A few of you are suffering from what I call referral resistance. What's referral resistance mean? It means you've got a pretty good size database of people, a sphere of influence, and it's not performing well.

In other words, you're not getting a lot of referrals. Your sphere of influence isn't sending you buyers and sellers.

Why?

It's because the people in your sphere don't quite trust you enough. They don't quite see you as the expert that you know you are. And because of that, there's resistance to sending you referrals.

So how can you overcome referral resistance?

I'm gonna give you three quick techniques to help you with that:

1. You have to be the experts in their minds, not yours.

How do you do it? You need to be giving them information regularly about the real estate market. Now, this is super easy to do because you are given information all the time. One of the places you are given information from is your local MLS system....

One thing that we should do this year is cut the dead wood.

What does that mean?

It means we don't wanna be walking up a mountain, our mountain being our figurative goal set that we've set for ourselves and have a backpack full of rocks on our back.

Now, what is that backpack full of rocks?

Those are clients that don't wanna sell, that don't wanna buy, that are wasting your time, that are frustrating, that are angry people that we do not need to be carrying around on our backs anymore.

We need to cut them loose and work with people that really wanna buy and sell.

So going into the new year, how can we approach our business a little bit differently?

One is to work with ready and willing clients which sounds crazy, but it is so simple that it's obvious, right?

We need to work with ready and willing clients.

Having a ready and willing conversation is important. So I'm gonna give you my "ready and willing" conversation script when I'm...

I want to talk to you about what I call the algorithm of sales. And what that means is that there's some base numbers in our industry, that if you embrace them, it can unlock unlimited opportunity.

The problem is most agents don't want to embrace them. They just want somebody to hand them a buyer or seller. Or for a buyer or seller to literally lay down in front of them so they can just start working with them.

Guys, that doesn't work.

You have to go out there and work the numbers if you want to do well.

I'm going to give you six numbers that are going to be just what I would call standard in the industry that you have to embrace for you to have success.

1. For every 30 conversations you have, you'll average one closing.

So if you want to make 300, 400, 500, $600,000 a year, you just have to figure out how many closings you need. And then multiply that number by 30, which will tell you how many conversations you need to have in...

What is your power base?

Have you ever heard that term before? Well, your power base is a measurement and it's a great measurement that all of us should understand and really work towards improving over the course of the next 12 months.

So here's what it is:

It's the amount of sales your database is producing every year per member. So I'm going to give you an example to kind of put this in perspective:

Let's say you have a guy named John. John's a realtor has been in the business for years. Let's say John sold 22 homes last year. And his database size was 232. So we had 232 people on his database, created 22 closed signs last year. He can simply divide the 232 by 22 and this gives him his power base number, which is 10.5.

What does that mean? That means for every 10 and a half people in his database, he's averaging one closed sale.

What's the national average?

It's about 10. So if you're doing 10 and a half, your database...

What is Q2?

Well, Q2 is your most valuable asset. And you might not even know it.

Your most valuable asset is your database, your sphere of influence, we know that.

But what's Q2 mean?

Q2 represents the quality and the quantity of your database. So let's look at those two issues and how they can impact your bottom line coming into the new year.

Let's start with the quantity. What does that mean? Well, if we know that for every 10 people in our database, we'll average one closed sale, knowing that quantity makes a big difference. In fact, when I talk to agents on a regular basis, and I ask, how many transactions did you close last year? And they say 10, 12, I'll say, how big is your database? Let me guess. It's probably 80 to 120 am I right? Most people will say, yeah, you're right on the money.

Why?

Because your database is a reflection of your performance. Smaller database, smaller performance. Larger database, larger...

This week, we got some great information from NAR and some good news for the market.

We've had this kind of trending downline with home sales across the country. Now we've had a sharp turn in sales:

Sales are up 7% compared to September.

So why would we have this kind of dramatic increase in sales right now coming into fall?

There's a couple of key reasons:

1. There's more listings coming to market

We're seeing more listings coming to market every single month. The market is building with listings right now, which means buyers can finally find what they're looking for. So if you've got buyers on the sidelines, encourage them to come back in, because now there's more and more listings piling in. And there's listings coming back on the market as well.

2. Interest rates have stayed low

But the biggest reason why buyers are coming back to the market?

3. Prices are moderating

People are finally bringing their prices down to meet the market. And...

Zillow announced recently that they've stopped buying homes!

In their press release, they said they had supply chain issues and labor shortages, which is interesting because when you look at what they actually did in Q2 and Q3, where we've had kind of the same issues going on, they actually doubled the amount of homes that they purchased during that time compared to last year.

So why would they go from twice the amount they were buying last year to stopping on October 18th?

Some people are saying that one reason might be they're seeing market changes, just like we've been talking about. They're seeing a lot more listings coming to market which creates pricing pressure and competition. So they may not be able to come in and pay these high prices and then resell it at an even higher price. Because Zillow runs a flipping operation, right?

So we're actually seeing that. I've got a lot of students and a lot of parts of the country that...

If I were to ask you, what is your business strategy right now? Would you be able to write it down in two or three sentences — your specific strategy and how you're approaching the marketplace?

If not, you may have an issue because you might be market-driven and we don't want to be market-driven.

Why?

Because a market is kind of a high tide floats all boats kind of situation. What happens when the tide's not with you? And you're kind of fighting the market.

That's where you're going into a danger zone. And none of us want to be there. As Vince Lombardi said:

"Hope is not a strategy."

We absolutely have to have a strategy to survive and thrive in this business.

And one of the biggest things that we should be doing every day is understanding that we have a job that probably most people don't identify with. And our number one job isn't sales.

Our number one job is data collection. That is adding people to our funnel so that we can...

There's a new study out that shows that 77% of homeowners believe now is a great time to sell their home.

And when you combine that with a recent study we talked about — which is that 1 in 10 homeowners is going to place their home on the market over the next 12 months. And 63% of those will do it in the next six months alone.

Question is:

What are you doing about it?

We know 80% of your business is going to come from a direct result of your sphere of influence. Either direct business or referred business. So we need to dive into that first and foremost.

I'm going to give you three ways to have impact at scale with these folks.

1. A weekly email into your database.

This doesn't cost you a dime, but it's one of the most powerful things you can do to stay top-of-mind.

But that email has to be value-orientated. It can't be garbage that people are going to look at it as spam. It has to be high value.

What's the highest...

What if there's one thing you could do that would have a massive impact on your business? And it was something that would feel like it wasn't work? It was almost rejection-proof. And it's something that you could do every single day. Would you like to know what it is?

The answer is networking. And what I mean by networking is going to coffee, dinner, drinks, lunch, breakfast, you name it. Whatever it is where you're meeting one-on-one with someone in your sphere of influence.

There's nothing more powerful than you can do for your business in terms of marketing than that.

Now it's not going to feel like you're doing anything — you're just having fun with somebody who you like to visit with. But by stretching yourself and meeting with more people in your sphere and getting outside your comfort zone, I can promise you the result of this will be referrals.

Now it's not instant gratification. It won't instantly happen. But when you...