MODEL TWO: YOUR LEAD-GENERATION MODEL As important as your Economic Model is, your Lead-Generation Model is just as important. Why? One relies upon the other—the two go hand-in-hand. Once you know how many appointments you must have, you now have to generate the leads necessary to generate those appointments. That’s where your Lead-Generation Model comes in. Leads are fuel to your economic engine. And here is a truth that you must never lose sight of: You can never have enough good leads. Never.
THE POSITIONING BATTLE One of the great “ahas” I took away from reading the marketing classic Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout, was the idea that the human mind is an “inadequate container.” The basic idea they share is that under the constant bombardment of advertising and marketing, the human mind becomes saturated by brands and can hold only a finite number at any one time. Ries and Trout cite the work of Harvard psychologist George A. Miller when they assert that the maximum number of product brands we can remember for a given category— the brand “saturation point” for the mind—is seven. That’s when I had a huge “aha.” Their book is about major brand advertising, the multimilliondollar campaigns behind soft drinks, airlines, cars, and fast-food chains. It made me wonder what the implications were for the local real estate agent marketing to their target audience. Chances are, if the average person can’t name more than seven brands of potato chips, they can’t possibly name more than two or three real estate agents in their market. Data gleaned from the 2002 National Association of Realtors (NAR) Profile of Buyers and Sellers tends to back this up. According to NAR research, 76 percent of all sellers contacted only one agent and 16
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