Congratulations, you secured an invitation to present your proposal to a client. You can’t hit a home run without getting to bat, so now it’s time to take your swings.  Forgive the baseball analogy; corny as it is, it is true.  Now what do you need to do to make your presentation a success and win the listing or representation assignment?

If you haven’t already, and the opportunity is for a listing, get out to the property and become an expert on it. Take pictures, drive the neighborhood and drive all of the comps you will be using in your proposal. You should also do research on the area to ensure you are aware of any upcoming projects which could affect the marketability of the asset.    If this opportunity is for a tenant or landlord representation, find out everything, and I mean everything, about the company/owner.

We see  listing and representation presentations, almost daily, from across North America.  Many miss the point of the proposal.  Prepare a presentation you can be not only be proud of, but also addresses the specific needs/issues of the opportunity.  Believe it or not, many brokers frequently just slap a few pages together and hope for the best. If you’ve been invited to present, you can be pretty sure your competition was invited also. Put your best foot forward and prepare a well-structured proposal.  Remember, “You Can’t Wing It to Win It”.

Practice. Then practice some more. Make sure you know what you are going to say and that you can say it concisely and convincingly. Brush up on your ability to overcome the client’s objections. The best way  to do this is to role play with a mentor, colleague, your coach or your spouse.  Don’t laugh, my wife has  improved a vast majority of my speeches.. then again maybe she enjoys correcting me.. but I digress.  Whoever  you use, encourage them to throw you some curve balls, to make sure you can think on your feet when the time comes.

I know I just told you to prepare a great presentation, but when you get in front of the client, remember the most important thing is your ability to tell the story, which is completely different than telling your story.  It’s not about you.  It starts with telling the story of the opportunity and how the client sees it. Once you’ve told that story, you can tell the story of why you are the only plausible broker to service the account.  The presentation keeps you in the game, but articulating the right story is what wins you the business.

Statistics overwhelming demonstrate that coaching is one of the most successful decisions of individuals looking to maximizing results.  Athletes, Fortune 500 CEOs and top performing residential agents all have coaches.  Recently a growing trend in commercial real estate is the hiring of a coach who specialized in the industry. 

The very first question we ask anyone when they contact our company regarding our coaching services is “Why do you feel you need a coach?”  This is followed up with a more telling question “What does a successful coaching relationship look like to you?”  Time and time again the inquirer outlines the main reasons our client’s desire, select and value coaching.

1)      A coach will work with you in defining what the most important elements to focus on based on your personal vision of success.  Your role in your organization and possibly on your team has a significant impact on what is going to maximize your and/or your teams’ production or commission income.

2)      Coaching will create clear, and more importantly, relevant metrics to measure your progress and provide the critical feedback during the journey.  Goals and vision are great, especially if they are clear and committed to, but without a metrics, they are meaningless.   More often than not, sales meetings and pipeline meetings are focused on the result or effect and not the metrics that drive the cause.  Without metrics, success is not planned, it is simply accidental.

3)      A coach should work with you in not only monitoring and providing feedback on your behavior, but should also assist in defining the actions to reach specific goals.  The bridge between planning and production is performance.  If you are going to achieve a goal you have not reached before, you must change your behavior.

4)      The coach will highlight both the positive progression as well as any regression made.  A coach will help identify alternatives if there is an obstacle to performance or behaviors.  Without a consistent review of the aforementioned metrics, action plans and results, the likelihood of achievement on what truly drives income depreciates exponentially.

5)      Hiring a coach is an investment in your greatest asset – YOU.  A professional commercial real estate coach will be your partner, your motivator, your confidant and your trusted advisor.

Coaching is certainly not for everyone.  No doubt many less seasoned and less successful commercial real estate brokers look at items such as coaching, training and education as a cost.  With this perspective, coaching would rarely be successful.  Coaching is an investment.  The dividends are real, but they are also earned.  If you are truly committed to success, than hiring a commercial real estate coach may be one of the best investments you can make.

The Massimo Group is proud to include every major commercial real estate firm and/or their individual brokers as clients.  In addition we provide services to many regional and local firms as well as associations.  To learn more about our services, please see our 2012 Service Offering package.

It is our pleasure to present our 2011 Holiday Video for you and your commercial real estate brokerage team.  2011 was full of both challenges and achievements, but you made it through.  Despite the obstacles facing all of us in 2012, greater success is certainly ahead!

Please click on the link below to play the motivational message, or copy and paste it into your browser. Your speakers must be on; it fact CRANK the music!

 http://play.goldmail.com/bd0q0538e2zd

Happy Holidays!

The Massimo Group

The Massimo Group, the nation’s premier commercial real estate coaching and consulting organization is seeking 1 full-time and 1-part time commercial real estate coach for its growing practice.  The Massimo Group is proud to include every major commercial real estate brokerage firm and/or its individual brokers as clients, along with scores of regional and local firms.

The position will be responsible for delivering the Massimo Group’s proprietary coaching systems, as well as supporting several of the Massimo Group’s consulting assignments.

The position, shall be independent contractor-based.  Licensed candidates are welcomed, however actively performing brokerage functions are prohibited as the Massimo Group does not compete with its brokerage clients.

This is an opportunity for an independent, driven, real estate professional to be part of one of the fastest growing companies in the industry.

The ideal candidate will possess:

• Minimum 10 years of commercial real estate brokerage experience
• Proven track record for success
• A higher industry-related designation, such as an SIOR, CRE, or CCIM is preferred, though not required.
• Brokerage management experience is a major plus.
• Excellent Communication, Presentation and Writing Skills
• Excellent Listening Skills
• MS Office, and ACT CRM Skills, preferred but not required.

Serious inquiries only please.  Submit resumes to info@massimo-group.com, under the subject “CRE Coach Candidate”.

Brokerage Lessons from the NYC Marathon

Last October my friend Charles Herskowitz was visiting from California and asked if I wanted to go for a run.  Back then I was running regularly and could finish 6 miles comfortably and 9 miles if I really pushed it.  Charles however struggled to keep up with my old man pace.  After our run I figured I had shown him who’s boss and he would go away softly.  However he asked me if we could go running the next morning, and I agreed to meet him at 7:00am at my house.

The next morning there was a cold and steady rain.  I hit my snooze button on my 6:30 alarm and rolled over.  30 minutes later my door bell rang.  It was Charles.  “What are you made of sugar?  Let’s go!”, was his greeting.  He pushed me and held me to my earlier commitment and off we went.  He still struggled, albeit less, to keep up with me, but there was no way I would have run without his prodding.

This past Sunday Charles finished his first Marathon.  It happened to be one of most famous marathons of all, but nevertheless, it could have been the Topeka, Kansas marathon and it would have had the same impact and the same lessons.

Over the past 12 months we would communicate by email and telephone.  We would encourage each other and try to outdo one another.  I am more of a casual runner, more of a P90X guy, but Charles kept running and running – faster and longer.  Faster and longer than I could ever imagine.  All culminating with this weekend’s New York City Marathon.

It’s incredible what a steady measure of accountability can do.  Whether you have a fitness goal, or a personal brokerage goal – creating a platform of accountability, a partner, spouse ,  or perhaps a coach is the best approach to keeping you on-track, pushing you when you falter and celebrate when you succeed.

Wherever I travel throughout the country for presentations or workshops, or speak with our coaching prospects, there always the No. 1 question:  What do top producers do to both attain and maintain their dominant positions in the market?  

Having worked with, studied and/or managed literally 1,000’s of brokers during my 25+ year career, I have identified the 8 traits of dominant brokers.  Over the past weeks we have share with you these essential qualities of success.  This week we will explore traits 7 and 8; Team Orientation and Entrepreneurial

Team oriented is your leverage.

It’s amazing how many brokers work in little silos and don’t even try to leverage the skill sets and knowledge of others to maximize their effectiveness. When I talk to some of these brokers, they’re frustrated and often say something like, “I can’t do it all,” but they don’t take the next logical step and investigate the resources they have or can acquire to make their day, and more importantly their effort, much more productive. Here’s the simple exercise we use with clients who want to build a team.

First, identify exactly everything you believe you have to do, from the mundane to the most productive. Put everything in one big list. Don’t leave anything out. Next, go through the list and identify everything you’re good at and everything you like to do. Then we go through that inventory with our clients and we prioritize, we allocate, we figure out what the broker needs to do and then we delegate everything else. Take some time and do the same thing; you should wind up with a list of your most productive activities and a list of everything else to delegate.

Then identify sources, whether external, virtual, or in your office who can handle “everything else.” Now comes the hard part. You have to invest in those resources. That’s a big hurdle for some people, so let me remind you that what you’re really doing is investing in yourself and your career. Don’t forget, your greatest asset is you.

Entrepreneurial approach brings everything together.

Most brokers think and act like an employee, even though the legal fact and practical reality is that most brokers are independent contractors. If you work for a large firm, your firm may have terrific resources and brand, but ultimately your success is measured by how well you leverage those organizational assets. Many of the brokers profiled in this book are aligned with strong regional and national firms, but they act like they’re the CEO of their own firm. They use their brokerage firm as a platform to launch their personal success.

Wherever I travel throughout the country for presentations or workshops, or speak with our coaching prospects, there always the No. 1 question:  What do top producers do to both attain and maintain their dominant positions in the market?

Having worked with, studied and/or managed literally 1,000’s of brokers during my 25+ year career, I have identified the 8 traits of dominant brokers.  Over the next few weeks we are going to share with you these essential qualities of success.  Follow these principles and you too can put yourself on the path to brokerage success.

Last week we addressed market presence and industry focus.  This week we will dive into traits 5 and 6; Navigate Careers and Assertive.

Navigating your career means taking the long view.

The biggest mistake I see in navigating a career is brokers’ making a change without thinking through what the results will be and how the change fits into their career plan. They jump at an offer, thinking the business or the managing broker will be better someplace else. But they usually forget a couple of things. Number one, the grass is not always greener on the other side. For example, higher commissions are higher for a reason, maybe because the supporting resources are fewer. Number two, when you change your company, your address, there is absolutely a down period, a slow period that will happen during the transition, no matter how sound you think your client relationships are.

Assertive moves you to the front.

Lack of assertiveness shows itself as caution or conservatism. That cautious approach, in a more extreme form, can suggest fear. During their careers, brokers may face several things they fear. Fear of rejection and fear of failing are probably the most obvious. Brokers rarely suggest they fear anything. Instead they say. “Prospecting isn’t really effective” or they need to do a little more homework before they call a client, or they know that client really isn’t in the market or something else that sounds like it makes sense. If you find yourself making excuses for things you know you should be doing, like prospecting or making presentations, ask yourself what you might be afraid of.

Assertiveness is a personality trait. We screen all our clients at the Massimo Group with a personality/behavioral assessment to better understand several such traits, with assertiveness being a key component. We also know if you don’t test at the top of the assertiveness scale, there are things you can do to become more successful. Psychologists tell us people who are fearful usually spend their time and energy thinking about what could happen, but people who overcome fear concentrate on what needs to be done.

Wherever I travel throughout the country for presentations or workshops, or speak with our coaching prospects, there always the No. 1 question:  What do top producers do to both attain and maintain their dominant positions in the market?

Having worked with, studied and/or managed literally 1,000’s of brokers during my 25+ year career, I have identified the 8 traits of dominant brokers.  Over the next few weeks we will share these essential qualities of success with you.

Last week we addressed discipline and orientation to the client.  This week we will dive into traits 3 and 4.

Build Market Presence three ways.

There are three important channels for building market presence, the personal (one-on-one meetings), the physical (mailings, advertising and media campaigns), and the digital (email blasts, e-newsletters, social media). The most common mistake brokers make is using only one of the three approaches and expecting that one approach, alone, will bring great success. You just cannot do that and expect to get the best results.

I see brokers who only build presence with one-on-one meetings. That’s fantastic, but the problem is your reach is extremely restricted because you can’t hold enough of those meetings to get the word out to the larger market. Other brokers depend on advertising campaigns using postcards, letters, and media appearances.   Those are great for visibility, but they won’t give you the personal contact you need to build business. And, today, many brokers are trying to build presence using social media and nothing else, but you won’t reach clients who don’t use social media that way and you rarely get personal contact either.

Another mistake brokers make is assuming the Personal piece is a prospecting piece. It is not.  Prospecting is directly asking for business.  Presence is about building your sphere of influence and creating that “Top of Mind” position in that sphere, as well as with your targeted prospects and clients.

There’s one more very important thing to remember. These efforts don’t pay off right away; this is not a quick-payoff business. I see brokers who do a newsletter for a month or two, and give up because “it didn’t work”. Presence needs to be a varied, yet consistent effort. There are no shortcuts to building a strong presence. To build presence you need to use all three channels with consistent effort. Then to build production, you must follow up with prospecting and develop one-on-one relationships.

Industry/geography focus turns you into the expert.

No one can do everything, not even you. Even if you could, trying to do everything is a bad idea and one which will not lead to a profitable career. When we ask people what they specialize in, and we’ve done it a variety of ways over the years, more than half will say they do it all.  They do leasing, sales, investment property, represent tenants, represent landlords, and so on. We use the analogy that if you have cancer you’re not going to a generalist or an internist! Face it, you want the doctor who knows cancer and not just any cancer, you want the doctor who’s a specialist in what you’ve got. The fact is people trust experts and if you’re not an expert it’s harder to get business.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are successful generalists out there, but what they really are is specialists in a smaller market area. If you’re in secondary or primary markets you have to specialize, to have a niche where you’re the expert, or you’re doomed. So become an expert in something, find a niche that’s a combination of a product type and either a type of client or a geographical area. Then, do your homework, dig in and learn everything you can about your niche and key your presence building and materials and prospecting to your niche.

Wherever I travel throughout the country for presentations or workshops, or speak with our coaching prospects, there is always that No. 1 question:  What do top producers do to both attain and maintain their dominant positions in the market? 

I’ve worked with, studied, and managed literally thousands of brokers during my 25+ year career and I know what it takes to succeed, but I wanted something based on research, not just experience.   So I studied several of the top brokers in the business and distilled what I learned into my upcoming book, Brokers Who Dominate: 8 traits of top producers.   The book will be available next month.

Over the next four weeks we are going to share with you these essential qualities of top performing brokers.  Follow these principles and you too can put yourself on the path to brokerage success.

This week we will dive into the first 2 of 8 traits; discipline and oriented to the client.

Discipline is the secret sauce that makes everything else work.

Discipline comes first, because if you’re disciplined you can improve in every area of your business and life; but if you aren’t, you may simply have to depend on luck, and you can’t control luck. That’s why the biggest mistake brokers make regarding discipline is they don’t have any.

Too many brokers lack the discipline, the planning, the approach to their profession as a business, so they wind up chasing deals and never building an infrastructure for long-term success. Instead of a disciplined approach to business, they just wing it, and you can’t wing it to win it.

We find those brokers who create a business plan with real action steps and then work that plan make a dramatic improvement in their business. Unfortunately, the majority of brokers who do take the time to come up with a “business plan” for the year wind up sticking it in a drawer until next January. This is why we created our proprietary R.A.M.P. program, an extensive series of audits and exercises to help our broker clients identify the key initiatives (we call them “Success Levers”) they’ve got to act upon to move forward, and then track their performance on those initiatives.

Orient to client is building long-term success.

The big mistake here is focusing on anything that’s not best for your client. What’s that look like? When you’re not oriented towards your client, you tend to chase deals, go outside your specialty, be uncooperative with other brokers as far as sharing your fees, or take shortcuts in regard to servicing that client by not looking at enough opportunities or not exposing them to the maximum number of buyers. It’s easy to start doing this when times are tough.

In tough times you still have bills to pay and you have to take care of your family. Then it’s a fine balance, sometimes, between meeting your current obligations and building your long-term success. But, anytime you’re just chasing commissions, you’re not oriented to your client; you’re oriented to your commission. Don’t get me wrong; commissions are essential. But focusing on the payday won’t build a long-term, profitable business for you. You build long-term profitability by building enduring relationships with your clients that generate more referrals, more leads, and more profit.

So, what can you do? What habits can you develop that will help you focus on the client? Make your client look good, especially to his or her boss. Every time you touch the client, do something to add value to the experience of doing business with you.

At least this was one of several opinions I received the past two weeks when I asked some 800 members of our Linkedin Group – CRECoach – why they thought commercial real estate brokers are so reluctant to invest in themselves.

We had a robust online discussion, with opinions provided by some of the leading commercial real estate minds in the brokerage industry.  Do I agree most commercial brokers are cheap?  Let’s just say the majority of commercial real estate brokers lack the vision, understanding and/or confidence to invest in themselves.  

In contrast, top producers and consistent performers do not hesitate in investing in their business; whether it is new technology, hiring administrative help, attending a tradeshow, participating in a training webinar or hiring a commercial real estate coach.  Top performers understand they are their greatest asset.  So naturally, they must invest in themselves.

Doug Wolf, of REA software suggested “Brokers fall victim to the e-myth, always working “in” the business and no time for working “on” their business. When the flow of deals is slow, the compulsion is to act to generate more deals, but then when busy, no time to invest.”   Right on Doug!  There is a common misperception among brokers that their number one priority is to close deals.  The fact is their number one priority is to build a business that leverages the broker’s time and skill set to generate a consistent deal flow.  This is not the same thing.

Jim Tucker, CCIM and owner of NetworksCRE felt the issue was deeper than that.  According to Jim “brokers are not inclined to invest in a “fix” until they clearly understand what needs to be fixed. Most of us don’t want to know what is wrong with us and therefore never will be willing to take the “cure.” When one is wise enough to enlist the skills of someone who can help us recognize what we need, then we have a better chance of making the decision to do something about it….and possibly even pay for it.”  As always Jim’s profound insight has strong merit.

Bob McComb, who created Top Dogs, a CD-based training program, which has an excellent reputation for assisting new to business brokers get off to a fast start, felt the issue was more one of the broker becoming more open minded. “Generally speaking, most of the also-rans in CRE will do pretty much anything to be successful except read about it or think about it. Conversely, ALL the top producers I have met are all on a self-development path…. They never ask themselves “will this program benefit me?” Instead they ask, “how will this help me to get better?” and “where do I enroll?”

Jim Garrett Jr, MCR and Chief Operating Officer of Colliers International’s Ohio offices shared a very telling story.  “I had an agent tell me one time he felt that commercial real estate agents invest more annually in their golf games than they invest their professional growth.  I then challenged the next 20 agents to whom I spoke with. With one exception, they all agreed in the assessment. The one who disagreed is probably what most would call a “Ten Percenter”.   Is it because they don’t see their business as “their” business, rather they see it as the broker’s business?” 

All those participating in the CRECoach group discussion had similar comments. Kevin Fitzgerald, CSE who now heads the leadership council at NAI Global added “It’s been my experience Commercial agents and brokers alike see the investment not as a necessary event but as an expense. If they could just see the benefit of the investment before the investment has to be paid then they might realize by not investing their progress will be much slower.”

And therein lies the obstacle for most brokers who continue to struggle in the business, and are not consistent producers.  Investing in self development is simply that; an investment.  Like all investments there is a level of risk with anticipated returns.  Expenses, by definition, have no risk, and appropriately have zero return.

There are truly scores of platforms and programs where an indvidual can invest in him or her self.    However, commercial real estate brokerage is not a risk-free business.  If someone is not willing to take on a little risk, then they are most likely not willing to invest in themselves.  If this is the case, it is not necessarily an issue of being “cheap”, but rather it is more likely they are in the wrong business .