In continually becoming the great agent that you aspire to be, one of the most important skills that you can master is that of successfully moving your prospects towards becoming exclusive clients of yours.

This is one of the areas that many agents can always make great improvements in.

Typically when an agent uncovers a lead - someone who indicates that they will be looking to buy, sell, or lease in the coming months - the agent makes a note to follow-up with that person at a specified date in the future. The agent may also send a follow-up letter to this person in the mail or an e-mail after each telephone conversation with the prospect. And for many agents this is the bulk of their typical follow-up procedure up until the moment of truth when the prospect is just about ready to begin the process of buying, selling, or leasing property.

Keep in mind, though, that your competitors are constantly contacting the same prospects that you are contacting, also hoping to do business with these people when they are ready to make a move. So unless you do a great job of differentiating yourself from your competition along the way, you will be wrestling against your competition for your prospects' business when your prospects are ready to begin the process of moving forward.

To solidify your relationships more strongly with your prospects you might consider doing something like the following:

Once you have identified a prospect who will be looking to do something in the coming months place the prospect in a special category. For people who fall into this category you will want to have a stepped-up system of contact and publicity with them in the coming weeks and months.

Create specific mailers to send to them on a regular basis, perhaps once a week or once every two weeks. As an example of what to send to them, if they will be selling their property you can design and write a series of individual articles, each one addressing a different subject they will want to know and understand about the selling process as they get closer to putting their property on the market. If they will instead be leasing their property you can do the same for the subject of leasing also. And if you also represent buyers and lessees in your real estate business you can do the same for what they need to know about the process they will soon be experiencing also.

A quick, inexpensive, and impressive way to do this is to use Realty Times' print newsletter, which brands you on every page. With an archive of over 6,000 stories for buyers and sellers, newsletter subscribers have their pick of which topics to download and print out for their snail-mail customers. Realty Times also has an e-mail version of the newsletter, and offers a discount to agents who purchase more than one product.

If, however, you do articles yourself, have them articles nicely laid-out and printed on good quality paper along with your photo and contact information. If you have good in-house design capabilities you may even be able to design and print these mailers in your own office or at home. But make sure that they look sharp when you're finished with them!

When you mail these articles out to your prospects, it shows them that you are at the head of your class in the brokerage community, and it has them feel that you are providing them with great information they will want to know about as they get closer to beginning the process of buying, selling, or leasing. In sending them information like this they will be thinking about you more frequently than your competition, and you will show them that you care about providing them the information that will help them to prepare for their upcoming real estate transaction. And on top of this by sending them this information you begin to look like the top real estate authority in your territory on these subjects. I mean what other agents normally publish and mail out information like this to prospects in your territory on a weekly or biweekly basis? Not very many of them. And as your prospects receive this information they will begin to feel that you are exactly the agent they should be working with when they are ready to get moving.

Whether you purchase a newsletter or design your own individual mailers, you'll only have to do it once. Then you can use these mailers for the rest of your career with only minor modifications along the way. Just make sure that you begin to mail the appropriate series of information pieces to each and every prospect the moment you first identify them as a prospect. Do this and your prospects will definitely remember you each and every time you call them!

In addition to this, do your best to see your prospects periodically face-to-face as they are getting ready to buy, sell, or lease. Take them to lunch or dinner if possible. And pick up the tab! Breaking bread with a prospect periodically can do wonders to solidify your relationship with them while many of your competitors are simply calling them on the phone whenever the alarm goes off in their client contact software telling them that it's time to call and checkup on them again. You'll be way ahead of these people and will leave many of them in the dust!

Published: October 1, 2002

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