Blog / Winning Business
Real Estate Pilates, Peter Clements
In a sporting event you warm up and stretch if you want to be the best you can possibly be on the field;
In the same way that Pilates is an exercise style where muscles are trained to improve posture and alignment by focusing on core strengths, real estate agents must constantly work on their own core strengths while stretching and challenging their sales skills to improve results.
Peter Clements from Caporn Young in Perth had allowed himself to become complacent after years of fantastic results, but was reinvigorated by changing his focus, learning to communicate with his team better and adding some structure into his campaigns. One of the most important changes was making himself accountable to a list of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) on a weekly basis.
“A lot of the work I’ve been doing at the moment is about resetting goals, putting business plans together, getting some great KPIs. We’ve just started a sales manager and he is putting a focus on things that I’m not good at,” Mr Clements explained.
Being Accountable
Caporn Young’s sales manager, Paul Slaughter, has stopped Mr Clements working on energy alone and got him to outline selling strategies and attach achievable figures to his work, making him more accountable to himself, but also more in control of his results.
“Paul has a target to work on and he gets paid on the increases. There’s a real financial interest in him helping me out. Having someone monitor you each week - that paid buddy - is exciting for me as well,” Mr Clements said.
“It was really getting back to basics and realising the things I had done that had worked, such as 120 phone calls a week so I can rematch buyers and sellers again, getting out on the streets, dropping my own flyers and having a look at houses.
“I’d got lazy. In a sporting event you warm up and stretch if you want to be the best you can possibly be on the field; you don’t just take off your tracksuit and jump on the field. I think, to a certain degree, I was just running on the field every day and selling real estate and expecting it all to just happen without stretching myself, and knowing how far I could stretch.”
Communicating for Success
Backing up these results, Mr Clements has also been working more productively and communicating more effectively with his team, particularly his PA, which has added to his success. “I’m learning to become a team player now, which I haven’t been very good at in the past because I’m a bit of a control freak. My PA sends me an email every night of what she’s done. I used to be concerned about what she was doing and not getting on with what I should have been doing, which was listing more and selling more. The reporting system that’s been created allows me to empty my mind,” he explained.
Breaking out of the comfortable cycle he’d entered and putting plans in place to achieve the results he wants has fired up Mr Clements’ energy levels again. “I’ve developed a fantastic sheet, like a dashboard, that I can look at every moment of the day. I know once I’ve finished and completed that sheet I’ll be making my two sales a week and listing 3-4 properties,” he explained, adding that he was on track to making - and even smashing - his goal of $1.5 million in gross fees this year.
“When the fire gets going you can do anything you want.”
Future Strategies
One of the moments that forced Mr Clements to re-evaluate his methods and stretch a bit further was thinking about his future and where he wanted to finish his career. “The end result that I want is really clear – there’s a retirement plan in place and it’s given me a drive that I probably wasn’t that clear about before. With clarity now it’s relit the fire, and when the fires get going you can do anything you want.”
Setting himself the goal of stretching for $3 million in gross sales last year, Mr Clements realised there was no substance behind his goal and it was “just a number”. His revised target is now based on real, quantifiable sales figures. This is where the doubled-sided A4 KPI sheet comes into play.
Motivating Numbers
After spending time with his sales manager and working out the numbers he needed to achieve to get the sales he wanted, Mr Clements has created his ideal motivation tool in the KPI sheet. It has the following fields:
- Space for his name at the top - so he can find it easily at any time of the day
- New listings – with two spaces to fill in each week
- Past client calls – phoning 5-10 a week to gain more listings
- Pipeline seller calls – 50 per week
- Pipeline buyer calls – 50 per week
- Buyer appointments – 14 per week
This information is stored electronically in the office, but Mr Clements also prints a copy to keep with him at all times so he can make notes and can pull it out at any time, like when he’s having a coffee or meeting a potential client. “If I fill in all my 50 pipeline seller calls on a Monday, that’s done and if I do my other 50 pipeline buyer calls on a Monday and I show 14 people through houses over the week I know that it’s actually going to turn into two sales, because we’ve worked out the stats,” he explained.
Mr Clements knows if he doesn’t fill in his KPI sheet he won’t achieve the two sales he has set himself, and will have to work even harder to make up the figures. “If you don’t fill in the sheet this week, you’ve got to fill in one-and-a-half the following week, and it’s the catch up you do in real estate that kills you, but if you can keep on top of it, it becomes manageable and you can have the lifestyle you want,” he said, saying that once he has achieved his two sales for the week he can enjoy himself surfing, playing golf or doing whatever he feels like.
Looking beyond the $1.5 million goal and into the future, Mr Clements plans to run a team of people - “a tribe” - who support each other. He aims to have a partnership where he finds the listings, his partner makes the sales and they split their fees. “It’s 50-50 down the middle, so we’ve got a fantastic lifestyle, we pay our PAs a lot of money to create a life where all we really have to do is focus on what we’re really good at, rather than focusing on running a business, which to me is the real drag of real estate,” he said.
Mr Clements has discovered stretching is not always about aiming for something beyond our reach, but is sometimes working with strengths to support the weaknesses, resulting in a stronger and more effective agent.
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