If you're looking to capitalize on more of the real estate transactions that are going down in your marketplace, you may find the following analogy helpful to you.

Imagine for a moment the vast number of real estate transactions that are closing in your territory each and every year. Now out of all of these transactions, what percentage do you think represents your average share of these transactions in any given year?

Whatever percentage you choose here probably represents a relatively small percentage of all the transactions that are being closed by all the real estate agents who continually work in your territory.

So why are there so many transactions closing every year in your territory that you're not involved in? Well, part of the reason is because you have competition in the form of other agents in your territory. But the other part of the equation here, the part that is truly within your own control, lies in the effectiveness of the system you are utilizing day-in and day-out to generate leads for yourself in your real estate business.

The potential leads you want to uncover are constantly manifesting in your territory every single day. You just need to locate these people and enroll them in working with you as their real estate agent before your competitors do.

So how do you maximize the number of leads that come your way early enough in the prospects' search cycle to then enroll the prospects in working with you exclusively? Well, you may want to first imagine that your lead generation system is very similar to a funnel, and that the wider your funnel is, the more leads in your territory it will capture for you and bring to your attention.

The more proactive you are in implementing systems and approaches to locate leads for you in your territory the wider your prospecting funnel becomes, making it easier for more leads to be captured by it. If you're not prospecting, mailing, or utilizing electronic technology to generate leads for yourself through the Internet, then your funnel for locating leads is extremely narrow. In situations like these the leads you then find are fewer and farther between and are normally of the worst possible quality.

It's as if there is an entire wealth of great opportunity waiting for you out there and you have completely shut yourself off from it. You're busy "being busy" instead of finding great new prospects to work with. But your competitors are also busy, uncovering all of these great prospects that you're missing out on, and they're making deals all over the place with them.

The more approaches you utilize to proactively locate leads in your territory the wider your funnel gets. What you are then effectively doing is maximizing all the different avenues that will then allow you to discover all the great leads that exist in your territory.

In some ways, this can be metaphorically compared to successfully running a commercial fishing operation. You can have one fishing line in the water, a great number of fishing lines, or you can utilize many large fishing nets. The latter two approaches will enable you to catch a far greater number of fish. The fish are always out there for you, but you just need to employ the system that maximizes the number of fish that you catch for every hour that you work.

So take a look at your current system of prospecting and ask yourself if it's continually producing for you all of the quality leads that you want to be working on. If not, what is it you need to be doing differently to consistently locate a much greater percentage of the best leads in your territory?

The truth is that great new prospects are always out there for you. You just need to have a great proactive prospecting system in place that continually funnels the great leads to you before they get discovered and capitalized on by your competitors.

Published: March 4, 2004

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