You’ve been in the industry a while, and you have a consistent business. Maybe making $250,000 annually was your goal when you first started, but now it’s second nature to you. Now you wonder, “How can I take it to the next level?”
Here are three crucial shifts real estate agents need to embrace to take their careers to the next level, no matter what that looks like for you.
1. Choose your clients
Don’t work with anyone. Instead work with your ideal clients.
When starting, agents are happy to just get a client, so they work with anyone. But as they become seasoned agents, they still tend to retain that bad habit.
Don’t be that agent. Choose who you want to work with.
How do you get your ideal clients?
Getting premium clients by choosing who you’ll work with requires you to “position” yourself differently than how most agents position themselves to prospects.
It requires a different mindset as well.
Provide a preeminent experience.
Jay Abraham, the famous marketer, speaks about this quite elegantly. The bottom line is: you must serve your prospects with amazing value before they’ve even become a client.
Attract people to your sphere by answering questions they may have. You can do this through content marketing. You can provide articles, podcasts, SoundCloud audio snippets, infographics, etc.
Don’t be afraid to post useful content to all the mediums you feel comfortable with. It’s quality, not quantity, that matters here.
One way to create useful content is by making videos. Here are a few helpful hints on creating and distributing video.
- Start by creating a weekly agenda of content you’ll produce.
- Break it into small bites of useful, valuable content.
- Content should be based around challenges buyers and sellers are going through at stages of the buying process; this is where you can help them the most. For example, if you want more listings, you need to provide viewers with ways to improve the value of their home, current market conditions, etc. The key here is to build rapport with your prospects while everyone else is mailing out postcards, cold-calling and emailing MLS property updates.
- Once content is done, push it out to your audience. Email your database, share it on social, and even use paid traffic such as Facebook ads to boost your content to the right audience.
- If you make videos, make sure you create a YouTube channel, and even consider running some ads on YouTube to push your videos out to your audience and get subscribers.
Produce your content as if you’re sitting across the table from your ideal client, and help them through one challenge at a time.
For example, if your targeting high-end homebuyers, you need to know who they are, how old are they, what they want, what they need, what their challenges are — it’s crucial to know these things before you can properly produce content for them.
This will attract all the right clients and — as a side effect — will decrease the sales cycle time. The actual tasks are not the hard part, it has more to do with your mindset.
Serve clients immaculately, and build your lifetime value with each client you have chosen to serve.
2. Change your mindset
You have to shift your mindset from fixed to growth. With a fixed mindset, you believe intelligence is static. This leads to a desire to look smart and a tendency to avoid challenges, give up easily, see effort as fruitless — or worse — ignore useful negative feedback and feel threatened by the success of others.
People with a fixed mindset may plateau early and achieve less than full potential. It confirms a deterministic view of the world.
On the other hand, a growth mindset believes intelligence can be developed, which leads to a desire to learn and a tendency to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, see effort as the path to mastery, learn from criticism, and find lessons and inspiration in the success of others.
Carol Dweck
People with a growth mindset reach higher levels of achievement. All this gives them a greater sense of free will.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Dr. Carol Dweck, a Stanford professor is a must-read.
The key is to understand that the top two characteristics, beliefs and focus, matter the most.
The rest are by-products. Imperfect action always beats perfect action because perfect action never happens.
The brain is like a muscle. We learn by doing. The more we do, the more we learn.
It’s not a gene that you’re missing. These skills and habits get developed. You’re not simply born with them.
Success doesn’t happen without failure. So fail fast and often — because from that struggle comes growth.
Once, you’ve enabled a growth mindset, it becomes a matter of applying your strengths and delegating the rest.
3. Scale your business
Again when starting out, you don’t have much choice but to do everything yourself or become someone’s minion until you gain enough experience and knowledge to be self-sufficient.
However, as you build your business, you’ll quickly recognize that to further grow your business, and more importantly have a healthy lifestyle with the freedom to do as you please, you’ll need to have efficient systems in your company to automate and retain people who can fulfill elements of your business.
The goal is to have a business working for you whether or not you choose to be in the office all day every day.
Get in the habit of building an actual business.
Find the best talent, such as a buyer’s agent or two, perhaps a listing agent, an inside sales agent (ISA), a virtual assistant (VA), an administrator and powerful marketing team to fuel the machine. Become an efficient macro-manager.
You’ll need to bring these types of folks on as your business grows. Figuring out when and who to bring onto your team is up to you.
Incentivize performance and empower talent while you grow your company. The goal isn’t to have a large team unless you choose to, but have a sustainable machine that’s fed with prospects and converted daily.
The specifics of how that is achieved is unique to you.
Afra Sanjari is the owner of THRIVE Listings in Orange County, California. Follow him on Facebook or connect with him on LinkedIn.
