The Millionaire Real Estate Agent

One of the greatest stumbling blocks to achieving great success for most people is that they cannot get their heads around how obvious and uncomplicated success can be.

instead of looking for the “new-new” you might want to work on the “old-old” a little more.

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”

To me, modeling is the pathway to excellence.… The movers and shakers of the world are often professional modelers—people who have mastered the art of learning everything they can by following other people’s experience rather than their own.

To model excellence you should be a detective, an investigator, someone who asks lots of questions and tracks down all the clues to what produces excellence.… Building from the successes of others is one of the fundamental aspects of most learning.

Leads, Listings, and Leverage. We call them the Three L’s of the Millionaire Real Estate Agent.

Until you have enough leads (to meet or exceed your goals), there is no other issue. No matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, or entrepreneur, everyone has two jobs—their chosen profession and lead generation.

It was time to face the facts. To succeed as a real estate professional, I had to learn to generate client leads.

Listings are the high-leverage, maximum-earning opportunity in our industry.

consider how listings provide a lead-generation platform through direct mail, ads, signage, and open houses. It is a fact that being in the listings business begets more business.

Leverage can be divided into three categories: people, systems, and tools. By far, the most important of these is people.

If you’re like most salespeople, then designing and implementing systems and tools may not be your strong suit. The best way around this is to hire someone who is proficient at details and systems. That’s why we recommend hiring administrative support talent first.

The Three L’s of the Millionaire Real Estate Agent—Leads, Listings, and Leverage—are the pillars of any successful real estate sales business.

The Millionaire Real Estate Agent should progress through these four stages: Think a Million, Earn a Million, Net a Million, and Receive a Million.

Whatever services you provide, as specialized as they may be, can be duplicated through the right people implementing systems to achieve standards you approve.

“If you have the right why, it kicks the tar out of any how. You can always figure out the how.”

“At first my motivation was money. Now, God and family come first. I like my lifestyle.“ Jack

“I see no limit to the size of my business. My vision is to build a business that my children can take over and that will still pay an income to my husband and me.”

“I watched other agents who were doing well. I began to do what they were doing. Every year I set higher goals—’double it’ was my motto. It worked.”

“We put all our people through the CC Boot Camp. We teach them how to sell real estate at our level. We tell them they are on a Super Bowl Team. We expect the best.”

Virtually every top-producing agent we have ever worked with has a deep and almost inherent sense of service. They have a servant’s heart and place their buyer’s or seller’s real estate experience above all else.

Top real estate agents always have a clear understanding of why they should be hired and they are able to articulate it to anyone at anytime. For sellers, their goal is to net them the most amount of money, in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of problems. For buyers, their goal is to find them just the right home, at the best price, in the right time, with the least amount of problems. Great service begins with a clear purpose for why someone should work with you.

Nothing is more important to your sales career than prospective buyers and sellers. To have a viable business, you simply must have the client leads.

We must have leads, and, in fact, if it is helpful to you, you should think of yourself as being in the “lead-generation business.”

“Without leads, we wouldn’t be in business.”

“If I told you there was an out-of-town buyer who just got in this morning and who will be paying cash and needs to purchase a home by the end of the week, could any of you help him out?” Everyone would raise their hand. “Well, I can guarantee you there is a buyer getting into town today who has cash and needs to buy a house now. The problem is we don’t know where or who this buyer is. And that is the leads challenge of the real estate business.”

The issue of leads should always be at the forefront of your business consciousness.

The second most important L is Listings. While leads are vital to your sales business, seller listings are critical to your ability to build it to its highest level with the lowest costs and highest net.

“Listings make the business, and signs are our best source of leads.”

The Millionaire Real Estate Agent grasps the incredible advantages of making, obtaining, and marketing seller listings their primary lead-generation focus, and they do so almost exclusively.

Over time, they will hire one or more buyer specialists to work the buyer side of the business and concentrate their energy on the high-return, high-leverage business of listings. (And once that is fine-tuned, they may then hire a listing agent to work the seller side as well.)

None of the Millionaire Real Estate Agents we have worked with or interviewed claimed to have reached their current level of success alone.

Leverage answers three key questions in your business: 1. Who is going to do it? People 2. How will they do it? Systems 3. What will they do it with? Tools

“Our staff is the key to our freedom. With our team, we no longer have to deal with every little problem.”

“Take the leap of faith—hire someone. It will open you up and free you up.”

So your first step to leverage will be administrative help who will eventually help create and implement systems. Systems are simply the repeatable processes that allow us to duplicate magnificent results easily. You may create a listing-appointment checklist or a ten-point marketing plan for your listings. Whatever the case, it will be defined by your standards and repeatable by others.

Only after you have great administrative help (who in turn bring systems and tools), and they have helped grow your business to a point where there are more clients than you can handle, do you begin the process of hiring real estate salespeople leverage.

There are two sets of numbers the Millionaire Real Estate Agent is always aware of: 1. goal numbers 2. actual numbers The first set defines your annual goals for your business. The second set, if monitored on a weekly (or at least monthly) basis, acts like a compass.

They set big “someday” goals, three-year, annual, monthly, and even weekly goals.

1. How many leads must I generate this year? this month? this week? to be on track for my three-year and “someday" goals? 2. How many listings must I take this year? this month? this week? to be on track for my three-year and “someday" goals? 3. How many contracts must I write this year? this month? this week? to be on track for my three-year and “someday" goals? 4. How many contracts must I close this year? this month? this week? to be on track for my three-year and “someday" goals? And so forth.

Leads are the most important number you need to know. You must know how many leads you must generate to meet your other goals (e.g., seller listings taken, contracts written, contracts closed, etc.).

One of the most important things you can learn from tracking your leads is the conversion rates for you and your staff. You’ll be working to get at two key conversion rates: 1. Conversion rate for converting calls into buyer appointments 2. Conversion rate for converting calls into seller appointments

No one ever maximizes his potential by himself—so you will need help.

Millionaire Real Estate Agents are always focused on personal development.

Your personal education goal category will show up in your thinking as: 1. What knowledge do I need to learn? What skills do I need to acquire? 2. What knowledge do the individuals on my staff need to learn? What skills do they need to acquire?

Simply think of the four models as adding up to a formula that says: To achieve the amount of net income you desire, you will need to generate X number of leads, spend X amount of money in specific areas to support those efforts, and hire X number of people to service it all.

A sound Economic Model should do three basic things for you: 1. Show you where your money comes from (gross revenue) 2. Show you where your money goes (expenses) 3. Show you how much is left for you (net income)

There are three critical areas of focus in your Economic Model. First, you need to focus on knowing the key numbers you must hit. Understanding how the different aspects of your business interact to produce financial results is essential to making sound decisions. Then you’ll have to focus on the number of appointments you must make, the driving numbers in your Economic Model, and the conversion rates you must achieve, the key variable in the equation.

“We begin with the end in mind. We know the numbers we must hit and we never lose sight of them.”

Highly successful real estate agents will tell you that as far as lead generation is concerned, “the quality is in the quantity.”

Interestingly, many agents are seduced by the search for the perfect marketing image and invest large amounts of time and money in this pursuit. Now, there is no question about it, your marketing look and message are very, very, very important. However, we must keep them in perspective. Our experience working with top agents has taught us that even as important as your look and message are, there is a much stronger correlation between sales leads generated and the consistency and frequency of your message than between sales and the creativity of the message. No matter how you slice it, lead generation will almost always come down to a game of numbers. For effective lead generation, you need to be systematic (frequency and consistency) and go for sheer volume.

“We’ve learned to play the numbers game. The more we play it, the more success we have.”

Your lead-generation plan must always be more ambitious than your income goals.

Emerson was right when he wrote, “We aim above the mark to hit the mark.”

There are three key areas in your Lead-Generation Model. First, there is the prospecting and marketing aspect, where you generate leads and move them into your inner circles. Second, there is the work to set up your database and feed it constantly. And, lastly, there is the systematic marketing to that database to generate new, repeat, and referral business.

1. Prospect and Market The goal of your “achieve big" lead-generation program is twofold: to generate leads and to build stronger relationships for future business.

“Our business comes from referrals and reputation, but we still do a lot of marketing. We mail to our client base quarterly and to our farm area monthly.”

We recommend making a list of the prospecting and marketing options you currently pursue and then adding a number of those listed above.

Ads used for one form of marketing can often be cheaply and quickly adapted for other formats. Look for ways to “kill two birds with one stone.”

When you have your final list, systematize it. Create a written plan on how you propose to attack each of the areas over the course of the next twelve months.

Our interviews with top-producing agents clearly reveal that they purposefully employ a wide variety of techniques to a greater-than-average number of sources. Think of it as diversifying your lead-generation portfolio.

Educate, Ask for Help, and Reward. Each time you make contact with someone in your database, you should be “educating" them; in other words, you should reinforce the notion that you are in the business of real estate sales, that you are very good at what you do, that you have knowledge to share, and that you really prefer to do business on a referral basis.

At the heart of your lead-generation program will be a large, powerful contact management database.

Your database is your business. Building up the number of names in it and a relationship with those names is really at the very core of what building a real estate business is all about. Think of it this way: The size of your real estate sales business will be in direct proportion to the size and quality of your database.

came from the insurance business, so I know how to build a client base that brings repeat business.”

To operate your database model, you first need to realize that you’ll be trying to generate leads from two groups: (1) people you have met and (2) a targeted group of people whom you haven’t met. We refer to these groups in our lead-generation database strategy as Met and Haven’t Met.

Marketing and prospecting to your Met and Haven’t Met databases will yield three types of business: new (from Haven’t Met), repeat (from Met), and referral (most likely from Met).

Simply put, if you rely on pure prospecting, you probably will never generate enough leads to reach your highest potential. To become highly successful you will need to make sure your lead generation is marketing-based, which is highly leveraged.

“The key is to get people to call you. I do all kinds of marketing—the Internet, newsletters, real estate magazines, newspapers, and investment groups.”

The three methods we recommend to achieve this are: 8 x 8, 33 Touch, and 12 Direct.

1. 8 x 8 Everyone you know or meet (your Met Group) first goes into your 8 x 8 program. Your 8 x 8 program is a systematic way of establishing relationships and cementing in their mind who you are and the opportunities your business represents for them. Simply put, once a week for eight weeks you will make meaningful contact with these individuals via letters, cards, and phone calls, with an aim toward establishing yourself as the number one real estate agent in their mind.

Make sure time is set aside every week to follow through on your 8 x 8 program. Once you’ve completed the 8 x 8 program, these new contacts go into the Met portion of your contact database, where they will be included in your ongoing 33 Touch program.

2. 33 Touch Your 33 Touch program will be a systematic marketing and prospecting technique, which will ensure year-round contact with the Mets. As with any core task, I recommend time be blocked off each week to make sure these important contacts occur.

While e-mailing is inexpensive and convenient, we recommend preceding your telephone calls with real mailings. This simply makes it much easier to say, “Did you receive the ______ I sent you?” and break the ice.

Marketing to your Met contact database is generally the most cost-effective form of lead generation.

12 Direct The 12 Direct program is how you work the Haven’t Met portion of your database. It stands for twelve direct mail pieces mailed out annually.

Our research and experience have taught us that for every fifty people you market yourself to twelve times a year, you can reasonably expect to generate one sale. At a 50:1 ratio, you’ll have to have 2,500 people in your database to consistently hit an annual goal of fifty closed sales.

The key word used over and over again is systematic. The reason I’m hammering that one home is that it is the crucial concept behind your lead-generation program.

FOCUS ON SELLER LISTINGS If there is a creative angle to your lead-generation program you’ll want to pursue, it is to create your message, image, and methods such that they are conducive to generating seller listing leads. Why? Research shows that if your lead-generation program consistently delivers seller listings, you can count on the marketing of those seller listings to deliver buyer leads.

Our interviews with the best agents in the business have led us to believe that a seller listing properly marketed will consistently yield one or more buyer sales.

Try to remember this simple truth: If you focus on marketing your seller listings—the buyers will come!

If you know (and I mean really know) your scripts and dialogues, you will feel confident and empowered when you go about the otherwise intimidating business of making or receiving calls, approaching FSBOs, and working your Allied Resources. The bottom line is that script and dialogue proficiency builds confidence and that confidence leads to decisive action.

A strong marketing-based, prospecting-enhanced lead-generation plan backed by script and dialogue mastery is the best formula for creating the greatest number of leads for your business.

“In the past four years, I have gotten very focused on profitability. I now review my P&L almost every day.”

You should never be as concerned with how much money you’re actually spending as you are with the results you get by spending

“As my business increased, I put people in place so I could do what I enjoyed. I was not afraid to add staff. I got more time for the dollar.“

hiring a person, specifically administrative help, comes before the full development of systems and tools.

“You must surround yourself with talent—loyal, strong people who want to work, like to work, and are productive.”

Every week, you meet with him to review his goals, priorities, and weekly tasks, and to hold him accountable.

“We now only want people who have a work ethic and share our value system. They need to crave learning.”

“We have documented all our systems and put them in our operations manual. We run it like a business.“

“The cleverest thing I’ve ever done is to learn to delegate. My people actually do things better than I do.“

We’ll need to know: 1. the number of buyer listings and seller listings we’ll need to take to net 320 closed sides per year 2. the number of buyer and seller appointments we will need to go on to take the appropriate number of buyer listings and seller listings 3. most importantly, the amount of lead-generation activity needed to generate the appropriate number of buyer and seller appointments.

“Converting calls into appointments is one of the most important things for me to do.”

To generate this level of numbers, you will need to follow a highly leveraged lead-generation plan that is marketing based and prospecting enhanced. The reason we keep saying marketing based is because marketing is a leveraged activity.

“I mail to my database of 7,000 every month, and I try to make 100 past-client calls a day. I also do my own PR— I give the newspapers stories and then they call me.”

Below are the Millionaire Real Estate Agent’s Four Laws of Lead Generation, which we have found to be a helpful tool in getting real estate agents to maintain their focus on daily lead generation:

“I used to just throw mud at the wall; now I’ve narrowed my promotions. When you track your leads, you know what is working and where to spend your money. When you try a new program, track it for six months or a year. You have to give it a chance.” Bill

“I have a broad marketing plan, but our yard signs alone generate over 7,000 leads a year.”

Millionaire Real Estate Agents are seller listing lead generators first, marketers of those seller listings second, and buyer listing lead generators third.

Your buyer specialist is responsible for six key activities: Convert buyer leads to in-office presentation appointments Make the presentations Secure the buyer listings Show houses Negotiate purchase offers Handle communications from contract to closing

Every time I added people, my business grew.”

For a real estate sales business, there are three distinct areas of staffing: 1. Administrative—Marketing and administrative manager, transaction coordinator, listings manager, telemarketer, lead coordinator, assistant, and runner 2. Buyer—Lead buyer specialist, buyer specialists, and showing agents 3. Seller—Lead listings specialist and listings specialists

I got an assistant early. I love sales, not paperwork.”

In our experience, an agent should first hire administrative help. This allows the agent to focus on more dollar-productive sales activities such as lead generation, buyer appointments, and listing appointments.

The idea is eventually to reach a point where you are wholly focused on lead generation, listing, and selling while your administrative team handles everything else in your business.

As we have discussed, the more listings you have and market properly, the more buyers you will have.

The lead coordinator is an interesting piece of the administrative puzzle. This is the person charged with receiving, sourcing, assigning, and tracking your leads through a database. In the beginning, your assistant will probably handle much of the call sourcing (i.e., where did the call come from) and database entry for you while you are working alone.

When you have sales help, you, the Millionaire Real Estate Agent, will be personally assigning the leads and tracking conversion rates.

The last piece of the puzzle is on the seller side of the business. At some point your lead buyer specialist and any additional buyer specialists will handle almost all the buyer business and your marketing and administrative manager will handle all aspects of your systems and tools. They will be two of your three key points of leverage that you will need to manage actively or, if they are magnificent, with whom you’ll consult.

To sum it up, you are building a three-headed sales production machine. You’ll have an administrative team with up to five members. (Your accounting, tax preparation, and filing may be outsourced both to simplify your life and to protect you in case of error.) You’ll have a buyer team with three to five members including your lead buyer specialist. And you’ll have a seller team with up to two staff members: a lead listing specialist (you in the beginning) and possibly another listing specialist. Every position will have a written job description identifying the core responsibilities of the job and the performance standards you expect.

“The key to keeping great people is to pay them well and be flexible in their lives.”

If prospecting is used to enhance your marketing (which we recommend), you can delegate most of it to others in your organization: telemarketers, listing specialists, and showing assistants or buyer agents. At the end of the day, however, the most consistent, efficient, and predicable results will be achieved through marketing.

If you are going to hire someone, learn to hire the absolute right person for the job. Someone who can do the job, solve difficult problems, and think at a high level.

Marketing makes my phone ring. We advertise heavily, and the other portion of my business comes from the Internet.

I work out three times a week, and I have three coaches: a personal coach, a physical coach, and a business coach.