By using strategies for the future as the central focus of your business planning for 2001, you optimize your return on business building activities. If you focus solely on setting activity goals, your attention is on what you have already been doing and it only revs up the need for action to create more. What if an entirely new approach would yield a better payoff and actually allow you to do less? The bell curve of effectiveness for any given business strategy is dynamic, not static. Certain actions will yield results for a while, but will eventually diminish in their effectiveness as markets change.

Your business planning for 2001 should include at least one completely new strategy that focuses on the future needs of the marketplace. By being the first to offer a service or way of doing business, you establish yourself as the guru or expert. Getting there first has always been and still is one of the best ways to establish dominance in a marketplace. In the classic book on marketing, Positioning:The Battle for your Mind by Trout and Reis, their findings concurred that there was an enormous advantage to the company who was the first.

Strategies are broad directions to aim toward. They expand your thinking, rather than narrow. They provide a larger frame of reference where you can get creative and think outside the box!

Let’s look at the second of 5 strategies in this series of articles.

The Menu of Services Strategy

One size fits all pricing for the consumer has undergone pressure to change in the past few years as discount companies with flat or reduced rate services have rolled out alternatives. The smart companies and agents have developed more flexibility to compete. As new business models continue to emerge, such a Zip Realty or E-Realty.com, the choices are expanded for the consumer. How will you fit what you have into this need on the consumers part for choice? Competing solely on price is eventually a losing proposition.

It all starts with knowing who your market is and what they want and need. The young professionals selling their first home to move into a family home have much different needs and expectations than baby boomers who are ready to downsize or buy a vacation property. Increasingly, we are seeing consumers with a better understanding and sophistication about the process and a heightened desire for control and choices. As we move further into the 21st Century, the generalists will find it increasingly hard to maintain their previous level of business the old fashioned way. Those who have defined their markets and done market research are positioned to devise specific programs that fill the longing of their particular markets.

Julie Garton Good’s presentation at the 1999 NAR Convention sited models of future services that took this thinking beyond the segmentation of the present services we offer. The hesitation of agents to simply give a dollar value to each part of the transaction has met with much resistence. Garton Good’s research suggests a need in the market for new ways of packaging and presenting what we do. For instance, offering for a fee a “Remodel vs Sell” consultation or a “Rent vs Buy” consultation. Inclusion of other service providers or increased complexity of current *free* information (such as CMA’s) further provides some exclusive, value-added information for the consumer. Market studies indicate only about 20% of people buy on price alone. For the remaining 80%, if there is value, or actually the perception of value, the consumer will pay more. The evidence of this is seen in folks paying $2+ for a cup of coffee these days or $5 for a pint of Premium ice cream. Your clarity in who is your best customer, in where is your strength as an agent and therefore with certain groups of consumers, is your key to developing a menu of services that is unique and will position you first

Some Specific Ways To Use a Menu of Services

• Give the consumer a choice of listing packages from “all the bells and whistles” to bare bones.
• Give buyers choices on how much of the process they want you to do and how much they want to do themselves.
• Create killer alliances with other businesses and service providers for specific service packages that enhance your menu.
• Use your website to give lots of content and enhance your status to GURU.
• Continue to enhance you Menu of Services on at least a quarterly basis.
• Do lots of communicating with clients at every stage, before, during and after, asking them what else could have been provided—listen to and learn from your customers.

As you add new ways of thinking about what you do, you will undoubted find even other great ideas. This is not a time to play small. The future will belong to those whose creativity and flexibility reshapes our industry models.