And welcome to Mike Ferry TV, it is Mike Ferry speaking to you today, it is the week of November 23rd here in the US. It is our annual Thanksgiving holiday. Canada celebrated theirs the first part of October. So for our Canadian friends, have a great week, take a few listings and enjoy yourself for our American friends. Hopefully you’ll get a couple of days off to be with your family and enjoy this experience that we have called Thanksgiving. In two thousand and fifteen, I put together a little series of thoughts and it was called The Formula for becoming a great listing agent. And of course, you know, I had a couple people say to me, well, I don’t like the formula that you put together. And I said, well, that was wasn’t designed to please everybody. But it’s a formula that was nothing more than a series of questions that I put together in twenty fifteen designed to lead you to becoming a better listing agent. The reason I want to talk about it today is because in the Formula, one of the questions that I bring up is the fact that I’ll say, OK, it’s two thousand fifteen. How many listings have you taken? And then how many do you want to take next year in 2016, and then I want you to close your eyes and project way into the future. Let’s go to the calendar 2020, five years from now. How many listings would you like to take? Well, here we are now, almost at the end of two thousand twenty.

It’s the third week in November. We basically have five weeks left of this calendar year before we get to start a new year. So I want to share with you what I said in this little report that I put together. And I started with the words, the choices, because the choices are many. What makes Real Estate so unique compared to other industries and whether it be business or a university class that you were taking or being involved in some level of sporting activities, in most businesses, there are not a lot of choices. There is a program that the company uses to market and sell their products, and all the salespeople are in line with that program or they’re not going to be a salesperson for that company. The example that I’ve used for many, many years is that, you know, Xerox is very famous for the strength of their training, as is IBM, very famous for the strength of their training. IBM does not invite the Xerox training director to do a class for their salespeople, nor would IBM ever even consider bringing anybody outside of the boundaries of what they believe is right to train their salespeople. Real Estate is different. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of trainers spewing all sorts of different thoughts. And most of the time, and I’m not saying this to be critical of my competition, but most of the time a speaker trainer coach is trying to and I’m going to use the word LURE, you are a lured you in to their types of thinking to attract you to become a client.

I’ve always taken the approach that some of you like what I teach. Some of you don’t. And it’s OK with me either case. Because here’s the catch, if you want to be productive, there is a program that you can follow to be productive, but in Real Estate they will say, well, no, there’s 50 programs you can follow, which always amazes me because, again, most of the programs and Real Estate that are designed to teach you how to take Listings are designed around the thought that you do not have to be rejected to be successful as a Real Estate salesperson. And the truth is, if you’re not being rejected, you’re not talking to people. And if you’re not talking to people, you know, you’re not going to be on a lot of Listing Presentation. and you know, you’re not going to get a lot of listings. So in 2015, I wrote down, there’s one, two, I guess three choices that you could make to become a better, stronger listing agent. Here’s choice number one: Stay where you are right now in your production income. Just stay where you are. So how many transactions have you closed year to date? This is two thousand fifteen. How many listings have you taken year to date? What is your paid income year to date? And the most important question, are you happy with these numbers? So this was written, I think it was July of twenty fifteen.

How many transactions closed? How many listings have you taken? What is your paid income and are you happy with these numbers? And it’s a yes or no answer. I don’t need an explanation, but one choice is to say I like what I’m doing. I like where I am. We just had a person quit coaching. I got this letter from one of our clients for four years. I really do not want to change what I do. I’m very happy at this level. The gal does twenty four or twenty five deals year, which is a good, productive agent, as you know. And she said, I’ve spent four years in your coaching and I fight it every single week. I fight with the coach every week. I don’t want to change. I want to stay there. OK, well stay where you are. But are you happy with your production, and the second choice… let the economy dictate your production and income? That’s a tough one, but a lot of people take that path. When the economy is going up, their production goes up. When the economy goes down, their production unfortunately goes down. And that I’m not really sure if that is the way you want to live your life. But I wrote down this question, is this the type of business that you want to have now and in the future, be dependent upon the economy? You know, I said to my friend Joe Alexander today from Park Regency, I was doing a webinar for his company and I said to Joe, how many times have we seen agents because of this terrible situation of covid-19 that we’ve all experienced worldwide and started the first of March? And, you know, the economy was shut down and a lot of people responded in a very negative manner and virtually started to hide and have come out of the closet since.

And a lot of people, like a lot of you, went right back to work following all the protocols and did your job and have had, in many cases, the best year of your entire life. During the last seven, eight months of covid-19, well, the economy was wavering a little bit, but you decided to work and you made this business work for you. So if the economy goes up, I’m in heaven. If it goes down. Oh, my gosh, it’s terrible. So the question is, is this the type of business you want to have? And the answer in most cases is no. But then the third choice I wrote in twenty fifteen, start changing your sales behaviors and your sales activities. Because there’s two parts, the behavior. OK. Oh, I hate prospecting, Mike, I you know, I can’t stand managing my time. I’m not going to learn your presentation. I think I’d rather not even list properly rather than have to learn your presentation. Those are sales behaviors.

Activities are what you’re doing each day to create business. So I wrote down a couple of questions. I wrote down: What do you have to change first to increase your production? Is there a behavior or an activity that if you tweeted and changed a little bit between now and the first of the year, you could count on an increase in production? I think the answer is yes. Then I wrote, What are you fighting? That if you quit fighting it, your business would improve because, you know, it’s normal that we fight change. It’s called being human. And then I wrote down third, do you want to improve your production and income? If the answer’s yes, what are the behaviors and activities you have to change? But then I wrote down a fourth option, and that is I use this example, one of the great agents in the history of the Remax Corporation, Craig Proctor, out of Toronto, and he’s also a speaker and a coach; The Craig Proctor approach is an option. And that’s really basically looking at a way to invest your money in advertising, marketing, direct mail and branding. It works and a lot of people use it very successfully. But I also wrote down, can you afford whether it be to spend five hundred to five thousand or ten thousand a month to get the results you want? And can you get the net spendable income you want with this type of approach and it’s up to you to decide, but I wrote down in this case, my son Tom, the Tom Ferry approach, which is everything from open houses, geographic farming, social media, buying leads off the Internet.

And then, of course, it comes down to who would rather have buyer controlled sales or listings than it were saying that you should be aiming at listings. And do you think these techniques are aggressive or passive in their approach? Because the truth is, you know, open houses, geographic farming, media buying leads can work in your favor, but it’s very passive compared to other things you could be doing. And can you build a large, predictable duplicator business this way? I put the Brian Buffini approach because Brian has done a great job for years, aggressively working your database, past clients, Center of Influence, which is one of 60 methods of prospecting. It’s the one he pushes the hardest. But then I wrote, How many names do you have in your database? And is that enough names to create the revenue streams that you want? And do these people really know who you are and what you do? Can this database approach get you fifty, seventy five close transactions a year or do I need to expand my lead generation? To get better results or I wrote down then last maybe the Mike Ferry approach, which you’re to a certain degree already buying into because you’re on Mike Ferry TV, which, by the way, we’ve been doing this now for I think it’s 16 or 17 years.

We’ve been doing these little events with you folks. Hopefully it’s starting to come through that the Mike Ferry approach, which is a very specific Real Estate sales system that has been proven to work for in excess of forty five years. Well, do you have a specific sales system in place? To keep your business growing in spite of the economy, are you willing to be open minded to changing what you say and do to increase your production? Will you commit the next 12 to twenty four months of learning a sales system that will produce unlimited listings, sales and income? Would you like to start today and then you’ll get a kick out of this, it’s mid two thousand fifteen, how many deals have closed and been paid on so far? And if it’s December thirty first, two thousand twenty, five years from now, how many deals would you like to do and see? The truth is the choice is yours. The nice part about our business is that there is no ceiling in terms of what you can accomplish and what you can do, but it’s also a business where you have so many things coming at you option-wise. That’s why so many times it’s hard to decide what to do. So the basic Mike Ferry philosophy is when you know what to say, you can do what you’re supposed to do. And if you don’t know what to say, it’s very hard to do what you’re supposed to do. So think about learning what to say in every phase of the sales situation to give you the confidence, to perform and then perform in two thousand twenty one at a higher level than you performed in two thousand twenty.

I’m glad you’ve been with us all year. We still have a few weeks to go and we’re going to have a great new year and a great strong finish to this year. Go take a listing and prove to yourself that you can do it. Talk to you next week.

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Mike Ferry is the global leader in real estate coaching and training. Watch Mike each week as he discusses a variety of topics to help real estate agents and brokers. Grow your real estate business by improving your mindset, developing your skills and creating a plan of action to increase your production!