Summer is here in its full glory! With 90 degree days what you think about is how to stay cool or your upcoming vacation at the beach. As tempting as it is to stay in the coolness of your office and slow down, after all, it’s been a challenging year. But here’s the thing, you still have a business to run. Unless you’ve made an exceptional plan, your business can’t afford to be neglected for three months.
Although you may long for a slower pace, that seemingly small break could mean your pipeline dries up, marketing activities are put on pause and closings can be few and far between. As a result, your dreams of “finishing strong” in the fourth quarter are crushed.
I’m not saying you can’t take some time off to recharge, I’m simply saying that you still need to work on your business so you have some business come September. Let’s take a look at some of the activities you can do to set yourself up for a successful and busy fourth quarter.
Optimize Your CRM
Your CRM is the foundation of your business. Now is the time to do a clean up and make sure you have the contact information for everyone you want to have a business relationship with. Having a large CRM can produce stress and anxiety. Your thoughts run to, “if I have this many people in my CRM, why don’t I have more business?” The issue is, you don’t truly have that many people in your CRM that are clients or will refer business to you. That means you need to archive or delete a lot of the people currently in your CRM.
If you get to a contact and you honestly don’t know who they are, where you met them, or didn’t have a great experience with them, delete them. For your remaining contacts, make sure you have their mailing address, email address, cell number, birthday, house anniversary, significant partner info, names of children and pets, when they purchased their home and how much they paid for it. Having all of this information in one place will save you time and energy in the long run. If you don’t have all of this information, you have the perfect reason to give them a call.
Work on your CRM 30 minutes a day and by the end of Summer you will feel like you accomplished a huge task and your CRM will be manageable and not a cause for stress and anxiety.
Update Your Buyer Presentation
With the changes in our industry, now is the ideal time to update your buyer presentation. Make sure that all of the information you provide in your presentation is still applicable. You should also get an accountability partner (preferably another agent) and practice how you are going to explain how you get paid and how that may impact how much cash the buyer needs to bring to closing. The more you practice, the more confident and comfortable you will become with the language and the easier it will become when you are in front of a potential client.
Update Your Listing Presentation
There is nothing worse than getting a call from a potential seller and you don’t have your act together. You instantly go into panic mode because your listing presentation is out of date. Take the time now to review your listing presentation and see what areas need to be updated. Look at your bio and update the market stats. Again, our industry has changed, your listing presentation should reflect those changes so your seller can make educated decisions on how best to get their property sold. Make sure you have a section about buyer broker representation and how that may have an impact on the sale of the property, as well as the seller’s net.
Review Your Marketing Plan
With the fourth quarter right around the corner, you know you will be busy. And when you’re busy, the first thing to fall by the wayside is your marketing…and we can’t let that happen. If you haven’t already done so, create a marketing plan for the remainder of the year. List what activities you plan to do and what clients will receive from August through December. This should include any mailings you want to do, pop-bys, newsletters, and client events. This is not only a great way to minimize your stress, but it also helps you budget for those events and activities.
Reflect on Your Business
With more than half of the year gone, take a moment to evaluate your business. Ask yourself what you are doing well and what areas need improvement. Look at your numbers. What has been your return on investment on the marketing activities you conducted January through June? How much outreach did you do versus what you planned to do? How much referral business did you conduct? Look for ways that you can work smarter, not harder.
Getting through the Summer isn’t always easy because the temptation not to work is all around us. But now is not the time to take your foot off the gas. You still have to do the work. Work on the tasks and activities that you don’t seem to have time for when you’re busy or those you simply don’t enjoy doing. All of the tasks listed above are important to running your business, so get started now.
When your Sphere of Influence gets out of Summer/vacation/camp mode, they will be ready to speak with you about buying and selling and you will have all of your systems in place to work with greater organization, efficiency and confidence.