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Summer is Heating Up--You Better Start Hustling!!
“Deal first with whatever is causing you the greatest emotional distress. Often this will break the logjam in your work and fill you up mentally to complete the other tasks”.
-Brian Tracy-
June is almost gone. It represents graduations, the end of the school year, the start of vacation season, and Father’s Day all wrapped up into summer. Summer usually represents the busiest time of year for most sales professionals, especially those in the real estate and mortgage business. June offers incredible opportunities to expand your business. July is just around the corner….time to gear up for the last six months of the year.
It’s important to take advantage of the summer months in order to finish the year strong. Review your life and business plans and start working on the gaps that may need closing. Take a look at your day to day business practices and honestly assess if they need improvement. Sort through the piles of “to do’s” and either implement or shelve past ideas. Make sure adequate time is spent time blocking for prospecting, touching base with past clients and contacting professional referral sources. Start focusing on dollar productive activities for your business and close the gaps that are holding you back in your personal life.
Give more than you ever have before. Go above and beyond with your customer service. The goal should be to create loyal customers for life. An average grades at school comes out as a “C” grade. Aspire for valedictorian. Your client’s are the key to your success…make sure they are satisfied.
You are in business to make money. Increase your profit per sale. You might be getting business, but if your margins are thin, so will your profitability. More business with small margins keep people busy, but not profitable. To increase your margins, you have to “up” your services and earn the opportunity for higher profits.
The economy is slowly showing signs of improvement. Still, keep financially light on your expenses. It is true that you have to spend money to make money, but that doesn’t mean with wild abandon. Analyze every expense and make sure it is a necessary part of doing business. Eliminate waste and ideas with expenses that go nowhere. Instead, focus on ideas that cost little and take minimal effort such as utilizing the social network pages. 80% of referrals will take the time to ‘Google’ you before they call. They want to learn as much as they can via the internet. Make use of Facebook and Linkedin. Using social networks, at least for now, is free marketing. Just make sure you have something worth saying.
Growing your pipeline seems like such an obvious activity for those in sales. Yet how are you doing? Do you have a ‘process’ which keeps your pipeline full? Build a net on your clients to keep in touch. Your ‘A’ clients are the top of the heap…they receive everything you have; emails, direct mail, phone calls flyers, etc. They are your best clients or your best referral sources. ‘B’ clients are good clients and referrals but aren’t quite up to par with the ‘A’s. Make sure you touch base with them once every 2-3 months. Your ‘C’ clients and referrals are those whom may never do business with you but there remains a shred of possibility. Contact them once every six months. You never know when a ‘C’ suddenly has a lead that will make them a ‘B’ or ‘A’.
Look for at least one new market that you would like to expand in. Time block two hours this week and analyze the opportunities that are possible. Seek council with a person involved in the markets you’d like to touch and find out what the possibilities may be. This will become an opportunity to expand your Professional Referral Sources as well; reaching out and paying it forward to others in related businesses will mean a pay off in your own business.
Script and teach your Professional Referral Sources how to refer business to you. Let your past clients know the importance of referrals and encourage them to look for opportunities for you. Utilize your team to be an extension of you. The average person knows 250 people in some way (think friends, neighbors, local businesses, service people you use, church, etc.). If each of those 250 people know 250 people, you suddenly have 62,500 opportunities!
Grow your character and become multi-faceted. Expand your knowledge through reading and books on tape. Feed your mind and gain knowledge continuously. Take time for your family. Exercise your body as well as your mind. Become involved with a non-business related group, just for the fun of it or the community service it offers.
Long gone is the optimism of what a new year might bring. The New Year’s Resolutions are forgotten, the status quo has resumed and time continues to march on at a frenzied pace. Where is your business at? It doesn’t have to be a New Year to start fresh…every day offers that opportunity. It’s time to reassess where your business is at, refocus on the goals for the rest of the year and set your pace for a strong finish right up to the last day of the year.
Tom Ninness is Vice President/Regional Production Manager for Cherry Creek Mortgage in Denver, CO. He is also the President of Summit Champions, Inc. and creator of the “The 90 Day Journey to Your Sales Success”, a powerful 90 day action plan for the sales professional. To learn more about The Journey and Summit Champions go to www.summitchampions.com or contact Tom at [email protected] Office: 303-840-0753
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