There are two basic reasons why companies fail: unwillingness to embrace the obvious changes of their day, and a smug rejection of customer feedback. Those two factors can be found in every company that once commanded its market, then lost the leadership spot: Ford, Motorola and IBM. Each thought it “knew what was best” for the consumer. And each was taught quite quickly that the customer is always right. It’s a lesson being learned by other industry leaders today – such as Barnes and Noble, and some of the biggest real estate brokers in the country. We call it the “Failure Mindset.”
On Screen – a periodic “launch” of news, commentary, resources, bloggers and other information you can use to get your week started – from Matthew Ferrara & Company.
On Screen: Real Estate Industry news launch for February 9, 2010:
- The Wall Street Journal reports that Fannie and Freddie have already consumed more than $111 billion in taxpayer dollars. And they are likely to need more.
- A real estate bubble in Canada looks like it’s already inflated and expanding. Some markets are experiencing surges of 20% month-over-month, and it shows no signs of stopping.
- NAR Economist Lawrence Yun finally acknowledges that the tax credits are causing housing data to skew wildly every month in the latest release of pending sales figures from the National Association of REALTORS.
On Screen: Expert Advice from Industry Leaders:
- Steve Harney reminds REALTORS that the housing “recovery” is shaky in “Built on Jenga Blocks.”
- Stephen Fells offers ideas on how REALTORS can keep an eye on what the social sphere is saying about their business in “Why Every REALTOR Should Use Google Alerts.”
- Ron Hahn offers thoughts on how branding differentiation works in the real estate industry in “Interesting Branding Insights: Real Estate Companies Pay Attention!”
On Screen: Technology Trends (with Comments)
- Cisco says there will be more than 5 billion personal devices connected to wireless mobile networks. (Important trend considering under 50% of REALTORS reported using a smartphone last year).
- Comscore research shows that more than 178 million US citizens watched more than 33.2 billion videos in December 2009. (Amazing considering so few property listings have videos on them.)
- Nielsen research says that use of social networking online soared more than 82% last year over the year before. (Yet less than 35% of REALTORS had a social networking presence in 2009)
On Screen: Smart Ideas to Sell More
- Entrepreneurs should beware “vanity metrics” when measuring true performance, says the Harvard Business Review.
- Timeless ideas on innovation from Peter Drucker at Human Resources IQ’s website.
On Screen: But Wish it Were Not!
Here’s the MLS photo of the week from “Really Bad MLS Photos” group on Facebook:
We all know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But for a while, homeowners, buyers and real estate agents thought a “heavily discounted” lunch was ok. Especially when it was Uncle Sam handing out the brown bags. Now the real estate and mortgage industries are paying the price for Fannie Mae’s free-lunch fraud. Looks like the people who couldn’t afford “affordable housing” most weren’t just consumers, but its most vocal advocates. Talk about bad strategy. Read more…
Ready to make big improvements in your business in 2010? Most of us make a list of things we currently aren’t doing – and probably still won’t in the New Year. So rather than work against ourselves – a formula for failure and disappointment – why not resolve to keep doing what you are already doing. Perhaps just a little differently!
At Matthew Ferrara & Company, we don’t believe in the “overcoming weaknesses” method of business planning. Rather, we think everyone should focus on their strengths and find ways to maximize the use of them every day. If your resolutions involve working on things you don’t like to do, don’t have a propensity for, and mostly do poorly, you’re heading for underachievement, frustration and disaster. On the other hand, if there are some things you’re already doing that leverages your natural talents, you enjoy doing already and would be more inclined to do more of or better, those should be the focus of your strategy for the next twelve months of business.
Focusing on your strengths lets each of us create business resolutions that best suit us – and therefore have the greatest chance of success. Rather than adopt someone else’s “must do” lists that we’ll never even try, we’ll be more successful if we take our “already doing” list and fine-tune it. Here are ten ways to do just that.
1. Know your strengths: The first thing you need to do is identify what you already have some talent for doing. Very few of us have talent for everything in business. So we need to figure out where our talents lie and organize our strategy around them. So sit down and make a list of what you are already doing that you do fairly well every time. Every other resolution you’ll make must focus on taking those talents and turning up the “volume” on their effectiveness.
2. Accept your strengths: If you list the things you have talents for, you’ll also bring to mind everything you’re not so good at doing. Make a side list of those things. Review the list and label each one “QP” or “NC” – Quick Possibility of mastering and improving or No Chance of being really good at soon. There are some things you might be able to improve – if they already relate to your existing strengths. Maybe you’re a strong prospector, but you are fairly week at generating new contacts. That is probably a QP with a little technology and technique. On the other hand, if you are really bad at paperwork and numbers, then list if NC and put it aside. You will deal with it – but not personally – later.
3. Outsource everything that’s a NC or clear waste of time. Look at your No Chance list from #2 above. Decide whether you can simply stop doing it (and nobody will notice) or if it’s a vital activity required for your success. If it’s vital, determine how you will outsource it. Remember, you’re already not doing it – or not doing it so well you should stop doing it harmfully – so someone else is going to have to do it for you. Find an office staff, another agent or third party business who can do it for you – at peak quality and performance – and resolve to stop wasting time trying to fix things you’re never ever going to actually do well.
4. Set goals, not to-do lists for your business. Rather than make a list of lots of things you’ll buy, try or do, focus your mind on the most important outcomes you wish to achieve in your business this year. Stress and chaos are created by task-oriented planning. You can easily create a list of things you can never get done in the time you have each day. If you want to succeed differently this year, stop worrying about tasks and keep your mind on the goals. Whether it’s financial, professional or personal, three clear and measurable goals which you review and keep in mind every day will more effectively guide you to what needs to get done than a “master list” of intimidating to-do’s and tasks.
5. Organize your time. Most business professionals make the mistake of trying to organize their tasks, rather than their time. They erroneously think the goal is to find the magic combination of scheduling tricks to get the most things done in the least amount of time. That works if you’re a machine on an assembly line. However, most real estate sales is knowledge work, and your brain cannot work “on command” in an unbroken stream of activities. Deal with your time differently this year, by organizing it into periods of most useful outcomes. Determine what is most useful to your business – prospecting, training, presentation skills, negotiating – and then organize your time around getting those things done consistently. Look at the week and ask yourself how to best use the time you have to work towards your goals. Then schedule the right amounts of time to using your best talents to achieve those goals. Eliminate, delegate or forget about everything else.
6. Get effective before you get efficient. We sometimes mistake efficiency for effectiveness. This often leads us to mis-use our talents and time, and especially technology. For example, using technology to organize our databases and create labels for mass mailings may be highly “efficient” compared to the days when we tried to remember everyone’s name and send handwritten notes. However, it could be massively ineffective if the consumer’s preference for contact is email or social media. When you look at turning up the volume on your talents, don’t just take for granted that improvements come from simple efficiencies. You could outsource your prospecting calls to a call center, who could call 1,000 people a week for you; but that might not be nearly as effective as making friends with your past ten clients on Facebook, and writing a personal note on their Wall each week. Both are prospecting. One is efficient by volume. The other is effective by goal.
7. Fire things. Just like you clean out the drawers of your desk at the end of the year, simply throwing away paper and items you packed away rather than dealt with all last year, start your new year by firing everything that no longer works toward your goals. For managers, this might be non-productive salespeople, unattended office meetings, or handing out leads to agents who just throw them away. For agents, this might mean unreasonable sellers who refuse to market-price the home, buyers who won’t work under contract and other agents who refuse to pull their own weight in a deal. Your problem solving must be different this year. If avoid-and-forget didn’t work for you last year, fire-fast-now might be the different approach you need.
8. Stop copying others. Too many of us think that if we just copy someone else’s activities, we’ll reach the same success they have achieved. This is a bad strategy for two reasons: We only see the outward side of others’ success, without the back-story of challenges they handle, but some of which might sink us. We are simply not the same people; problems they can handle with their talents could overcome us if we have different strengths. Secondly, copying others activities means implicitly accepting their goals. Our goals should direct our own activities; There are many paths to success, and it’s important for each of us to follow their own. Some agents achieve high sales performance with lots of technology; others are masters of the telephone and handshake. Both can achieve measurable successful outcomes – based upon different strengths. But adopting the techo-approach for a techno-phobe could be the wrong strategy, and vice-versa.
9. Listen to customers. Lots of consultants, planners, leaders and technologists in the industry claim special access to the future. They have systems, tools, programs you can purchase to get there. Some work; some don’t. But what always works – every year, boom or bust – is talking to customers. They will tell you exactly what they want, how they want it and how they would like to pay for it. And since they pay the bills – not create them, like everyone else – they should be your most important source of information. Then you can go back to the others and ask how their products and services jibe with what consumers are saying, and incorporate the best of these into your optimal use of time and talents.
10. Get to work. While this sounds obvious, it is most certainly not. Most people go to the office but never go to work. They hang out, chat, catch up, eat lunch, run errands, do paperwork, upload a file, check their email, and lots of other activities. But they never actually get to work. If your job is to make sales, then going to work only happens when you make sales. At the very least, you’re only working when you’re doing activities that directly correspond to the next sale you will make. The sales will not make themselves. Others – your fellow agents, your broker, the government – will not make the sales for you. If you want to really do something differently in the next twelve months, then go to work and get to work for every minute you’re there.
So there’s a quick list of ten things to do differently in 2010. Note that none of them are silver bullets, get-rich-quick schemes. There’s not a single specific techno-gadget or snappy-comeback to use for or against consumers. The list requires each of us to assess, evaluate, plan, organize, delegate, focus and do that which is necessary to reach our goals in 2010. To create your next year of success, wishing for a thing is not enough to make it so. It’s time to do the right things – and differently – to make next year your best in the business.
According to research by the National Association of REALTORS, buyers habits are changing when it comes to real estate. The report, recently released by NAR, asked more than 100,000 consumers to rank the usefulness of information sources to their efforts to learn more about the marketplace. The good news was that for the first time in years, the real estate agent edged-out the internet for top-spot as “very useful” (81% vs 77%). The bad news is that, by a factor of 4, most buyers think open houses suck.
Hindsight is always 20/20, they say. Unless, of course, you spend most of your time navel gazing. So it’s almost myopic to point out that some ideas’ time has come. And other ideas’ time has passed. On one hand, it’s time for every sale to include in-house ancillary sales. On the other hand, it’s time for NAR to give up the dream of one HAL-like central database. Didn’t they find the bellybutton lint the last time they tried it? Read more…
November 12 – San Diego, CA – As the National Association of REALTORS Annual Convention opens this week in San Diego, Matthew Ferrara & Company announced the launch of its latest learning service, real estate brainchain (http://www.rebrainchain.com). The new online video learning community features high-quality training lessons for real estate professionals on a broad variety of topics like sales, marketing, technology and management. As easy to use as YouTube, but with real estate specific content, brainchain launches with almost 100 ready-to-learn lessons featuring some of the industry’s top trainers.
“Brainchain changes the paradigm in online learning for REALTORS,” says Matthew Ferrara, CEO of Matthew Ferrara & Company, the parent of brainchain. “In the last two decades, we have repeatedly delivered innovations in real estate training, first by incorporating technology into the classroom, then by creating the industry’s largest delivery system of webinars. We’ll deliver more than 3500 webinars this year alone, but we still don’t think that’s enough availability and affordability for the industry. That’s why we’re introducing real estate brainchain.”
The new platform uses the latest video innovations to change how real estate professionals use the internet to grow their business. While many real estate agents have been using the web to learn for quite some time, “we’re focused on the educational paradigm,” says Derek Deveau, Director of Development for brainchain. “Many agents have attended live webinars online for years; the challenges we’re solving there are to make the content available all the time, and to make them far more exciting than just slide shows and computerized voices. By using a state of the art video studio, we can record and broadcast live, with a higher learning impact. People learn quickly and easily using television today. We’re doing the same thing on the web.” Likewise, Deveau adds, we’re eliminating the scheduling hassles that keep some agents from attending the classes they need at the times they need them.
Brainchain is much more than just online videos, says Ferrara. “As a professional education company, we don’t just create content. We study how people learn and what helps them retain that learning. In most cases, that involves two factors: Learning in discrete amounts of time, and learning when it’s important to solve a problem. With brainchain, most of our lessons are under 10 minutes, so you can pay attention, focus, absorb, and then go apply the learning right away in your business. And since it’s on-demand, our members will watch the lessons they want, when they want it, which creates the motivation to concentrate and acquire the skills. In two decades of training experience, we have seen that students learn more when it’s in small bites and on topics they are really interested in.” Brainchain also adds social networking elements to its platform, creating a true video learning community.
Laura Fisher, Director of Site Development says that brainchain is designed to get members teaching and talking to each other. “The site’s full of extra features. There’s a forum where members can discuss hot topics and share ideas with each other. The Think Tank provides access to the trainers who are in the videos, so students can contact them and ask questions. And every member can blog about how they are using their new skills and knowledge to advance their careers. By combining social network features with high-quality video learning, we’re really creating a skill-development environment that has something for everyone, and lots of new content every day.”
The real estate brainchain platform will launch at NAR with almost 100 learning lessons ranging from “how-to” lessons on technology, social networking and office productivity, to real estate sales lessons on prospecting, farming, staging, pricing, marketing and management. “Brainchain links together great minds, like Martha Webb, Matthew Ferrara, Rich Sands and others. Each has dozens of lessons that can be watched and combined to create new ways of thinking – new “brain chains” – for real estate agents of the future,” Deveau adds. “It’s going to make an amazing amount of knowledge available to the greatest number of people in a format that’s both easy and fun for anyone to use.”
For more information about real estate branching, visit http://www.rebrainchain.com or contact us today.
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Live from NAR Starts Friday – with Matthew FerraraThose who do not learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. So said someone we’ve all long forgotten, but I’m sure you can Google it. But rather than worry about who said it, shouldn’t we be worrying about whether we’ve heeded the advice? As 20,000 REALTORS make the annual migration to the National Association of REALTORS Convention, maybe we can know what to expect by looking back at what happened last time.
It has often been said that sales is a contact sport. If so, then every opportunity to work closely with consumers is a sales moment. Real estate sales professionals know that it’s all about relationships. So it’s important to never let a good sales moment go to waste. If you’re serious about a sales career, then selling means more than just showing up. And one place to start selling more is at the Open House. Read more…
For many real estate brokers and agents, the hot technology today is social networking. Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter are the “new new thing” for making friends and influencing business. There’s probably no better tools for directly prospecting your marketplace – and maintaining your referral and repeat business base. But let’s not lose sight of the other pieces of the social networking-sphere, notably those technologies that we all take for granted, but may not be maximizing to drive web traffic and sell more homes. Long before there was social networking, there was social bookmarking, a system for recommending cool web content to your friends – and millions of others. The real estate industry should revisit these networks as free systems to drive web traffic without increasing their marketing budgets.
What one phrase has done more damage to the housing industry – consumer and practitioner alike – in the last two years? “I’m waiting for the bottom.” Buyers have been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for prices to hit their lows. Those REALTORS who didn’t just quit (200,000-plus of them did) similarly stuck their heads in the sand, waiting for everything to just blow over. “When the market changes,” was the favorite phrase of meetings, workshops, articles and convention speakers. A few out there – the Harneys, the Stavers, even yours truly – continued to plead for sanity. Nobody has ever called the bottom of anything on time: from Tulips to Tech, market bottoms have consistently eluded all of the experts. So it should come as no surprise that the REALTORS missed the housing bottom this time as well.
