Daniel Hayes from Hayeswinckle Agent takes a lighter look at what happens to agents when they take their eye off what is really important to success.
You wake up each morning, stand in front of the mirror in your Anthony Robbins ‘motivator’ boxer shorts, look yourself in the eye and scream at the top of your lungs, ‘I am a champion, I am the greatest real estate agent to walk the planet… I am GOD!’
Then you have a shower, where you slap your face and tell yourself ‘You are not weak, you are strong.’
You get dressed in your 1200-thread Egyptian cotton shirt, woven in France, and your shiny silk tie, and put on your BOSS suit with your imported cuff links and shiny Calvin Klein shoes.
Slap on some Joop! aftershave and off you go in your European car. It’s a late model but it’s got half a million kilometres on it (got it cheap from an auction – wink wink).
Through the coffee drive-through, you go, put on the Real Estate Motivator CD in the car, get to the office and walk in with your earpiece in, acting all dramatic, immersed in a phone call.
‘Another 10 million dollar deal?’ You’re out to impress the new receptionist!
You read your real estate motivator wall, look at some motivational stuff on Facebook, read a chapter of a book on inspiration, ring your real estate coach just to get your ass kicked, scan the newspaper for all the listings you missed out on and have a cry about it, scramble for the iPod to listen to some more motivation, go to realestate.com.au and bitch about how the guy who beat you on the listing ‘just high balls everything!’
By this time it’s nearly lunch.
You’ve made four phone calls to vendors and you didn’t have the guts to tell them the truth so you probably shouldn’t have made them anyway.
By 5 o’clock you’ve made about 10 calls, left the office for 90 minutes to drop 50 flyers, obsessed over your 5000 database contacts and still, after three years, can’t figure out how to actually use these in a beneficial way.
You’ve blamed your PA for everything because, again, they’re ‘the wrong one for you’, obsessed over how slow the Internet is in the office, bitched about the photocopier always jamming or being used and so on and so on and found time to whinge about how the director steals everything!
My point is this: some agents are so obsessed with image, social media, the right training CD and wanting to blame others for their own misgivings that they are easily distracted from dollar productive activity.
A lot of this is emotional exhaustion from all the stress they have created for themselves to look and act the part.
Really, they are not doing a whole lot in a nine or 10 hour real estate day, just non-dollar productive stuff.
Then they have the hide to blame the market or, worse still, they blame the agency they work for!
If my bank manager got out of his chair, walked 20 metres into my office and said ‘Daniel, we have a new product. We think you should consider it. Can I have five minutes of your time?’
I would be blown away!
However, if they sent me an email or a letter it would simply be seen as SPAM.
Nothing beats an agent, or anyone for that matter, who is prepared consistently to pound the pavement, one who looks people in the eye as he or she is talking to them on the street, representing their company and themselves.
Walking the same patch over and over and over again is sure to yield a good harvest in time.
There is no quick way or gimmick that will put you ahead of the competition or some secret closing phrase that will compel them to sign on the dotted line.
I personally went through a pair of shoes every two months in my early years on the job and I was constantly out of the office.
I was obsessed with prospecting by simply being in the trenches shoulder to shoulder with the very people who were going to pay me.
This paid massive dividends for my personal income and holds me in good stead today as a business owner with a flourishing sales team.
In his first 12 months of real estate, Daniel Hayes became the number one salesperson for one of Victoria’s largest franchise networks. In 2011, he started “hayeswinckle AGENT”, his own business that has quickly grown to be one of the leading agencies in the Geelong area. For more information, visit www.hayeswinckle. com.au.
