All day, every day I am faced with the reality that our industry is fundamentally challenged to service our customers to the level they would find meaningful.
That might sound harsh, and you, dear reader, I acknowledge, may be in the minority of service-first minded agents who move heaven and earth to provide exceptional service to each and every customer, however, we know that most people who enter our ecosystems will be underwhelmed by the level of service they receive.
The issue in its simplest form is that real estate businesses are lead generating machines. Each listing creates a unique audience of potential buyers, investors and sellers.
Each person we speak to can be a source of referral and so when you think about it, literally every conversation interaction with another person in your community can be a source of future business. It’s exciting, but can also be overwhelming.
It’s easy to understand that even the best, most conscientious agents will eventually be capped at how many people they can help.
But capacity isn’t the only issue. For every agent who legitimately runs out of time each day to make every phone call they’d like to, I would estimate that there would be two to three who don’t make calls for an entirely different reason. Avoidance. Call avoidance, or reluctance is much more prevalent than genuine capacity issues and can present itself in a variety of common ways.
What does your script say?
Not knowing what to say. There’s a reason people are always looking for the best scripts and dialogue content to replicate. In truth, most real estate scripts are pretty straightforward, what fearful callers are looking for is a compelling piece of dialogue to give confidence to make the call in the first place. What can be a great way to flip this process is to think about what you would find valuable if someone were to call you about real estate.
Most home owners are really interested in recent, relevant sales, as these impact the value of their property’s potential value.
We tend to find most agents have the highest confidence and strike rate when making ‘Just Sold’ calls. The reason for this is agents feel empowered with a positive story and the coveted information about sale price. The best way to set yourself up for successful call sessions is to think about the reason for your call; new listing, change in interest rates, community event, whatever it may be.
Then you need to make sure you create a memorable opening to your conversation, ensuring to bring energy, use your first name and last name and clearly announce the name of the agency you’re calling from. Most recipients of your call aren’t expecting it so they need a minute to catch up!
You need to build trust
Feeling like a creep. Have you ever heard of ‘five gives, then an ask’? It’s an abbreviated way of saying you should offer someone five gifts before you ask for anything back when trying to build trust.
Aside from not knowing what to say, dialling to land a listing on the first call can feel a little too fast for many inexperienced callers. Instead, call with an offer of a service or with information that will be of value to the recipient.
For example, a quarterly market update, end of financial year suburb report or community news letter can be an informative document that will provide value to the recipient but more importantly, provide lots of confidence for the caller.
Get a (accountability) buddy
Finding distractions. The answer? Get an accountability buddy. Building a calling culture takes time and dedication. Some agents are naturally born with the ability to push through the hard, awkward moments, but for everyone else, you might need to try some other tried and tested methods. Having someone to do the hard stuff with is a winning recipe, one that we’ve seen replicated frequently in our industry.
That’s what our Real Estate of Origin program is about, getting everyone on the phones at the same time, competing with each other and before you know it, the idea of making calls being hard fades into the background. Just like having a work out partner, having someone you can hit the phones with is a great way to make sure you’ll get the job done and not find yourself making excuses to push the calls aside yet again.
Agree on how often, for how long and how many customers you will call each day or week and make sure
you keep each other on track.
Feeling overwhelmed. Make sure you start with a target you can hit. There will always be extremists in every pursuit in life and real estate is no different. While it’s easy to feel like a failure after listening to million dollar agents talking about making 50 plus calls every day, day in, day out, it’s important that you start somewhere.
Let’s talk about numbers
What’s a number you can absolutely achieve? Somewhere around five dials is where I would recommend extremely call reluctant people start out. Commit to doing five dials each day of the week. This should take somewhere between two and ten minutes, depending on the amount of connections you have and duration of conversations.
I’m sure every single person reading this could commit to ten minutes each day. Once you have mastered that feat, you can build by five calls until you get to your natural limit. It’s surprising that most agents can dial between 15-25 numbers per hour, and on average, an experienced agent will book one appraisal in that amount of calls. For most agents in Australia and New Zealand, that level of activity repeated each day will produce an incredibly successful career. Success is far more achievable than you may think.
