Real Estate prospecting time is precious, and if you don’t zealously protect that time, there’s no shortage of people who want to take it away from you.
That’s why Keller Williams Realtor Jason Morris developed the habit of not looking at his phone or email every morning, when he has a standing appointment with his Mojo Dialer. He sets his phone on airplane mode every night when he goes to bed, so none of his emails, texts, or voicemails pop up on his screen as a distraction.
“You have to teach yourself to protect your headspace,” says Morris, who sells homes in the Middletown, Delaware area. “You have to be mentally present to talk to strangers with confidence. I no longer let anybody have access to my time prior to noon. That time is 100 percent reserved for the primary task of the day – prospecting.”
“I don’t check my messages until my prospecting is done. This freaked me out early on because I was afraid I was going to miss something. But the reality was that there was seldom anything to miss to begin with. The habitual checking only served to foster stress and procrastination,” he says. “If you don’t have any drama bombs dropped on you first thing in the morning, it frees up your mindset to do these calls. By cutting yourself off from those information sources, you’ve already won most of the battle!”
Delaware is a Fast-Growing Commuter’s Paradise
The Middletown, Delaware area is a fast-growing market driven by the state’s affordable home prices (the same $300,000 house here fetches $500,000 or $600,000 in New York), low property taxes and no sales tax. It has become a very desirable area for new retirees and commuters to Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore (otherwise known as ‘Super Commuters’ who want higher salaries and cheaper homes).
“Traffic is pretty light here,” Morris says. “From Middletown, you can take a 20-minute car ride to get to the Amtrak and take the rail into the city. You can get to New York in an hour and a half. A lot of nurses do it. They do four 10-hour shifts and spend three days here. Philly’s only a 45-minute commute.”
“Much like the national trend, our market bottomed out around December 2012 – that was the turning point – and it’s been coming up since then. We’re seeing bidding wars and rapid price increases. It’s definitely becoming a stronger and stronger seller’s market. Inventory is low and we’re having a tough time finding houses for the number of buyers who are in the market,” he adds.
Mojo Boosts Real Estate Prospecting Productivity
Morris runs a core 5-person Keller Williams team that includes himself (listings side), his wife Nancy (oversees buyer team), two buyer’s agents, and a closing coordinator. The team also is supplemented with outsourced help from receptionists, marketing assistants and additional phone salespeople.
The team currently sells about 100 homes a year in the $225,000-$400,000 range and 80 percent of its business is within a 12-minute drive of the office. (Here’s an interactive Zillow map of the homes they’ve sold over the past year.)
“We’re now at a plateau,” explains Morris. “When we first started Mojo (in 2012), we were adding 20 to 25 sales a year. We went from the low 20s to the mid-40s to close to 70 and then we hit 100. But we just haven’t been able to get beyond the 100 pace. The reason is staffing. We have some bottlenecks in terms of efficiency. So we’re changing things to fix our efficiency issues.”
Morris now hires a second company (that also uses the Mojo Dialer) to do all its circle prospecting calls – looking for sellers aiming to sell their homes over the next 12 months. This allows his internal team to focus primarily on follow-up nurturing calls.
“This will allow us to ramp up again,” he says. “We have an in-house person do all of the nurturing – the warm interaction – up until they are ready for an appointment and only pass those leads off to an agent once they’re ready to sell the house. That way we can actually have our agents doing three listing appointments a day versus three a week.”
Using Mojo for their nurturing calls, the team has found that the Mojo Dialer “squeezes out all the dead time” from working the phones. Here’s a breakdown of why:
- If you were to make calls with a cell phone, you’d have to look up the phone number, manually dial the phone number, then wait for it to ring. You’re probably two minutes between attempts.
- So if it takes two minutes to find a number, dial it and wait for a pickup or voicemail, and you have to do 10 of those to get a conversation, that’s 20 wasted minutes listening to the phone ring.
- Mojo squeezes out the wasted time by finding the number for you, dialing the number for you and dialing multiple lines. Instead of spending most of your time twiddling your thumbs and waiting for a real person to pick up, you spend most of your time talking to prospects – real estate prospecting bliss.
“The huge firepower that Mojo brings to the table allows us to have such an abundance of leads each morning that we don’t have to chase people in the evenings or the weekends,” Morris says. “I never have to work on the weekends. Our staff on the buyer’s side does, but on the listings side, I can work a regular 9-to-5 day and be home everyday by 6 to be with my family.”
On the buyer’s side, the team also uses BoomTown for web lead generation and their primary CRM – a business practice that predates the team’s use of Mojo. Now that Mojo is fully integrated with BoomTown, the team can instantly import their live leads into the Mojo Dialer as they come in.
“This was the change that got my entire team using the Mojo dialer,” says Morris. “It was kind of a ‘teaching old dogs new tricks’ thing. They had been reluctant to try the Mojo Dialer because they were so attached to Boomtown and didn’t want to have to manually copy over the data. They found it easier to dial those calls on their cell phone. But once Boomtown connected to the Mojo dialer, it was a no brainer!”
Finding Motivation on YouTube
No matter how successful or accomplished they may be, every professional occasionally hits a rut and finds it challenging to maintain his or her peak performance everyday.
According to Morris, finding inspiration is a skill that has to be practiced and developed just like any other job skill. “There’s motivation all around you. If you go into YouTube and type in “motivational videos,” you’ll find thousands of these short 3 to 5 minute clips that are amazing for getting pumped up about your day.”
The video doesn’t need to be directly about real estate. One of his favorites is called Mindshift, a montage of quotes about pushing yourself and tapping the most out of your talents:
Whether it’s images of people enjoying a luxury lifestyle or training scenes from the latest Rocky movie, make your own YouTube playlist so you can keep going back to the videos that you find most inspiring.
“Once you’re in the right mindframe, you’re ready to make that first call,” Morris notes. “And once you make that first call, momentum takes over!”
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