19 Jan Words On Paper And From Out Of Your Mouth.
Words on paper and from out of your mouth.
Some sooth, others rupture.
They all frame your Personal Brand.
Personal Brand; the perception others have of you.
A perception that would be sensible to influence, where we can.
Who you are. What you do.
How you make others feel?
For estate agents/realtors, what you do is commonplace. So too, how you do, what you do.
That's the basis of commodity work.
But who you are? How you make others feel?
That is the most compelling reason for any vendor choosing you over another agent.
Let's start with Who are You?
Male. Female.
Bubbly. Studious. Polite. Precise.
And any other observable characteristic you care to mention.
But that's not enough.
I need to know more and I don't want to have to guess.
If I do, it may not be you that I choose.
Loves football, particularly Manchester City, or Leicester, even Chelsea. Keen on cycling. Partakes of the occasional bottle, or two, of wine. Walking, muscle cars, yoga, food, veganism, health and fitness. All very commendable and ostensibly the start of a relationship.
But this nodding glance to your hobbies doesn't single you out as one that I can trust.
I'm not about to choose one realtor over another based on one liking baseball and the other, hockey.
Values, beliefs and convictions - that's what I'm looking for, were we to have a relationship based on trust. The alternative is a transactional sales process - where I look for the cheapest, because no matter your pitch, as long as it's not broken, it's a commodity service.
Am I to guess at your values? Should I infer we share the same beliefs? I might have a sneaking suspicion that you wish to remain diffident. It's hard to tell.
There's no need for confession, or baring of the soul.
Transparency isn't needed as yet. You can still keep the mask.
Because there's a vehicle that allows vendors to know, like and to trust.
A vehicle that has been around since the dawn of time.
One that is used every day in each of our lives.
It's the stories that we tell.
Pure and simple.
From venture capital to religion, from politics to philanthropy, there is no place untouched by story.
More memorable than facts and stats.
More emotion. More engagement.
The story that only you can tell.
One of my favourite entrepreneurs is Steven Bartlett, CEO of Social Chain and host of the Diary of A CEO podcast.
This episode, the first of 2020, might just become my all-time favourite.
Not because of the story, but from what we can read into the story.
What we can read into the story is Steven's character - his values & beliefs.
They're laid out. In full view. Inviting judgement, should we so wish.
For me, though, the episode shines a light on an incredible, compassionate and thoughtful human being.
Other, earlier, episodes had already formed my opinion, but this was simply adding congruence.
In the world of real estate, congruence in thought and deed isn't that common.
Encouraged by estate agency gurus and trainers to cold-call, door knock and interrupt in order to make a connection, there's a danger that realtors/agents follow blindly, even when they're badly led.
Annoying the very people they are trying to win over.
"It's a people business."
Then make it so, for all you Star Trek fans out there.
Give them a reason to choose you - rather than to reject.
Closer to home, I heard a story from a U.K estate agent that I still remember to this day.
Then branch manager at Winkworth's Ladbrook Grove office and my first ever guest on this Needle & Haystack podcast
He relayed a story of a buyer, looking for a property in the area. Nothing unusual so far.
But whilst taking this buyer to several properties, he managed to get a clearer picture of her ideal home.
Pulling up outside a competitor's office, the words that next came out of his mouth were this:
"We don't have what your'e looking for at present, but they do."
Shock, horror.
In the shark-infested, red ocean that is estate agency, where it's mandatory to 'crush it' and to 'hustle for your worthiness', here was an estate agent, not only admitting defeat, but presenting the prize to a competitor on a silver platter.
An act of generosity?
I don't think so.
Just a decent, thoughtful, forward-thinking human being - who just happened to be an estate agent.
Again, it's not so much the story as what we can read into it.
Words on paper and from out of your mouth.
Say more about you than you will ever know.
In the age of attention, where 300 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute and users have just an 8 second attention span, having something interesting to say is mandatory.
The Local Property Expert? Sounding off about the latest price trends in your area.
The Awards ceremony? The latest office fit-out?
The new recruit? The latest instruction - sold, when other local agents could not?
Stop - I'm bored of your self-congratulatory pat-on-the-back. I've heard it all, many times before.
Competence is everywhere.
But we don't need a competent agent, when there's yet no trust.
We won't trust you - even if you've won the Sunday Times Gold Medal, three years running. If the reviews on that spoof comparison website, TrustPilot, are all five star.
Particularly if the Allagents review web site doesn't show publicly the agency details, unless I first enter my contact details.
We can be as defiantly laconic as any agent.
No, there's only one thing we look for in an estate agent.
Vulnerability.
When an agent pushes their worth, we push back.
When they lower their guard, we reciprocate.
Words on paper. And from out of your mouth.
Some sooth. Others rupture.
They all frame our personal brand.
If I can help with those words, drop me a message. I'm happy to help and my advice is always free.
chris@andsothestorybegan.co.uk
Thanks, as always for reading:)
Chris.
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