|
1. Become
Proactive in Developing Your Business One
of the biggest mistakes that real estate
agents make is becoming reactive instead
of proactive while working in their
day-to-day real estate businesses. While
you may have the best of intentions of
doing what will have you stay focused
and producing outstanding results, so
many things cry out to you every single
day in your business trying to take you
off track from producing the income and
results that you know you deserve. And if
you don't watch out you can end up
becoming extremely reactive in your real
estate business while this is happening.
Three
of the greatest distractions that take you
off track in your real estate business
are your office telephone, your cell
phone, and your pager. Whenever you are
always available on the receiving end of
these you risk wasting a lot of your
productive time. This is because you are
constantly faced with many people each
and every day who will contact you at
any given moment in time regarding
things that really don't need your
immediate attention in your business.
To illustrate this
point there was a highly-successful
agent that I worked with years ago named Jeff
who had just returned to our office from
a business trip to New York. Upon his
return I asked him how the trip went for
him. He
responded by saying, "Great!
Absolutely great! I love a city where
when you walk out of a building and try
to go left but the flow of the crowd takes you to the right
instead and there's absolutely nothing you can do
about it!"
Keeping
this in mind the following can happen to
you if you're not careful in your real
estate business:
You
have the best of intentions of being
productive during the day. You know what
needs to be done in order for you to
have a productive day but so many people
keep contacting you with requests that
have little or nothing whatsoever to do
with what you know needs to get done.
It's very similar to what Jeff said about New
York. You have a goal and a
direction you want to move in but so
many people are distracting you and
taking you off track. What you need in
these situations is to become more of a master of your
own time.
When
you answer every single call that comes
into your office and cell phone
immediately you risk letting
everyone else control your time, your
business, and your life. This is also
true when you feel compelled to
immediately respond to any pages you
receive even though it would be better for
your effectiveness in your business to
respond sometime later in the day. Keeping
this in mind what's important for you to
accomplish in all of your communications
with your clients and prospects is to
respond quickly to the situations that are
important to accomplish your business
goals while making sure that everyone you
are doing business with feels that you are
doing a good job of taking care of their
needs. So for some of those people who
call you insisting that you drop
everything you are doing to take care of
their needs right now you will want to
learn how to effectively communicate to
them in a way that allows you to take care
of their needs in a time frame that works
for both them as well as you. For
oftentimes in this business people will
call you insisting that something needs to
be done immediately in a transaction when
the truth is it that what they are asking
for doesn't really need to be handled for
hours or sometimes even days in order to
still keep the transaction moving ahead
smoothly.
So
many of the calls that you
receive everyday do not involve matters
that have to be
handled immediately. And you as an agent
have to have a good intuitive sense about what
needs to be handled now, and what can
wait until later. The real estate
business is not the stock
market or the commodities trading
business. Unless you are in a situation
where you are negotiating in competition
with others for a listing or a
transaction, rarely do
requests from clients and prospects
truly have
to be dealt with in a matter of minutes
to ensure that the transaction will
continue moving ahead appropriately.
Keeping
this in mind you need to make sure that
you're getting everything done each day,
week, and month that will propel you towards having
the kind of year that you want to have. This
must be your first priority rather
than always being available for whoever
decides to contact you at any given
moment during the day. If you don't make
this your priority you will probably then
feel that you're always extremely busy but
you're not accomplishing the goals that
you want to accomplish.
So
become a master of managing your own
time. Know which activities need to be done right
now and which ones can wait. Understand that
sometimes it's OK to let calls go into
voicemail instead of answering them when
there are important things for you to
get done. You can always immediately
check voicemail messages and decide
if they need your immediate
attention...or not.
Follow the old expression that says,
"Plan your work and work your
plan." Make sure first of all that
you get everything done each and every
day that you know will lead to
achieving the success that you desire. If you
don't take control of your time and your
business no
one else is going to do it for you.
When you
learn how to proactively accomplish the
goals you set for yourself every day,
week, and month while also
following-up excellently with your your clients and
prospects, you will be well on your
way to having exactly the
kind of year you want to have in your
real estate business.
|
