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.