Getting to Know Clients Over Time
Your success in becoming an Super Agent depends on how effective you are at meeting with your clients, not once but multiple times. In the relationship business, you cannot expect clients to fork over their business or become your personal advocates from a single encounter.
The best relationships develop over time from getting to know each other, establishing trust and discovering opportunities that help your clients as well. But too often agents get stuck because they give away too much information during their first meeting, making it more difficult for the client to rationalize meeting with them a second or third time. Just like when you first met your best friends it takes time for a relationship to develop and blossom, leaving them without a hunger for an encore can kill any forward momentum
Fortunately, there are some simple things you can do differently that will help you plan and hold multiple meetings with the same client. Follow the 3 principles described in this article and you'll experience success in landing multiple meetings.
Don't Be Interesting
In your first meeting, you should ask questions and listen. You should offer nothing of yourself until you comprehend the client's goals and understand the potential obstacles standing in the way. The second and third meetings with the same client will anchor the relationship but the key to getting those meeting hinges on the success of your first meeting.
The fifth habit in Dr. Stephen Covey's bestseller, "7 Habits of Highly Effective People," tells us to seek understanding. Being interested, instead of being interesting, means you're not trying to impress the client, or "wow" him or her with your offerings. Seeking to understand shows you're curious about the client's problems and eager to comprehend their circumstances.
Don't Give It Away
The more you develop the habit of seeking understanding, the less time you'll spend in your first meeting discussing the least important subject - yourself.
When you meet a client for the first time, they don't care about you. That's not an insult; instead it's good news, because if you feel pressured to impress a client, you'll making another critical mistake - you'll tell your whole story. It's the biggest reason why it's difficult to get to a second or third meeting. If you include in your presentation every aspect of your service and every reason for doing business together, you'll leave nothing for follow up. It's the same reason why many movie sequels do so poorly at the box office. The first episode gave away the whole story, leaving the second one uninspired.
Plan Your Sequel Beforehand
However, there have been some wildly successful movies that included sequels, like the Star Wars trilogy and Harry Potter. The key to their success is that the sequels were planned and written before being filmed.
Before you meet with an client for the first time, plan how you'll get to your second and third meetings. Take the time to prepare and forecast what the potential clients needs will be, are they downgrading, are they first time buyers, what king of information can you offer to follow up with?
Plan your questions, like an interview, for the first meeting. Your strategy might include discussing the client's goals and any potential obstacles standing in their way. By getting an client to talk about potential obstacles, you help them to share their problems. The greater the problem they raise, the more important it becomes to them to get it solved. Your goal is to help the client raise significant problems you can solve.
But your key in the first meeting is to get the client to share their problems - not to solve their problems. Instead, your first meeting should simply raise their awareness of their problems. You'll use this momentum to plan the second meeting - to discuss how to solve their problems together.
Although you could have given solutions right away, you would be destroying any future opportunities to build more rapport and trust. Get the client to show you where their pain is, remember people love to talk about themselves and their problems, one you find some hot buttons do not offer solutions but plant the seed for the second meeting.
Holding multiple meetings serves an important purpose because the relationship development process occurs more naturally. Actually, by slowing down the "getting to know you" process, you speed up rapport and trust building. When you have rapport and trust, your odds increase of forming a loyal client.
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