Singapore is so small! What if other agents get to my leads or clients?" I heard this one from one of my agents. Do you find yourself asking this question too? I don't blame you! You may have had your leads and clients stolen by other agents before. Worse, that agent might even be the client's brother, uncle or cousin! That's why you might even suspect that hey, since this is such a small world, there's less business to go around! In short, many agents fall prey to a scarcity mindset. And today, I decided to talk more about that. You're not alone! It had happened to me! I was sitting at home, and I could hear my mum and siblings in the other room talking. They had no idea what had just happened. I was sitting there freaked out because another agent had just stolen away my client, and I had no idea how I was going to get paid. I started to get a shooting pain in my stomach. It felt like a heart attack, but it was lower in my gut. I felt this pressure coming down and I literally felt like someone was sitting on my neck. It got so heavy that I couldn't lift my head. The only thing I could see were the palms of my hands, and they were sweating, yet I was freezing cold. My whole body was shaking and shivering because I was in so much pain and frustration, yet I was frozen with fear. I was now very afraid whenever I felt an agent sniffing around my leads and clients. It took me a long time to overcome this fear. I had become a realtor back in 2008 to support my hard-working mother. After 8 long months, I managed to close my first few deals. And I was doing financially ok. But now, I was having trouble with keeping my leads and clients only to myself. The business that I worked so hard to build was almost breaking up. My business was breaking up. The fear of losing business made me very worried. Was there no end to my struggles? I had barely closed one deal, after months, and now I was back to zero! Unfortunately for me, it wasn't long until I realised that it was a way of life. Clients were fickle creatures. It was a necessary evil of being an agent... Sort of like an occupational hazard that came with the job. I had work to do and an income to earn, so I went back to prospecting and tried hard to steel myself up. Then something shocking happened Time flew until I was 3 years into my business. I learned to live with it. So one day I taken completely by surprise when a previous lead who I thought was dead (that is, wasn't serious), turned up and ended up buying from me. When I looked closer, I realised I had been communicating with them all this while. It was a simple follow up that I had set up all those years ago! Ironically, I was too impatient to close when I was starting out; wishing prospects to buy homes from me. I realised one thing; You can't force people to buy whenever you want them to. They'll only buy when THEY are ready! I had ended up only working with a tiny pool of ready-to-act prospects who were ready to buy NOW. But it was the follow up and nurturing of long term prospects I almost discarded (which suddenly turned to NOW business) that really surprised me! I had discovered what all long timers already knew by painful experience: that every week, there were prospects ready to buy or sell who were not ready last year! Future prospects were turning current every week! I decided to do something about it. I couldn't afford to be shortsighted anymore! Since this was a long-term business, I needed to be PATIENT!

So I created a plan (and that was how my automated follow up strategy was born). I decided I would treat different prospects differently. All ready-to-act prospects would naturally see me in an appointment.