Coaching

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Five Ways to Master Q4 Prep for the New Year 🎆

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Fourth quarter of the year is here, and with it comes so many things to wrap up and plan for while simultaneously experiencing a landslide of holidays and events until the end of the year. Use our guide below to help you approach this quarter with a solid plan and a sense of calm to prep yourself and your team to turn 2024 into your best year yet!

📈 Take an honest look at your 2023 goals. Did you adjust them properly to the current market conditions, or were you overly optimistic that things would go back to the way they were? Make any adjustments needed in your 2024 goal setting based on your predictions vs performance of the year so far.

👩‍🏫 Re-Train your team on the basics. If you’re a professional, you don’t start practicing free throws when the season starts, you master that in the off-season. Revisit and re-train your team on the basics so they are educated, confident, and ready to hit the ground running in the new year. Better yet, don’t stop training on the basics throughout the year and see how much better your team performs!

📊 Work with your team on THEIR goals. I hate to break it to you, but no one cares about your company goal. “But if YOU sell more houses to get us to that goal, you’ll make more money too!” Nope…still don’t care. Of COURSE, have a company goal. That’s necessary to any business plan! But what your team cares about is their bank account, their family and loved ones being taken care of, the food on their table, and if they can afford to go on that family vacation or not. Make your goal-setting conversations about building their book of business and accomplishing their personal goals. Keep the focus on them throughout the year and you will find that investment in them personally will pay off for you professionally. 

🔎 Inspect your marketing. What marketing efforts or campaigns generated the most business for you last year? Look at reporting on what your results were so that you can lean into the messaging that resonated with your audience and do less of the things that didn’t. Keep varying your message, but double down on the types of things that were a hit.

📱 Dig into your outbound communications. Your 2023 goal has already been pre-determined by the efforts you put in earlier in the year. Sure, you may get someone who registers in your database, answers their phone, and writes a contract that will close before December 31, but you can’t count on those bluebirds to get you to the finish line. The real estate cycle from new lead to closing is anywhere from 90 days to nearly a year, depending on your local market and efforts. I’m not saying to abandon your 2023 efforts, but if you dig into your database of leads now, you will not only make up some ground to hit your 2023 goal, but you will be laying a super strong foundation of business for the first half of 2024. Educate and remind your team of this sales cycle and help them see the vision of putting in the work now to reward their future selves. The work you do today will pay you in 90-120 days from now, dig in and reward your future self!

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✈️ Getting the Most Out of Attending a Real Estate Conference 

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Real estate conferences are always a good time and can be a transformative experience. You meet dynamic, like-minded people, get motivation and ideas from the industry’s best thinkers and speakers, and walk away with a real shot in your arm, ready to tackle your business in a whole new way. But…after a week or so, many of us tend to slip back into the behaviors and patterns we lived in before the conference, and other than riding that high for a short period, nothing changed at all. 

Here are some strategies to use to ensure that the next time you attend a conference (cough, like FUBCON, cough,) you know you’re going to maximize your time, money, and energy and implement lasting positive changes to your business when you get home.

🏅 Set Your Goals
Think about the conference before you go and define your objectives. What are your goals in attending? Expanding your network, learning more about a specific topic, finding a new partner for a business opportunity, recruiting others to join your cause, or finding potential clients are all things you can accomplish while you’re there. By defining these goals specifically, “I am going to learn how to connect everything in my business to my Follow Up Boss account,” or “I am going to find another team to partner with and grow my business,” you will know exactly what you want to do and be much more likely to accomplish them. 

🗓️ Plan Your Schedule
Look ahead at the agenda for the conference and make a plan as to what you want to attend and create a personalized schedule. Knowing where you want to be and when in advance will cut down on your game-time decision-making and reduce stress when you’re in an unfamiliar place and time zone. Be sure to also leave some wiggle room for breaks, meals, and spontaneous networking opportunities. You wouldn’t want to miss out on meeting someone fantastic if you are always rushing to the next event.

🤝 Be Prepared to Network
Can you describe who you are and what your business is within a few strong sentences? Prepare your elevator pitch in advance so that you can easily deliver it on the spot. Use any available event apps, Facebook Groups, or other social media to connect with people you want to meet before the conference begins. Having the initial formalities out of the way will make your in-person meetings more productive. Being approachable is also important, you never know who you will run into at the breakfast buffet or standing in line so keep your phone in your pocket and be open to chatting up strangers in any setting, opportunities abound if you are looking for them! 

👩‍🏫 Attend Diverse Sessions and All Exhibits
A real estate conference is not the time to stick to your comfort zone. Of course, hit up the sessions most important to you, but take the opportunity to attend sessions and meet exhibitors that you are less familiar with or think you may not be interested in. Your perception of those topics or vendors may change and you may find just the thing that your business is missing!

📝 Take Notes and Ask Questions
Be sure to take notes and truly engage (where appropriate!) with those presenting. If it’s not welcomed during their presentation, stick around afterward to ask clarifying questions. The presenters, I am sure, are eager to share more and get to know the pain points in your business so that they can help. Taking notes may not seem like the cool thing to do, but our brains can only retain so much information. Documenting your notes and takeaways will be a valuable resource that you can use long after the conference is over.

✅ Decide Which Items You’re Going to Implement
Using your notes, decide which items you want to implement and make a list of what you want to implement when you get back. We suggest keeping a list either in the very beginning or end of your notes and jumping there as soon as you have an a-ha moment. Keep this running list during the conference and then revisit it when you get back. Some things you may add out of excitement and decide not to pursue, but having an easy-to-find list will be helpful in your next step.

🏗️ Make a Plan to Implement
Using the list you created during the conference, order these items as to which are going to move the needle the most for your business and start with those items first. If you have a team, delegate what you can to others to champion so you’re not doing it all yourself, and assign some rough deadlines on when you want to have these items implemented. Then go back and fill in the individual steps to complete each item to make smaller deadlines, giving you a solid plan to implement the things that you learned.

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🛠️ Recruiting Tools You Can Use 🛠️

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In a shifting or uncertain market, your recruiting efforts are more important than ever before. Having a system to attract, nurture, and follow up with recruiting leads is essential for converting those leads into producing agents. 

In this week’s newsletter, we share with you tools and strategies to build this system out within your Follow Up Boss account or, if you want the white-glove treatment with additional tools, we will be happy to do it for you!

Watch the replay and use the links below to get all the goodies. 
This webinar was so much fun! It was jam-packed with actionable items to help you up your recruiting game and we discussed ways to set up a solid recruiting system within your Follow Up Boss Account.

Use the links below to grab all the free resources we mentioned! 
🔗 Amplified Solutions Recruiting Guide 
🔗 Free resources for you to brand as your own 
🔗 Amplified Solutions YouTube with all the DIY videos you can handle
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📰 Ways to Connect with Clients Amidst a Sea of Bad News

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The media isn’t doing real estate agents any favors these days, are they? Once a potential client has seen enough headlines, they firmly believe that the market is crashing and it’s tough to move someone out of that belief once they’ve made up their mind. Fear not, dear reader! This won’t be our reality forever, or theirs, and we have some effective strategies to help you navigate the current storm. Remember, a calm sea has never made a skillful sailor, so let’s adjust our sails to the conditions and get to work!

👂 Hear Them Out and Genuinely Listen to Their Point of View
When someone you are chatting with tells you completely wrong information, they are saying it because they believe it, and none of us ever want to hear that what we firmly believe to be true is wrong, or crazy, even. Fight the urge to correct them and ask questions as to how they know that to be true, where they heard it from, and genuinely listen to their point of view. Once you’ve heard them out, ask them if they would be willing to learn about your point of view as a licensed professional who works every day in the current market and has their boots on the ground.

📉 Fight Feelings with Facts
Most of our potential clients aren’t economic or real estate market experts. They likely don’t even read the entire articles that are attached to the sensational headlines they consume every day. Wild headlines sell views, attention, and clicks and that is what the media is going to continue to pump out. As a modern agent, you’re fighting for the same attention but instead of just stating, “The market is NOT crashing!” in a video or post, back that statement up with a chart or graph from a reputable source. This simple yet effective strategy will help set you apart from your peers and tee you up to be a local market expert that people want to learn from. Back up everything you can with documentation to bolster your reputation. 

👩‍⚕️Be the Actual Expert You Say You Are
Carve out time in your schedule each week, each day if you can, to study both the national and local markets. Thirty minutes a day would be ideal here. This will allow you to confidently share facts and their sources with anyone you are speaking to which will, in turn, boost their confidence in you as the market and real estate expert that you present yourself to be. 

👩‍🏫 Stay in Front of Your Audience With a Steady Stream of Up to Date Information
We are all marketers now and if your messaging has been solely your amazing transaction numbers and happy clients, you need to make the shift to education and expert knowledge. When people are fearful about the decisions they are making, someone who is steadily educating them about current market conditions, sharing historic data to put things into perspective, and advising them on what to expect next is going to have an advantage over someone who just celebrates their newest listing or latest closing. An educated client is a calm client who can confidently make decisions. Begin educating your entire community to nurture them into your very own calm clients!

📊 Share the Good, Bad, and the Ugly
Sometimes there isn’t good news to share, and that’s ok! Don’t hide from it, face it head-on and share what it means, put it into perspective over the long term, and educate your audience on when those conditions are predicted to lift. 

💪 Don’t Resist the Market, Lean Into it and Get to Work
This market is asking more of us and there isn’t anything we can do as individuals to change the market, so do not waste your precious energy resisting the current conditions. The market is always going to do this, that’s it’s nature, so let’s get to the acceptance phase and get to work. Make a plan for what you need to do and stick to your plan. Soon enough, the market will shift again and we will adjust again together!

You’re doing great, just keep going. Continuity is the secret to success.

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What Got You to This Point, Isn’t Going to Take You to the Next Level

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Adults, on average, gain one to two pounds per year as they age. This means if you’re a runner, or insert your particular flavor of exercise there, that in order to maintain your weight year over year, you will need to increase the time and intensity with which you run – and that’s to maintain the same weight as the year before. By the same principle, you would need to do significantly more yearly to lose weight.

The same effort-to-outcome equation applies to us in the current real estate market: The efforts and activities that found you success over the last few years are not going to yield you the same results if performed now.

But Kris, I can’t POSSIBLY work harder. I’m already pushing it to my limit!

If you are already truly giving your business 40 hours a week then you’re right, you don’t need to put in more hours, you need to take an honest inventory of the work that you’re doing to ensure that you aren’t unknowingly behaving as though you are still in the previous market conditions.

We are creatures of habit and the groove you got into and found success with a year or two ago is likely not yielding you the same results. So let’s pop the hood and look at how we are spending our time and make the changes necessary to get some real traction.

Self-Check: Are you putting in the work where it counts, or are you waiting for something to fall into your lap?

If real estate is your full-time career, are you truly putting in 40 hours a week?

  • If the answer to this is no, then get to bed earlier and add the hours you need to! If you’re treating this like a hobby, it will pay you like one.
  • If you are hitting the office full-time, are you working the entire time you’re there…or are you playing office? Perform the money-making activities and ditch the rest! If you were your own boss, would you be considering yourself for a promotion or would you need to be fired? Don’t be your own worst employee!

Is there an activity you’re still doing that isn’t gaining you results?

  • Just because you started doing something a few years ago doesn’t mean that you have to continue to do it forever. Perhaps it’s second nature now and you can kick the reminder or chart to save yourself some time. Perhaps it worked during a super hot market and it’s not being fruitful now.
  • It’s okay to stop doing things that don’t serve you anymore. The market is different, you are more experienced and have more information. Drop the things that aren’t gaining you more clients, exposure, and transactions, and replace them with more fruitful activities.

Do you have time set aside every day to prospect for new clients?

  • Put this on your calendar every. single. day. and honor the time. Schedule around it wherever possible. If you miss a day or two here or there, that’s fine – it happens! But don’t let it slip to a week or worse, a month. The work you do now will pay you 90-120 days from now so it can become easy to fall out of the habit of prospecting when you don’t see immediate results.
  • Every single top producer I know prospects every single day that they can. If they miss a day, they hop right back on the next and don’t let it get to day three.
  • If this is a challenge for you, figure out how to make it easier. Do you need it on your calendar with reminders set? Do you need an accountability buddy to hold you to it? Can you turn it into a game with rewards? Make the time for this and you’ll be thanking yourself in short order.

How are you staying in front of existing contacts and clients?

  • Kill the call to check in, call to show them your value, and give them something they can use or think about each and every time you reach out. If you’re struggling with what to say or share with them, that means you should increase the amount of research you’re doing about the market to give you material and ideas!
  • Stay in front of them so you are top-of-mind. This is crucial to connecting with more clients and increasing your number of transactions. If someone says they are a year out, that means you need to be reaching out for updates and sending them information at least once a week – in addition to their home search. Life situations change so quickly, the last thing you want to hear after a month of silence is that they got that promotion and went under contract with someone else because your follow-up wasn’t frequent enough.
  • Are your buyers still pre-approved? Interest rates are on the rise and that pre-approval your buyers received 90 days ago may not mean the same thing for them as it did when they first received it. Their price point or other search criteria may have changed. Discussing changing interest rates and encouraging getting RE-approved is a fantastic reason to reach out to buyer clients who are on the fence.

Are you the expert you say you are on your market and its current conditions?

  • Hustling alone will not set you apart from other agents within the market. You need to be informed so that you can be an information broker. There is a ton of misinformation and seemingly scary news floating out there, position yourself as a beacon of truth, accuracy, and helpful information to your community.
  • Read, subscribe to newsletters, watch videos, attend trainings that are offered to you, and listen to podcasts to the point where you can confidently educate someone on what it takes to get a home under contract and close it in your current market.
  • Be ready to answer the question: “How’s the real estate market?” at social gatherings with a really strong answer.
  • Know how to share this information about your market during a conversation without having to look it up:
    • Current inventory levels
    • Average days on market
    • Current interest rates and how it affects buying power
    • Highlight the most recent market reports
  • Make educating your community, customers, and clients a priority.

Review the above items and make whatever changes are necessary to streamline your work and gain better results from your efforts. This market is demanding more from us, but if you perform your work with more intention and focus, it doesn’t have to mean more hours.

You can do it, I know you can!

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