It’s been nearly 60 days since we introduced The Listing Next Door system, and so far things have been exciting!

So far I know of at least 8 listings directly from the postcard, and lots more listings in progress.

A couple of weeks ago, I hosted a QuickStart Teleclass with tips on how to get the best results with The Listing Next Door system.

Here’s the audio from the call:

…then go over to TheListingNextDoor.net and grab everything you need to start marketing around sold listings in YOUR area.

Here’s what you get:

1. Camera Ready Lead-Getting Postcard

2. Direct Response Appointment-Getting Letter

3. Magazine Style Report -
“10 Ways To Make Your House Show Like A Model Home, In One Weekend, For Less Than $200″

I’m excited to hear about your results!

PLUS: New Getting Listings Teleclass Starts this week

Thursday, July 29th at Noon Eastern

Get all the details at GettingListings.com

This week I’ve got a special Interview with my friend Philip Tirone.

I met Philip in March of this year…and we immediately became friends. His passion about helping people is clear the moment you meet him.

Philip is an expert on helping people get to a 720 credit score.

Here’s a great video he did with a hidden camera that illustrates the problem…the BANKS don’t even know what to do!

I just recorded an interview with Philip where he shares some advice for how real estate agents can help their clients with less than perfect credit.

Here’s the audio of the interview:

plus…here’s a copy of philips ebook – just click on the cover to download the book.

I’m going to talk with Philip about doing a special teleseminar with our Marketing Monday subscribers, and I’ll email you soon with all the details.

Enjoy!

This week I’ve got a fantastic new system for you to get listings around recently sold homes.

The best part is, it doesn’t have to be YOUR sale for it to work.

Listen to this audio, and I’ll explain the whole thing:

…then go over to TheListingNextDoor.com and grab everything you need to start marketing around sold listings in YOUR area.

Here’s what you get:

1. Camera Ready Lead-Getting Postcard

2. Direct Response Appointment-Getting Letter

3. Magazine Style Report -
“10 Ways To Make Your House Show Like A Model Home, In One Weekend, For Less Than $200″

I’m excited to hear about your results, and I’d like you to join me on a free QuickStart Q&A call on:

The Listing Next Door!
Wednesday, June 16th
1:00 pm Eastern

Dial-in Number: (712)432-0075
Access Code: 227100

Talk to you Wednesday!

Today, I’ve got a very special interview with a good friend (and neighbor) of mine in Florida.

His name is Gary Coxe, and you may recognize him from TV appearances on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsche and other shows.

He’s the author of a fantastic book called “Don’t Let Others Rent Space In Your Head” – and I’m happy to have him as a guest on Marketing Monday today.

Q    Gary thanks for joining us.

A    Dean thanks for having me.  I’m flattered and privileged at the same time.  I really mean that.  Thank you so much.

Q    Now where in the world is Gary Coxe today?

A    Today I am in central Florida – when I’m here.  As you know I travel quite a bit but I’m in Florida right now enjoying the weather.

Q    Perfect.  Well Gary I was mentioning your book “Don’t let others rent space in your head” and I appreciate you coming to maybe share some insights with us because there certainly is a lot of negativity and a lot of things, especially in the real estate world that we can let occupy our minds right now.

A    Yeah, there’s no question about it.  You’ve got the short sales and the foreclosures and all the stuff and if you’re not mentally set and right if you will, we’re going to unfortunately allow that stuff to affect our attitude and the danger in that obviously it’s going to possibly slow us down.  If it doesn’t slow us down we may want to just go to the point of totally quitting and if we can learn to focus more on a solution than the problem it will cause us to look for the right answers to keep going forward to becoming more creative and doing things that we have to do to really focus on getting results; not whining about “Oh no, what’s going to happen now?”

Q    You’ve got a very interesting background and how you came about making a life study of all of this. Can you just share a little bit about your background and how you came to be who you are here?

A    Yeah, I want to let people know and I want to let them appreciate that I understand what it’s like to have some rough times but I also understand what it’s like to really bounce back and keep going forward.  I’ve had a pretty interesting life I guess.  Early in the game I was very successful; like all the people listening to this and yourself I was an entrepreneur very early; I started my first business at 11, my second at 15.  As a teenager I was doing quite well making over $100,000 a year and then things changed.  I got married.  Shortly after we got married my wife and I we had a baby and then she tells me it wasn’t mine; hugely painful.  After this, my grandfather and step father died of cancer – in a time frame of all this my father was murdered, I had $30,000 cash in the bank, lost all that and of course my business that I had, I lost all this and this all happened to me Dean as you know, by the time I was 21 years of age.  I don’t share this with people to get their sympathy but I want people to understand that yes, there is somebody out there who has experienced similar joys in life and also similar pain.  So I come from a background that hey I know what challenging times really are but I also know specific strategies and what has to be done to get beyond those and keep moving consistently.

Q    It’s actually really timely right now because there are so many people who just a few short years ago were making hundreds of thousands of dollars and everything was great and now there are a lot of people who are really struggling to stay positive and to keep the train on the tracks.

A    Yeah, there’s no question about that and I think most people that are in business they know the importance of maintaining a positive attitude but unfortunately I think there’s a lot of misleading stuff out there Dean that people don’t quite understand how to do this.  For example, we hear a lot about positive thinking.  Well, positive thinking, as far as I’m concerned, really does not work; positive thinking is like spray paint on rust – it doesn’t last long.  Let me give you an illustration.  If I had a bunch of people over to my house and I say to them “Let’s bake up some cookies” and I bake up the cookies and they smell so good and I give everybody a cookie and everybody takes a bite and they look at me simultaneously and say “Gary, something just doesn’t taste right” and I look over to the counter and I realise “Oh my goodness, I forgot to put the eggs in the ingredients”.  No I don’t think we have to be professional chefs to know that not all cookies, but for most cookies to taste right, you have to have eggs in the ingredients so I take the eggs and I mix them up in the bowl and then I take your cookie back from you and I dip it in the raw eggs.  Now that’s pretty disgusting but did we not agree earlier that for the cookies to taste right, we had to have eggs in the cookie?  Well there’s a difference between having eggs in the cookie or eggs on the cookie.  Technically you know as well as I do for those cookies to taste right, we’ve going to have to start from scratch so positive thinking by itself is like raw eggs… by itself it’s pretty disgusting but with the right ingredients, that’s when things happen and we have to learn how to use those different ingredients together.  One of the other things that a lot of people will do – in fact you can go to the library and see books and books and books on this stuff; it’s positive affirmations.
I don’t know about you but I remember when I started to get into business more and learning more about personal growth, I got the idea or impression from other people that all you’ve got to do is say these positive affirmations and things happen.  Well I realised that it takes more than positive affirmations so here’s something that I think is very powerful.  I’ll say it slowly and I’ll repeat it so you really, really get this.  The more you say a positive affirmation, the less you believe it; that’s why you keep saying it.  Let me repeat that – the m ore you say a positive affirmation, the less you believe it; that’s why you keep saying it.  When you and I woke up this morning, I know that you and I did not look at ourselves in the mirror and try to convince ourselves by saying ‘I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man”.  We know that so a lot of times people are just trying to say things over and over just to convince themselves of certain things.  That’s a start and I’m not saying don’t use positive affirmations but what we have to learn to do and this is the key, we have to learn to convert the positive affirmation to an empowering belief and the purpose and the power of that is for every belief you act on, you get a result.  If we want to get more results or different results, we have to create new beliefs.  Positive affirmations alone in themselves are not going to do it; we have to convert them to a belief.  That’s when we start really making change and getting results and going forward consistently.

Q    It’s interesting because you hear all this talk about positive affirmations and what a good thing they are so what would you do instead?  How would you use them properly?

A    Well I’ve heard so many people in all my travels Dean – and I think a lot of people can relate to this is they’ve used positive affirmations because so many people have told them to but nothing changes and they think something is wrong with them and they’re not doing something right.  I think we have to learn to distinguish what is just a positive affirmation as just a simple positive thought for example if you read a scripture or you read an empowering idea or thought, sometimes that just becomes a reminder; not necessarily an affirmation because we’re so bombarded with so many things that we get stressed out and when we read a reminder, we go “Oh, I forgot about that.  That makes sense” and it puts you back on track.  Also realise that when we say a certain affirmation if you will, is it something that we believe?  That’s the key.  A lot of times people will say these affirmations not believing them so how do you know that you can say an affirmation and you say it and believe it?  A lot of people don’t know the difference so I want to share with you how do you know that you bought a belief?  In other words, how do you know that you say an affirmation and it actually is a belief for you?  The way you know is that a belief is something that you feel.  When you say it and feel it, it becomes a belief.  If you don’t say it and can’t feel it, then it’s just positive words or positive thinking and what we have to do is we have to learn to take that affirmation to a belief.  Every time we use an affirmation if you will, ask yourself “Is this something I really believe?  Do I feel it in my gut?”  If you don’t what your goal is now is to get it to the point where you believe that.  There are several ways to do that; listening to programs like you offer is one, going to meetings, going to conventions, filling your mind.  It’s what you influence your mind with and these are the things partially that create those beliefs.

Q    So are there specific strategies that you can use then?  What do you advocate?

A    Yes, absolutely.  Of course the time frame that we have is quite limited to go into it in a lot of detail but what we have to do is start finding out what beliefs do we think would benefit us or what affirmations.  Then I’ll encourage people to write them down.  For example I went to an event that I was doing some time ago and the gentleman said that he keeps on saying he wants to make $250,000 a year.  That was his affirmation –“I’m going to make $250,000 this year, I’m going to make $250,000 this year”.  So I asked him and he was very honest in front of the entire group, I asked him “But do you believe that?” and he looked at me and he sadly said “No, I don’t believe it”.  What I had to do in this particular situation is we had to work on getting him to believe that and then to get him to believe that – which is something that you’re good at – is in this particular case; this is not the answer for all affirmations, it’s just this example, we had to get him to break things down.  So “What would it take for me to get to this point?”  “Well I’d have to do a certain amount of cold calls or a certain amount of this today and this would equate to this” and he had to become a little bit more logical with it and then once he started putting this all down, now it started becoming believable and real to him and as he looked at all this he said “Oh, this is do-able” and now as he says this belief or this affirmation at this point, now he starts saying “I’m going to make $250,000 this year” – now he can believe that because he sees it all on paper.  In this particular example he was using an affirmation but he didn’t believe it because he didn’t have it put down on paper.  In this particular case by him just chopping it up a little bit and seeing what’s involved weekly, monthly and so on, now that affirmation became very believable for him and as he started doing that he started seeing more and more results.
That’s a typical example but every example is a little different; every person is a little different but that’s one way that you can start making it more realistic but remember when you say it, you’ve got to feel it and if you don’t feel it, it’s a simple measuring rod to let you know you’re not quite there yet – you don’t quite believe it.  Your job now is to get to the point of working towards believing the affirmation then it becomes a part of you and then after a while you don’t even have to say it over and over again; it’s just ingrained into you now – it’s a core belief.

Q    What do you think the role of action is in this?  Do you think that part of the strength of an affirmation or a belief is that you’re going to take action on a belief?

A    Yeah, that’s the bottom line.  Saying that we’re going to make this or do that gets us nowhere.  That’s just the positive thinking affirmation stuff so yeah, the law of action says it all.  Using affirmations – what’s great about them, it kind of keeps the metal detector on but if you’re not willing to move the metal detector around to look for the goal that’s underneath there, it’s never going to beep.  It takes more than the affirmation.  Yes, action is everything and one of the things that I encourage people to do is always remember no matter how bad it gets, you must, you must take action and one of the laws that I share with people is the law of inertia.  What it states is things that move want to keep moving.  It doesn’t say it has to move fast.  As you know Dean, it says it just has to move so one of the things that I tell myself no matter how bad things can get is that I must take action.  I’ll be very upfront with you – there are times that I’ve been in tears because things have been so challenging but while I’m in those tears, I will do something consciously to tell myself “I am moving forward”, whether it’s mail something out, get ready to make a phone call, start writing some copy; do something.  A lot of people – we’re so programmed to be a slave to our feelings so when things get bad, we feel a little a discouraged and how do we usually reward that?  We reward that by just throwing in the towel for the next couple of hours or the next couple of days, waiting for something good to happen to excite us.  Now we’re just being controlled by external stimuli; we’ve become like a kite in the wind and that’s just no way to control our lives.

Q    When you were talking about saying an affirmation that you don’t believe, I’ve heard other people saying you want to go somewhere but building the belief is almost like looking at the map and seeing where that is and realising where you are and how do you actually get there and knowing that you’ve got some direction.

A    That’s so true because a lot of people – especially if they’re new in business and new in personal growth – they’ll grab onto these affirmations, keep saying them over and over and nothing will happen and again, like I said earlier, they’ll think something is actually wrong with them but what you said makes so much sense is that you have to have clarity, you have to have a specific road map.  I’ll give you a great example – we’ve all been to seminars and there is something that happens when we’re at a seminar; most people after the end of a seminar usually feel pretty jacked up, bullet-proof, unstoppable and for that moment their mind starts thinking “take action, take action, I’m going to do this, going to do this, going to do that” and then something is happening – they don’t even realise it’s happening, that’s causing them to feel bullet-proof and if they knew exactly what it was they could duplicate it consistently.  Because they don’t know what it is after their event, maybe on a Saturday or a Sunday, something comes around Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday and they no longer have that bullet-proof feeling and because of that they’re no longer willing or able to take consistent action as they thought they were going to do after their event or right at the event.  There are just basically two things and two things only Dean that cause us to have the desire and motivation to attain anything.  Number one is having a value or placing a high level of importance on our success and number two – a belief; value and belief.  Here’s what happens subconsciously when we go to an event and we start getting that really excited bullet-proof feeling, the external stimuli that we’re not exposing to, the music, the speaking, the colleagues that are also being successful;  you see them getting recognition and awards.  What’s happening without us even realising it’s happening is our value and our belief starts to increase and as these increase it creates more drive and desire and the ability to take action.  What we have to learn to do is learn how to change all this consciously but hey at least it helps us out a little bit for a temporary period of time but because most people haven’t learned to master these two things consciously, when they leave the event now, right after they left the event, those values and beliefs are really high but once they start hearing about the economy or the foreclosure or somebody says “Oh you need to go find another job”, before you know it one or two of those things change.  It doesn’t have to be both of them; one or two of them start to decline or descend and now you’ve lost that drive and motivation and that all affects your ability to take action.  When we learn to master those two things we become very consistent when it comes to taking action.  It’s very, very powerful.   It’s a great feeling to have and there are times when you can’t master that consistently then when I can’t I jump back to the law of inertia – no matter what happens, take action, take action, take action.

Q    It’s funny that you say that.  We would do big events all over the country and have hundreds of people and there was definitely that feeling when people were there that you could see… it was a three day event – you could see by the middle of day two their beliefs starting to shift and they were feeling things, they were seeing things, we were talking about things, thinking about things, they were hearing other people right there in the same room talking about how things worked.  It’s almost like they could touch somebody who had actually made it happen and I guess that proximity and that full immersion of being around and in that kind of environment really shapes the way people have that experience of believing that something is possible.  You’re absolutely right, yeah.

A    Yeah and what’s being shaped are those two things; value and belief.  Those two things are being shaped and influenced tremendously and it’s when they leave the event they allow other things to change that influence and that’s where the value and belief start to decline.  A lot of people – and you’ll hear this at events also too – belief is everything.  You have to have belief, belief is everything. Well that’s a lie.  Belief is half of it; value is the other half.  That would be like me giving you a beautiful brand spanking new Maserati – let’s say it goes zero to a hundred in five seconds, whatever – and I say “Here Dean, you can have the Maserati, it’s beautiful but there is no engine inside”.  Well basically the Maserati, just its body alone, that’s the belief but if it doesn’t have an engine you’re getting nowhere.  You have to have both of those two things; belief isn’t everything but what you have to have is belief and value.  Value enables you to take action on the belief and when you have those two things you can be so consistent that you can just be incredibly unstoppable.

Q    Where would people start?   If you could say the best strategy or the best advice that you could give to a realtor right now who’s maybe stuck with all this negativity in their minds, they want to turn things around – what would…?

A    Well number one is we have to admit it and it’s not bad to admit it.  You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.  Let me repeat that – you cannot change what you don’t acknowledge.  Once you’ve acknowledged “Look, I’m letting junk get in my head” and it’s okay, it’s not being negative, it’s being realistic.  It’s like when I take off in an airplane as I add the power, I say out loud “Be prepared to abort or lose an engine”.  I’m not being negative; I’m being realistic, things happen, I want to be there and be on top of my game.  If you can acknowledge that you’ve got a lot of this junk in your head the next thing now is to identify the limited beliefs, the limited junk and literally put them on paper; write down what is on paper right now – all the stuff on paper, I’ve just pulled out of my head is creating this bad, negative attitude.  Then and only then can we start changing it but a lot of people won’t even get to the point of acknowledging that “I’ve got junk in my head” because that’s not a positive thing to do but that’s ridiculous.  How are you going to change it without a diagnosis?  I think that’s the first thing – acknowledge that we’ve got some junk in the head and then start pulling specifically what are those thoughts because for every belief you act on you get a result whether it’s a negative belief which will cause a negative result or an empowering belief which will cause an empowering result.  So identify all the negative trash and put it on paper, listen to what you’re saying, see what it says and then also understand that information that’s on that paper is what’s giving us that negative attitude.  Then we can start focusing on working towards changing that and that can be in several ways as we discussed a little bit – books, CDs, being around the right people and of course there are other deeper mental barrier ideas and strategies if you will that you can work through and change them quickly as well.

Q    Speaking of books, I would highly recommend everybody reading your book, “Don’t let others rent the space in your head” – are there any other resources that you have or any other things that people could take advantage of?

A    Yes, I’ve got everything from programs on persistence, programs on self-esteem – I have one program “Secrets that my millionaire mentors taught me about business and success” and what this program does Dean, it enables you to listen in to some of my millionaire mentors as you learn from them some of their thought processes and their strategies and also marketing ideas and strategies.  The thing about these programs it just gives you a lot of specific practical answers.  I’m not into the pump up “rah, rah, you’re great, you’re wonderful, you can do it” stuff because that doesn’t last long.  I like to share with people specific ideas that changed their behaviour.  That’s what we want to do, we want to see that “hey this is a track that I want to keep mastering.  I want to make it better” or “here’s a track that’s not doing too good that I’m on – I want to change that but I want to change it quickly” so that millionaire mentors series program is pretty good because you really get to gear in and listen to the minds of some very successful people on how they think, also everything about marketing and really unique, out of the box thinking ways to market and attract customers and create a huge amount of loyalty.

Q    Where can people find out about that?

A    That program is “millionairebizsecrets.com/videofree”

Q    “millionairebizsecrets.com/videofree”?

A    That’s it.  And then of course I know you archive a lot of this but at present I’m doing a promotional tour and if I’m in a city nearby, let’s say somebody is listening to this and they’ve got a meeting coming up with a group of their team, I’d be more than happy to come in and try to make it work and if they’re interested they can go to “garycoxe.com/workshop” and you’ll get a bunch of details on my promotional tour that I’ve got coming up.

Q    Perfect. Gary thank you so much for spending some time with us and I look forward to seeing you when I get back to Florida.

A    Very good and thank you for your time and remember between now and the next time we talk or see each other, you too should not let anything or anyone rent space in your head.  I really appreciate it Dean.

Q    Thanks Gary.

This is one of my favorite Seth Godin videos. Enjoy!

Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain from 99% on Vimeo.

This week, I’m going to introduce you to another of my good friends Frank Kern.

Frank and I have spent a lot of time together talking about lifestyle and designing the perfect life.

In these two videos Frank shares his thoughts on this, and an exercise he calls “Core Influence” that he attributes as the KEY to completely reinventing his life and moving cross country from Macon, Georgia to La Jolla, California.

It really works.

Watch the videos and let me know what you think…

Dear Friend,

Welcome to the second in a three part series on optimizing your website market.

Now last week we talked about converting leads into clients, and this week we’re going to talk about getting more leads from your current website visitors.

So next week we’re going to talk about getting more visitors to your website, and we’ll wrap up the series with our web clinic where I’ll show you how to put it all together. I’ve been getting lots of submissions for our web clinic, and if you’d like me to consider your website for the clinic, just send an email to marketingmonday@gmail.com. And I’ve got some great examples to choose from so far, and I think you’re going to get a lot out of it.

Okay, so let’s get right to it and talk about how to get more leads from your website.

Now I’m going to give you seven ideas here and I’d like you just to think about these as mindsets that you can adopt here, and there’s some tactics in here too, but mostly the things that we’re talking about right now are shifting your mind first, because you want to think about things a little bit differently and that will guide your actions.

Mindset 1: Know who’s coming to your site before they get there so you can be prepared for them when they arrive.

Now that’s a different little mindset for you, but what would you do if you knew that the next 100 visitors to your website were looking for a condo, or that they were looking for a town house, or a luxury home or a golf course home, or an investment property, or any single target market that you can think of? How would you approach your website differently if you knew that the next 100 visitors were all going to be looking for a very specific thing?

You know, I bet it would be much easier for you, wouldn’t it? I mean it would be much more relaxing that that was what’s going to happen, but often we try and make our website be multi-purpose, where you don’t want to leave anybody out, so you try and make the website apply to as many possible target markets as you can.

And I’m going to show you some different kind thinking this week, and the first mindset of planning for your target market ahead of time is going to really lead into next week where we start talking about how to attract the right people, because if you know what your website is set up to do, and you know who you’re trying to attract, that 1-2 combination is very powerful, and it’s going to lead to lots of more leads for you. You know, because if you know who’s coming to the site you’re able to optimise it for exactly what they are looking for.

Mindset 2: Realize your immediately viewable screen is the most valuable piece of real estate on your website.

You know, the question that you want to ask yourself is when you go to your website, and I would encourage you to do this, go to your website and what is the first thing that you see? You know if you know who your target market is, what they’re going to be thinking when they come to your website, would they say “Jackpot,” when they get there? Would they feel like “I’ve stumbled on the gold mine of gold mines for exactly what I’m looking for?” You know, would they say that? Would your target market say “This is exactly what I’m looking for?”

You know, whatever occupies that window when they arrive, the first things that they see that sets the tone for the whole experience. So if they come there and immediately everything starts to click into place they start feeling like “This is the place that I’m supposed to be,” that’s going to be a big help for you. You know, if your target is coming to the site and they’re looking for town houses and the first thing they see are pictures of town houses, and the first words they see are “Free information on how to buy lovely town homes in Winterhaven with zero down payment,” or “Lovely condos in Winterhaven,” whatever your target market is, the more things that you can get to click into place, to let them feel like “Yes you are in the right place. You’ve absolutely arrive, and this is the site that’s going to give you all the information you need to fulfil whatever your selfish desires are.”

That’s really what we’re saying here, because that’s the thing that your prospects have on their mind above everything else, is there own selfish desires. What you’re looking to do is aim for your website to be a perfect match between what they’re looking for and what they’re seeing when they come to your website.

Mindset 3: Make your website about THEM – not about you.

The most important thing that you can do is understand the difference between a lead generating site and a personal web page.

What we’re talking about here is not about your personal web page, it’s not about a page where it’s all about you, because they don’t care about you, your prospects care about what they care about. So your best course of action is for you to care about what they care about, and pretending you’re them will help you really get into that mindset. You know, a couple of big mistakes that I see in this regard, first thing is that the first thing that I see when I go to the web sites, and I’ve been going to a lot of them, everybody who sends in a request for the web clinic or a submission for the web clinic, I go and look at their site, and more often then not the language and the tone and the sense that I get when I go to look at these sites is “Welcome to my web site.” You see a big picture of you, the agent, front and centre, right there in the first viewable screen, often there’s more then one picture of you, you’ve got a big picture in the middle and then you’ve got another little picture off on the side, and the big telltale sign is when up in the navigation side on the left, if I see that the first button says “About me,” then it’s very crystal clear what the focus of this website is, you know?

You want to look at the language that you’re using and the imagery that you’re using when you come to your website. You want to get away from thinking that it’s yours, and you want to start thinking “You get,” instead of “I’ve got.” Now that’s a little bit of a different distinction for you here. Start thinking “You get,” instead of “I’ve got.” ‘Cause when you say “You get,” you can’t fill in the rest of that sentence without filling in a benefit. “You get a free report on how to buy lovely town houses in Winterhaven with zero down payment.” “You get access to the MLS so you can see all the new listings that are on the market right now.” “You get weekly updates of all the new town houses that come on the market.” “You get a Saturday tour of all the town houses that you want to see in Winterhaven.” See how just that language of saying “You get,” promises a big benefit, as opposed to “I’ve got.” When you say “I’ve got,” it focuses on you and not on your prospects, so you can’t help but fill in that “I’ve got,” statement with language that is not very benefit oriented. You know “I’ve got one of the largest real estate teams in Winterhaven.” That doesn’t matter. “I’ve got the backing of the largest franchise company in the United States.” That doesn’t mean anything. You know, when you start saying “You get,” you can’t help but focus on your prospects. So look at your website and start thinking about “How can I use that kind of language on my website?”

Mindset 4: Make an offer

You know so often we put up all these things on our website and we sit there and we expect that because it says “Email me,” or “Contact me,” that people are going to contact you. You know we’re not wired like that, we’re not wired to take the first step in any kind of social situation. You know we often force people into that position because we don’t make an offer, we want to appear sort of not pushy, if you want to say it like that. We want to appear that we’re being accommodating and that we’re here for them, but we’re really forcing them to take the first step, which is a big obstacle for most people. Here’s an example, here’s a story that I often tell, imagine if I brought you into my living room and I sat you down in the living room and I said to you “Hey, you know what? I’m really happy you’re here.

If you are hungry or thirsty there’s lots of stuff in the fridge, feel free to help yourself. I’ll be over here in this other room if you need me, just go ahead and call if you need anything.” Now how many of you would go and take something from my fridge? You know, you wouldn’t would you. Because it’s very, you know, it takes people out of their comfort zone, it’s not polite to ask. But then again the corollary to that is that it’s rude to turn somebody down. So you’ve got that as the big win.

Imagine now if I sat you down in the living room and I came out with a plate of freshly baked cookies, and I said to you “Would you like a cookie?” It would be very hard for you not to take the cookie because I’ve already got it here, I’m offering it to you, you can see the cookie, I want you to have the cookie, and it would be much more difficult for you to turn down the cookie then it would be for you to take one, so you’ll take it. Now you would never ask me, if I said “Hey, do you need anything, or would you like anything?” You’d never say “Would you go and bake me some cookies please?” Because we never want people to go out of their way for us. So the best thing that you can do on your website is treat it just like people are coming into your living room, and that you’re not just going to say “Contact me,” or “Email me,” or “Ask the realtor.”

Don’t make people do those things because that’s not how we’re naturally wired. Think about making an offer. You know, what kind of offers can you make? You can offer a free report by email. You could offer free updates of new listings when they come on the market. You could offer a free downloadable guide or e-book. You could offer to search properties. You could offer free hot list newsletter. You could offer a Saturday tour of the homes. You could offer a free seminar, or webinar or teleclass. You could offer free video tours. You could offer audio interviews with experts like a mortgage broker or a financial planner or a home inspector or a feng shui expert, what ever it is. You could offer audio interviews, you could offer a weekly pod cast, all of these things that you can offer with an exchange.

Mindset 5: Make it easy, easy, easy to take the first step.

You know, have you ever been to a website where in order to get any kind of information or a free report, you have to fill out this four page form with your blood type and your bank balance and your political preference, you know, it’s an obstacle.

It’s such an obstacle for people to fill out these forms, and that’s why so few people will fill out those forms. You know the easiest thing to start with is to make it low resistance. And the easiest and lowest resistance offer that you can make to start a dialogue with people is something that they can get in exchange for just their email address and their name. That’s it, it’s very, very easy, it’s very low resistant, and once they have left you their name and their email address, now you’ve got a way to continue a dialogue with them. So it’s the start of the relationship.

You know, one of the keys that you want to try is that instead of making all these individuals offers where they have to leave their name and email address to get any one of them, try bundling all your offers together so they get lots of stuff just in exchange for the one email address, not once for each thing. So if you’ve got a whole series of reports, rather then having people click on it and leave their name and email for each of the reports say “Get free access to all of these free reports,” and list all the title that you have, and then just put a free instant access where they can leave their name and their email address so that they can start that dialogue with you. You know, the more that you do this, the more that you put these offers right up there on that home page, you’re going to find that you see the number of people who start a relationship with you by email increase exponentially.

Mindset 6: Begin with the end in mind and always lead to the next step.

You know, even though they start out with just an email address in exchange for a free report, or in exchange for searching properties, know that the email is going to lead to a dialogue and the next offer.

You know, you have to start looking at this like a chess master, you have to start looking at this like knowing two, three, four moves ahead where you’re actually headed, and reverse engineering that this first offer of an email in exchange for a report on how to buy lovely town homes in Winterhaven with zero down payment is going to lead to a dialogue where you’re going to send people short, personal emails expecting a reply, where you’re going to lead them step by step to the next offer.

So somebody who’s asking for a free report on how to buy lovely town homes in Winterhaven with zero down, the next step might be asking them “Hey Dean, would you like a list of town homes you can buy in Winterhaven that are for sale right now that you can buy with zero down payment?” Or “Hey Dean, would you like to come on a Saturday tour of town homes in Winterhaven?” You know, all these things where you can engage people in a dialogue, and ask them, or make them offers, ask them if they would like a cookie. You know, ask them would they like an offer, would they like to come on this Saturday tour? Would they like to come to your open house this Sunday? Would they like to get a free list? Would they like for you to email them updates? Would they like your weekly newsletter? You know, all of these things, don’t leave it up to them to ask for help, offer it ahead of time.

Mindset 7: Lather, rinse and repeat.

You know, once you know the formula for turning visitors to your website into leads, you know, why not do it again and again and again?

Why not do it for a bunch of different target markets? You know, if you know the formula is that when people come to your website that the first think you want to do is make an offer where they will their name and their email address, and then once they leave their name and email address you continue and start a dialogue with them so that they’ll share the desires of their heart, who they are, what they’re looking for, the kind of house and the price range and the area, all the kind of things that you would need to help them, once they do that now you’re ready to engage them in a relationship where they can meet with you face to face, once you know that whole formula and you’ve got all the components of it working, you know, it’s easy for you to duplicate, its easy for you to do it in other target markets.

You know, so you could have one just for town homes, you could have one for condos, you could have one for investment properties. Any target market that you can think of, once you know how the make the basic formula work you can apply it to any target market that you choose.

So that’s it for this week, tune in next time and we’re going to talk about how to get more visitors to your website. And I’m going to talk about how to get more visitors to your website without spending a ton of money, and without depending on the search engines. So tune in next time and we’ll talk about how to get more visitors to your website.

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SPECIAL INTERVIEW with Jay Kinder – #2 Coldwell Banker Agent in the world.

651 transactions and over $2.6 Million in 2009

BONUS: Video with Jay  “how to make $250,000 THIS year with zero expenses”

>Click Here for Video

Dean Jackson

Hello everybody, welcome to the marketingmonday.com live Podcast.  My name is Dean Jackson, and we truly are live today, I’ve got a special guest with us, my friend Jay Kinder from Lawton Oklahoma, that international real estate hot bed you’ve all heard about.  So Jay, welcome.

Jay Kinder

Well thank you, Dean.

Dean Jackson

Now I want to give people a little bit of background on who you are, so that it’ll set a little context for some of the things we’re going to talk about, so I’m going to ask you to brag about yourself a little bit here, so we can establish who you are.  How long have you been doing real estate first off?

Jay Kinder

Well I’m going into my thirteenth year now.

Dean Jackson

How old were you when you started?

Jay Kinder

Nineteen, 19 years old.

Dean Jackson

So I was 21 when I started, so we both have that in common, starting young.  So let’s talk a little bit about you, you’ve gone into your thirteenth year, what were some of your numbers from last year, what kind of operation are you running over there?

Jay Kinder

We had one of our best years ever.  We didn’t eclipse our best year, but we had, as far as profit goes we just dialed things in pretty good.  We ended up with 651 transactions in 2009, over $2.6million in total gross commission income into the company, so that was a pretty big year coming off of a pretty slow 2008 I guess you would say.

Dean Jackson

Yeah exactly.  Now you’re with Coldwell Banker right there in Lawton, right.  Where do you rank in terms of all of the Coldwell Banker agents right now?

Jay Kinder

Our team has ranked in the Top 10 for Coldwell Banker for the last I don’t know, probably six or seven years maybe, maybe a little bit longer than that even.  But this year it looks like somewhere around Number 2, Number 2 or Number 3, I don’t think we knocked off the Number 1 spot.  But I kind of like being not Number 1, because that means I’ve always got something to work towards. 

Dean Jackson

So the Avis of real estate agents and the Coldwell Banker, you try harder.

Jay Kinder

You try harder, that’s it.

Dean Jackson

How many agents are with Coldwell Banker?

Jay Kinder

As far as the whole franchise, or just our office?

Dean Jackson

No as far as the whole franchise, you’re Number 2 out of how many?

Jay Kinder

There was I think 120,000 last year, so probably maybe a little bit fewer than that, but probably close to 120,000 I would say.

Dean Jackson

Top of the top of the top.   So that’s exciting, and to see that you’re in a business that’s still growing, when everything else nationally might sort of characterised as slowing down, you’re still being full steam ahead.  Let’s talk a little bit about this 12 year journey, to go from zero at 19 years old, to being the Number 2 or 3 agent out of 100,000 agents, and doing $2.6million, what kind of is the trajectory and the path that you took, going from 19 to where you are today, do you remember when you first got started?

Jay Kinder

Yeah absolutely, I think if you had to draw this out on a graph, it would look like I was lost, back and forth this way, that way, and up here and back over here, and it certainly wasn’t a straight line to where we’re at.  I guess I would say probably my claim to fame is always been I wasn’t the smartest kid in class, but I always sat next to him.  So that was probably what’s propelled me to this level, over the years I’ve never stopped learning.  And at the very beginning, I think probably the thing that really probably was working to my advantage more than anything, and I got this a lot, was the first thing was I was really enthusiastic, I didn’t really know why, but I was always excited, I always kind of enjoyed what I was doing, when I was meeting with people.  And then I think secondarily it’s just I didn’t know what an average agent was supposed to do and what was the limits that were really supposed to be set upon this industry, in terms of averages and stuff like that, I just didn’t believe that there was a ceiling, and I just didn’t know any better.

Dean Jackson

And then what a 19-year-old especially is supposed to be able to do, right.

Jay Kinder

Sure.

Dean Jackson

So what was your strategy when you got started?  So you’re 19, I know you’ve got some sort of family background in real estate, but what was your experience when you first got started, what was your strategy to get off the ground?

Jay Kinder

Looking back it’s kind of interesting trying to remember what it was like in the early on days.  I know that I didn’t sell a whole bunch of houses right off the bat, I think it took me three months to close on my first deal, and I had to have some help with that one.  So I didn’t just naturally just jump right in and start doing deals, it was kind of an uphill battle.  But the very beginning was, interestingly enough I took my Dale Carnegie course which really helped me I guess in terms of kind of coming out of my shell a little bit, and I went into, taking my GOI, my very first year, and started just really trying to educate myself, because I wasn’t going to college at this point, so I figured I probably ought to learn, and if it wasn’t for my dad; actually nobody in the company, it’s actually a company that we represented a few REO properties, and nobody wanted the listings in the entire company, they were like $40,000, $30,000 listings, and I was like ‘I’ll take them’.  So I picked up a few listings, and kind of had a little bit of fun with that, and did a few deals that way.  And then started learning from; actually the guy, the very first conference I went to was Roger Butcher, if you’ve ever heard of Roger Butcher.  He’s been around, I’ve got his cassette tapes still to this day, and I just started using kind of a 30-day marketing plan, and started building this presentation for listings, and I kind of started going after for sale by owner and expireds, and the only opportunity that kind of really were coming my way, and doing open houses every Sunday, just kind of doing what these mentors told me to do to be successful.

Dean Jackson

Do you remember, because the funny thing is that the very first real estate conference that I ever went to was a Roger Butcher conference.

Jay Kinder

No way.

Dean Jackson

No it’s the truth, and I have never been to any kind of seminar like that, I was young and I’d never been to a ballroom with a few hundred people in it, kind of thing, it’s all new. So I bought all the tapes and listened to them, and the funny thing is I remember immediately going back to the office and I happened to be on floor duty that night, and it was a Wednesday night, which was when the local real estate paper, the weekly paper came out with the real estate section, so that was always like the prime time to be on the floor duty, because everybody back then, this was 1989, and there was no internet, so the Wednesday paper was like the Bible for people looking for a home.  And they would get home from work and they’d open up the paper and they’d circle the ones that they’re interested in, and then they’d start calling.  And a technique that I learned from Roger Butcher, was to tell them to get a piece of paper and write down your name and number, and then tell them about the house that they were calling on, and then I would ask them the question, ‘how would you like it if this was the last phone call that you had to make?’  Tell them, I said ‘I know you’ve got the Wednesday paper there, what other houses have you got circled, because I’ve got all the information right here, and I’d be happy to tell you about them’.  And the guy who called in, he really liked that approach, and the next day I went out and listed his 5 Acres on the outskirts of town, he was going to move into town.  And just from having; and I think this is the most important thing and it’s probably helped for you too, is knowing what to say, just having a new skill, a new ability.

Jay Kinder

Yes, absolutely.   Once you find something that works, you just latch onto it.

Dean Jackson

So your first year you’re doing open houses and learning the ropes with some REOs, and what kind of strategies did you do, advancing there, you were kind of learning and evolving, and what were some of the next things that you tried?

Jay Kinder

I think probably, it’s kind of a blur to me now just going back and looking at what strategies.  I know one thing I wouldn’t have probably called it a strategy, it was just a lot of hit and miss.  I started to really enjoy getting listings, and I’m pretty competitive, so even as a kid in high school I was very competitive and stuff like that.  In fact I know what drove me, one of the things that drove me, we used to have a star board on the wall in the office, and there was this one guy, Tom King, that always had stars all the way across, he was Number 1 in the company, and he always was.  And I just wanted more stars than him, and I didn’t care what I had to do to get more stars, I wanted more stars than him.

Dean Jackson

So what did you do to get a star, did you get a listing?

Jay Kinder

Well a listing, a sale, a listing sold we’d get a yellow star, and then with the referral into rental management I got a star too or something like that, so any way I could get a listing.  And that seemed to be the easiest way for me to get stars, and I enjoyed it, I loved meeting with people, and again it was taking a bit of what I learned from Roger Butcher to say to expires and too for sale by owners, at the time it was better than anything else I had learned and it was working.  And for sale by owners it’s so easy to set up appointments with, they show houses to just about anybody.  So we just started trying to get listings, and I enjoyed that.  And as I started to build a listing inventory, and calls would come in, it just started kind of working that way I guess you could say, and I enjoyed it a lot, so that’s kind of what I focussed on was just getting more listings, I guess I would call that my strategy now.

Dean Jackson

Yeah well that’s interesting isn’t it.  And I love the fact that what drove you was getting the stars, because I think that’s such a common thing, is that we don’t have the; we didn’t have stars in our office, but we did have a big deal board, where every time you got a listing or a sale you got to write it up on the board, and it’s something where it was that recognition.  And I think it was, I forget who told me, somebody said that Napoleon said that what changed his life was realising that men would be willing to die for a blue ribbon, and it’s interesting how we all crave that recognition, it’s funny.  So you’re going along and you’re doing the for sale by owners, are you kind learning the moves on that and developing your approach to it?

Jay Kinder

Well I didn’t have anything else to do, so follow-up wasn’t a problem at that time.  And I always followed up with them on Mondays, on the days that they were disappointed from not selling it over the weekend.  I had a marketing plan, one thing that I had, and I think a lot of agents didn’t have at the time was I had pre-printed; I went down to Staples and bought this paper with the fancy little borders on it, and I would go online and I would try to screen capture different pictures and stuff and put it into this presentation, I had no skill set whatsoever for doing stuff like that, but I tried to make this presentation, and pretty much just did what Roger Butcher or any of the other people that I had bought books or tapes from, and went to courses with, and just took some of that information and put it into a presentation.  I carried Roger Butcher’s little 30-day marketing plan, little binder thing that he sold me, and I just tried to perfect that.  And as I would go to more and learn more, I think I bought Walter Sanford’s stuff, and I think I bought Rick DeLuca, and the next one would have been probably Mike Ferry.  I started taking a little bit from each one, and I was like ‘oh I like this, this works really well’, or I would try something and it would work and I would just stick with it.  But that was the difference maker for me was, and I’d always call and find out, I was kind of amazed that people would list with me, just because I looked like I should be mowing their yard, not them paying me thousands of dollars to sell their house.  But I’d ask them that question, and they would say ‘you know what, you were real enthusiastic, and we just really believed that you can sell our house’.  And I used to beat some of the top agents in the market, on nothing more than a really good presentation, and enthusiasm and excitement.  And I still carry that to this day because I really love what I do and am passionate about it, and I think that’s something that you have to maintain and you have to have in order to be successful in anything.

Dean Jackson

What was the first thing, did you come to a point where you would run into a little bit of a feeling where you kind of realised ‘I can’t continue to do this just on my own’, where it was getting a little busier for you, can you recall what was the turbo fuel for you?

Jay Kinder

Yeah, definitely there was a point at which it got to the point I couldn’t keep up.  And it’s really kind of crazy looking back at how many deals that I did, without any buyer agents or anything, I just didn’t know any of that stuff, I didn’t know anything about building a team, and anything like that, I just knew the level of service that I wanted to provide to my clients was not possible, or if it was I certainly couldn’t communicate it back to them what I was doing.  And it got to a point where I just wasn’t able to stay in touch with them, I wasn’t getting back to my calls, and I felt bad, but you have a deal and someone’s wanting to list a house, or someone’s wanting to go look at houses, do you sit there in the office and make your calls, or do you go write up another one.  And there was a certain point, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, that I brought on my very first assistant, and that poor girl, I still feel sorry for her this day, because I just dumped everything on her plate that I didn’t like doing.  And I started to really just delegate the things that either a) I stunk at and shouldn’t have been doing in the first place, and b) I didn’t like doing, and now looking back I also delegated the things that’s really not productive in terms of dollar productivity per hour, activities that I should have been working on in the first place.  So just started delegating things off to my very first assistant, and that allowed me to be on more appointments and working with more buyers or whatever the case may be.  But whatever it was I was out there in the field, not writing ads, or shuffling papers.

Dean Jackson

And what did that do for your business, would you say that there was an immediate, that that was a trajectory changer, that you were able to handle more because of that, or was it a little bit longer before that started really having an impact?

Jay Kinder

No, and I really wish I could go back and watch this whole thing kind of evolve.  But I went from, I think it was my second year in the business I went from 39 transactions to 72 transactions or something like that.  And that was a pretty good sized growth and I had delegated quite a bit.  And I remember coming back from a Coldwell Banker conference, I was on the aeroplane and I was looking at what I’d done the last year, and I’d been through every one of those little classes at the conference, and had notes everywhere, and I remember my parents were sitting in front of me.  And my dad, he’s a broker, and he never really did a whole lot of transactions himself, he just kind of has always been a broker, and done a few deals here and there.  And I remember showing him that the President’s Premiere for Coldwell Banker was 110 transactions; no it was 100 transactions exactly, and I had broke down this whole formula, how many listings I had to take, because only half of them would sell, and how many buyers I’d have to work with, and this that and the other, and I wrote this whole plan, and I said ‘this is all I have to do to do 100 units’.  And they were like; I remember they looked at me like I was crazy, but they were like ‘okay’.    I saw it though, I saw that there was a plan, I knew what I had to do, now it was just a matter of; I saw it, all I had to do was just make them see it, at that point.

Dean Jackson

You know what’s interesting, I was telling somebody else about this, and kind of talk about you for a second.  Because when we were together in Atlanta, the one thing that struck me about you, is when we were, and you may not even remember this, but when we were at lunch, and we were talking about a website, just giving you an idea of something that you could do about a website, and I remember being there and you’re right beside me at kiddie corner there, and I remember immediately, like within 10 minutes of that idea being planted in your head, you had already implemented it and were already getting results from that.

Jay Kinder

I do remember that.

Dean Jackson

You do remember that, and I was just like, I thought there’s a guy that, a lot of people are in this environment where they’re learning, and they hear a new idea and they write it in their notebook, then they go back and put it in the pile of all the other ideas that they have in the other notebooks from the other conferences they’ve been to, and here you are right there on your smart phone, implementing the idea you’d heard literally seven minutes ago.  And I think that says a lot about you as a doer, and somebody who I think one of the characteristics of your success is that speed of implementation.

Jay Kinder

I couldn’t agree more.  The only thing I would say as a caveat to that is, and I hear a lot of different folks around the industry that say ‘you’re a typical conference-goer’ or whatever, and I went to all of them.  There’s not anybody that doesn’t have my money – I have bought everything that you can buy.  I’ve taken a little bit from everybody.  There’s not anything that I wouldn’t have bought; the challenge I think sometimes becomes focus, and I think I’ve learned as I’ve gone on, there’s so much good information, and maybe it’s just me but I certainly am not smart enough to remember all the greatest ideas that I’ve heard, so it’s probably going to get forgotten if I don’t start and plan how to implement the idea.  And that’s probably the biggest difference between success and failure in a real estate agent, is not just the innovation or the ideas, but the implementation of the ideas, the doing it, just doing it, that’s all that it takes sometimes for you to come over the edge and the success is right there.  And I agree with you on that, the implementation is something that is key for anyone to be successful in real estate, but saying focussed and planning and looking at the things that are the lowest cost to implement, the easiest to implement, and then that give you the highest return, and focussing on those things first, makes for really giant leaps in your business.  And it was three or four years almost consecutively I had doubled my business and doubled my business and doubled my business.

Dean Jackson

I was just going to say that, I was going to ask you then coming from, so you went from 30 transactions to 72 transactions, you had the realisation that hey all I need to do is get to 100 and I can be at that award level, and we know how much those awards motivate you – so how long was it from the time you had that realisation to the time you actually got to 100 transactions?

Jay Kinder

The Coldwell Banker conferences are in February, so I was trying to figure the dates out.  So if I had done the 70 whatever transactions, that year I completed; the very next year, the same year that I was at the conference I went to 131 that year, and then the next year was my blockbuster year, 233 transactions.  And as I say it was my blockbuster year, I guess I say that because that was where I really became a brand, and started to become a brand in my marketplace, and started to become well known and been around a few years, started to get a few repeat clients and stuff like that.  Then I took off another, doubling virtually in the next couple of years as well.  But that year I didn’t have any buyer agents, and I think I had four staff that I had grown to that year, and I hired my very first buyer agents at the end of that year, I think it was 2000 or 2001, 2001 I think it was.  So I was out in the field running around like a chicken with my head cut off doing transactions.  Certainly going backwards I would; what I would change is I would have put systems in place, because man, my boat had a lot of leaks.  It had lots of leaks.  I still apologise to this day to anyone who did business with me during that year, because I’m pretty sure I probably didn’t take as good of care of you as I would have liked to.

Dean Jackson

Now was there a realisation at some point where, did you start employing some marketing at any point along this trajectory, or did you start realising hey I can leverage myself a little bit with some marketing or some money spent on my business here, what came into play there?

Jay Kinder

Yeah, there was; during the year that I went up into the 200s as far as units that year, was the year that I had started doing some marketing.  I actually had taken out an ad in the newspaper, I was the only agent at that time that started that whole idea.  I started testing some different things.  Again I’m in a small town, I actually started testing radio, and actually I still have the same radio spots, the same position on the radio ever since I started that back in I think 2001.  And that was what really truly started to build my brand was radio.

Dean Jackson

That’s really interesting because, I guess we talked about before that you’re kind of on an island there in Lawton, you’re surrounded by a lot of farmland, so you’ve kind of got a self-contained kind of market there.

Jay Kinder

Yeah, I wish it was an island, but it’s definitely not an island.

Dean Jackson

Yeah, you know what I mean, that whole idea of it’s surrounded by farmland.

Jay Kinder

Surrounded by nothing.

Dean Jackson

Yeah I started up in Toronto in one of the suburbs of Toronto, and everything kind of blends right into the next town, it’s like the one town one side says ‘welcome to Mississauga’ and on the back it says ‘welcome to Brampton’.  So it’s like you’re going back and forth there.  Now what does it look like now for you in terms of your team and the kinds of roles that people have in your business right now?

Jay Kinder

Wow, it’s completely; I’ll say it’s amazing how much I didn’t know.  This whole set up now is, I have much better systems in place, I have much better people in place, I’ve learned a lot about hiring, I’ve learnt a lot about firing, I’ve learned a lot about pretty much every aspect of the business, really taking care of your customers, just better systems.  I think that’s probably one of the main things that we really do truly have a handle on now is that we’re not people dependent, we’re more systems dependent.   I have a great supporting cast around me that helps to leverage me.  And my day consists basically in terms of real estate, when you’re working in the business – I have a very, very strict schedule, it’s almost, I’m kind of proud of that, because I have always been one to just run and jump all over the place like a ball ricocheting.

Dean Jackson

Let’s talk about that then, what is your schedule, what does that look like right now?

Jay Kinder

Basically, I have built into my schedule from 7 o’clock to 9 o’clock on Monday through Thursday is what I call flex time, and that’s the time that I prepare for appointments, sometimes if I’m going to be reviewing some kind of a new product that I want to check into, or working on something that needs to be worked on, I’ll build it into that timeframe.  I try to go to the gym every morning and be at the office by 7.00am, it’s not like clockwork I can tell you that.  But that’s my goal, at least to make it at least three times a week into the gym.  So from 7.00am to 9.00am so there’s that flex time, any calls or anything that I need to have with anyone I might try to schedule into these flex times, before the day begins. The mornings are filled with impact zone meetings, which my impact zones for my company are anything really that drives the bottom line, anything that drives what our mission and core values and the things that we’re trying to accomplish, I call them pillars for my business.  And I think we have nine impact zone meetings, not all of them are weekly, some of them are monthly.  And they range from our short sell department meetings, I have one employee in the short sell department that manages all my short sells and those processes, and an REO meeting, I have our closing department meetings, I have a financial meeting obviously, I have a company-generated business meeting – I’m missing quite a few important meetings there, but those are all scheduled in the mornings.  And I schedule those meetings, the listing department, all of those meetings are scheduled weekly, Monday through Thursday, generally before 11.30am or 12.00pm, I’m in and out of those meetings, I think our recruiting and retention meeting is one of them, and a couple of others maybe.  But that’s when I’m working on the business, I’m truly working and I’m taking everything else, and marketing is my biggest one, I nearly forgot a good one.  But those are the things that – how do you forget that one, right?  But those are the things that I do in the morning time, and I meet with the particular people that are involved, along with my CEO that really runs this place, John Kitchens, and we meet in those meetings and take notes, and then we deliver action plans and action steps to implement things and to get things done, and then we follow those on project worksheets every week to see where we’re at with things, and prioritising, and keeping every one of those pillars moving.  And then the afternoons, I plan off for lunch, I didn’t used to do that, I used to work straight through lunch, and I still do that most days, but when I can I take off lunch and I’ll try to go to lunch with one of my agents or someone in the staff or team, or maybe recruit or whatnot.  From about 1.30pm to 3.00pm is more flex time for me, again returning calls, handle anything that needs to be handled, anything that needs to be scheduled in that flex time has to be approved by me.  And the rule in my office is two things, either you have to have my signature if I bought something, and you have to have eye contact if you put something in my schedule during my flex time, because if you just walk in my office and you’re talking to the back of my head, there’s a really good chance that I didn’t hear anything that you said.    But that’s it.  And then from 3.00pm, some days I allow 7.00pm appointments, but 3.00pm, 4.00pm, 5.00pm and 6.00pm are listing appointments only, or a meeting with sellers.  So if I have a seller that I need to get a price reduction on and they’re coming in the office I’ll meet with them only during the hours of 3.00pm, 4.00pm, 5.00pm, 6.00pm, and sometimes 7.00pm, that’s Monday through Thursday, and Friday is pretty much planned time off or just kind of whatever I want to do Fridays, and different things like that, and then weekends off as well for the most part.

Dean Jackson

So basically a four day work week, but a pretty structured four day work week, pretty focussed with built in attention, right.

Jay Kinder

I’ll tell you this, it whips my butt the last couple of weeks.  It sounds like it’s all perfectly structured, but there’s probably 15 files on my desk right now I’m looking at right now that need my attention, in terms of getting them listed.  And I leverage myself so well that I can only do listing appointments, but the problem is my head listing agent that sets the appointments, that’s all she does all day long, she set 77 listing appointments last month, so there’s just not enough time to go on that many, and I don’t have all of the systems perfectly in place for that second appointment in the office, where they come back into the office to do all of those appointments myself – I thought I was super-human, and I’m certainly not, I figured that out in the last couple of weeks.

Dean Jackson

Seventy-seven appointments.  And what do you do, just out of curiosity, in the times if you don’t have a listing appointment scheduled at 3.00pm, 4.00pm, 5.00pm, 6.00pm or 7.00pm, at one of those points, what do you do in that time.

Jay Kinder

Usually something else will get scheduled in there.  The way my schedule is, and I used Top Producer, just for lack of any other better options at this point, but it works pretty well for most of the things that we’re doing.  I block that time off completely, and Dina who is my inside sales agent, she’s the one setting all those appointments, she has the ability to fill in appointments at any point, so she’s kind of the only person that really messes with my schedule.  And then sometimes there’ll be something that comes up, and something that’s a problem in the short sale department for instance, and it’s a deal where I need to get involved, and we’ll schedule that to fill that space.  There is never…

Dean Jackson

You might be out at your 3 o’clock appointment, and while you’re there she fills up your 6 o’clock appointment even?

Jay Kinder

No, that happened, I used to happen and I would ghost the 6 o’clock appointment because I didn’t know, or I didn’t check my schedule or my email, so if it’s within 24 hours of time of the appointment, then the eye contact rule comes into play.

Dean Jackson

I love these little systems, what a great way to, like you said being sort of distractible, like most entrepreneurs are, and able to follow shiny objects everywhere they go, this has been a great way for you to keep yourself focussed, nothing like a meeting that’s scheduled, where other people are sitting there waiting for you, to keep you on task, right.

Jay Kinder

There were times definitely in the last three years that we actually; actually we do, I think we still have it somewhere, I just try not to be late.  But I used to have to put money in a jar whenever I would be late to appointments with staff, just because I was always running and gunning and always late.  In fact we still set to this day set my appointments, and Dina has a very specific script she uses, she says ‘Jay will be coming off of another appointment, so he’ll be there between 4.00pm and 4.15pm’.  So I’m never late now.  That kind of helps that. So it’s definitely hard to stay on schedule, and you’ve got to be careful not to plan things too closely, because you certainly can be late.

Dean Jackson

That’s what the flex time helps you kind of recalibrate and get right on track again.  So you go on a lot of listing appointments then?

Jay Kinder

It’s pretty crazy actually.

Dean Jackson

That’s the key role when you’re working in the business, is being on listing appointments.

Jay Kinder

This is the thing Dean, I have never found anything that makes more money than the listing appointment, because you look at the amount of time that I spend, and I don’t spend more than an hour in the very first meeting with a seller, and I might spend another hour total with them between maybe the closing, and I’m very seldom involved in the offer presentation, I have a listing coordinator that can manage it, she’s a licensed agent, and she’s been with me for about five or six years, she presents all my offers, she’s a certified negotiation expert, she is very good at what she does.  And I explain that, I build that into the presentation as a benefit.  And they understand that, so they don’t expect to see me, they don’t expect for me to be the one that calls, I give them my cell phone, I tell them ‘you can call me anytime 24/7, and I will answer any question for you, but here is what you should expect.  If you do call me, I may not get back to you right away, if you need something right away you should talk to Carla in my office’.  And I just manage their expectations, it’s a lot easier than you think, or especially when you present it as a benefit – you’re not probably going to get a hold of me during the day, very easily if you need an answer to something.  But that time that I pretty much whittled away everything that I do including pulling up the comparables and getting all the graphs and the reports and the package and everything ready – the seller counselling interview is done by Dina, everything is all a process.  And I literally, and I use the dentist, my dentist has a very good system that I think, kind of like unconsciously I may have copied, but he would come in and he would poke his head into the office while I was there with galls of stuff in my mouth and everything and he’d be like ‘hey’ and he’d come in and do his deal, then he’d go to the next office down the hall, and the next one and the next one and the next one, and I could hear him doing all these, working, and he’s got like eight people he’s working on at one time.  And he didn’t make the call and make sure that I was going to be there on time, and he didn’t clean up all the tools, and he didn’t do a lot of the process that kept things going there, but he did the surgery, he came his job and moved on.  And it’s such a great system, and you wouldn’t expect anything different, and I think that it works very well in real estate, getting the things off of your plate that are not the most productive.  For me the average the commission, even in little Lawton Oklahoma, $120,000 deal, it’s over, with the commission that we charge, it’s in excess of $4,000 to $5,000, sometimes $6,000, just on the listings I commission for a couple of hours – there’s nothing I can do that’s going to make more than $3,000 an hour, I can guarantee you that.

Dean Jackson

Right, exactly.  How many listing appointments would you estimate that you’ve been on in your whole career here?

Jay Kinder

Oh gosh.  We tried to figure this out the other day, and it’s probably well in excess of 4,000, maybe 5,000 appointments.  It’s got to be somewhere in there.  And who knows.

Dean Jackson

Would you say that you have learned a few things about being on a listing..?

Jay Kinder

Yeah I’ve learned just about everything, and if not, like I said I’m not the smartest guy, but when you go on that many appointments, you just start to figure things out.  It is absolutely the easiest thing to do once you have done it so many times, and you just kind of know a good method to go by.  There is a lot of things I have learned over the years, but that’s probably the thing that I’ve mastered the best is just understanding that process, and the best way to work through it and get the result that you want, and get the listing.

Dean Jackson

So what do you think the top two or three things that sellers want are, so your experience of doing that, what do you think that they really want, and how do you ensure that they get that?

Jay Kinder

The sad thing is that, and I don’t really know how to answer this, so the sad thing is is that the seller doesn’t really know what they need to…

Dean Jackson

They don’t even know what they don’t know, yeah.

Jay Kinder

Yeah, it’s unfortunately because I almost would say my presentation, a lot of it goes, if I could just walk in and give you my advice, your doctor doesn’t have to trick you or befriend you and become your best friend and go through a whole bunch of market research on what he’s going to do whenever he opens your mouth and starts working on you, you pretty much take just whatever you tell me to do is what you should do, you’re a doctor, right.  So a real estate agent is not that way, they want to believe that their house is worth more than it is, they want to believe that they have better options than what are right tin front of them, and it takes a lot longer sometimes for me to get to the point where I give advice, because I have to, Number 1 they have to know, like and trust me and believe in me before they’re ever going to listen to me and listen to my advice, and then I have to become an expert – I have to absolutely demonstrate that my knowledge of the market is so much better than anyone they’re going to speak to, so they don’t make that mistake of everything sounds good, they’re all excited and everything, and then you call back and they listed with someone else.  Those are probably two big things that I have to spend a lot of time on, and then going over before, and especially within the days of short sales now, I take all the short sale appointments because I know that no one can explain it better than me, and I just don’t feel comfortable – even if I’m not going to list the house, I do not feel comfortable without having gone through all the options for 30 minutes and explaining what would happen if they do decide to lease, what are the real costs, what is going to happen four months, three years from now when they want to sell that house, that they have to kick the renter out, do the repairs, and it sits on the market and they’re paying $1,000 a month for five months until it sells, and while they were doing the repairs, and it’s got to come out of pocket.  They don’t think about all those things, so I’ve got to paint that whole picture so they see it, and then okay now will you listen to me about the short sale, because this is probably going to be your best solution.  And then they listen.  Otherwise they’re like ‘oh no, I’ll just put it on the market with so and so, they said they could sell it for $30,000 more’, and it’s ridiculous.  But it’s sad, but with sellers you really truly have to follow those steps – if not, what I feel like, and I hope that every real estate agent is the same way, is that I feel like it’s my job to spend as much time as I have to to educate them, because I know that I’m going to give them the best advice.  I don’t know that the next person coming through the door will, but I know that I can.  So it’s my due diligence to spend the time and go through and build a rapport with them, become their friend, understand the situation, really demonstrate that I understand the marketplace and what’s going on out there and what’s real and not real, really demonstrate what they’re going to need to do to sell their home for the most money and in the timeframe that they said is important, so they don’t have more stress in their life.  They just don’t know what happens.  I asked a seller the other day, he said he wanted to be sold, and he wasn’t highly motivated, but he wanted to put his house on the market and he wanted to have it sold no more than a few months kind of deal, and I said ‘what happens if you own this house in October?’  And he looked at me kind of funny, and I said ‘if it hasn’t sold by October, what would you do?’ And he’s like ‘oh well it’s got to sell by then’, because that’s five months longer than he ever even dreamed of selling the house.  And so he mentally, I took him to a place mentally where he was very uncomfortable, and I said ‘what does it feel like?’  Or especially in the summertime like if you’re listing in the winter and you’re talking about mowing the grass in the spring – whoa, they don’t think that far ahead, so that decision of over pricing or that decision of doing something other than what I’m advising, could very well cost you making an October payment.  And that’s that pain that they need to feel unfortunately, not in a bad way, but they need to understand that that’s a very real possibility, that they could be making an October payment.

Dean Jackson

I call that pushing the accelerator pedal and going forward six months, and saying what does it look like here if we are still in this situation.  That kind of thing that you learned and are able to do naturally now, has come from all the experience of having done thousands of listing appointments.  Now you’ve got that knowledge, you take that with you no matter what.  One of the questions I always ask people, if I were for some reason, Lawton was out of the question, you were run out of Lawton and you couldn’t do business in Lawton, and you had to move up the road to Broken Arrow, which is the same population as Lawton, and we dropped you in there with no team, you don’t know anybody, it’s just you right now, how quickly do you think you could get back to the level that you’re at now?  It took you 12 years to get there the first time.

Jay Kinder

That’s a good question.  To get to where I’m at now I don’t know how many years it would take, and there’s the question of would I really do this all again?  I think I could do it a lot faster, but I think I could probably monetise my business better than I did during the building it to this point.  But without a doubt, we both know the answer to this question, the thing that I; the most valuable thing, and I say this all the time, you could strip away everything from me, as far as my business goes, but the one thing that’s the most valuable and I would never want to lose, is the knowledge, it’s the skill, because mastering that skill has allowed me to get where I’m at.  And if I go to another market, and it’s only because I’ve been mastering this skill over and over and over, going to conferences, going to places, role playing, listening to the CDs, learning it and learning it and learning it, still to this day, I’m still running my credit card every week for something, just trying to gain more knowledge about anything that has to do with anything, looking outside the industry now even more than ever.  And that’s what I take with me, and that’s what’s going to be what builds me back up.  And real quickly what I would do is I would get a presentation put together, and I would have a lot of the documentation, and the same system that I have now in terms of market, I would start learning the market, I would do everything I could to learn as much as I could about every house on the market, every sale going over the last two years.  Broker Metrics is a great product for agents and brokers for graphs and statistics and stuff like that, I love that program, it’s amazing.  You can put up so many graphs, you could make anybody think that you’re a genius just by having all this market research done.  It’s amazing, but it’s really good stuff, and then when you start really to understanding it and learning it, it’s just incredible how you use it.  But that’s what I would do first.  And then obviously, no budget, the first thing I would be going after is a for sale by owner and expireds, they’re free, they raise their hand.  And I say this all the time too, for sale by owner and expireds are the easiest thing to go after, there’s nothing else that you’ll ever do marketing dollar wise that will put you in front of, percentage wise, as many people that are motivated.  So if you had to mail to people or anything that you had to do to spend money on, you’re going to reach a whole lot more people, but how do you find 100 people that have already pretty much raised their hand and said ‘I’m interested in selling’.  Expireds and for sale by owners are waving the flag saying ‘hey look at me, I want to sell my home’.  And a lot of agents they don’t do it – just do it, just go out there and make it fun and just go out there and just try something, try anything.  And once you get one and you get the taste, it’s just like man this is so much easier than I thought it was going to be, and then you just go after it.

Dean Jackson

It’s funny you said something about making it fun, and how a lot of times people, they won’t go and put themselves out of their comfort zone to go and talk to a for sale by owner, or call an expired, yet they don’t think anything of going to the golf course and being frustrated about their game, if you’re looking at it it’s no different, where it’s a game and you’re with other people, it’s a cool mind set to have when you’re looking at it, just look at it with fascination and not frustration.

Jay Kinder

Yeah, that’s how I look at golf too though.  Golf is the most frustrating sport on the planet, even basketball I can hit 7/10 free throws left-handed, golf I can’t hit the ball down the fairway 1/10 times.  But it’s just one slight little minute change in degree that crushes the ball down the fairway.  And that’s all it is in learning the process of working with expireds or anything, it’s a skill, it’s just a matter of mastering it, changing just a little bit, just enough to nail it, and that’s when the reward comes.  It’s just with golf it doesn’t seem to come often enough for me.

Dean Jackson

And you over the years, that’s the thing, developing the ability to know what to say, how to say it, and when to say it.

Jay Kinder

Exactly.

Dean Jackson

Well Jay, I told you we’d say on for about 30 minutes, we’re coming up on an hour now.  That’s great, I think there’s a lot of learning here. What would you say in summary of, take you on a journey back to your 12 years, or 13 years, what would you say to people right now who may be struggling, maybe haven’t figured it out yet, what kind of encouragement would you give people?

Jay Kinder

The one thing that I think is out of; there’s so many things that you can latch onto that are going to help take you to success, but the one thing that you have to have is, you have to have your own why, and deep down inside you have to have a reason that you wanted to do this, you have to have a reason to want to succeed, and go and find that.  Go and find out what it is that really drives you, what it is that makes you want to achieve success, and hopefully you’ll love this industry, you’re passionate about it, even if it’s not, the market may not be what you want it to be, adapt, learn what other agents are doing and implement, and set goals, build a plan, and just do it.  Just make it happen, follow your dream.  This is no secret, like I said I certainly didn’t invent anything ingenious here in this marketplace, I just learnt…

Dean Jackson

But you do have the advantage of being in that international real estate hot bed of Lawton, Oklahoma.

Jay Kinder

Yeah.  Unfortunately if you’re just not in; I really don’t want to name my marketplace, I don’t want a bunch of realtors moving here just to get into this market.  For all the agents that used to make fun of me because of my average sell price, I think we’re about even now, so I don’t get to sell $600,000 homes, in fact there’s not a home on the market above I think $650,000 in my entire market.  And there’s only one like above $450,000.  So I just sell a bunch of small ones.

Dean Jackson

Well Jay, I really appreciate your time, I think there’s some great lessons in here for people, just even from the mind set and implementing and doing it.

Jay Kinder

I appreciate it Dean, it was my pleasure.

Dean Jackson

Thank you again.

Couple of cool things for you today.

1. I have been re-reading a great old book called The Science of Getting Rich.

It was written way back in 1911 before Think and Grow Rich…and it’s a really great read.

The language is kind of “genteel” and I like to read it with a sort of old english man narrator voice in my head

Anyway…here’s the PDF: The Science Of Getting Rich

2. Over the holidays, my friend Rob Minton sent me his cool new book about Goal Setting. Which worked out perfectly since that’s exactly what I was doing at the time

It’s a great book…and you can download the PDF here.

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