By Debbie Yost, CRS
Success comes to those who get in front of the inevitable.” This is one of the quotes that I live by. I am celebrating my 40th year in real estate and 25 years co-owning my own company. In my mind, that demonstrates our company’s ability to anticipate shifting markets and trends, and remain relevant and trusted advisers for our clients, staff and community.
How can we prepare ourselves to be “in front of the inevitable”? No one could have anticipated the specific COVID-19 situation and the disruption it has brought to the entire globe, let alone our industry. Yet every business must be prepared for disruption and have the ability to shift strategies and operations. While the way we do some specific physical things may have shifted as a result of COVID-19, our service and level of communication with our clients has not—and thankfully our business continues to maintain pre-pandemic levels.
On the scale of life stressors, buying or selling a home ranks as more stressful than divorce, but less stressful than the death of a spouse or child. As REALTORS®, we want to make clients feel that their buying or selling experience is as stress-free as possible. It’s critical that you set realistic expectations and ensure clear, timely and proactive communication with your team and your clients.
Creating leverage
To provide exceptional client service while maintaining a satisfying personal life, we want to scale our business by creating leverage. We create leverage with three things: people, systems and technology. Systems and technology can be easily and effectively managed, as long as they are updated regularly. Hire the right people, put them in roles that play to their strengths and let them run your systems with technology. Many agents forget how important effective communication is for everyone involved. As many of us have shifted to working virtually, communication is now more important than ever.
The secret sauce
All members of the team need to understand their roles, and the roles support the systems you put in place. As an example, when we take a listing, whether we drop off a physical file, email a scanned file or send an electronically signed file to the listing manager, we know exactly what’s going to happen next. According to the options we’ve discussed with the seller, we know when the sign, lockbox and photographer will be scheduled because we have a system for handling these routine tasks. The difference in our service (our team’s secret sauce) comes as a result of how we treat each individual client. With these systems in place, we can truly listen to the client’s needs, understand their motivation and then provide options for them to consider. When all the typical tasks in each transaction are handled efficiently, we have more time to truly understand the client’s specific desires and support them without wear and tear on ourselves or our team members. When we provide information proactively, the client can relax and trust the process. While we’ve handled thousands of transactions, this is the client’s only transaction at this moment.
Prepare your client
We want our communication with the client to be proactive and positive. We take the approach that if the client calls us with a question, we’ve failed because we should have provided information on the next step in the process before they even realized they had the question. And I believe that’s what the industry is about today. It’s not about selling: it’s about listening to the client’s needs, analyzing data and providing options to solve their problems or meet their desires. Our job is to be proactive problem-solvers.
I like to use this analogy: If we’re on a plane and the pilot tells us to expect some turbulence and keep our seatbelts on, we are prepared. If we didn’t have any warning, we’d be alarmed with the bumps and the jolts because we didn’t expect them. So, a big part of our job is providing that communication for clients: “Here’s what’s going to happen next.”
Team work
How do we use systems to make sure that the client feels cared for? One important way is to make sure everyone on the team knows all the important details about the client in a listing datasheet or on a contract summary document. Why are they moving? Will there be a trailing spouse? Who watches the house when the seller is not there? Is there a pool, and if so, who services it? Did we make any special promises outside of our typical service? We put all of that information into our systems so the seller doesn’t have to repeat it to every team member, and so we don’t drop any balls. Skipping this step might leave clients with the impression that the team is disorganized.
When you have a strong team, great systems, utilize great technology and represent calm clients, you are free to concentrate on your negotiating skills to support the best long-term interests of your client.
Yost teaches a System Series to help agents build efficient and effective systems—search for her series on the education catalog at CRS.com/catalogsearch.
Photo: iStock.com/Maria Stavreva
