Effective Strategies for Closing a Listing

Transcript:

The Listing System

So I’m going to go through some material that I originally put together for the first iteration of Real Estate B-School and I want to sort of unpack the mentality: you’ve got to build the listing system as a way thats going to be consistent no matter what. Even if it's my best friend or my mom that’s listing her home- I tell my mom to call the office.

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Essentially, that’s the thing. If I get in the middle of it, especially with past clients who have your cell phone number that are going to reach back out to you: you’ve got to say, “Hey, listen Judy, every time I try to get this set up on my own, we’ve got a process that gives us these awesome success rates and let me do this: let me get you in touch with Ashland in the office, she’s going to take all the information on the home, all your improvements, just set up a time for us to connect," and every time they’ll say yes. So it’s got to follow that process every time. 

Most of our leads - and we get a lot of people who come from phone-jockey / phone warrier standing behind a podium prospecting-type world - but most of our leads come through branded direct response sources.

If you haven’t read some of Dan Kennedy’s books on direct marketing, especially his direct marketing, it’s kind of like the bible of direct response marketers; you definitely want to consume that book.

Everything has to have a call to action, everything should have a USP, a deadline or some scarcity if possible, very strict guidelines for how you want your marketing to be. That’s the way that we work. We don’t have any outbound calling effort and we still maintain the margins that we maintain.

People that are really hard on outbound calling, they’ll say, “oh you buy your business.” Yes, of course I buy my business, but I do it in such a way where it is a calculated return. Manning a team of inside salespeople is risky, and it’s not necessarily the easiest thing that you’ll ever do, if some of you have even tried to do it yourselves.

Just the nature of the mindset around the call, no matter what the market is, you have to bring some doubt into the mind of the seller prospect, but if you don’t use us, bad things will happen. We always end with a question,

“Mr. Seller, if we come out to the property and you love the marketing and our approach, you know we’re going to do the best job and get you the best price in the least amount of time, and we agree on a pricy strategy and commission structure, will you be ready to move forward and get your house on the market?”

Doesn’t matter how they answer. Everyone should write down the question. That has to be the last question that the person that is doing the seller intake asks; because if it’s “yes” then you know it's game on, and you better be ready to close them. If they say, “well, we’re meeting with four other agents,” you’ve got to know that as well.