What’s on your to do list?

(photo courtesy of kecute.wordpress.com)

There’s so much to do these days, even in a down market. But what’s on your to do list for today? Most agents find themselves trying to solely concentrate on making sales and getting new leads and clients. This probably includes checking email 50 times per day, answering and making phone calls, and going on appointments. Having this kind of frantic schedule leaves very little brain power left for making remarkable changes for your business and development.  If you are only focused on being frantic, like most agents are, you aren’t making progress on your real goal…actual business development.

You need to take some time each day or week, only a few hours, to work on projects that you enjoy that will create more business. Like to blog? Take three hours each week and work solely on that. I like to work on my blog about twenty minutes each day, doing research and writing posts. Why don’t you work on writing and formatting for your newsletter? Or get some research done on that new area of town that’s going to become your niche in the marketplace.

Point is, you need to take a breath….(that was nice). Then figure out the big picture task that you really want to get done this week or month. Then write out the three to do items that you can achieve today to move that vision forward. If you don’t take time to look at the macro picture of your  business, you will forever be stuck running in your hamster wheel without any real progress.

Can you make more money by firing half of your database?

Most of us have huge lists of people. We collect names, sometimes just email addresses, like its a hobby. Then we take those names and we write them down and we write all of those people everytime we have something to say. We write everybody regardless of their preference to hear our message, and this effects our messaging.

Today I was reading Seth Godin’s blog post titled, “Infinity – they keep making more of it”. He talks about this very issue and the almost innate desire to grow our businesses and our reach exponentially. If we can reach fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand more people then why not?

When you sit down to create your newsletter or your weekly marketing piece you probably salivate when you think about all the people that are going to “read” your message. But I think somewhere in that creative process you dilute your messaging. You go for broad appeal because you’re sending to a large, varied audience.

But we work in a niche market. We are specialists in our product type. Our messaging should never be broad, and it certainly isn’t meant for the masses. We need to deliver specific information to a very targeted group of people.

So, I ask you to consider getting rid of the parts of your database that you know nothing about. The names that haven’t responded to your emails, or the addresses that bounce-back everytime. If you’re not ready to do this just yet, try this little test. Take a look at the content in your last newsletter and then look at the content to the last email you sent to less than 30 people. You’ll see what i’m talking about and then maybe you’ll be ready to start cutting.

Thanks for showing up!

I appreciate you taking the time to check out lassohelp.com. Please take a minute to poke around, you’ll find the 5 latest posts below. To the right you’ll find a subscribe via email button, that I recommend you hit as well as a search box, archive, and a category sort bar. You can expectt to see an update here at least once a week that will help you promote and grow your business. Feel free to comment on any of the articles to get a discussion going with your peers. Let me know if you have any questions and I hope you enjoy!

I want you to succeed

Times are tough right now, the economy is showing signs of hope and potential for upward movement but we aren’t quite there yet. Most of us don’t have to look farther than our own bank accounts to know that we need to be doing more to succeed in this market and then the bear market that will return. I know that you can do better business with lasso using proven strategies for permission based marketing. But don’t take my word for it, consider this case studies:

1) Amazon.com: Amazon has been collecting information on their users/customers for years now. They’ve been collecting information on what kinds of books you like to read and therefore what kind of books you will most likely read in the future. The “print” business as we know it is doomed to fail. But Amazon has the right outlook for success. They have slowly been sending email to subscribers that want to read what they send. They send you suggestions that actually match your interests. They haven’t made a killing yet, but in the next two years Amazon is getting into the publishing industry. They are going to pre-empt the market and only print books with pre-orders because they know what their customers are looking for and they have built a trust relationship with those customers. They are going to make selling books extremely profitable from investing in permission based marketing.

This can and will work for real estate. If you can give your customers the reward they are looking for (quality, focused information) they will reward you with business and even better, referrals. I want to help you establish this relationship with a no-cost investment that doesn’t take a lot of your time once you have it set up. Others in our business and in our office don’t use this strategy because its not as glamorous as blasting 10,000 random email addresses. When you blast a random list you feel accomplished, but what do you get out of it other than that? I guarantee if you take the time to set up your own permission based marketing campaign you will see results.

If you have any interest in getting your own campaign off of the ground lets set up a one-on-one meeting. Give me an hour and I can show you enough data to convince you to move forward.

Don’t wait too long, somebody has the motivation to do better business, if its not you today, you’re a step behind.

You want fries with that?

Questions of the day: How do you treat your new clients? What kind of relationship do you work to build with them?

A lot of people in our industry don’t put a lot of value to new leads. They treat new leads like McDonald’s treats a new customer. The gauge interest and try to make the sale on the spot. If the prospect doesn’t show interest, they move on to the next prospect and forget about those leads who came in not ready to make a decision.

We need make sure that we value our new leads and prospects. During the initial contacts you should work to get valuable information out of them. Then take this information and plug it into lasso. Once you know things like timeline, pricing, and location preference, you can start working to nurture that prospect into a sale. You have to follow-up regularly with these prospects with personal, relevant, and anticipated messaging.

What is personal, relevant, and anticipated messaging?

I’m sure that you are on a lot of email lists. I get tons of stuff of title companies, lenders, other agents. I haven’t opted-in to any of this messaging (not anticipated), most of the time the email isn’t valuable to me (not relevant), and on top of that I know this email is being sent to thousands of other people (not personal).

But what if they asked me what I was interested in learning about? What if there was a lender who only sent me email about condo loans? I’d probably look forward to receiving that email on a regular basis. Then maybe when I was ready to purchase a condo or make a referral to a buyer, I’d be much more likely to use that lender.

You need to find out what your prospects are intrested in learning more about. Then ask them if you can send them the information. Finally, send it on an anticipated (regular) schedule. Send one email to prospects interested in downtown condo living. Send another to your group of people (or just that one person) who are interested in living at TOD stations. You get the point.

Just don’t be the McDonald’s employee of the month. We aren’t serving billions of customers, each prospect is extremely valuable.