By Lee Woodward, CEO Real Estate Academy
Talk is cheap. It will only get you so far in real estate. Your charm, entertaining spiels and tall tales may win the listing. But if you don’t deliver on the promises you made in the lounge room during your listing presentation, you won’t get the referral. And long-term success in real estate is grounded in referrals.
Selling in the last few years has been relatively easy in most parts of Australia. Property would basically sell itself. You just had to get out of the way. Now that the market has cooled, success is far more reliant on creating an outstanding customer service experience.
Once the excitement of leaving a vendor’s property with a signed Agency Agreement settles, it’s time to live up to the brochure that enticed those owners to list with you. What’s your process from this point onwards? Do you even have a process and, if so, is it consistent? Are your clients justified in feeling apprehensive over their decision not to go with the cheapest agent?
If you were to ask every sales agent in a team of ten how they sell a property, you would likely receive ten different responses. That was my experience when I conducted national research for the development of my new workshop on the Listed to Settled process. It highlighted a real need for structure and simplicity.
In developing this workshop, I interviewed and recorded some of the industry’s elite sales agents and found they all had one thing in common – a consistent approach to the vendor and buyer experience. This knowledge led me to develop a new model that breaks down the selling process into ten clearly defined milestones with all the tasks and associated assets visibly shown as dropdowns within each milestone. If you are familiar with my Frameworks model, this new model zooms in on Client Fulfilment, going deeper to break down and systemise this crucial stage in the sales cycle.
The only way to deliver a brilliant customer experience every time is to be consistent with your professional approach. Once a solid structure is in place, with many of the behind-the-scenes tasks handled for you, you will be free to focus on providing exceptional service and getting your client’s property sold. Forget the long, complicated checklist. The future of selling is stripped back, refined and consistent.
If you are serious about a long-term career in real estate sales, you have to be prepared to negotiate your way through the turbulent times as well as rolling with the good times. It’s time to master the sales process and the vendor and buyer experience once and for all. My new four-hour workshop will have you walking away with the recipe for consistently nailing the process from Listed to Settled and live up to the brochure every time. I look forward to seeing you in the training room.