An 8-Step Painless Process to Selling More
You want to make more per year, but you are stuck in a rut. And you can’t figure out what is wrong. You’ve tried to work longer hours to sell more houses, but that just ends up killing you, your family and ultimately your business.
What you have to do is get smart about selling more. The following eight steps will help you do that without you having to sacrifice more time or family.
1. What you sell is a verb–not a noun.
Whether you are on the buying or selling side of the market (or both, for that matter), think of what you do as an action–instead of thinking of it as a noun. For example, your product isn’t a house. That’s a noun. Your product is selling that house–helping the owners get out of it so they can move on to their next phase of their life.
Why is this important? If you focus on the house, then you will only focus on the features of that house. You’ll try to sell the kitchen rather than the world-class cooking that could happen in their. You’ll try to sell the fireplace as a thing of beauty rather than the wonderful Christmas’ the family can have in front of a roaring fire.
2. Pre-qualify your leads.
Just because you have a dozen leads coming in a week doesn’t mean that you will get more sales. You have to ask yourself if those leads are qualified–or are they just tire kickers? More than likely they’ll just be tire kickers.
Naturally you’ll want to be able to spot poor leads quickly and kick them to the curb, but that can be time consuming. A hotline is a great way to vet leads before they even reach you.
3. Maximize your time with clients
Next to having the ability to quickly vet leads you also lead the ability to vet clients as well. Even after a qualified lead comes in you should still be on the alert for whether you can help them or not. They may have demands that are too high and unrealistic or want to look in a market that is unfamiliar to you.
Discover whether you can help these people quickly. If you can, great. If you can’t, kick them to the curb and move on to the next lead. Forcing someone to look at or even buy something they don’t way is not a good long-term strategy when it comes to getting more sales.
4. Learn how to listen.
Your time with a lead or client should be spent asking them carefully-crafted questions that will help you understand their needs. Don’t discuss everything you’ve accomplished in the past two years or how you’ve helped some clients find the best houses. Get to know your lead by finding out what it is they want and need.
5. Hire an assistant–delegate everything but selling.
When you are working with more qualified leads you are closing more sales. And when you are closing more sales you are naturally doing less of something else. This something else could be paperwork, marketing or cold calling. Hire someone else to handle these for you. What you pay them per hour will be small compared to the amount of money you can make selling more.
6. Shorten your sales cycle.
One of the things you should constantly strive to do is make your sales process more efficient. If a typical sale occurs in four months, shaving 15 days off will give you room for another sale in a 12 month period. Of course you’ll have multiple sales going on, but that time you shaved off will earn you more.
7. Go for the big sales.
If you focus on moving $150,000 homes, you’ll have to move over 7 houses in order to make a million dollar sale. That’s a lot of work–at least not as hard as moving just one million dollar home. Of course there are more $150,000 homes available than a million dollar home, but even if you moved up to the $300,000 to $500,000 market you’ll make more in less.
8. Keep the leads coming in.
Never lose site of where your leads come from–and never let that source go dry. Whether you are churning out leads from referrals, direct mail, internet or event marketing, constantly keep that pipeline full.
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