It’s no surprise that the real estate industry is chasing an end-to-end experience. Case in point: Back in January, in his opening talk for Inman Connect, Brad Inman called on real estate professionals to “break down the silos and create an end-to-end experience.”
Right now, we’re in an era where information is cheap. It’s free and readily available. But somehow, a lot of Realtors are still trying to use data as a commodity of value.
Instead, Realtors need to show up and communicate their value in a powerful way through knowledge, service, experience, expertise and integrity. To really show your value as a team, you have to provide a smooth experience to your clients, from beginning to end. Here are a few things to keep in mind.
Why you need a sales process
As I mentioned above, it’s absolutely crucial for you to bring value to your clients and not just information they can easily find with a quick Google search.
Our clients don’t see what the result of the sales process — or the steps to get to the result — look like. If they did, they wouldn’t need the calculated value we bring to them.
When you create an end-to-end process, you are creating a repeatable result. This result gives your business a planned approach to succeed each time you execute your sales process.
Chain of commitment
The chain of commitment is one of the most simple processes you can implement into your business. It begins by using the appointment you have (current step in the sales process) to gain or achieve the next step.
Most of our time is not actually spent selling a home. It’s spent selling our potential clients on the idea of taking the next step in the sales process with us. But if we focus on the chain of commitment, the deals will come naturally and effortlessly.
Focusing on deals when you haven’t put in the effort and value into moving your clients through their process is like expecting your car to keep driving without gas.
Pair it with the client process
When it comes to the sales process, you need to have a system that matches on every step. This will ensure you manage clients’ needs and interactions in an organized and timely manner as they move through the process with you. This will give you a repeatable result, as mentioned previously.
Project management solutions like Asana, for example allow you to outline each step of the process for your team and streamline the process for your team — ensuring success every time.
You can add due dates and tasks for your team members to write and memorize their scripts before meeting with clients. This will help keep a high standard of how your team members run their presentations.
Having an dedicated plan for all of your sales process steps in place will allow you to organize yourself and your business to best serve your clients. As always, being organized and methodical goes a long way in improving communication, and ultimately, your business.
From first booking to meeting, through market education, showings, offer and final acceptance, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your process and to have that process so internalized that you don’t need to think about what comes next — you just know.
This level of understanding will allow you to seamlessly balance multiple clients with ease. The client process has powered the top 1 percent for over a decade, you can use this approach to scale every top producer into a team.
In 2020, COVID-19 magnified the power of client processes. Teams and top producers thrived with the ability to adapt existing steps to remote platforms, while other agents struggled to identify and use the steps that lead to deals in the future, versus only deals on the table right now.
When it comes to organizing and fulfilling your processes and systems, you will find yourself and your business running much more smoothly when you implement this end-to-end process to benefit your clients and your team.
Kathleen Black is the CEO of Kathleen Black Coaching and Consulting in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada. Connect with her on Instagram at @kathleenblackcoaching or through her website ItTakesa.Team.
