Led by Mark Leader, the No. 1 real estate sales trainer in North America, Mark Leader Courses (MLC) is the umbrella organization for three distinct real-estate sales training offerings: Leaders Choice (nine-week classroom course with a 12-month follow-up), Leaders Elite (for Leaders Choice alumni and real estate agents looking to improve) and MasterKey™ Success Coaching (one-on-one customized coaching). MLC has helped tens of thousands of salespeople increase their production and revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars.
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I see more and more people relying on social media to build their business instead of traditional methods — and really, my opinion on that is still up in the air. I still haven’t decided whether that’s the right thing or the wrong thing. My reason for saying that is that sales comes down to communication, and history has shown us that there are three forms of sales communication: the written word, the telephone and face to face. Of course, the most effective way to communicate with someone is face to face; if not face to face, then over the telephone; if not over the telephone, then through the written word. When all is said and done, though, all is for naught if salespeople don’t still pick up the phone, book listing appointments and get face-to-face meetings with buyers and sellers. If social media can enhance that, then I’m all for it.
If you read my answer to the next question, I would respond the same way here. The people listed below all run top real estate companies. The organizations and the individuals within them are really one and the same.
§ Harold Crye, Crye-Leike, REALTORS®
The expectation is to get back to what the relationship with the salesperson was meant to be about all along: giving great customer service, honest information and candid counseling when it comes time to make a decision. Further, it’s making sure that that counseling is always in the best interests of the customer — not in closing the deal. Simply put, they’re looking for honest counsel.
They need to put more emphasis on training and less emphasis on everything else. Salespeople need to be trained on having good sales skills. That is the No. 1 thing lacking in the industry today, bar none. You could argue that that is a self-serving comment coming from a real estate sales trainer — and it might be — but the numbers tell the story, too. The average real estate person this year will do four or five transactions, according to the National Association of REALTORS®. That’s got to send a message that these people really don’t know how to sell.
If you want to have less conflict and fewer problems with ethics, you must teach salespeople how to be successful so that they can build a career on abundance instead of scarcity. Leader’s Choice students average 1.5 to 2 transactions per week. We teach 12 different ways of prospecting; good attitude and time management; objection-handling skills. We teach agents how to help the consumer find the home of their dreams more quickly. The No. 1 problem in the real estate industry is that production is far too low for the average agent to look after their family responsibilities.
Mandatory training. You can’t keep running an industry off people who sell four or five houses a year and who take the majority of the money in their transactions. Pretty soon, someone has to say, “This isn’t working.” We simply can’t supply 12 months of service to salespeople, have them do five transactions in that amount of time and then take 70 percent to 90 percent of the money. We also can’t keep running a business off ancillary services and not have your core services be profitable. The real estate industry, unfortunately, has been doing this for some time. All facets of the industry have to be successful in order for the industry as a whole to be a success. The agents have to be successful for the brokerage to be successful, and on and on.
None. I don’t see them taking any role.
It’s up to the brokers to take back control of their businesses. Counting on others seems to be a business trend these days, whether it’s the automobile industry, banking, life insurance — you name it. Many industries are counting on the government to make them profitable. We have to stand on our own two feet, and it’s up to the brokerages to start implementing minimum standards for production, customer service and for being part of the company team. The broker has to be more concerned with per-person productivity than the number of bodies that occupy an office. Give me 10 salespeople who are each doing 30 to 40 transactions a year vs. 100 salespeople who are doing three or four transactions per year. It all comes down to looking after people.
Whenever I have the opportunity, I spread the message that ultimately, each of us has a decision to make every day: You can choose success, or you can choose failure. Either way, the good Lord is going to love us equally. I instill into salespeople that they must choose success. To ensure success, they have to do certain things every single day. A lot of people want success but are very rarely willing to put in the long-term effort to achieve it. I’m trying to instill those values.
I give them the process to follow in order to accomplish their goals. For example, I worked with the Ebby Halliday in Texas last fall. I worked with Reece & Nichols in Kansas City; Champion Realty in Annapolis, Md. They went through the mortgage meltdown like everyone else, but with powerful dialogues, techniques and processes, they did better than 1.5 to 2 transactions per person per week. That kind of success demonstrates that in any kind of market conditions, even hostile ones, the right philosophy and work ethic will bring success to anyone who chooses it.
“Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill
“The Magic Ladder to Success” by Napoleon Hill
“You Were Born Rich” by Bob Proctor
“The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne
“Distinguishing Marks of a Leader” by Mark Leader
The common thread among all of these books: If you can see it, you can achieve it, and if it is to be, it’s up to me. There is no free lunch, and ultimately, success isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. No matter how great you are, we all make mistakes. Those mistakes can drive us down, or we can turn those mistakes into lessons and use them to drive us to the place where we need to be in life. It’s all up to us.
Spend more time, energy and resources on training salespeople how to be good salespeople. Teach them the correct dialogues, techniques and processes so that they can run a successful business. If you do that, in return, that success will breed success for the consumer and the brokerage.
Our industry is like no other. If you gave someone a license to be a doctor or a surgeon, do we expect them to know how to do the operation, or do we only expect them to know how the law affects them if they do the surgery without knowing how? That’s how the real estate industry treats new agents. In other words, if they don’t do a good job, it’s likely because we’ve taught them all of the legal lessons but not how to pick up the scalpel and use it.
Why is it that we can take people through nine weeks of sales training and achieve better outcomes immediately than other agents who have been in the business five, 10, even 15 years? To continue the analogy, it’s because if someone wants to own a restaurant, they should probably take cooking lessons, not accounting lessons. The accounting lessons can come later, but if the restaurateur doesn’t know how to cook, there won’t be any money to count.
