EDITOR’S LETTER
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“If your head is on fire, and your feet are in a bucket of ice, it does not even out to a comfortable body temperature!” A valuable lesson taught to me by one of my early career mentors and a metaphor I often used to kick off a large bid back in the corporate world, pre- my Elite Agent days. It would often get an outrageous amount of laughter and it was a great icebreaker (pardon the pun!) My point to each bid team I addressed during that time was that there was no point in having the best sales strategy, or the best document, or the best negotiation session in the world if the engineering team didn’t get along with their opposite geeks, or the service team couldn’t present with a can-do attitude. The same thing applies – perhaps on a smaller scale – to you and your team, and your business. With a new year upon us and peak performance top of mind,
I can offer you this: Your sales funnel is a chain-link system and your potential for success will always be limited by your weakest link. When I say sales funnel, I mean the process of taking someone you have never met through the various stages of marketing and relationship building to the point where they are happy to sign off on the agency or management agreement and then loyally refer you to their friends because you’ve done such a great job. A good example of a chainlink system is a military convoy which can only ever travel at the speed of its slowest vehicle. There is no point in improving the speed of the other vehicles in the convoy if there is a slow one holding up traffic. With all the information we have about how to be an ace at cold calling or how to be a gun on social media, it was a podcast interview with Jimmy Mackin that caused me to stop and remember my old training and
Your sales funnel is a chain-link system and your potential for success is limited by your weakest link.
think more about this concept of chain-linking and how it applies to real estate. And what the success factors really are.
LEVEL UP IN 2020 Sales or marketing success comes down to a combination of skill and personal attributes. If you’ve achieved moderate success, then getting to the next level is going to be limited by your weakest chain link. You can continue to improve one aspect of your system continuously but it won’t improve your success if it doesn’t address your own personal limiting factor. For example: If you are great at generating appointments on Facebook, but things don’t work out at the listing presentation because, let’s say, you are weak at objection handling… well, that is the weak link that will limit your success until you do something about it. There is absolutely no point at listening to a social media guru telling you to throw more money at Facebook when the listing presentation is the slowest vehicle in your convoy. Or when you don’t have the systems to follow up. Over January this year we did something new and ran a 30-day kick start where I questioned the notion of ‘just making more calls’ with participants. Some breathed a sigh of relief when I challenged that age-old notion. If you’re great at making calls and it really works for you, by all means go for it. But if you’re not great at making calls, you really need to get better at making them before you make more of them!
AND THE TOP PERFORMERS? From what I have gathered from interviewing some of the top sales people, leaders
4 ELITE AGENT • MAR 2020
