When I started in Real Estate, I wanted to help people who truly needed my help! Everyone is a buyer or a seller at one point or another. My mentor at the time had a really strict criteria of who I was to help or who I should work with.
The best advice I was given was that if you're working with people who are not nice, not motivated, not reasonable, and not very serious you won't have time to help people who actually need your help.
Needless to say, I ignored that advice and started working with anyone who had a pulse and anyone who said they want to buy or sell. Eventually something happened, I started to realised a certain pattern between the people who bought and sold and the ones who just talked about it.
I started to see a consistency with everyone that I worked with and everyone my team members worked with. It was pretty awesome. Then I sat down and did three things that changed my life and my career.
I developed a standard who I wanted to work with. I always stayed true to the standard.
I developed 3-5 questions that helped me qualify anyone to see if they met my standards. I can't tell you what your standards should be but mine were they had to be nice, they had to be someone I liked being around, they had to be reasonable, and they had to be coach-able and a few other things as well.
I know that might be very basic, on the other hand, I saw too many Realtors work with clients that they didn't like or they weren't very nice or respectful. The questions I developed were very simple. But effective.
Make your own questions and see if they can be standardised for everyone.
My questions were centred around the following:
- Did the prospect want to sell in the next x amount of time?
- What areas was the prospect thinking of buying or selling in?
- Why was the prospect buying or selling now? What was the reason? (very important)
Come up with process, follow the process, and you will win.