Put Yourself In Your Clients’ Shoes!

As a real estate agent, change surrounds you. There are constantly new strategies and technologies which promise to shake up the industry, not to mention the continuing education courses necessary to maintain your license. With all the changes and shifts you encounter on a regular basis, it feels good to settle into habits you’ve developed when farming and marketing. Whether it’s reaching out to internet prospects or reaching out to your sphere of influence, you may have tried and true scripts and jokes to break the ice. Regardless of how long you’ve spent developing your strategy, your initial engagement and first impression are still the foundation of how you get more potential clients into your pipeline. With that in mind, it is very important to ask yourself “how would I feel if I was the client?” By imagining yourself on the receiving end, you can envision the tweaks and changes which will keep your phrasing fresh

Study Yourself

Some people are self-conscious and cannot stand to hear their own recorded voice. As a real estate agent, your primary goal should always be growing your business and building a brand based on client satisfaction. So, you cannot let that discomfort stop you from learning from one of your best teachers-yourself. When you record yourself, try to do it after a full day. You do not want to stage the call by being focused on the fact that you are recording. Ideally, you should record yourself while in the middle of a planned block of time for outreach to new prospective clients. As you examine your performance, think about how you felt when dialing, and what energy you have during the call. Many agents will set aside time in their week for outreach, but this time will not be well spent if you are not able to understand how you come across. Making the most of your outreach time means being aware of yourself. If you are a person whose mood can be affected by outside factors, do not jump into doing outreach if you know you are in a bad mood. If you know that after dialing 30 phone numbers you will feel too emotionally exhausted to make a good first impression if your next call answers, then it may be time to switch to a different task and plan to have more outreach sessions that are shorter in length. 

Ask for Feedback

While reviewing by yourself is a good start, it will not cover all your bases. When you listen to yourself, you are listening from a real estate agent’s perspective. Find friends or family members you can practice with. Call them and have them pretend they do not know you. Try to see how many full conversations you can have. Have your friends pretend to be wary, or distracted, or confused. Practice different strategies to keep the conversation moving forward. Afterward, review the conversation and see where you have room for improvement. Don’t be afraid of constructive criticism. Sometimes you may need to rethink or eliminate a phrase entirely. In this process, try new and different ideas. Come up with different sets of scripts and approaches you can rotate through. Even the best joke or greeting can feel stale if the person you’re talking to can sense that you’ve said it thousands of times. Keep the process engaging, and build this type of review into your monthly schedule.