86

You’re listening to the Focus Radio and I’m Alyssa Granlund. My goal is to share some strategies and ideas to help you to grow a healthy and thriving real estate business that you love.

Today our focus is getting clear on who it is that you “want” to serve.

There will be some cheat sheets for this episode that I know you will want to pick up. Just go to alyssagranlund.com/86 to access them. This is my 86^th podcast hence the 86! There you will be able to download the transcript from today, some cheat sheets to help you stay focused and put this idea into action and a helpful list I will be discussing later in the show.

You know, there’s a saying that goes something like this, if you try to serve everyone, you end up serving no one. That’s the root of our topic today. How deciding who you want to serve and then having a strategic marketing plan in place, is going to help you stay focused and help you attract the clients you want. If you can work with the clients that you enjoy, then that makes our business more fun. Also if you can control the amount of clients that are coming in, you can make sure that you always have business and can get a grip on the feast or famine that is so common in our industry.

The beginning of a strategic marketing plan is to identify who’s the market that we’re going to serve? This is really important and it’s something that I feel that most real estate agents don’t do. We may decide to do a geographic farm for a bit, buy online leads, attend a few networking groups, hold some open houses, think about calling expired listings etc.….but a lot of times we just kind of dabble in a whole bunch of different things. Just kind of throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks, and it can work, but it’s only going to get you so far. If you really want to grow your business and if you want it to be thriving and you want customers to continue to come to you year after year, in a systematic way, you have to be much more focused and strategic than that.

This is a secret top agents know and use so they can count on their business to provide sales year after year. They have four or five areas that they’ve identified that are their target market and they serve them systematically.

Look at it as four or five different niche areas or verticals that you can focus on. So it still could be the same common ideas I mentioned such as open houses, Sphere of Influence, expireds, etc. whatever you’d like to choose. It doesn’t really matter what the vertical or a niche is that you’re going to focus on. It just matters that you identify them. Then we will work on developing a strategic marketing plan for each one so that we can go really deep in that niche instead of wide with too many focus areas.

I know a lot of people are worried about focusing too narrowly because they worry they won’t capture all the leads they can but actually the opposite is true. Honestly if you try to do that, if you try to serve everybody, you can’t really get as successful as you could if you pick specific strategic areas that you’re going to focus on and serve.

Here’s an example. When I first started in real estate, I was pretty young; I was 24 years old when I got my license. My parents were in the business, my in-laws, we’re in the business and my husband was in the business. So that meant is that all of our SOI or family and friends already had realtors and I was related to all of them. So you can probably imagine I wasn’t going to be able to really go very deep in that niche, as far as cousins and uncles and aunts go, they were all spoken for. And, I was young and I felt that in order to have confidence with the people that I was working with, I needed to look at working with people in my own peer group, people my own age. So I decided that I was going to work with first time home buyers.

Now, it wasn’t that I understood all of this when I first started, but this as I look back over why I was successful in that niche and was able to sell a hundred homes a year just with first time homebuyers, I see that there are some strategic things that I did and continued to do throughout my career in each niche that I have developed.

First, I did some research and I learned about what is it that’s most important to first time home buyers? What I discovered was that one of the things that were important to them is that they had their own realtor.  A lot of times they were trying to branch out on their own and do their own thing their own way. They definitely wanted their parents buy in to the project and the process and the home that they were going to buy, but they didn’t want to work with their parent’s real estate agent. They wanted their own. They were making their own financial decisions right now, and so they wanted their own agent.

At this time and I’m sure it is true today as well, first time home buyers were 50% of the market. So here are 50% of the people coming into the market that are not represented. So I felt that if I could figure out how to reach them and be able to speak to them about what they were interested in, then I was going to be able to work with them. That’s exactly what happened. At the time I was doing first time home buyer seminars and actually I see those coming back now too. We know people start their search on the internet and there’s so much information out there, it’s overwhelming and they don’t really know what information applies to them so this is where a first time home buyer seminar could actually be a good thing now, if we can get people in the room. We can be the curators of the information. Help them sort through it all.

The next thing I discovered as I worked with first time homebuyer’s is they had a lot of questions and they really needed a lot of handholding. So I put together 24 newsletters that I could mail to them. Once they came into my pipeline, I would be able to put them on the mailing and they would get newsletter number one and then number two, and then number three and so on.  This was a strategic system and it talked about things that would be helpful and that they would be interested. Some examples are; renting versus buying. I sent them a chart on renting versus buying and what the benefits were of owning a home. Then I sent them how much they could qualify for. I included a factor chart to help them to figure out how much payment could they really afford and then what does that convert to as far as a house payment and price range of a house. Then I sent them a list of what a lender needs in order to provide a loan for them and a list of the documents that they would need for their loan appointment. I talked about the importance of a home buyer’s inspection. I talked about seller’s disclosures and how problems are handled if there’s a seller disclosure and maybe the seller doesn’t tell the truth and what their options are. In my market they have two options. They can go to arbitration or they can go to court. And I explained the difference between those two.

I went through all of the scary stuff that comes into buying a home and I broke it into 24 newsletters. Each one was a little nugget and they hung on to them. So what would happen is I would meet them maybe at the first time home buyers seminar or open house and build some rapport. Then I would add them to my mailing list and it might be six, eight, 10 months but I would get a phone call from somebody seemingly out of the blue that had been receiving my newsletters that wanted to work with me. I had become their trusted advisor.

I got four or five of those calls a month because I was working a lot of numbers and this really worked. Now you could do the same thing with blog posts and emails. You could do the same thing with Facebook posts and links to your blog. So there’s a lot of different ways to go about it. Once we can figure out what type of information would be important to them.

I wrote these emails over the course of 24 months, one a month. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Just take small steps. The important thing is to get started.

Next I took all of those newsletters and I turned him into a book. So this is something you could do if you like to write blog posts, you could do the same thing. You can turn it into a book. Then I used this book as my cookie to set appointments. I used it as was my offer to get buyers to come in and meet with me. So this is how I would present it: I would say, “I wrote a book about everything that you need to know in order to purchase a home as a first time home buyer her in Minnesota. If you will give me the opportunity to meet with you, then I’ll give you a copy for free, no obligation. I just want a chance to explain and share with you the home buying process because it’s complicated. I’d like to have the opportunity to see if I could be a fit to help you. I’d like to interview for the job.

So as you can see I was able to attract the buyers to me because I had spent time figuring out what it is that they wanted to know about, I created some tools I could offer which earned me the opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with them. I could build rapport and show that I was the obvious choice to help them achieve their goal of buying a home. You will also notice I reused the tools I had to create new tools.

The next step in my process was my buyer interview. This was the process when I was going through the book with them.  I talked with them about all of the things that I knew that had come up that were objections with clients that I’d worked with in the past. Like for instance, finding a house that they want and then their parents come in and you know how that is, parents can kind of blow the deal. So in my buyer interview I explained that it’s a lot of pressure to put on parents to give their blessing when they have only looked at the one home you are considering. I would encourage them to have their parents come along to look at homes with us so that they at least had a chance to see what was out there instead of just having them see the one home that they wanted to buy.

Because I had done some thinking about what they needed to know and then also what the objections had been with people I had helped, I was able to come up with a lot of material that was really highly focused on the particular niche of the first time home buyer. And because of that, when a client met with me, I was very thorough and I went through everything, the contracts, the process, everything that they needed to know. I would get them pre-approved. I usually would try to have a loan officer that would have an appointment with them at the same appointment tie as with me. So because I went through all of that and it made it less likely for them to be interested in even meeting with anybody else. And if they did, I knew that they probably weren’t going to be as thorough as I was in presenting all the materials.

I feel that this process gave me a real cutting edge on the competition and I was able to work with most of the people that I met with, if they were able to qualify for a home. It was a great process and I have used it many times in each niche or vertical I have worked with since.

To put this plan into action for you, you’ll want to take a look at your niche and figure out what are the things that you can do to go deeper in order to serve them best and really to be the ideal choice, the obvious choice for them, as far as the agent to work with. If you do you will become the trusted advisor in your chosen verticals.

So now let’s figure out how to make this work for you.

1^st Step: Choose your 5 areas of focus to bring leads into your business

So first of all how do you determine what these four or five areas of your business should be?

Here is what I recommend. I’d like you to take a look at your business over the last couple of years and see where the sales that you had came from. I want you to divide it up into the different buckets that they came from. Note the source of business such as open houses, referrals, past client, Zillow leads, sign calls, ad calls, Facebook ads, where ever your sales came from, put a list together.

Now, if they were referrals, I’d like you to take this one step further and I’d like you to identify who it was that referred the client to you and how you know the person that sent you the referral. Are they a relative? Was it a friend from church? Is it a friend from the golf club? How do you know the person? Because what you’re going to start to see is some areas that maybe you could focus on to go a little bit deeper in your business, there might be some low hanging fruit and some connections that would be worth looking at as a niche area.

So for instance, if it was your golf club that some of these referrals came from and you would like more of those, then it would make sense for us to put together a strategic plan to figure out how you can get in front of more of the golf members and so on for each focus area.

Now use your sources of business to start to identify your five areas that you think would be good for you. If you find that most of your business came from one of two sources, I want you to know that is normal and one of the reasons that you don’t have as much business as you would like. If that is the case then to help you determine the rest of your verticals you will need to choose what areas you would like to focus on. This different for every agent I work with. There are so many choices! I will include a list of ideas of areas for you in the show notes.

Now, I will say that not all of these areas are going to be winners. You may try something that doesn’t produce any results for you. That’s okay. But, if we spread it out with a few areas like this, then if one is not producing, but the rest are, it’s fine. Then each year as we see the market turning and changing, we can add a different vertical to the mix and drop one that’s not producing.

2^nd Step: Once you have determined your areas and then next I want you to ask yourself some questions about those four or five areas. All right? Who are they? What is their age range? Is that something that identifies them? Are they in a relationship? Are they health conscious? What is their education level? What is their income level? Do they have kids? What are their beliefs? What do they value? Is it status? Is it commute? I mean, you have to figure that out. What do you have in common and what’s a commonality among this group of people that you see?

One other way to make this easier for you is to identify someone in that group that someone in that group that you really loved working with. So say you were working with first time home buyers, you decided that was going to be one of yours, identify a couple or single or whatever it is of the first time home buyer vertical that was so enjoyable for you to work with. Maybe there’s a couple of them. Use those people to answer your questions. I will include a worksheet for you on how to identify your avatar in the show notes. When you work through this, you might be able to find some commonalities such as, they had just gotten married or they just had a new baby they were a certain age range or wanted to live in a certain city or whatever it might be. You’ll want to try to figure out what those commonalities are so that you can really speak to that person and develop tools to serve them where they are at.

This idea is what marketing experts call creating an Avatar. This avatar or ideal client is who you will write your marketing or your messages for. They are who you create your materials or your items that you’re going to use to service your clients for. When you have that particular person in mind your message becomes much more personal and it actually speaks to them on a deeper level instead of sounding salesy or sounding too generic.

So some other questions that you could think about are what is their career? What do they do for a living? I have clients that focus on just doctors and so doctors have a whole different need. Often when they’re looking for a home they can have a problem with financing because usually they have high student debt and so they need to figure out some loan programs that they can use that are specific for Doctors and help them to get financing. Other question ideas:  Are they into a certain hobby? Do they like to golf or do they play tennis or are they part of a country club? Agents who specialize in more of the upper bracket might need to get involved in a club or charity or fundraisers. We have to hang out where our ideal clients are.

3^rd Step: I want you to uncover a common problem that this niche is facing. Let’s say that one of your verticals is seniors. You want to look at what’s the common problem that seniors are facing? Most of the time, I’ve found that seniors don’t want to move because they’re afraid. They are afraid of where they’re going to go. They’re afraid they won’t like it or they won’t have friends. They don’t know what their choices are. It seems too big to tackle. They don’t know what’s going to happen to all their stuff. How are they going to downsize? How are they going to possibly get everything packed up? It’s so big and overwhelming to think about. So let’s say that that was one of the verticals that you picked. One of the solutions that you might provide is more of a concierge service where you could help them to get in touch with the people that they need. Maybe you even organize it to help them to have the estate sale or the yard sale or have the antique dealer come in or meet with the kids and the parents just to value their things and let them know if they should sell things or donate. You could take them to visit senior housing or do presentations at a senior housing center. You could even put together a book!

There’s so many ways that you can go with a vertical once you identify it and you can go deep and you become a market expert in that vertical.

Now, one of the objections I get on this sometimes from agents is, they don’t want to disqualify themselves from getting other business and that isn’t what I’m talking about doing here. What I’m talking about is figuring out strategically the five areas that you’re going to serve. These are the areas that we spend our money on, our marketing, our time, our energy and our efforts in a very focused way.

It doesn’t mean that if you don’t work on attracting seniors, that when one of your clients calls you and they have a senior parent, you won’t help them. Of course you’re going to take that listing and work with them. It is just you’re not spending time or money trying to attract that business. Obviously you will take all the business that comes to you.

If we can strategically go after business in focused areas, you can attract your ideal clients easier and you will spend less money too. It is a wonderful way to be able to control the flow of the business that comes in and to really help you to avoid that feast or famine that comes with real estate sales.

So I hope this was helpful today and a little bit of food for thought to help you think about who is it that you want to serve.

Now you just need to make a plan of your own.

I will put up the show notes on my website at alyssagranlund.com/86 and it will include the transcript, an ultimate list of niches/verticals you could consider, a worksheet to help you determine your avatar and some questions to ask yourself or research to understand what you could offer to help them that would set you up as the obvious choice to your niche to be their trusted advisor.

Go to alyssagranlund.com/86

My challenge for you today is spend some time on this topic! Figure this out so that you can be even more effective and efficient serving the clients that you want to work with.

So thanks so much for joining me today and I am really looking forward to talking to you again soon. Have a wonderful day.