Does this sound familiar? You spend half the day researching information on ten expired listing prospects. You have detailed information just in case one of these prospects asks you a question. You know you’ll be prepared and have the answer because you’ve done your homework. You proceed to stop or call all 10 expired listing prospects. Six do not respond or are not at home, one just relisted, one has a sister that’s an agent, one just isn’t interested, and one is open to discussing re-listing with you. Congratulations! You may get the one listing, but you just wasted most of the day preparing for people that you never talk to or that just weren’t interested.
On another day a buyer calls expressing an interest in seeing property this weekend. They’ll be arriving on Friday and wants you to show them property in a specific community on Saturday. You spend several hours on Friday preparing for the appointment. On Saturday morning something comes up and your buyers are a no-show. Once again, congratulations, you just completely wasted another half-a-day.
How often do scenarios like the two above happen to you? As a professional, you want to be prepared for your buyers and sellers. The key to maximizing productivity is to only prepare when you know you have a ready, willing, and able prospect. In many cases, scheduling two meetings instead of one is an effective way to avoid wasting time. For example:
In the first scenario above, you would have been much better off just identifying the ten expired listing prospects you wanted to contact. If you had attempted to contact all ten without any further preparation, you would have avoided spending hours on the nine prospects that went nowhere. By postponing a conversation and scheduling a second appointment with the one good prospect, you could have prepared for not ten but just one person and the preparation wouldn’t have been done until after the appointment was scheduled. You just saved nearly a day of wasted time.
In the second example, it would have been better to have a brief meeting with the buyer on Friday to qualify them before spending hours researching the market in preparation for the appointment. By having this preliminary meeting you would have likely identified the buyers true interest. If they were a no-show to this meeting or weren’t qualified, you just saved hours of useless preparation.
The moral to this story, be fully prepared when you need to be fully prepared and not before. Always remember that YOU control your schedule. A brief delay for a prospect that’s genuinely interested is rarely a problem if you present it properly (i.e. you’d love to discuss listing their home now but have an appointment. Could they meet with you a little later on?)