The 3 Surfaces You Work On
After the last two years of speaking with real estate agents on a daily basis and understanding the way their business works, I found that most of them, as small business owners / entreprenuers, worked on just about EVERYTHING themselves. No matter how big of a team they had or how much revenue they brought in, there were often some common problems that exiested across the board when it came to Real Estate agents.
The first thing you have to understand about real estate is that you are expected, in many brokerages, to be responsible for everything. Just because they have a national brand logo on their card does not mean they have a legion of help behind them. They are still responsible to accomplish everything on their own.
Most people do not understand what that entails. It is more than simply showing houses and negotiating prices. As a Realtor, you are expected to know how to sell, neogtiate, utilize social media, shoot videos, understand marketing strategies. You need to know how houses are built, what the building code is, and how to explain it all without your buyer freaking out. You need to be able to balance a budget, use a CRM, track your past customers, keep relationships with people you have not done business with in years, and help navigate co,plex financial products in order for your customer to make the largest purchase of their lives.
No pressure.
With all of that, I needed a way to break down such an impossible job into manageable pieces. I came up with the idea of the desk, the dining room table, and the conference table.
Let’s start with the dining room table. This is where you sell your product, whatever it is. It is the time you spend face to face with your client learning about their concerns and hopfully solving them. This is one of the areas that people love to focus on, but it only makes up 5-10% of the job agents actually do.
The desk is the area where the majority of the real work happens. This is the behind-the-scenes work that most people hate doing, but create the most tangible differences in the business. This is where you track your numbers, do your work in the CRM, monitor your finances, write goals, etc. It is also where you do your prospecting and fill out your paperwork. These are the parts of the job most of us try to avoid, but without it we would not have the opportunity to sit at the dining room table with the client.
The last surface is the conference table. This is where things get fun. This is where you scale all the things that needed to be done at the desk and conference table so you do not need to be the one to do them. This can happen either by hiring or recruiting a team or by hiring sub-contractors to fill the roles. If you hire a marketing person or contract a marketing company, the result is the same. The chore is off your desk and you don’t have to do it as often.
The problem is most sales training focused in on the Dining Room tables, but neglects the desk and conference table when that is the area where you are the most profitable.
Even if you are in a sales role, do what you can to ensure that you are not only focused on following up on the leads that you are given from the marketing “desk”. Spend time building systems in order to get repeat and referral customers. Leverage the contacts you already have in order to get more sales.
The sad thing is there are many sales employees, even those who work nearly 100% commission or on a draw, who look at what they are doing like a job, not a business. Take a note from entrepreneurs and leverage your existing clientele in order to get more clients. Do this by focusing on all three surfaces, not just increasing your ability at in front of clients.