Eric Lofholm

How to Sell in the New Economy

I recently interviewed Eric Lofholm who is a Master Sales Trainer who has trained tens of thousands of sales professionals nationwide. As a top-producing sales representative for 3 different sales organizations his consistent track record of regularly outperforming his fellow sales reps earned a reputation of success that follows him to this day. Eric has been trained by the top trainers of his time including: Anthony Robbins and Dr. Donald Moine Ph. D. as well as countless others.Many of America's top companies hire Eric regularly to train, motivate, and inspire their sales teams.

I asked Eric to share with you his top ideas and strategies for your success in today's selling environment. He offers a treasury of advice and resources to compete and dominate in this new economy.

Check out our related interview about called Dominate Your Market in 90 Days or Less with  Dave Lakhani

Facts tell stories sell. We buy with emotion and justify with logic.Use emotion to sell the reasons to buy real estate today. Go to Positive Real Estate to get both the facts and the stories to help you to influence your buyers in this marketplace.

Majoring in Minors

• Your Search engine ranking positions are always what might be.
• Your server logs/analytics are what are who might be interested.
• Your lead counts are who would like to get to know you better.
• Your Signed Contracts are only a potential sale.
• Only a closed escrow puts food on the table.

So often the online webmaster community is taught to look at each of these as one singular event. Without acknowledgment of the larger picture. And of course each of the above bullets represents a whole body of disciplines. We are taught to obsess over small singular actions such that our online marketing is nothing but a series of short lived, poorly executed tactical executions.

Some major minors:

Search Engine Positions: Search positions are nice. But a top position and fifty cents will only get you a cup of coffee (well maybe in 1976, I just paid $1.75 for a large at Mickie D's yesterday). A position is only implied traffic.  Folks worry about 1 ranking phrase while my clients and I rank for hundreds. Folks worry about keyword density or proximity. They matter, but not much.

Server Analytics: Look at your visitors. Who are they? How many of them are there? Well analytics do not give names, but they give numbers and behaviors based on keywords. So if you are majoring in just one keyword phrase (everyone loves to major in "city + real estate" ) phrase look at your server logs. You will find you can attract a much larger audience by considering your keywords that people use to find you.

Lead Counts: Conversion. Think of the "tootsie roll pop" ratio. This is where you get into visitor values. How many visitors do you need to get to a lead? If a visitor is worth $20. Then, theoretically you can spend up to $19.99 to get that visitor as a client. But you will not know that unless you track.

The above are what lead to sales and closed deals. Within each are mountains of knowledge bases that can easily waste a lifetime.

However, when you start with the end in mind. That is your business plan calls out for x amount of sales, and y generated online balanced by your own values and objectives. Then you have a start. A target.

Instead, so often we live with the delusion that if "I just rank number one for Happyville Real Estate, then I will reach Nirvana."

Did You Forget Why You Came to The Dance?

So often I hear that I blog to give my visitors great information to enrich their lives or at least online experience. Give me a break! You are there to make money. And the sooner you admit that the sooner you will make it. Otherwise stop writing it off as an expense as it isn't a business it is a hobby.

But learning this stuff can be fun and exhilarating. I get that. But you have to stay on focus or the web and vendors will steal your most precious selling time.

The web requires you to grasp the big picture or you will get lost. Not only your time will get wilted away but also your money. In order, to succeed on line you must develop a strategy first before jumping into the next big thing.

At http://www.realestateguerilla.com is an exclusive Coaching club where we will work with you on your top down success strategy. Or if you would prefer a private consult, contact Tim O'Keefe today. 310 533 9145. He consults at $500 an hour/minimum 2 hours.

->related blog post:
Are you trying to hit a home run with your prospects without even asking them out on a date?

• Next year there will be 2.3 million weddings in the US, at an average cost of $30,000 (we have helped increase the average this year considerably). That is $72 billion on weddings. And many of those new families start with the need to find a place to live, furnish a home, and build their nest.
• 4.3 million babies were born in the US. Each of them will need all sorts of "stuff" - food, education, and places to live - in (hopefully) 20-25 years.
• Gays? This niche is exploding in income and targetability.

More good news at houseblogger.

Some big stuff going on in HouseBlogger.

First can you use subliminal seduction to gain more favor with your prospective clients? Is it even real?

And what does a mind virus have to do with blogs and more importantly branding.

Microblogs. BS? A waste of time? OR the next big thing? Do you tweet real estate?

 

From Recession to Boom

Dave Lakhani
http://www.boldapproach.com
Listen to the whole interview to discover a secret link on Dave's website that contains a ton of free gifts for you. Like an interview with industry great Seth Godin.


(get the online player at my blog-AR would not post it)

What does Jimmy Buffett's Parrotheads, Apple Mac Heads and the Kiss Army, all have in common? They all enjoy a large fan base of zealots for their products and services. Dave shows you how to create your own army of followers that will guarantee your success in any marketplace.

Dave Lakhani has been described as a "Marketing Genius","Business Acceleration Strategist" and "Multipreneur" by his peers and the media.

Dave shares with you million dollar ideas that he charged me a ton of money when he originally taught me these principles. He opens up and shares:

• How to get clients to find you.
• Building Your own Cult-Would you like to build a list of clients as fanatical as an Alabama Bible Revival?
• The difference of manipulation and persuasion.
• How to position yourself as the expert in your local market.
• Dave actually builds a model to dominate your Real Estate Market in 90 Days or less.
• How saying no to business, can actually get you more yeses.
• Why facts tell, stories sell.
• Building your million dollar expert persona.
• A completely unique and wildly effective new way to virtually guarantee that your prospect will buy in your area.
• Why money follows action.
• How to make your listing irresistible.
• Why getting people out of their head and into their emotions will guarantee you real estate selling success in any marketplace.

Belief in your product is the most important thing in sales. So how how do you succeed when your home prices keep dropping? Dave shows you how to deal with what might seem like a crisis of conscious for some. 

This is by far the most revealing sales training I have heard in a very long time. In fact, I guarantee you have not heard this from any real estate trainer.

Thanks to Allen for pointing people to the killer interview that we did with Stefan Swanepoel about how the newsmakers of last year will affect 2008. It is all part of their promotion for their New Trends Report. Allen has a deal of 20% off, while Stefan is offering free shipping. So see what works out the best for you.

 I want to give high fives to Robert Lockard for his insistence to prove that the market is not so bad.

Yah we are feeling it for sure as it is an adjustment not a crash. Transactions are happening. NAR just mentioned that the year of 2007 was the fifth highest ever. So I aplaude Robert for not buying into the negativiity.

I have been posting as an anti-bubbler against the bubblistas since almost the start of my blog in 2004.

The bubblistas are flooding the news. As publishers we can flood the news with why real estate is a good investment NOW. It takes work but it can be done and you can look like an all star doing it.

So I have launched an inititative at Positive on Real Estate.com (this is our Digg style good news stories site). What I am teaching over there is that you can change the news because your publishing is the news. Journalists come to blogs and social sites to get news. If you flood your posts with reasons why there is good stuff happening to real estate you will change the news.

You can get onto our strategies here.

Dead?

On page optimization matters very little anymore.

Alive?

Optimization has moved into link optimization whereby your inbound  links are what will get your pages found/indexed by the engines. And what passes on value to your pages.

No links and your gorgeous website or blog are dust in the digital wind.

Many in this blog community know that SEO can cause traffic. Because they get it from this site. It saves the pain of creating massive links on your own when you can get it from here. You get on the front page and the link value from activerain.com passes down into your blog. Others chat up your blog and you have links from all over the community.

Its not enough in big markets, but it does help and it saves on time.

How Many Eggs and In How Many Baskets?

Many guerillas know this and take advantage of this ability to get traffic from portal communities. But I have warned many times, "Consider what is the value of free".

1.What does the owner of the portal get out of you posting? No one is that charitable.Ads or Offers are inevitable.
2. What happens as in the case of Squidoo when Google comes along and "slaps" the entire network? If your only "blog" was on Squidoo, you were possibly put out of business.

Certainly a network such as this has its value, but again free is free.  Call it Karma or the the Google god. But the engines know what can happen with free anything. Just look at what happened with their own free blogging at Blogster.

Web 2.0 to the hypsters is about socialization and human created content. To Internet Marketers, it is another link back to their paid for place of doing business. Perhaps you noticed the link above? It fits within the context of this post. But many are not as kind to the network when they post.

But this network is pretty responsible. However, a logic, understanding and compassion is not always go hand in hand with the cold realities of a search engine algorithm.