Hello and welcome to Debbie's Daily Tips! Today we’re talking a little bit about effectively negotiating your deals.

Just the other day, I had a conversation with a top producer and we were talking about effective negotiation strategies.

While there are so many things we could cover under this very big topic, here’s one of the things we were talking about:

You must be the calm, cool head in the deal!

You know, so often the agent on the other side of the negotiation may be new or not friendly or at all cooperative.

When this happens, it’s easy to lose your cool, but don’t do it!

You see, you owe it to your clients to be the calm one, the strategic one. You will be so much more likely to win the negotiation when you think of the agent on the other side, just as you would your clients, and persuade them just as you do your clients!

I know it’s tough, but we’ve got to win them, build rapport, be a pleasure to work with, and even when they are not, be nice!  You will see that if you let go of the need to be right, if you overlook their flaws and you treat them with respect, you will be the one they want to encourage their sellers to work with when you write an offer on their listing and your properties will be at the top of the showing stack when they are showing homes to their buyers.

What’s the old saying? You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar!

Hello, welcome to Debbie's Daily Tips and today we’re going to be talking a little bit about visual networking tools.

I was at an event recently and one of our coaches Gee Dunsten shared a great idea for networking.

He talked about the fact that if you put some visual tools on your phone to share when you are out and you find yourself discussing real estate in a group or social situation, it makes it a lot more interesting to those that you are talking to.

He told us a story about a party he had attended the week before the event. He said that he had stored a market report on his phone and at the party as people asked him about the market, he opened up the report and showed them the trends.

It was so popular that he was quickly surrounded with people all wanting to be in the know! His wife, in fact, got a bit annoyed when he didn’t come out of the kitchen for hours as he fielded real estate questions and picked up leads.

He took away from the event 2 quality seller leads. Leads that he will most certainly will!

And guess what? He didn’t even bring up the conversation –they did. All he did was show the report on the phone, answer their questions, and pick up leads!  You too can do it!

Hi, welcome to Debbie's Daily Tips! Today I’m going to ask you to stop using the word but!

A perfectly harmless word, you would think, however, if you have ever studied power persuasion you will already know that experts suggest you eliminate the word but from your language.

Here is why. The word but negates everything you said before it.

For example, you may say, “Mr. Seller, that is a great point, but here is what I would recommend.”

So, you gave the seller approval and then you took it away by saying “but” (in other words, “but you are wrong”).

What should you say instead?

As a substitute for the word but, say and or and yet.

“Mr. Seller that is a great point, AND here is another way we could look at it!”

You see, our goal is to stay in rapport and it’s hard to do that when you are telling them that they are wrong.

If necessary, you can use the word however, and yet it is a little close to the word but, so I’d prefer you don’t.

I would recommend you stick with and or and yet, and practice it. In fact, don’t just eliminate the word when you are working with clients, eliminate it altogether from your vocabulary. You don’t need it, and your communications will improve!

Hello and welcome to Debbie's Daily Tips! Alright, let’s talk about your game plan for the first business day of the New Year.

We are going to talk about what you should do on your first day, your first week.

Get up early, do some exercise, eat a healthy breakfast, meditate, read, or do something else that’s good for you.  Practice your scripts for 15 minutes and start your new year’s routine off with a bang!

Have a well-defined schedule to maximize your productivity between the am and noon.

Call your hot leads first to confirm your pre-set appointments and to set new ones for the week.

Start your lead generation calls, whatever methods you’ve chosen that make sense for you to create your business in the New Year. Stick with your commitment to make the contacts you need to make to achieve the goals you have set!

Have your 5 big rocks you want to accomplish and make sure you complete them by day’s end.  Time permitting; you can always do more prospecting!

Make it a super efficient and powerful day so that you can go home happy and excited about the New Year ahead.

Hello and welcome to Debbie's Daily Tips! I just want to say, we are on the countdown to the New Year! Wow, can you believe 2016 is almost over and the countdown to the New Year now begins today?

As you prepare to wrap up 2016, I hope you have a few days off to enjoy your family and friends. I wanted to suggest a few final items you should give some attention to as you work to finish strong!

Keep up your lead generation, at least through the first 3 weeks of the month. You will still have a nice break and you will roll into the New Year with hot prospects and power.

Remember, make it a point to talk to every single lead and if they cannot or will not meet with you now, get them pre booked for the New Year.

Call every seller of every active listing and talk to them. Set a game plan for 2017: extension, price reduction, whatever you need to do to position the property to sell.

Call, at a very minimum, everyone on your AAA list of hot clients and sphere and wish them a happy holiday!  As you attend social functions and parties, be ready. Have a great script so you can have organic conversations about real estate. 

Make it all about them. How was their year? How is their business? What is their goal for the New Year?

When they ask you, “How is the real estate business?” tell them it’s terrific and it’s a very opportunistic market and you were wondering, “What opportunities were they looking to explore in the New Year?”  Your goal is to spark conversation.

Next, clean up your desk, your files, and your systems because we want you to have everything as clean and flawless as possible so that you can have a quick start out of the gate.

Maybe even consider coming into the office on December 31st to call expireds leads and set appointments for the New Year ahead!

Have fun, enjoy your holiday break, and then come back ready to make 2017 your best year ever!!!

Hello and welcome to Debbie's Daily Tips.

I wonder, what is the opportunity that your market is presenting that you’re not taking advantage of?

Or, what market changes are occurring, or are just ahead, and you’re not paying attention?

The other day I was with a very successful broker who is a great pilot and had just bought a new plane. He said to me, “I flew in last night, Debbie, and the weather was really bad.” I said, “Wow, how was that?” and he said, “Well, it was pretty frightening. But you know, I’ve been trained to do this, and what they teach us is to always be ahead of the plan. Because when your plane is moving at 400 miles an hour, you’ve got to be at the top of your game, you’ve got to be thinking of the next storm, the next hail, whatever’s up there that’s in that flight path right up ahead of you, so that you can have a strategy to deal with it.” And it made me stop and think about the fact that real estate agents often use the ostrich approach to their business. They put their head in the sand and they don’t want to see the changes that are coming at them. Years ago when Gilda Radner played Rosanne Roseannadanna on Saturday Night Live, she used to say, “It just goes to show you, it’s always something.” And it is always something, but that doesn’t mean that something is bad. It just means that change may be a little bit uncomfortable. Remember that book from a few years back, Who Moved My Cheese? The whole point of the book was if the cheese moves, move with it. So let’s get ahead of the plane, let’s get ahead of the market. Talk to your lender, talk to your affiliates, talk to your broker, pull the data in your MLS, pay attention to what’s going on so that you can be well informed and well prepared.

Hello, welcome to Debbie's Daily Tips.

Here’s what I want you to think about today: what are you doing out of routine or habit that is not especially productive or profitable?

We all have certain business practices, it’s the way we’ve always done our business, and yet of course as technology changes and the consumer demands change, some of the things we do may no longer be necessary. There may be a more efficient way to do them. They may just not be profitable any longer. But we’re running our same pattern of doing what we do, day after day. And actually, this is one of the big reasons that people often come to us for coaching. They want us to examine what they consider their best practices and have us help them fine tune and improve. I want you to take a step back, take a look at: what are my best practices? And is there anything that could be improved, streamlined, or eliminated, because I simply don’t need to do it anymore? Because of course we are always striving to improve efficiency, to work more strategically, so that you can make more money in less time. So make it an efficient day!

Hello, welcome to Debbie's Daily Tips.

I wonder, what time did you get up today?

Here’s why I ask. I did a little experiment or calculation with an agent the other day. We were looking at how they could add a little bit of extra time to their day. Time to reflect and practice and read, and just get a chance to get a good start on the day. Well of course, my thought went to getting up earlier. We took a look at that and realized that in a 285 work day year, because that’s about how many days they were planning to work, if they just got up 30 minutes earlier, it was astounding how much time that it added to the year. It added 8,550 minutes. Which is over 142 hours. Now if you worked a 40 hour week, that’s like adding almost 3.6 weeks to your year. Just imagine. Just 30 minutes earlier. Here is what I see happen sometimes to agents who are getting up at 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning. They go to a meeting, they get inspired, and they say, “I’m going to get up at 4:30! Or I’m going to get up at 5:00!” and they do that for one day and then they don’t ever do it again. So why not do something just a little more reasonable? Why not set your alarm for just 30 minutes earlier? Instead of rushing off to work, use that 30 minutes for you. To get your head in the game, to do some reading, some practice, take a walk, to do something that you enjoy. That might be your only time of the day to have that opportunity. So give it a try!

Hello and welcome to Debbie's Daily Tips.

So I just bought my daughters a sign for their office and it says: worry is the misuse of imagination. Because of course as new real estate agents they go through all the ups and downs and all the worrying about the deals or lack of deals that we all do and all have. I was sharing with them that there’s this great book that Zig Ziglar wrote and in that book he wrote, “80% of what you worry about will never happen. The 20% that does happen, worrying wouldn’t have stopped it.” Napoleon Hill wrote a great book called Grow Rich with Peace of Mind when he was in his 80’s, it’s kind of obscure and hard to find, and in the book he says something like, “when you’re hesitating about going out there and trying new things and achieving your dreams, you need to ask yourself: 100 years from now, would this really matter?” And of course the answer is no, because we are all going to be gone. So the point is to live. To live and be brave. Be excited, try new things. Really make it happen. Because what’s the benefit of playing small? So obviously, if there’s things that need action, take action. If there’s things that you can do to make your life and your situation better, you’re going to do that, but worry probably isn’t going to help. So action is always better than worry. Imagination is always better than worry.

Hello it’s Debbie De Grote and welcome to Debbie's Daily Tips.

If you’ve seen our Business Planning Packet, you’ve seen a form in there that’s a piece of paper that says at the top: “I will earn.”

It has 20 blank lines so that every single morning you can sit down with your cup of coffee or tea, and you can write 20 times, “I will earn—” “I will earn—”“I will earn—” And fill in that amount that you will earn. You see, the mind is so incredibly powerful you can program yourself right into success. It’s part of that whole visualization. In a Jim Carey interview he was talking about how he had a goal, a goal to have a pay day of $10 million from a movie. So he wrote that amount on a check and he carried that check around in his pocket, looked at that check every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. And low and behold, not that long after, he was offered $10 million for the movie Liar, Liar. I wonder if he thought he should have asked for more. Is that an accident? Is that a coincidence? I don’t think so. So just try it, see how you feel. Keep it up; you never know what will happen. It might make it that much easier to achieve that goal. And it only takes a few minutes; why not give it a try? You don’t even have to have the form, just take a blank piece of paper and write daily 20 times, “I will earn –.”