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2.
Direct Mail and Getting Your Prospects
to Call You
There
are, generally speaking, two basic
approaches to prospecting. The first and
most traditional approach in our
industry is where the agent gets on the
phone and calls their prospects or goes
door knocking to speak with their
prospects face-to-face. Both of these
approaches can be very effective if done
consistently. The
other general approach is to locate
prospects by either direct mail or the
Internet, and, depending on how
effective your campaigns are in this
arena, these approaches can bring you
solid results also. And of course you
can always implement a prospecting
campaign that incorporates some or all
of these approaches just mentioned, too. But
for the moment, I'd like to speak to you
about direct mail. Once you've
identified your target market, you can
virtually guarantee all of your
prospects receiving your direct mail
pieces whenever you send them out to
them. All you need is an accurate
database of names and addresses to make
this happen. On the Internet, however,
while you can certainly develop a good
number of prospects there, you can't
guarantee that every prospect in your
area will find their way to your Web
site. So a lot of your ideal prospects
may never locate you on the Internet. When
it comes to direct mail, most of the
mailers that agents send out seem to be
relatively boring. And they're very
limiting, too, in terms of maximizing
the probability that your prospect will
be inspired to call you when they read
what you've written. For example, it's
very normal for agents to send out
"Just Listed" or "Just
Sold" postcards. But oftentimes
when you give too much information about
the properties on these mailers, your
ideal prospects now have no reason to
call you. You've already told them
everything, and prospects will normally
only call a real estate agent for the
first time if they want new information
they don't already know about. This can
be particularly costly when someone who
is looking to buy, sell, or lease a
property decides not to call you because
the property you described on your
postcard is smaller than the one they'd
be interested in closing a transaction
on. You'd still like this person to call
you off of your mailer, but the
information you sent them is not
relevant to the size of real estate
transaction they intend to consummate. As
an example of a mailer that can generate
phone calls from a higher percentage of
prospects in your area, let me tell you
about the only mailer I've ever received
from an agent that got me to immediately
pickup the phone and call him. This
agent sent me a postcard offering me a
free report he had put together showing
all the comparable sales in my area for
the past six months. All I had to do was
call him, give him my name and address,
and he'd send me the report. When
I called the agent, we understandably
ended up talking for a few minutes about
what was going on with real estate
values in my area. I figured as long as
I had him on the line with me I might as
well ask him about his observations and
opinions on my area. Well,
he sent me the report, and he
immediately then went to the top of my
list of agents I would contact if I was
interested in buying or selling in the
area. This opened up a brand new channel
of communication between the two of us,
and since then I've talked with him once
or twice a year about what is going on
in my marketplace. And during this time
I've also had no other conversations
with any of his competitors either. I'm
mentioning this to you because you may
want to offer a similar report to your
own prospects. Doesn't it make sense
that people who will be looking to buy,
sell, or lease in the weeks and months
ahead would love to have a report like
this one? This is because people who
will be entering into a real estate
transaction in the near future normally
want information, and a report
containing six months of recent comp
information is very often exactly the
type of report they'd like to receive. So
when these people contact you and ask
you to send them your report, they could
very well be identifying themselves as
one of your ideal prospects. You just
need to find out a little more
information during your first
conversation with them. And if they're
not looking to do anything right now,
you've just opened up a new relationship
and a direct line of communication that
never existed before. So in effect
you're now one step closer to working
with these people whenever they do have
a real estate need in the future. But,
you may ask, "Will creating a
report like this and sending out a
polished, professional mailer offering
it to all my prospects get them to call
me?" All
I can tell you is that in my 25 years of
being a licensed real estate broker,
this is the only real estate mailer
that's had me pickup the phone and call
the agent who sent it to me. 
Click
here if you'd like more information
on my one-on-one coaching program to
take your real estate productivity to
the next level. One-on-one coaching is
available for both real estate agents
and company management.
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