Power Through A Shift: The Six Strategies
As the market turned this summer, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan knew that times were only going to get tougher. They called together the KellerINK writing and research team, along with instructional designers from Keller Williams University to go through the 12 SHIFT Tactics and decide what was going to be the most impactful for real estate businesses in the year to come.
As a result of those conversations, Gary and Jay came up with Six Strategies that will power you through a shift. The Six Strategies are:
1. Get Real Get Right: Mindset
2. Re-Margin Your Business: Cut Expenses
3. Do More With Less: Leverage
4. Find The Motivated: Lead Generation
5. Get To The Table: Conversion
6. Help Buyers And Sellers Adjust: Reset Expectations
Some of these strategies will be familiar, but each has evolved as the market and our understanding of the shift have become clearer.
1. Get Real Get Right: Mindset
When the market shifts, you need to get your mind in the right place. By being in the right mind, you’ll be able to take the right actions to ensure that you get the right outcomes. This involves making two different shifts.
The Mental Shift
When you’re making a mental shift, you’re accepting the reality of your situation. This is the first step to being able to align your actions in the right way. It means you know:
1. You can’t control the market.
2. You can control your outlook and response to the market.
3. The market doesn’t determine your success, it simply determines your strategy.
The Action Shift
1. Taking the right action now is just as necessary as knowing what to do.
2. It’s not about more knowing, it’s about doing.
By getting real and right, you’ll be able to ask, “What do I do right now?” You’ll get more clarity when you ask this question.
2. Re-Margin Your Business: Cut Expenses
A shift means you need to manage your expenses tightly.
What worked no longer works, so what you spent money on before won’t yield the same results.
Invest In Your Business
1. Drop your expenses until your inflow exceeds your outflow at an acceptable level.
2. Play Red Light, Green Light.
3. Grow your budget incrementally in line with your acceptable profit margin.
4. Spend with a “lead with revenue” approach and grow by a “cost-plus” perspective.
The Path Is In The Math
One of the truths of a shift is that the math that you used to run your business on has changed.
1. Track your conversion rates and determine the ROI of your lead generation techniques.
2. Your lead gen budget may need to go up in order for you to get the opportunities you need to protect your profit.
By keeping an eye on your changing numbers, you’ll be able to identify the actions you can take to increase your profit margin.
3. Do More With Less: Leverage
When there’s more to do and less margin for error, you’ll need to be minimizing your leverage. This means that you need to identify the members of your team that are going to pull you through, and which ones might be best to let loose.
Embrace 30-60-90s
Inspect what you expect. Meet with team members and set new expectations with everyone. Create and document a shared plan for how their role and responsibilities may shift and hold them accountable with a 30-60-90.
Take Advantage Of The Gift Of SHIFT
The gift of a shift is that there’s a lot of talent on the market. You have the opportunity to make hires that might not be available otherwise.
If you’re adding to your team, don’t compromise out of pain. As Gary told his recent Top Agent Mastermind, “You need to hire your equal. If you’re hiring an assistant and that isn’t capable of thinking as big as you, they’ll make your world smaller.”
You need someone who will be excited for the growth of your business—even if that means they’re going to have a more complex or difficult job.
4. Find The Motivated: Lead Generation
It will likely take twice the effort to generate the same number of leads you’ve enjoyed in better markets. Once you accept this reality, you can focus on making sure your lead generation efforts are fine-tuned.
Master The Six D’s
No matter the market, there are always people who are going to need to buy or sell. Life happens. (Jay Papasan recently wrote about The Six D’s in The TwentyPercenter newsletter, which goes into more detail about how to capitalize on these evergreen leads.)
Revisit Your MOFIR
If you haven’t mastered your MOFIR yet, revisit your messaging. The right messaging for the shifted market will unlock the value you need to provide to get your unfair share.
Just because there’s less opportunity overall in a shifted market, doesn’t mean that there has to be less opportunity for you.
5. Get To The Table: Conversion
The issues that will plague an unprepared business during a shift are more skills-based than anything that has to do with the larger economic climate. Once you have generated a lead, are you able to convert that lead into a client? Keep the following in mind:
Speed To Lead
The number one challenge after encountering a lead opportunity is not making a winning presentation—it’s winning the appointment. During a shift, this is doubled.
Capture, Connect, And Close
The conversations that you’re having with potential clients mean more than ever. Are you keeping up with your talking points and frameworks? Are you testing whether they match the concerns of the market?
Learn the issues people face, the perspectives that help them make decisions, and the conversations that move them into action.
6. Help Buyers And Sellers Adjust: Reset Expectations
Most people would understand that real estate market changes every day, but that doesn’t mean that when it comes to their real estate transactions that they have an accurate understanding of what is going on and how it can affect them.
Price Ahead Of The Market
President of MAPS Jen Davis recently shared that one of the biggest issues that coaching clients are facing right now is pricing.
As we explain in SHIFT, you’ll need to help your listing clients understand that the price they would have gotten for their property six months ago is no longer a realistic expectation. In fact, if they insist on listing for that price and having to wait to undergo several price corrections, they may end up making less money on the sale than they’d like.
To help them avoid this fate, you’ll have to set a price that’s ahead of the market. To do this, you’ll essentially look to where the trends of the market are going, and then you’ll price slightly ahead of that direction.
Help Motivate Buyers
Understanding the challenges that buyers face in this market will the key to keeping them motivated through rising and falling interest rates, potentially protracted home searches, and all of the usual twists and turns of the home-buying adventure.
This market may be difficult, but it can also be a market with lots of opportunity for your buyers. With price reductions, seller concessions, or interest rate buy downs, your clients may find that the market isn’t as expensive as they thought it would be.
No one succeeds alone and no one certainly buys a home alone. Keep in touch with your buyers and educate them on the opportunity they can find.
Wish you could go deeper in each of these six strategies? You can! Visit KW Connect to access KWU’s new SHIFT courses based on these six strategies. The Six Strategies is great business training to help you succeed no matter what type of market you’re in, whether in a shift now, beginning to shift, or not yet shifting.
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