Your Mission Statement Redux

As we head into the holidays and rainy weather (I won’t mention the “S” word!) and you review your stats and progress for the year, it’s a good time to fine-tune your unique Mission Statement for your personal business. 

The purpose of your Mission Statement is to, first of all, reflect what you are passionate about in your business and in life, and, second, to give your clients, and especially those potential clients, a solid feel for not only the “what” you do but also a bit of the “why” and the “how.”  The textbook elements of your Mission Statement can be viewed as:

1    .     Who is your target market?

      .     What is your contribution, ie, the features of the service you provide

3    .     What are your distinctions or benefits, ie, what makes you unique or the “best,” and why        should someone consider using you?

 My own Mission Statement is:

I help people with some of the biggest financial decisions of their lives, using highly personalized services focused on making their experience a rewarding one.

The elements of the Mission Statement can be seen as:

Target Market:  people wanting to buy or sell real estate and who are looking for a highly personalized service approach.  Thus, my mission statement will probably not appeal to the REO division of a bank or a flipper looking for low priced bargains.

Contribution:  the features of helping those people with financial decisions through services provided during an “experience” or process, not just a transaction

Distinction or Benefits:  highly personalized services focused on making the experience rewarding.

There is no mention of “selling houses” but there are two echoes of money in the references to “financial decisions” and to “rewarding,” yet the emphasis is on service.  In other words, this Mission Statement not only hopes to appeal to those who look for excellent service, but it also is intentionally not all that attractive to folks whose primary goal may be to win every point of every negotiation or to bottom feed.  Yes, you can and should be selective in whom you want to serve, and recognize your own strengths as well as those areas where you might not thrive.

So, what’s your own passion in our business—and what kind of clients do you want to serve?  Be sure to take some review time to refine that passion and tap into it for your own unique Mission Statement—and a shorter “tagline”—as part of your Annual Business Planning for a strong 2014 and beyond!

David M. Hassler

Director of Coaching

Could Less Be More?

A recent post on the 1000WATT blog--thanks to Greg Cooper for pointing me to that one--got me to thinking about marketing for our real estate businesses.  The blog noted that, while email "open rates" are at all time highs, we need to remember one of Peter Drucker's wise statements:

"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself."

By that, Drucker--and the blogger--mean that the better we taylor our marketing message to reflect exactly what the prospective customer wants, the higher the probability we'll connect and develop a client relationship.  That makes sense.

But the blogger points out that with so many emails filling inboxes these days, the effectiveness of drip campaigns like our monthly newsletter, Market Watch, or ecards, may not be as effective as they used to be.  Hmmmm.  He then takes it a step further and recommends "turning off" our drip campaigns--doing less--for our real estate business and only touching our sphere of influence a couple times a year with a much more focused phone call or face to face meeting.  Then, he goes so far as to "guarantee" more success in our business!  

Really?

Recalling Michael Maher's Communication Hierarchy pyramid with shotgun style broad advertising at the bottom, or least effective, level and one on one meetings at the top, or most effective, we all know we get a better return from the investment of our time and money in such face to face chats.  But does it follow that it means that's the ONLY thing we need to do?  How about, instead of making it the ONLY thing, let's just consider it the MOST IMPORTANT thing we can do, and plan and use our time accordingly?

I'd suggest that, especially given the heavy email traffic our sphere of influence may receive, it's even more important to make sure we have an integrated approach--a true marketing plan--that combines email drip campaigns with "Just Sold" postcards, hand written notes, phone calls, and those crucial face to face meetings.   And Drucker is correct, so it will pay off if we taylor our messages to best strike the right chord with our potential clients, and that chord is of course based on our own personalized mission statement focused on our own target market. 

So, now is that time of year when we can take a break and work on our 2014 annual business planning, starting with fine tuning our mission statement and target market so we can create the most effective marketing plan to help our business grow next year.  

I guarantee it!

David M. Hassler
Director of Coaching

Knowledge Trumps Information

Recently, I skimmed an interview in Fortune where Warren Buffett talked about the best advice he’d ever been given, along with his secrets to success.  The thing that struck me most was Uncle Warren’s comment that his “big secret” was that he was good at “lifelong learning.”  Wow, what a simple idea, and one we so often forget as we get caught up in our day-to-day spin!

So, taking a page from Warren’s book, I decided to do some reading and turned to the Inman News website and was of course delighted to see that a new Facebook app “let’s homeowners tweak valuations” so they can “adjust their published online home value….”  As Charlie Brown likes to say, “Good grief!”

But then I found another article that lowered my blood pressure a bit.  The writer’s lead line had to do with “knowledge-driven services,” and since I love knowledge and I love services, I dove right in.  The article pointed out the widespread public availability of a vast amount of real estate information that has become staggering compared to what was out there even ten years ago.  The consumer can be overwhelmed by not only the amount of information, but the wide variety of sources. 

Unfortunately, having access to information can be confusing and misleading, and is no substitute for knowledge! 

And that’s where we real estate professionals come in.  Our expertise and experience allow us to analyze the information and recognize subtle patterns and quirks that make one element of that information more important, for example, than others.  Our understanding gets us to the “how” and the “why” of the information that are crucial in making decisions.  Voila, value added!

The article goes on to remind us that not only is knowledge power, but that given the near instantaneous generation of information, such knowledge had better be delivered quickly.  Enter technology!  The writer urges us professionals to make sure we’re fully integrating the latest tech tools—tablets, digital contracts and signature, etc—and that we’re comfortable and professional in their use when we’re with a client. 

So, where are you with the integration of contemporary technology so you can leverage those tools and showcase your high level of knowledge to win and impress your clients every day?  Your coach is there to help you assess your integration of the various tools, and the snow will be coming soon, so you can spend some time on the practice field honing those docusign skills if you need to.  Get ready to showcase your knowledge to its best advantage!

David M. Hassler

Director of Coaching

Action Versus Motion

Have you ever been watching a movie or reading a novel and found yourself asking, “What’s the point of all this stuff going on?”  There may be characters flying around or wandering all over the place, yet it all seems pointless, and the story has stopped moving forward, has lost its ability to keep you on the edge of your seat.  So instead of being immersed in the story, you lose interest and turn off the TV or put down the book.  A disappointment, and you probably consider the time you invested a waste.

In dramatic terms, that failed movie or book had tried substitute “motion” for “action.”  Motion simply means “stuff happening,” while action—the key to a successful story—means things happening that move the story forward, that keep the viewer or reader interested.  In other words, action leads to the goal of the story, while motion is, well, usually a waste of time.

In our real estate business, action means controlling your time and doing those tasks that move you toward your goals, while motion is pretty much any activity that doesn’t!  And we all know how easy it is to fall into time-consuming motions—the interruption of responding to emails or calls; showing those rental homes to clients we know will never buy; putting out fires with clients or other agents that might have been avoided through the right Quadrant II, proactive “action;” or failing to say “no” and allowing our time to be in others’ control instead of our own.  We all have our own particular “motions!”

So, in our real estate business, how do we make sure we’re working on action versus simply being in motion?

One key is to make sure you have those monthly, weekly, daily, and yes, even hourly priorities for what you need to accomplish—actions—to keep you on track to meet your overall goal of making more money per hour.  Of course, it starts with establishing all those goals in all that detail.  Then you can put in place a system of priorities and time management—I call it an Action Agenda—to keep you on track so you can avoid falling into time wasting motion, and focus on the action that moves you forward like that story toward your goals.  Your coach is there to help you with goal setting and systems to maintain focus on your priorities, so your career story can have a brilliant plot and a successful conclusion.  Please pass the popcorn!

David M. Hassler

Director of Coaching