Commitment to comfort....or Excellence

Oftentimes when leading a real estate seminar I'll ask the audience, "How much more commission would you make in the next 12 months if you prospected 10-12 hours every single week that you're working throughout the year?"

And typically, the majority of the audience responds by telling me they would at least double their income over the next 12 months, if they focused on doing only this in addition to what they're currently doing in their business. Some audience members tell me they would even triple their income, and most everyone in the room tells me that they would increase their income by 50% or more.

So if this is such a simple formula to increase one's business as a real estate agent, why aren't more agents doing it? And the answer lies in determining how committed one is to excellence in their real estate business, versus how committed they are to just being comfortable.

When you think about it, the difference between top producing real estate agents and mediocre ones often has nothing to do with the amount of hours that they're working. It has more to do with what's being done within those hours instead. Average agents often invest a good amount of hours in their business, but what they do with that time often involves doing activities that simply make them feel comfortable. But these activities will often be quite different from the activities that will really build one's business to extraordinary levels.

Shuffling papers, continually looking at information on various properties, not doing your prospecting, and having your day determined more by who calls you instead of who you're calling, are all death traps to the mediocre agent. Top agents, on the other hand, are in control of their own time and make sure they're talking to the people everyday who will help them build their business to new levels.

Average agents can also get sucked into not contacting many new prospects once they have enough relationships in their business to make them feel busy. But you have to be willing to ask yourself the question, "Are these people who I'm busy working with the ones who will lead me to building an extraordinary real estate business, or are they really just taking up a lot of my time?"

Once again, you can always feel busy throughout your real estate career. But are you busy working with the kind of people and on the size of transactions that will lead you to the income you want for yourself? Or are you busy working with people who take up a lot of your time and don't make you a lot of money in the process?

That's why it's important to continually prospect in your real estate business no matter how long you've been working in our industry. When you constantly prospect you find better people to work with than some of the ones you're working with right now. You also find greater numbers of people needing larger transactions than some of the people you're working with right now, too. And what this then does is it allows you to let go of some of the more marginal leads you've been working on, or hand them off to other agents who will pay you referral commissions. And a 10-25% referral fee on a smaller transaction, requiring no further work from you with the prospect, will oftentimes be a much better investment of your time than working with the prospect directly. Let someone else put in all the work and you just deposit the referral check when the deal closes. But the key to being able to do this easily is constantly having bigger and better leads to spend your time on.

The way to ensure this is through doing ongoing prospecting. When you're prospecting 10-12 hours a week, you're constantly swimming in an abundance of opportunity. You're continually digging-up bigger and better leads to work on, and you feel as if the real estate gods are constantly smiling on you. Show me an agent who doesn't have an abundance of opportunities to work on, and I'll show you an agent who probably hasn't been doing their prospecting.

Keep in mind that there's always an abundance of new opportunity out there just waiting to be discovered by you. The fact that you have tens or hundreds of agents working in your area all closing transactions every year that you're not involved in proves this. But what you'll now be doing by prospecting 10-12 hours a week is redirecting these leads your way, instead of passively letting them go to your competitors instead.

In addition, when you're prospecting 10-12 hours a week, you become much more effective at getting all your other work done. You find yourself wasting very little time, and you begin communicating with more certainty to people, having them get in alignment with the direction you want them to move in more easily.

In summing-up, what we're talking about is making the choice between being excellent at your real estate business, or just being comfortable. Now mind you this involves not spending any additional time working in your business, but instead involves changing how you're spending your time right now during the hours you're already working.

With this in mind, how much more commission would YOU make in the next 12 months if you prospected 10-12 hours every week that you're working?

And if you like the answer to this question, just move forward now with no excuses, and get the prospecting done.

Jim Gillespie Ph.D