling, chasing unwilling prospects, frankly, you should feel just as foolish because I eliminated any need for any agent to suffer this pain, indignity and poor use of time over 15 years ago! (Just as I’ve ERASED any need to sit twiddling your thumbs at open houses or being one of many contestants in a parade doing listing presentations or playing tour guide to poorly qualified potential buyers who suck up time like a vampire sucks blood.)

You can see how much easier it is to catch a bunch of baby ducks when it’s their idea to come to you, right?

We teach this to agents, but it only works if you actually apply what we teach. At this point, we’re almost through the year (times flies, even if baby ducks can’t). Let me challenge you, before you crack open the champagne to usher in another year, to sincerely put effort into implementing my Reverse Prospecting System so both your Now business and your pipeline of future business starts of overflow.

“One of the most effective ways for you to get other people’s money and other people’s effort is for you to have an idea that can help them to achieve their goals faster than ever before.” – Brian Tracy