We tell them to:

• Set goals.
• Have a prospecting plan.
• Practice your value proposition elevator speech.
• Pick up the phone and call expired listing owners and for sale by owners.
• Create contact campaigns with follow up and tracking.
• Utilize social media networking for visibility.
• Be visible in the community and talk to people every day about real estate.
• Include both proactive and passive prospecting activities every week.

We tell them when they do these things, they will get more listings, have more sales and make more money.

Talent attraction is prospecting for broker and managers. How do you approach talent attraction? The competition is stronger than ever to attract and retain good talent in real estate companies if we are to grow and prosper. The best way to accomplish the goal is to practice what we preach.

Instead think of a triangle. What makes this shape special is that it’s three sides are all the same distance. I view the relationship between broker, agent and consumer like a triangle. In other words, equal.

The consumer is on the top and both brokers and agents should be focusing on meeting the consumer’s needs in the best way possible. At the base of the triangle is the broker at one side and the agent on the other. Both need to bring equal value to each other and both deserve to be rewarded for that value.

We saw this relationship get out of balance starting back in the late 90′s. With agent centric business models being adopted by brokerages, the agents kept more and more of the commission dollars. Brokers began offering fewer and fewer services and tools. However, agents expected certain things from their brokers and were often disappointed. The broker and the agent were in a bad marriage with each other. They shared the same house but had stopped communicating and started sleeping in separate bedrooms.

Then the market downturn hit. That combined with the emergence of technology and the changing needs of today’s consumer left the agent and the broker looking at each other agreeing that it was time to work things out.

And that leads us to today. The successful brokers and agents I see across the country have recommitted to each other. They have found a place where they are each offering a mutually beneficial value proposition and collectively as a team they are focusing on delivering exceptional real estate experiences to the consumer.

Brokers and agents are like parents who should be working together to provide the best possible environments for their kids (i.e. the consumer). Isn’t it time we worked as a team?

To make it easier for you to grow your network in Twitter and potentially secure new friends and followers, the social network is testing a new “You Both Follow” feature. Great way to make new connections! In other social media news, numbers out this week suggest that 34 percent of adults who use social media do so, in part, to rant or rave about a company. An important lesson for all of us is to maintain quality customer service online just as much as off and to address any complaints and issues consumers raise online immediately.

It may seem surprising that only one in five small business owners are integrating social media into their business (although, this number has doubled in the past year), but those that are often see impressive results. A salon in Seattle gets 75 percent of its business from Facebook, Twitter and its blog. Wow! Take some time this summer to build and execute a social media strategy. And, for those of you already with a blog on WordPress, this week the site introduced new features to become more social: quick reblogging and the ability to “like” posts. Good stuff!

Looking for ways to make your office seem more high tech and connected? Take a bite of an organic burger restaurant in New York, which will be constantly streaming Foursquare check-ins, tweets from Twitter and restaurant information on a large monitor, among other things. Pretty cool.

Now on to the infamous Apple versus Microsoft debate… Recently, Apple officially passed its rival as the world’s most valuable technology company. It should not be surprising then that Steve Jobs is predicting his company’s iPads will replace PCs in the years to come. What do you think will happen? Will one of these technologies trump the other or will a new technology emerge to topple them both? We should keep in mind, though, how third parties will affect the future of both technologies. In a move that could make potential iPad owners not as anxious to purchase, AT&T this week announced it will drop its $30 unlimited data plan. If you’re not considering an iPad yet, will this change your mind?

“Can I please have your credit card?”

“Can you please fill out a quick survey about our customer service?”

Why do we have to fill out the surveys?  Do they really care what we think?  How do they use that information?

And then my mind wandered a little deeper…

How does the hotel know whether a 3 in the “Facilities” category means “Everything was ok” or “There were some really good and some really bad, so I’m putting the average”?  If this is so important, why are they asking only when I’m leaving?

There are a lot of marketing and ops people who might quickly jump in and provide answers like this:

“User surveys are a very important tool to quantitatively analyze a large sample of responses from the select target user groups in order to provide management with information about its customer base preferences…blah blah blah…and over time the large numbers will wash out outliers and individual idiosyncratic responses…”

In other words, they add all the numbers to scrub out any one individual’s response.  Academics and systems analysts love this because it gives them nice roundable numbers on reports that they can give to executives.  Execs love this because they can spin the numerical results to validate what they need to sell.  Unfortunately it does nothing to help improve the experience of the customer who has already paid his bill and now filled out his survey.

How and when do you measure your customer service?

This is the beginning of a series of discussions about how we as salespeople, business owners, and employees approach, measure, and use customer service.

1) Talent Attraction

Broker/Owners: The back bone of every successfully real estate company is its agents. Attracting and retaining professional, committed  and talented agents must be a focus every working day. A look at any successful brokerage will uncover a successful talent attraction program.

Agents: Agents need to attract talent as well. The perspective is a little different but the dependency on success is consistent to that of the brokerage. Agents need to focus on building their support team- mortgage brokers, title people, home warranty relationships, contractors, inspectors, etc. All the professionals related to the execution of a successful real estate transaction. As the agent, you have the starring role in your client’s real estate transaction, but just like every good movie you need a talented cast of supporting actors in order to make it all work.

2) Revenue

The dollars coming in the door. The need to substantiate our commission rate will never subside. In fact, our ability to communicate and demonstrate the value we bring to the client and the transaction continues to separate the successful from the not successful.

Broker/Owners: As company leaders,  your agent’s rely on you to provide them with leadership and an environment that will help them market their services and expertise to potential buyers and sellers. Your ability to do this is critical. Tools, services and expertise are all key factors in supporting your agents ability to generate revenue. If agents do not feel like you can help them make sales they are going to go elsewhere, and they should.

Agents: You are the front line. The direct contact with the buyer, seller or whomever is the gatekeeper to the transaction in the case of foreclosures and short sales. Your ability to bring value to that relationship will ultimately determines the outcome.

3) Expense Control

There’s a saying that you can’t save your way into profit. That may be true,  however you can spend your way into losing money. We’ve all been through an extremely challenging time and have had to make many difficult decisions in the name of expense control. That must continue. Whether a broker/owner or agent, we have to remain diligent about every dollar we spend. What is the return on investment? How does this expenditure support my revenue generation abilities and strategies? These are questions that we need to ask before we make any financial commitments.

I often hear from industry vendors stories about agents and broker/owners signing up for their services and then never using them. This just doesn’t make sense. We need to be smarter than this.

We are staring down the end of the first quarter of 2010. This is an ideal time to review these three areas of your business and evaluate where there are opportunities for improvement. These three elements are like a three legged stool. Together they provide firm support and steadiness. But any weakness will make your business shaky. And if you’ve ever sat on a shaky three legged stool, you know that’s not a comfortable place to be.

Photo Courtesy of Dexigner.com

We have all heard or read the statistics from various reliable sources sharing the value of one-stop-shopping (93%+ of future home buyers would prefer and select sales associates who offer one-stop-shopping over those that do not and that buyers who are provided these services are more likely to be satisfied than other customers.)  For me, what I find intriguing is that various surveys still say that nearly 70% of consumers are still only somewhat familiar with the concept of getting everything they need to buy and sell a home from their realtor.

One-stop-shopping is not new.  One-stop-shopping has a lot of benefits for all parties.  One-stop -shopping is available for nearly everyone nearly everywhere.  So, why haven’t the numbers and customers comments improved?

My thought:…….Because one-stop -shopping is hard……sometimes very hard!

Ask anyone who has implemented a true one-stop-shopping strategy and you’ll find folks who realize that proper implementation takes a lot of time, effort and energy- three things that aren’t easy to come by these days.

So, while we at BH&G RE can’t change the effort required, what we can do is help with proven best practices to make the time and effort spent more immediately effective for all our franchisees.

The first step of how we can help is by taking a more active role in assimilating our personal experiences and successes with those lessons learned from relevant industry practioners who are committed to the virtues of one-stop-shopping for all parties (customers, sales associates and broker owners.)   We are therefore attending this year’s Real Estate Services Providers Council (RESPRO) annual conference as a new member of RESPRO.

The Real Estate Services Providers Council, Inc. (RESPRO^®) is a national non-profit trade association that unites providers from across the home buying and financing industry towards one common goal: A business and regulatory environment that better enables all of our members to efficiently offer affiliated services through subsidiaries, joint ventures, and strategic partnerships (www.respro.org).

RESPRO’s members include Real estate broker-owners, Real estate franchisors, Mortgage lenders/brokers, Title insurers/agents, Home builders, Home warranty companies and other settlement service providers throughout North America.

In the weeks and months to come, we will be providing the information gathered at this year’s event to our franchisees so that we all can continue providing all of the products and services customers want in the manner that they want them.

Stay tuned to this blog space and other communications.  In the mean time, if there is anything you would like for us to learn or validate while at the RESPRO conference this March, please write me.  Thank you.

By the way, below are some more interesting stats for one-stop-shopping from a Harris Interactive Survey done slightly over a year ago:

The biggest perceived advantages of using one-stop shopping, according to consumers, are:

• Saving money because of discounted prices (77%)
• Increased efficiency and manageability (73%)
• Convenience (73%)
• Things not falling through the cracks (73%)