Show Me the Money! Restructure Your Time to Focus on the Highest-Paying Actions

Mon, Jan 19, 2015

In the real estate process, there are four stages that every agent goes through to earn a commission. Actually, these are the same four stages that every professional goes through with his/her clients, whether we’re talking about a doctor, a consultant, an insurance salesman, or a yoga teacher.
 
Those four stages are:

  1. Finding prospects
  2. Converting those prospects into clients
  3. Providing exceptional service so they become happy, lifelong clients
  4. Leveraging each customer’s satisfaction so they will give you their repeat business and refer you to others

The four stages are set in stone — they cannot be cured with a magic marketing formula. But what can be changed is how you approach each step and how much time you devote to it.
 
A Typical Agent’s Time Breakdown

Here is how the average agent spends his/her time addressing these four stages:

ACTIVITY % OF TIME SPENT
Finding Prospects 85%
Converting Prospects to Clients 10%
Servicing Clients 5%
Leveraging Clients’ Satisfaction 0%

The typical agent uses the majority of their time to go fishing in a vast ocean for a few teeny tiny fish. They spend 85% of their time being rejected by hundreds of prospects in order to convince one to take a chance on them. Not only is the Finding Prospects stage highly labour-intensive, but it’s also frustrating, humiliating, and most importantly, ineffective.

The activities of finding and converting prospects are the lowest paying parts of an agent’s job. Think of these as the investment stages of the customer life cycle. You only start to make money once you move to the later stages and your service results in the sale or purchase of a home. When you spend so much time in the early investment stages, there’s simply not enough left to devote to the real moneymaking activities. 

My Time Breakdown

I used to structure my time just like the agent above...because that’s what everyone else was doing! I spent endless hours on the phone and knocking on cold doors, until I had it up to here and just couldn’t take any more. With my system, I completely changed the way I approached the four stages and the time I spent executing them. The schedule I was able to follow once I’d perfected my system (and the schedule of agents who follow my system) looks something like this:
 
ACTIVITY % OF TIME SPENT
Finding Prospects 10%
Converting Prospects to Clients 10%
Servicing Clients 40%
Leveraging Clients’ Satisfaction 40%
 
The most profitable parts of the cycle occur when you receive a commission, and when you then leverage that one commission into many more. So that is where my system teaches you to focus almost all of your time. And you’ll notice it leaves very little time for finding prospects.

How Reverse Prospecting Works

With so little time to allocate to the investment stages, my system depends on reverse prospecting to attract prospects, rather than find them. Finding is very labour-intensive, whereas attracting is nearly effortless.
 
To use reverse prospecting successfully, you’ll need to use two tools:
  • Direct response lead generators: classified ads, editorial-style ads, USP ads, signs, flyers, etc. (both online-web and offline-print) that compel prospects to call you
  • Automated hotline system/website system: systems that automatically answer prospect inquiries and supply information, then sift and sort out your best prospects
Both of the above tools take very little time to implement. Once you set them up, they work around the clock to bring qualified prospects straight to you. When you can focus the majority of your time on providing top-notch service and leveraging the happy customers you have, your business will grow exponentially.

JOIN MY FREE WEEKLY TRAINING PROGRAM

Do you want to test drive my ideas and systems absolutely free? This free introduction to Craig Proctor Systems includes live weekly webinars, a monthly newsletter and priority invitations to free half day training events around the country. With these free training tools, you will learn; 

  • Reverse Prospecting – a highly effective lead generation that gets qualified prospects to hunt you down rather than the other way around.
  • More effective Lead Conversion
  • Prospect Presentation systems that will change the way you do business. 

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