Every agent experiences up and downs in their careers. The ups are easy to understand; the downs are not. If you put a program of consistent prospecting into your business plan, the downs are a thing of the past. And, the way to grow your business is to add something new to your plan every year. Here are some ideas that may help you in developing your plan.

Maintaining a consistent business

Your appointment book, calendar, Palm Pilot, or computer should remind you every day of one hour in the day that is devoted to prospecting. That sounds so easy, but do we do it? The answer is NO. We let everything else come around that which will bring us the most money, prospecting. And yet, if we faithfully reserved an hour every day, just five days a week, we would see our income soar and our downs be a thing of the past.

Reserve any hour of the day to prospect. During that hour, call as many past clients as you can; knock on as many doors as you can; cold call For Sale By Owners or expired listings or neighborhoods where your buyers may want to purchase; see as many shop owners as you can; call your prospective buyers; gather email addresses off the Internet and so on. If every day you talk with people for one hour with the objective of getting a lead, getting an appointment, getting a listing, or writing a sales contract, you will be successful. And, with the Internet, you can use the time to send personalized emails to hundreds. It’s easy. It just takes a little discipline and some time.

Growing your business

If you do the same thing you will get the same results. So, how do we grow our business? Add something new! All real estate agents come across people in our daily lives that do not know that we are in the real estate business so we don’t take advantage of it. What if we did? For example, the bank that you do business with, does each employee know who you are and what you do? They should. One easy way to do this is to give each employee of the bank two tickets to the movies once a year as a way of saying thank you for all the hard work they do for you and your clients who frequent their bank.

This is a wonderful way to get the bank talking about you. You deliver them in person and tell them there are “no strings attached.” Give them your card and let them know that you are a client of the bank’s, that you want to refer your clients to the bank and that you want to get to know them personally. Think about the surprise when they receive this acknowledgement from you. Are they going to talk about you? Are they going to say “good day” each time you come in the bank? Will this be the perfect opportunity for you to talk real estate while waiting in line at the bank? Do you think that perhaps you could leave some information about property in their lobby? There are endless possibilities with this simple way of adding to your business plan.

There are other niches that you come across as well, the grocery store, loan agencies, trust officers, solicitors, rental agents, new home development sales offices, your children’s sports teams, the gym where you work out, organizations you belong to, other real estate agents, doctors, local shop owners, Internet sites that may be a good source of business and so on. If you will concentrate on adding one of these groups to your prospecting each year in some form your business will grow.

It’s easy. Discipline yourself to prospect each day and then once a year add something that you hadn’t done the year before. Good fortune can be yours!

Published: December 26, 2000

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