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hello and welcome back to rev real estate school i'm your host michael montgomery and today we're talking about building a prospecting plan for you that does not suck now when we're thinking about prospecting almost everybody feels like it's cringy like it's salesy like it's not enjoyable when in fact you can build these amazing prospecting plans that are enjoyable that do not feel salesy and can drive a ton of business how do we go about doing this well there's a few simple steps that you can follow to build the perfect prospecting plan for yourself that you enjoy doing first off let's understand that most real estate agents almost all of them do not prospect almost none of them so what does this mean for you this means that even if you're willing to do a small amount of prospecting a very very little amount of prospecting you're still doing a lot more than the average agent now here's the other thing is most of us think that other agents are prospecting all the time we have this image in our mind when in fact there are really two types of agents who are prospecting all the time they are top producers and they are future top producers the remainder tend to not prospect very frequently or they don't actually have a schedule that they follow so with that in mind let's go about building a prospecting plan that can make sense for you now when we first start to do this what happens in a lot of ways is our eyes are bigger than our stomachs in the sense that we think that we are going to make x number of calls per week or per day and in fact when we start to do this we realize after day one that this is not something that we can sustain and the reason for that is we bite off way more than we can chew so we are going to discuss what is the right amount of prospecting to do and how can you do it so that it is enjoyable but with any type of prospecting we are going to deal with rejection there's truly no way around this we are going to be rejected at some point in time when we're asking for business and that person says no so what we have to do when we're approaching any sort of prospecting plan is understand that any time i'm prospecting we are always detaching from the outcome no questions asked regardless of how we're prospecting what we're saying who we're talking to we are always detached from the outcome because here's the reality of it we don't necessarily need any one client i don't necessarily need that one client that i'm talking to and i am completely detached from the result now that doesn't mean that when somebody says no to me it doesn't sting it does sting but what i can tell you is if it stings for a long period of time over the course of your career that sting is going to get shorter and shorter and shorter so over time it will still sting but it just doesn't sting for that long now why doesn't it sting for that long well the reason it doesn't sting for that long is because i'm detached from the outcome and the other reason is i am understanding that everything is practice and so because when i'm approaching these conversations it's practice and i'm not worried about the outcome there's really no failure if you think about that if you're not concerned about the outcome and if what you're doing right now is just practice there's truly no win or lose there's really just improvement because all we're doing is we're practicing so if we approach our prospecting plan with that mindset that's going to change our lens completely because now we are looking for genuine conversations we are not looking to be salesy we're not looking to close because we need that client instead we're looking to build this genuine relationship and then if it blossoms into deals wonderful so let's talk about setting up that plan so the first thing that you need to do is if you do not prospect on a regular basis so if you don't actually have a prospecting plan or you don't prospect regularly then you have to start from the ground up you have to start in a sense like you have never prospected before and so how do we do this we make it ridiculously easy it has to be so easy that it's almost laughable in many ways and then we can start to scale up from there but we need about a month of extreme easy prospecting so we can start to understand what this is like and we can get into a routine so what exactly does ridiculously easy look like well there are two tips for you here personally i generally prospect one day a week so i have one day a week that i focus most of my prospecting efforts on now the reason for this is i don't tend to want to be focused on prospecting every day because it takes a certain mindset and so when i'm in prospecting mode i'm in prospecting mode when i am in content creation mode i'm in content creation mode and so because of that all i really need is one day that i'm open to prospecting now what i suggest here is not necessarily just prospecting one day instead we want to get in the slow habit of talking to people on a regular basis so if you are just starting out here is a ridiculously easy strategy that you can use first off choose a day that you want to prospect now my suggestion is either tuesday or friday reason for that tuesday can be a good day because monday has passed monday's very busy for people it's hard for people to get back to you on mondays and tuesdays things tend to start get into a routine the other thing i like about tuesdays is we can still kind of ask them about what they did over the weekend we can still make a personal connection there because we have the weekend to fall back on as a topic of conversation now friday works in a similar way where we have the topic of conversation which is the upcoming weekend but on top of that people tend to be a little bit more relaxed the one reason why you may not want to use friday is if by the end of the week you're starting to feel tired and you just don't think you're going to get it done if that's the case then focus on tuesday so i tend to like tuesday and friday as my prospecting day now think about this momentarily you now have to prepare to prospect one day a week now in what world have you ever learned that you have to prospect one day a week that's all you truly need is if you have one day a week that you are focused on prospecting that's all you really need now what do we go about doing on this one day now how do we go about actually prospecting how does this work well we have our one day now of prospecting and then we also mention that we don't just want to focus on this one day we also want to get into the routine of having conversations so the way that we do this is we call one text today so every single day you have to do one outbound text to a potential client or to somebody who is not your close friend or your family member so basically this equates to one outbound attempt per day now what you're saying to yourself is this seems extremely easy and it is it is very easy we are just simply sending one text now what are we saying in that text we're not actually soliciting business a really good way to just start any conversation is letting somebody know that you were just thinking about them and so you can then start a conversation over text by saying that this person just jumped into your mind because of reason and all you have to do is do one of those a day now what this is going to do is it's going to get you in the habit of outbound marketing so you're starting to get into the habit of reaching out to people on a regular basis so that's the one text today very very simple and then we move on to our prospecting day and on our prospecting day all we're going to do is we're going to make two phone calls and so over the course of the week we have texted five people for working five days a week we've texted five people and then one of those days we also made two phone calls now you may be thinking that that isn't enough but again let's not let our eyes be bigger than our stomachs here let's start with the ridiculously easy and then scale up from there now here's another really cool concept is even if that is your limit you're just not willing to do any more prospecting than that great at least you're doing some at least you're doing some form of prospecting and you're doing more prospecting in doing this strategy than most other real estate agents out there so there are agents who will end up starting to do this and say you know what this is my limit i have other ways that i want to prospect as well great that's perfectly fine you can actually just cap it at this if you would like that being said after about a month of doing this then you can start to scale it up but you don't want to scale it up quickly where you scale it up to is then two texts a day and then you move on to five phone calls on your prospecting day but my suggestion here is do not even focus on that until you've gone through your one month of very simple prospecting now there is something to keep in mind here and it's if you are focusing on online leads this concept of prospecting one day and only doing two phone calls may not work because it really depends on how you're going about building your business so what we're assuming in this case is you're focusing on your soi and you're focusing on your database now this doesn't mean that you aren't getting leads from online sources but it means once that lead has entered into my funnel i'm now considering that person part of my soi i'm trying to get that person to understand the value of using a realtor and also helping to create a personal connection with that person regardless of where they came from so this moves us into the next strategy and the next strategy is stop doing prospecting that you hate so many times we're told to do certain types of prospecting but we can't stand it for example i have never called an expired listing i very rarely if ever would do circle prospecting why because i don't care for that type of prospecting for me that's just not enjoyable instead if you're my client or you're a past client or your potential future client or you're just a contact that i know in my city i'd much rather just shoot you a text and say hey how are you and then have that turn into a conversation or into a lunch or into a coffee and then at that point in time they'll very likely ask how is the market so what we need to be focused on here is prospecting activities that we like and that's why i say text and phone text and phone works quite nicely because for most of us texting somebody is not overly challenging it's asynchronous so it lowers the pressure the phone is not asynchronous we're having an actual conversation which makes it a little bit more challenging but again we have to be able to be comfortable on the phone so we have to slowly start to work our way up there but that being said let's start with text messages and let's start with two phone calls a week now if you're saying that there's no types of prospecting that are of interest to you well i would just pause for a moment and think that honestly everything in life is prospecting when you're going to the grocery store when you're dropping the kids off at school when you're taking your dog for a walk in the dog park that's all considered prospecting that is all a form of prospecting prospecting isn't just necessarily sitting down getting a list of names and numbers and calling them and asking them if they're going to buy and sell real estate that in my opinion is not fun it's not prospecting it's only just banging your head against the wall and that's not the way that i have chosen to build my business so the beauty of real estate and the beauty of prospecting is we can do this in a million different ways however coming back to this ridiculously easy strategy of just sending one text message a day and two phone calls on our prospecting day can be such a great starting point because now we're getting into these one-to-one conversations and then from these conversations we're then leading into in-person meetings and interactions so what are we talking about when we're on the phone with these people or when we're texting them well mostly what we're talking about is them we're just wondering what's new in their life we're saying something reminded us of them and then we're starting the conversation but there's an important point here and it's that they're going to ask us about real estate and so we all know that we need to be able to answer the question of how is the market now another strategy that you can use here is having a spiky point of view now what is a spiky point of view it's a term coined by wes cow you can find her on twitter absolutely genius she has tons of great material but basically what this is is it's a point of view that we have that might be different from others or that could be debatable now the reason why this can be very effective is having a point of view on the market this is what can actually lead to a great conversation now oftentimes we're taught to just not say anything until they've indicated what their interests are in real estate and a lot of times that makes sense if i'm sitting down with somebody who's looking to buy or sell real estate i want to know a lot more about what their goals are before i go and put my point of views forth however if i'm prospecting i'm having conversations with people people are saying what's new in the market what's happening with interest rates how is that impacting our market conditions i want to have a point of view on that and yes i will take a step back and if they are wondering for their own personal interest or if they are looking to buy and sell then my approach might be different but my approach will still also have a point of view to it and so you should have a point of view you should have a point of view on what is going on in the market what direction is the market going and it's okay if it's slightly contrarian but that being said we don't necessarily want to be negative but we also don't want to embellish and be overly positive because that's not trustworthy now when it comes to these point of views it's very important that we have them because that means that we understand the market but it's equally as important if not more important how we communicate them so if we have the perspective that the market is very likely going to drop in the near future and we're talking to a potential seller it's not overly strategic for us to worry them and to say hey we're in a free fall here that being said if we are in a free fall i want to ensure that i'm communicating everything to them appropriately so when i am talking to a seller and if i do see the market dropping then my discussion to them is going to be how important it is to be strategic with pricing to understand the market to know what we're doing when it comes to marketing so how we're communicating these point of views is equally if not more important than having them all together so what else can we do in order to make this prospecting plan work for us but we also have to think scalable what can we do once that a lot of people will see now the easiest strategy here and one that we all need to be using of course is social media so understanding social media from a prospecting perspective is important understand that when you are putting something out on social media anyone who ends up seeing it that in a lot of ways is reminding them that you're in real estate so understand that social media is just like anything else when it comes to prospecting but it's very very scalable now it is also very short-lived in the sense that we can't just post once of course and then all our problems are solved so we have to be consistent with it now what happens if we know the importance of social media however we're also struggling with consistency well when it comes to that blocking off a certain amount of time every single day and working on your social media at that time is a great strategy and so the way that we do this is we have it time bound we have a time bound in the sense that i have half an hour to work on social media after half an hour i'm done so i'm not waiting until my post is done i'm not working on social media until my post is done i'm putting time bounce and time bounds add constraints which are very powerful because it causes us to actually work within that period of time and it also gives us an end date an end time and without that we're just going to continue working on social media until it's potentially done which it never is it's like a conveyor belt it just keeps going so we do need to be time-bound now if even that doesn't work no problem there are so many great solutions out there hire it out hire out your social media now i have a social media manager she does an amazing job i'm super grateful to have her and that's just because dedicating that amount of time every single day is not realistic right now so she's been fantastic to really help take a lot of this work off our plates so this is what you can think about doing too depending on where you're at in your career if you're early on in your career you should definitely be doing all of this yourself 100 but if you're later in your career it may be time to start thinking how do i delegate some of this and how do i find somebody who is very likely better than us at this form of prospecting and yes it's scalable and that is the power behind it if we are not doing that then we are not getting in front of nearly enough people in order to continue to expand our business now on the topic of social media and on this topic of being time-bound we can do this with all of our prospecting and instead of saying here's the list of people i have to get through give yourself a time so you have a certain amount of time to prospect and once that time is up you're done and on to the next thing again we are adding constraints and constraints can actually increase creativity and it can actually increase our productiveness because instead of just waiting for something to get done and refreshing our email now we have time we have a certain time that we need to be focused on this and then we're done it's a very very powerful strategy when it comes to prospecting social media or any tasks that we have now finally when it comes to prospecting we need it to be enjoyable and not all of us are going to prospect in the same way depending on our personality types we may be prospecting with just pure interest in how that person is doing however we also might be the personality where we are a lot more focused on the mechanics of real estate we're very interested in what's going on in real estate in which case my prospecting is going to be a lot more focused on the market and in real estate so understand your personality but always be curious at the heart of everything is curiosity and so if you are the type that really likes to understand the real estate transaction understand everything about real estate in your community but you're less inclined to just reach out to somebody and say hey how are you doing then focus on market conditions focus on sales in their community focus on things that you're learning about real estate that can impact your clients and then communicate that and that is another very powerful strategy and a lot of us respond very well to somebody who's just reaching out and saying hey how are you doing and being curious is at the heart of this concept is just purely being curious as to how they are doing as individuals or as families this is a very powerful concept but with that we can also understand that if our style is more focused on understanding real estate and we love real estate and we love design and we love what's going on in comparable market activity all of that then we want to be communicating in that way and both of those strategies are equally as powerful with that thank you very much for watching or listening to this episode remember you can reach out anytime on instagram i'm at the.michael.montgomery or head over to revrealestateschool.com thanks again and we'll see you in the next lesson