Have You Calculated Your e-Factor?

Have you calculated your e-factor?  Do you even know what an e-factor is?

Not knowing this important phrase may be costing you THOUSANDS of dollars in lost commissions.  You need to step back, re-examine what you are doing and begin to plan your path to success.

So, what is an e-factor?  It's a fancy conjugation advertisers use to identify emotion factors, those things that drive people to make decisions, regardless of what the decision is, whether to let the salesperson in the door in the first place, or whether it's to make a purchase at the end of the process.

Conceptually, most marketing is push marketing.  It's sort of marketing by brute force and it's designed to shove products, services, sales people, and appointments down people's throats.  In many cases it comes across as begging, in some cases it comes across as pushy, and in all cases it comes across very "salesy".  Magnetic marketing is all about attraction; letting the prospect have the sense, the feeling, that he is seeking out the Realtor and often that allows a different type of selling, a different type of relationship, where the Realtor is really viewed as an expert.

One of the best examples that I know to illustrate this is the "marketing guru" who shares the story that he will cheerfully pay 500 bucks in cash to anybody who can tell him of a time when they received any kind of cold call from a cardiologist.   It just doesn't happen.  All cardiologist's marketing is magnetic marketing, not push marketing, and therefore, it allows for a sales process that is diagnostic plus prescriptive with virtually zero resistance, price or otherwise.  At the end of the examination and the diagnosis when the cardiologist tells you you've got to get in and they've got to replace a tube, your questions pretty much have to do with how soon can you get in, not how much or gee, my brother-in-law's a cardiologist and so on.

These are none of the things that sales people deal with in normal sales environments.  But, the reason it's that way at the end is because of the way it was structured at the beginning.  So, magnetic marketing definitionally is about using media, systems, processes to attract ideally qualified prospects to you, who view you as an expert with solutions to their problems so that you get to sell in a competitive vacuum.

If you want control over the process, that battles won or lost, I believe, in the very first square on the marketing game board.  It is determined by whether the prospect perceives that you are chasing them or the prospect perceives that they are choosing and seeking you out.  Therefore, control of that perception then controls everything else from there on out, and those who figure out how to do that real well find the rest of their process gets easier and easier and easier, and their sales production rises because they're only spending face-to-face time with people who are predisposed to do business with them in a competitive vacuum.

You begin by offering information of value or perceived value, precisely matched with the interests of the decision maker whom you wish to attract.  Simple translation is you create the right bait and if you have the right bait for the right fish, you've got the right bait for the right animal.  You focus on not advertising your product, not advertising your company, not advertising your services, not advertising your technology, but on advertising and marketing only the bait to attract precisely the right creature to respond.  Now, you begin this communication with this person who has raised his hand appropriately and through that communication you establish your problem solution set up, you establish the generic solution to the problem, you establish your specific solution to the problem, and you establish the expertise of you as the sales person, who is ultimately going to get face to face with this person, and you create an environment where the prospect is going to make the first move to call or otherwise respond to request the appointment, which usually is couched in some way as an appointment or an examination or a complimentary consultation, or something that has intrinsic value in and of itself.

A pure lead generation ad, or a pure lead generation broadcast fax, or email or whatever is very much akin to a personals ad.  If you've never run them, but go look at them you'll see that the structure of a personals ad is incredibly simple.  It is a description of who the person wants to respond, who the person does not want to respond, and an incentive for response, in this case it's typically implied, but still it's there.  So a personals ad may read divorced, white female, age 35 seeks single male 28-52, must like horseback riding, be nonsmoker, own boat, father own liquor store, etc.  It's who they want and who they don't want.

Translated into marketing, for example in the financial planning industry, an ad like that might be:  Attention individuals with incomes no less than $300,000 a year to $542,612 a year with children who will reach college age in the next three to five years, we have incredibly important information you should have blah, blah.....please do not respond to this ad if you are um, um, um... and then call for free recorded message or fax back this form or whatever. You can see how this format translates really into any environment.

There's fundamentally no difference between the objective of the marketing plans of the "big boys" and you as a Realtor.  Just remember this:  businesses don't buy anything; people buy things.  The check has to be signed by somebody, and the purchase order has to be signed by somebody, and that's a human being with flesh, blood, and so forth. You can learn a lot that you can use on a smaller scale from the million dollar ad campaigns that are run.

First, think of yourself.  What motivates you to buy all of the things that you purchase?  Unless you are an alien, the emotions you experience are very similar to the buying public that you are looking to connect with.  You need to design your advertising campaign around satisfying these needs, wants and desires.  Stop telling everyone how great you are, how many millions of dollars you sell...your intended audience can't relate and really doesn't care.  They have their own agendas.

Re-work all of you advertising and approach it from the point of view of how you will serve their agendas.  It will pay off with a fantastic bank account for you.

Just thought you should know.

Have a profitable day!

Steven