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Personal Productivity and Milestones for Growth – Josh Phegan

Josh Phegan discusses with the Super six why you should always be prospecting, and if you are stuck how to go about generating leads quickly using a "simple rule of 15".

Thank you our Week 8 sponsor: 

myrealestatecpd.com.au provide online CPD training for NSW Agents. Click here for more information.

Coaches:

Josh Phegan. Josh Phegan will be speaking at AREC 16 this year, to book your tickets visit arecconference.com.

Coaching Links:

  • Josh is a regular contributor  Elite Agent magazine. Click here for some of his articles

Video Notes/Transcript 

00:00 Introduction and Session Overview: Samantha McLean

01:18 The Common Enemy Approach

So today I’m going to come from a really different perspective in just trying to get you to think about really using that time well, in that you don’t really manage time at all, you manage the energy you put into that time. You’ve probably all had an hour where things were just phenomenal. You rang a few people, you got a listing, you got a sale, things were great. Then you’ve also got hours of time in your life which you lose to procrastination, distraction, fear, worrying about your competitors, all of that sort of stuff.

I come from the mindset that I actually don’t have any competition at all. The reason why that’s critically important, and there’s probably two notes to write down first off, is what we call the role model approach, or being in a position we then call the common enemy approach.

In the common enemy approach what you actually do is that you look at yourself and you think okay, in a common enemy approach you watch everything that one of your competitors do. How do they do it, when do they do it, what do they do, do they get that listing? They must have got it based on fee, they must have got it based on marketing. What actually happens is that you start telling yourself a whole series of stories, and some of those stories are actually true, and some of those stories are just actually not true at all. It’s your way of justifying why you’re at where you’re at in terms of success.

What I say is, if you think about that common enemy approach, you will forever be in a position of fear. You’ll forever be in a position of wondering what it is that you could be doing, vs. actually moving yourself into a different conversation about how do you move into being the role model. The role model is this sort of person who says I don’t care what the competition does, because I realize that who pays the invoice … So when you send your invoice does the competitor pay it or does the customer pay it? Who pays?

03:01 The Customer

Customer, right? So you know who I want to concentrate on the most? I want to concentrate on the customer. And I’m just a big believer that if you’re my customer today, what’s really important is that we walk away from this hour with some skills, but most importantly some tools. Or some frameworks that you can use for the rest of your career, to really get long term success. It’s okay to be great for a week, it’s good to be great for a month, but to be able to do this for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and not burn out, and have a great quality of life around it, is a completely different story.

What we are getting you to think about is that to move into that role model status, you’re always going to have to prospect. It doesn’t matter however way you carve it, you can put on an assistant or two or three, you’re always going to be in a position of generating leads.

03:50 Client ‘Bingo’

I’m going to get you to do an exercise. In our manual’s for those that have got them, for those of you that are on our Skype session you can just write it down. Just write down the numbers from 1 15 on page number 2. So if you write down 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, to make sure we’re using the same number system. I want now to write down 15 names of either the people or the street address for your next 15 listings that you have not yet signed.

Without references your mobile phone, without referencing any chasers and stuff that you’ve got around you. Just want you to write down 15 names of the next people that  you think are going to sign an agency agreement with you. The first person to get to 15 I want you to yell out “Bingo.”

4:32 ‘Progress’, not ‘Harass’

The secret here is that if you don’t remember them, then how are they going to remember you? That most important part of every business is that we’re talking about building great systems. What would happen if I said to you that I now want this in a Monday inside of your calendar, that we actually have something that we call a ‘directions meeting’ and that in that directions meeting the very first thing that we do every Monday is actually just review that list of those 15 people. All I want you to do for success is the ability to be able to get on the phone, ring those 15 people to see how you can actually progress that client rather than harass that client, to move them forward to success.

I’m here to tell you that you are 48 hours away from a completely different feeling on the inside of your business. If you go up 2, 3, 4 listings in the next 48 hours, would that change the way that you feel about the business in any way, yes or no?

05:24 Understanding the Client

This is great. All of the sudden you’ve got momentum and you’re got consistency and there’s a whole range of things that go with you.
On the top of that page I now want you to write down three key words for me, and it’s problem, timeline and destination. With problem, timeline and destination, what we think about is is that what’s the reason why these people are actually making that decision to move? Is it things like birth and death and marriage and divorce and relocation and financial gain and financial loss. What’s their timeline like? Do they need to do something before June 30? That could be like and investor market you might be working in.
Right the way through then that’s the destination, where are they moving to? Is it an apartment, is it a house, is it beach side, is it in a city, is it out to the country, is it into the center of town? Whatever that words. Now go through and have a look over that list of those people that you’ve got and tell me how clearly do you actually really know what their problem is and what their timeline is.

Getting yourself into a position of actually really understanding the client. Prominent focus and the ability to be able to do really we is not actually about just sending out hundreds and hundreds of calls, it’s actually about the ability to focus on who the best 5, 10 or 15 people that we need to be speaking to today, that’s actually going to really lead us to success.
That’s what I’m saying to you is that at AREC this year we’re going to speak a lot about becoming a reorder business, and that’s a really important part of your understanding where you should be concentrating your time.

06:54 Hierarchy of Work

The back of your manuals, maybe just on a spare piece of paper, I want you to write out for me what we call the hierarchy of work. This hierarchy of work is really important because no one every talks to you about where that hierarchy starts.

In my opinion, the first the place the hierarchy starts is in past clients. They’re the forgotten few, and your past clients are not in the witness protection program. That’s the thing about it is that inside of your careers, whether or not you’ve been in it for a week, a month, 10 years or 15 years, your past clients should be generating lots an lots of referrals for you.
If you go an see more established agents or people who have been around in your own office, who have been around for a while, who’ve done hundreds if not thousands of transactions. I want you to ask them how many deals have you done in your career, and how many of those people have you been back down to the house since the buyer actually bought the home? You know what you will find? About 10% of the people that they’ve actually sold to have they actually been down to. 90% of that database has never seen them face to face after selling it to them on the day of the auction, or doing the deal in a for sale campaign with offer and acceptance. There’s no ongoing relationships. There’s no ongoing level of relevance.
If you want to go and work with some of the best agents in our country, the number one thing that they do is they just say really, really focused about doing the activities that count. This is kind of interesting. Some of you will know we get the opportunity to work with a guy called Alexander Philips. In working with Alexander it’s a pretty amazing story. He does 178 transactions a year, turned over $6.2 million in fees in the last 12 months, which is out of control. I get that. He’s got a good, healthy average sale price, don’t worry too much, it’s a good $2.2 million.

08:35 Alexander Philips Case Study

Here’s something that you might not know. Last week we did a case study on just the number of calls that he actually makes. This is just from his landline phone only, this is not from a mobile phone, this is just the landline. Add his mobile phone call on top of it. Inside of his business, he completed just on 453 connected phone calls from Monday through Friday. If you have a look at his total talk time, his total talk time was just on 6 hours and 5 minutes. If you take that 6 hours and you times that, so … Take that 80 hours times it by six. It’s 485 minutes in total talk time, for 453 connected calls.

What does that tell you of the average length of each of his calls are? About a minute and 10 seconds. Now you might go “Whoa. How could you make a phone call to someone in a minute and 10 seconds and actually have a meaningful, to get an appointment out of it, to get a listing out of it. To go and get momentum out of it.”
What happens if I told you the majority of these phone calls are to the people that he’s already been calling for the last 15 years. The need to build rapport is very little. Does that make sense?

09:37 Effective Calling

Now you’re picking up the phone and you just go “Oh hey Ben, how are you, Josh, what’s up man?” I just say I give you a quick call, let you know number 23 down the road’s just been listed, got it open on Saturday if you want to pop by. How are things with you guys by the way, how is the house, would it be okay if I let you know when it sells and what it makes. Yeah that’d be great, okay cook, hangs up. The call’s executed like that. Now we go through and do the call again when the property’s being sold. Hey it’s just been sold. Did you hear how much it made. No I didn’t. Oh it sold for $500,000. Hey quick question Josh, what does that now mean your place is worth? I don’t know. Would it be of advantage just to pop down and give you an idea of the value. I’m not selling. You don’t have to be selling for us to catch up.

It’s all in how you deal with the objections. I’d love to pop down, come and see you. Think about it. If you then go down with all of these people, even if you’ve got 5 people that are like that, and then 10 and then 100 and then 200 then 1,000 as your career grows. How powerful is that for them to go and generate you referrals. The new economy is all about being ridiculously relevant to the client. How do I be relevant so that every single time that there’s a listing or there’s a sale, that I actually advise people about what’s actually happening there. This is about follow through.

10:54 Being Teachable, Learning Systems

You know, if you think about it, isn’t this what success looks like though? You actually want things that are teachable. I’m over the notion of people being exceptional or being bred into being real estate royalty. I’m actually all about learning a system and actually making something that’s scalable and teachable. If you can follow the system, if you follow the checklist, then that’s going to make you ridiculously successful.

If you had a checklist, what would that be? When you bring in a new agency agreement, the first activity that you do is that you say rather than do a buyer search for all the buyers that could match that particular property, why don’t you do a seller search, or a market appraisal search or a past client search or a landlord search, for all the people that you know that own a property of a similar type? If email is going to be done by everybody, why don’t you pick up the phone and actually have a relationship? The relationship is built by human connection. The relationship is built by being real and being vulnerable and making that stuff happen.

11:54 Your World or Client’s World?

Literally I just think that fundamentally is letterbox business is actually good business. When there are hundreds if not thousands of clients that have been completely underserved, by agents in your own offices that have retired, retrenched, moved on to other brands, and have left all of these past client relationships behind, and no one’s done any work with it. This is where I’m saying to you is that the actual vendor, the person who bought the home now, the future vendor, they don’t even remember who sold them the house because there’s no relationship, there’s no face to face over time.

I bought my first house 15 years ago, and the agent that I bought it from has phoned me once in that 15 year time frame and said hey Josh, I just wanted to let you know we’re thinking about your house, are you ready to tell it yet or what. I said no and he said well fair enough, you know where I am and hung up. Who’s world is he in? Is he in my world or is he in his world? He was in his world. Does that make sense?

12:50 Search is Success

This is the secret. If you go into Alexander Philips business, the number 1 thing that his guys does is that each and every single minute of the day is that if there’s a new listing or a new sale, whether or not that is his listing or someone else’s listing, whether or not it is his sale or someone else’s sale, that’s the first thing.
I’m going to say to you that foundationally search is success. What do I mean by search is success? Think about it this way: Imagine you could go into your database today and go search, find all people who brought a property from me during the month of April. Bring up a list to me of all those people who have ever bought a home from you. Would that be easy now to go and do your anniversary calls?

Does that make sense? Literally if you can get a great search, then you’ve got a great list of people to call. If you’re going to do the same anniversary call over and over and over and over again, do you reckon you’re going to get good at that call, yes or no? Right?

13:45 Reluctant Prospectors

This is about, and I’m not talking about scripting. It’s about relationship, it’s about how do you add value, how do you be there for the moments that count, how do I actually progress the customer rather than harass the customer. So a little birdie’s told me that some of you are what we call reluctant prospectors. What do you think I mean by reluctant prospectors? You say you’re going to do it, but then when it actually comes to doing it there’s something else that comes up. There’s the email, there’s the admin, there’s the photo because you need to make sure that you’re great with your videos on Instagram and you got to get the letter box stuff our and you got to go an do all that stuff.

This is what I’m going to tell you. You can’t write out that list of those 15 people, you don’t have a business. I know I’m really full on with you about that, but I’m starting to get you to understand that every single time that I back myself into a corner, when something isn’t going right in my life, like in terms of vulnerability, if something off, if we’re not working well as a training company on a particular product or service, the number one activity that I go to each and every time is to write out a list of those 15 people. Call them. Learn what that’s happening, what that’s doing from the customer perspective, and if I can go and do that, that just turns your whole business on its head.

14:57 “It takes 10 years to be that overnight success”

Now imagine that you did that for the course of 15 years. This is the problem that a lot of people don’t get. It’s just that everyone wants to be the overnight success, everyone wants to be the hero. It takes 10 years to be that overnight success. Think about what you’re building. You can’t have a day off prospecting. It actually is the entire core. But if you leased well it’s going to change the entire way that you work.

Questions?

If you have questions for the coaches or for the Super Six tweet us @eliteagentmag #transform

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