As 2000 begins to wind down, many agents I am coaching right now are designing their 2001 Business Plans and Strategies. Traditional business planning is no longer sufficient. The normal way an agent has been taught to formulate their goals for the coming year has been to set them a certain percentage higher than this year and then to focus just on the numbers and actions necessary to provide the increase. This is a mistake is because it creates a “more, harder, faster” mindset that eventually leads to exhaustion and burnout.

If, instead, the process involves a strategic focus, by taking into consideration the changes and expectations of our present and future clients and customers, some quite different approaches may generate a more effortless approach. The smart agents are looking to the future needs and expectations of the marketplace and they are developing new strategies that give them an edge and position them with ways of doing business that leverage their actions. Over the next five weeks, we’ll look at five strategies to use to shift from conventional planning to future based, based on new marketplace models, so your 2001 is your most awesome year ever!

The E-Farming Future Business Strategy

In the early 90’s, the time frame for the average buyer from first contact with an agent until they were under contract was 6-8 weeks. You didn’t need a system—you just converted the lead and ran with it. Today, many Internet Buyers are researching their future moves 12-18 months before they are ready to actually make a purchase. If you don’t have an easy system of follow up, you will likely lose a lot of Internet generated business. What a shame not to capture and nurture those leads you’ve worked so hard to generate! E-Farming will play an important part in building a foundation for future business.

Many agents simply feel it is a waste of their time to put energy into clients who aren’t ready to buy until next year. They have a website and the inquiries are coming in, but they have no system of prioritizing and managing the leads that come in. So, they capture, maybe, 1 in 10 or 20 and let the rest go because of the lack of immediacy or because they don’t have the time to follow up. The agents who have good systems in place to nurture and build relationships with those buyers, are patient and realize there is a new dynamic operating that requires a new process.

The opportunity is to develop an E-Farm from those leads. This farm is worked, not unlike the traditional geographic farm in the past, by planting seeds for future harvest. When you farm a geographic area, you build your credibility by consistent, repetitive messages that often do not pay off for years. The agents that do this well create a future harvest that gives their business a nice foundation as the cycle comes around for people to move. Similarly, agents who have been attentive to building an E-Farm, are finding the contacts who first made contact 12-18 months ago, are maturing into ready, willing and able buyers. When these contacts are nurtured, the future business is predictable and consistent. Are you just working the short term prospects or do you have a long term Internet strategy?

Steps To Take To Build Your E-Farm

Build into your website various ways of capturing the leads. Offer reports, relocation information, and other content that requires them to trade their contact information for your goodies.

On your reply form, ask a few simple questions to qualify the leads.

Build your databases! They are the gold you will be mining in the future. The better you can segment your leads by interest and needs, the better you’ll be able to target market. Use the qualifying information on your reply form to build fields into your database that allows you to pull specific types of buyers easily. Some of these fields would be timeframe, price, type property, etc.

Create a system & plan for follow up. Automatic and simple are the operative concepts here! A combination of a phone call, email, including a newsletter and other autoresponses will set a standard for the client to measure other agents against.

A monthly newsletter such as Newsletter Plus is an effortless tool that consistently reminds them of your expertise ad knowledge. Once they are added to your database of recipients, no further work or money is required on your part! Isn’t this a relief compared to the additional cost each potential customer used to cost us in snail mail marketing?

Investigate auto-responder systems. For a monthly fee, several companies, such as I-pro center (www.iprocenter.com ) offer turnkey programs of auto-responders. Once you apply the system, the contact gets a series of personalized letters on a preplanned timeframe. The most important aspect of this is that is applied AUTOMATICALLY…so you only have to put them in the system once and then they hear from you for the next six months or whatever timed schedule you choose, without any further work on your part.

As you strategize and expand your thinking about what the “new” consumer is looking for, you will find your creativity expanding and the ideas flowing. The future belongs to those agents who are approaching their businesses with entirely new ways of serving the marketplace. Value-added is a necessity to survive and the innovative agents will be capturing business that others miss.