iOS 4 can go there, no doubt. And the lame-ass “web-enabled” HD-TVs shipping now are no competition for what Apple can do. The iPad may be the actual future of video content, but there will be room in the home for big screens for a long time. An Apple TV becomes the ideal blackboard, too, and the ideal game machine. Integrated with nearby iPhones and iPads, it can become everything we ever hoped to find in a package marked “entertainment center.” Really, truly, the television — the lowly, despised television — is the computer for the rest of us. This is a reinvention that Apple could do better than anyone…
Category: Marketing (page 36 of 191)
To some in real estate brokerage, hearing the ‘R’ word — that would be results, causes them the same stress as my son’s mom felt the first time she read his lips on the mound, and didn’t like it one little bit. She didn’t buy my explanation that he was talkin’ about the umpire’s new truck. Go figure.
When agents are talkin’ about what they’re doin’ to generate business, helpin’ more clients to achieve their goals, things get quiet when some jackass wants to know how it’s workin’ out for them. In other words, has any of their prospecting or marketing, you know, produced empirical results? Are they helping more people?
I’ve been writin’ a lot lately on the changes in marketing, and strategy I’ve been implementing this year. It generally breaks down into two broad brush categories — my local market — the rest of the country.
I’ve now been back in my local market for three weeks. Cat skins are now adorning my special wall. It’s a new wall, specifically set aside exclusively for local cats. In the few weeks in which talkin’ has turned into walkin’, my firm has put $500K into escrow. Considering I’m not even outa second gear yet, $15,000 ain’t bad for the first month.
I’ve had to adapt to what I’ve described as the new normal, (don’t like sayin’ paradigm shift) in the real estate investment world. It’s gained traction big time with thinking investors who realize, in fact, we’re not in Kansas any more, and unlike Dorothy, it’s pretty unlikely we’ll return any time soon. Some of what I’ve been sayin’ the last year or so about the general real estate investment arena might be considered tough love. Still, the folks with whom I love doing business, believe what I’ve been saying is universally true.
The takeaway here is that I’ve had to adapt — many times, on many fronts in the last seven years. Not all of my changes have been successful, but the ones that failed pretty much showed me where the right path was.
I’m already thinkin’ my new office is too Read more
I wrote this in a comment a couple of weeks ago:
Everything we’re doing on-line emerges from the points of this star:
* engenu — rapid web site development
* encartus — elaborate custom Google maps
* Scenius — dynamic blogs-within-blogs
* ScentTrail — CRMishness with transaction management
* FlexMLS and the FlexMLS API — very robust MLS search
There is now a sixth point in our star: Praxis. I had an appointment cancel today, and I wrote the whole thing in just under five hours — while juggling all my usual eggs.
Although there is less editorial control than with engenu, now anyone we might add to our staff can create very professional looking web pages on the fly, with essentially no knowledge of how a web page goes together. Supplemented with other software (e.g., ScentTrail), I have the ability to create whatever I want with virtually no effort.
We hosted BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix twice, two years in a row. For both years, my local competitors made a big point of insisting that I have nothing to teach them. Perhaps they’re right. The only regular user of engenu I know of is Teri Lussier. Scenius has one fan, Cheryl Johnson. And only Cathleen and I are using encartus.
This seems a shame to me, but I’m the real estate business, not the software business. My belief is that the software I have written makes us much, much stronger as Realtors. We have tremendous marketing leverage for just two people.
But Praxis compounds that leverage a thousand-fold. I can do anything I want. I think I can take on anyone, including the Realty.bots. I’m convinced I can take whatever turf I want in Metropolitan Phoenix.
I don’t know when or where we’re going to do Unchained the next time. But I won’t be teaching Praxis, in any case. Even so, I have an idea that my local competitors may come to regret not having studied what I have to teach when they had the chance.
From the New York Times, economist Karl Case of Case-Shiller fame says: Buy!
This financial crisis has made us all too aware that we live in a Catch-22 world: the performance of the housing market drives the economy, and the performance of the economy drives the housing market. But housing has perhaps never been a better bargain, and sooner or later buyers will regain faith, inventories will shrink to reasonable levels, prices will rise and we’ll even start building again. The American dream is not dead — it’s just taking a well-deserved rest.
It’s hard not to love Jeff Brown’s prospecting challenge. But it’s kind of easy to note that most of us have not raised our hands to submit ourselves to its arduous benefits. It goes for me, too: If I have six hours to spare on any given day, I’m going to throw it at marketing — specifically software — not prospecting. Mainly, though, because our marketing is producing healthy results, I don’t have a lot of time to spare in any case.
Take note: I am not absolving you of anything. If you don’t have enough money work, and if you don’t have any money, prospecting will solve those two problems in very short order.
But whether or not you are running Jeff’s gauntlet, the kind of goal-achieving behavior we have been talking about is hugely beneficial — to your health, to your wealth and to your happiness.
So: Let’s set ourselves a challenge. Declare a worthwhile goal — prospecting, exercise, learning a new skill, etc. — and then jump in and actually do it for every day in September. You can use the don’t break the chain strategy I talked about yesterday. Here is a printer-ready September calendar.
Goal-setting is easy. It’s actually accomplishing your goals that is so hard. Between public declarations here, in the comments below, and that growing chain of red X’s, the month of September 2010 could mark a turning point in all of our lives.
I had a short sale get to approval this morning, which puts us one tiny deal away from a million-dollar September. We haven’t seen many million-dollar months since 2005, and it’s a harder target to hit than it was in those days. I’m loving where our business is going, and I feel like we might be just that close to the glide path. It’s been a hard road since the market turned, but it has been the dedicated — driven — dogged — pursuit of sales fundamentals that has put us back on the road to financial recovery.
Meanwhile, I’m loving the hardy souls who have taken up Jeff Brown’s prospecting challenge. Quoted below is a snip from a Lifehacker post we have talked about privately for a couple of years. The topic? If you want to master something, do it every day and don’t break the chain:
Years ago when Seinfeld was a new television show, Jerry Seinfeld was still a touring comic. At the time, I was hanging around clubs doing open mic nights and trying to learn the ropes. One night I was in the club where Seinfeld was working, and before he went on stage, I saw my chance. I had to ask Seinfeld if he had any tips for a young comic. What he told me was something that would benefit me a lifetime…
He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don’t feel like it.
He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here’s how it works.
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
Most real estate agents and mortgage loan originators don’t know how to find business. I fear that some of the social media strategies I’ve shared have morphed into a “build it and they will come” approach to business development. Greg Swann did a nice job of identifying this problem when he said that time spent on social media marketing is wasteful:
“Marketing” by social media is a huge waste of time. Selling is one-on-one, focused, time-consuming and goal-directed. Marketing, done properly, is broadcast, diffuse, time-efficient and passive and long-term in its goal-pursuit.
He’s absolutely correct. The time investment required, to keep your social media current, never pencils out if you want to make six figures annually. You will get some results but trust me when I tell you that you could have equaled or bested those results by handing out business cards at the swap mart (and yes, I’ve done that, too). Here’s where his opinion gets a bit murky, though:
Even if you are really doing your best to market your services on-line, if you are doing it by engaging people one-on-one in fleeting media like Twitter or Facebook, you are almost certainly wasting your time.
That, I can tell you from experience, is only partly true. Using social media to prospect can be exponentially more effective than cold-calling or handing out business cards at a swap mart because of the rich information users provide. People buy from people they trust and connections help to build trust more quickly. I’ll come back to this later but it helps to understand the difference between marketing and prospecting as lead generation tools.
Greg’s working definition of marketing (op. sit.) is a good one. The long-term benefit of marketing is that it is scalable. Online marketing, especially blogging, can be a workhorse, which generates inquiries from prospects for as long as the information is relevant. The hour investment in a well-written blog post can attract tons of inquiries over time (I have a few blog posts that perform that well). Likewise, a consistent display advertisement in the town’s weekly newspaper can trigger you to “top of Read more
In a recent comment on his own post: Are you closing on the wrong objectives? The most insidious form of sales call reluctance is proudly racking up empty “accomplishments.” Greg Swann, the author, said this: “we devote a lot of effort … to closing on the buyer and on the buyer’s agent. Salespeople need something to say, so we go to great lengths to get them to say what we want said.” That’s a very good point, as far as it goes – which is not far enough.
A couple of days ago, in a post by Glenn Kelman comparing days on market to listing activity level the discussion led, as it should, to actual offers in comparison to days on market. I wrote a comment that in our local market, “If you go more than two weeks without an offer, you’ve done something wrong… which, generally speaking, means you’ve priced it poorly.” Again, true as far as it goes – which is not far enough.
Agents don’t realize who their target market is or, if they do, agents don’t act on that knowledge. Who sells a home? The buyer? No. The buyers’ agent. According to the latest statistics from NAR, when asked where they found the home they eventually purchased, the number one answer is: agent. Think about that for a second: the primary referral source for the actual buyer who purchases your listing is the buyers’ agent. Do you think maybe they merit a little of our marketing focus? Duh…
I co-host our weekly Brokers’ Open Caravan. I have a few minor responsibilities: inject a little humor, keep the energy in the room up, and a weekly “Marketing Minute” presentation. But my primary job as MC is to keep the highlight on the Listing Agents who are there to pitch their property. Most agents, God bless ’em, get up to the front of the room, drop their head down into their notes and, in their best impression of a sleep aid, recite the Agents’ Manifesto of Facts: “This beautiful home has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and 1400 square feet. It’s offered at…” Shoot me now! Good Grief Myrtle, I already have that info right here Read more
I was talking to Scott Cowan this morning, and he asked me about future Unchained events. It happens that I’ve been thinking about doing something, and Scott and I explored a few ideas.
Here’s one I really like: BloodhoundBlog Unchained and Unwired in Las Vegas: The Return of the Sales Monster.
I’m thinking Friday, November 26th, 2010, the day after Thanksgiving. One day, one big room like we did in Orlando, 9 am to 9 pm, bop ’til you drop. You could fly in Thursday night after the family stuff or early Friday morning. Arrive when you can, leave when you have to, and maybe we do streaming video and a webinar all day as well.
For content, I think I want to focus on selling, rather than marketing. We can be counted on to cover a lot of wired marketing just in passing, but, as I have been writing, there’s is a lot of ground on the sales side of our business that we’re leaving uncovered.
I also want this to be a Stone Soup project, if we can get that done. I want to keep it cheap, so you can afford to come, and I want to keep it simple, so that I can coordinate things without going up in flames.
So tell me: Is this a good idea? Would you come?
Also: Hit me with ideas. Content ideas in particular, but I’m game for anything you have to say. We might set up the room in “rounds” so that we can structure the day half as formal group sessions and half as mini-kennels, self-coalescing unconference sessions.
I’ll listen to a sponsor if you’ll pay for the room and two rounds of snacks-‘n’-beverages, and I’ll give you banner space, a meet-and-greet table and a 30 minute speaking slot in exchange. Conference space should be cheap in Vegas right now, so we might not be talking about a very big check.
I truly don’t know if this is worth doing. I think Realtors need to get back to selling basics, but the great mass of wired agents seem to be so infatuated with selling small talk to each Read more
I want to talk about being a sales monster, so I want to issue a disclaimer first: We are all about value. I get paid for closing real estate transactions, and I like getting paid, but I never want to get paid for encouraging a client to do the wrong thing. I’m going to be talking about closing in a lot of different contexts, but I am never talking about arm-twisting or even the mildest kinds of suasion. The ancient Roman law of agency is respondeat superior — let the master answer — and this is how we conduct our business.
But still, as a salesman it’s my job to close. That’s important just by itself. It’s one thing to be an ethical salesperson, as above, but it is quite another to fail to close at all. My job — always — is to move the process to the next logical step. If my client wants to make a deal, it’s my job to make it happen, and the way I do that is by closing on the step of the deal-making process that happens next in the sequence.
That’s Salesmanship 101, except that no one teaches salesmanship these days. And, alas, many of the salesmavens who taught this discipline in the past were creepy, oily, slimy, smarmy moral degenerates. Selling is not a confidence game, and there is nothing at all wrong with helping your client take the steps necessary to achieving his objective.
Because marketing on the web is so cost-efficient, I can do a lot of my closing with software — passively, automatically, at any hour of the day. But: I still need to close.
When a new vistor lands on one of our web sites, I’m closing on one idea: More. Stick around and read — there’s lots of content. Or swap over to our free Phoenix MLS search. At an absolute minimum, I want you in our internet universe, so I do a lot to attract people, then I do a lot more to hang onto them.
When we get someone to do something we want them to do, we call Read more
I wrote this in the Summer of 2001, also. At the time, my friend Richard Riccelli convinced me to sit on it because it’s pretty arch. Even so, this is the counterpoint to Shyly’s delight.
How to succeed at failure
I work in sales, and while I don’t have many role models for success at my job, I am lucky enough to have an immense number of role models for failure. My co-workers fail all day, every day, and they are gracious enough to share ideas with each other about how to fail even more. Watching them and listening to them, I’ve been able to abstract the principles of a whole new self-help discipline: How to succeed at failure.
There is no better field in which to succeed at failure than straight commission sales. If you succeed at failure in education, they make you the principal. If you succeed at failure in politics, they elect you president. But if you succeed at failure in straight commission sales, you slowly starve to death… Top that!
And succeeding at failure in straight commission sales is easier than you think!
Here are a few simple rules:
First, start late and leave early. Some people try to make failure an endurance contest. This is a mistake. If you spend too much time in the office, sooner or later someone is going to buy your product from you just because no one else is around.
In the same way, when you do get to work, immediately do something useless, irrelevant and unproductive. The newspaper is a good bet. So is the restroom. The two together make for a perfect combination. Take your time. The point is to establish to yourself, to your co-workers and to the world that doing business is the last thing on your mind.
Once you get to the office — stay there. Don’t go out looking for business, make the business come to you. Show the customer who’s boss. That way you’ll have plenty of time to complain to your co-workers that customers just don’t appreciate all you’re doing for them.
Find innovative ways to waste your work-day. Do research about Read more
Chris Johnson pulled this out of our phone conversation the other night, quoting me on Twitter:
People don’t want a relationship with you. They just want your damn services.
We were talking about real estate weblogging, but the principle applies even more firmly to the world of social media — Twitter, Facebook, etc.
The notion that strangers are seeking out Realtors in order to befriend them is absurd. For a Realtor to get invited on a getaway weekend with three people who are not old school chums would require that all the undertakers and life insurance salespeople they know are already engaged. We all know what to expect from Realtors in any sort of social setting — which is why there is an entire mini-industry of RE(education)Camps to train Realtors to resist their smarmy, deal-probing impulses on-line.
That’s point number one, neatly Tweeted by Chris — who is, don’t forget, a vendor: You are the means to your clients’ ends, not an end in yourself. Even though you might sometimes hit it off just right with a client and forge a serious friendship, in virtually all cases — including those where you make a friend — it’s the mission-critical job that matters, not your sweet personality.
And that friendship? It will seem serious to you alone. If you are any good as a Realtor, your deep, deep friendship will be invisible to everyone else. You should be much too busy to be anyone’s friend. If you make a stout effort, you can hold up your end with your spouse and kids, but, beyond that, you should expect to hear this from the people you think of as being your friends: “The only time we ever get to see you is when we’re buying or selling a house!” That is real estate in real life.
Here’s point number two: “Marketing” by social media is a huge waste of time. Selling is one-on-one, focused, time-consuming and goal-directed. Marketing, done properly, is broadcast, diffuse, time-efficient and passive and long-term in its goal-pursuit. Even if you are really doing your best to market your services on-line, if you are doing it Read more
I was on the phone yesterday with Chris Johnson, talking with him about Realtor weblogs. He mentioned that some of the buyers of his real estate weblogs are having trouble coming up with regular content.
I have a solution for them.
What should they do? Stop worrying about it — and solve the real marketing problem instead.
Instead of building a blogsite around a regularly-updated weblog, it would make more sense to me for reluctant writers to build the blogsite around the mission-critical content instead.
Here’s the deal: There are a finite number of topics that you absolutely, positively need to cover. Whatever target-marketed niche the blog is concerned with, you need to document that niche in a fairly comprehensive way.
How many articles would that take? Five? Ten? Surely not twenty. If you’ve done what you need to do, you can ignore the blog except when you’re burning up with something to say.
A WordPress theme like Equilibrium would give your weblog a magazine-like look and feel. The “featured” section could highlight the three or six or nine posts that are mission-critical for your niche. And the “latest post” section can document your more-recent musings. If you write something crucial later on, you can rotate it into the “featured” section.
Here’s the thing: Everything so-called weblogging experts (including me) have told you about real estate weblogging is probably wrong.
You are not trying to build long-term relationships with regular visitors who will wait for your latest pronouncements with bated breath. Instead, the objective of your blogsite should be to provide mission-critical information to people who will find you by Google when they need you and who will be happy to forget you just as soon as they no longer need you. The magazine-style blogsite fits that approach perfectly.
The purpose of your weblog is not to be available for lonely people looking for friends. It is not to make you one of the cool kids, so that Realtors from all over the world can show up at your place to grouse about how awful the real estate market is. The purpose of your blog is certainly not to make Read more