The Hunger to Succeed with Tom Panos

The girls and guys that are winning around their offices are not the people with the highest IQ. They're not the best looking people. They're not the funniest people. They haven't got the best wardrobe, necessarily. What they have is the highest amount of hunger. 

There's a term, ‘Hustle beats talent when talent won't hustle’, and what I know is this: any day of the week, give me someone that's got an empty wallet, a broken heart, or a hungry stomach. It might not happen in a month. It might not happen in a year. But it will happen, because when you want something badly, the what, the how, the process, the methodologies, they'll show up.

1. BE A FANATICAL PROSPECTOR

You have to do copious amounts of prospecting. It’s critical in those first few years. You’ve got to have massive amounts of conversations with people in your marketplace. When I look 

at the Gym members who have been working in the industry for less than five years and are doing a hundred sales, they're prospecting is fanatical, obsessive, to the point where we're talking it can take up half of their day. 

The good news is though - it doesn't have to be four hours a day for the rest of your life because there comes a time where you'll be knocking on less doors, because they'll be knocking on your door.

Prospecting means capture lead, nurture lead. With some of these leads, you will be talking to people for two, three, four, five years before you do an actual listing presentation and they come on the market.

2. BE PROCESS-DRIVEN

I use the term, ‘Process trumps motivation any day of the week’. You know, when I look at someone like Chari Emrizade from Barry Plant at Geelong, here's a guy, a genuine 220-230 sales a year. A lot of people bullshit about figures but you can just go onto realestate.com and look at the ‘Just Sold’ section, and the truth comes out.

Go and have a look at this guy's individual sales, and what you'll notice is that he's got a process-driven life. A lot of good real estate agents that write big amounts of numbers, that have got capacity, need to have structure, and have role descriptions for each team member.

3. RUN AN ATTRACTION-TYPE BUSINESS

There's a great saying, ‘It's not who you know, it's who knows you’. And as an agent progresses up the layers towards black belt, which is $2 million GCI and over, what you notice is that there's this tipping point when they move from being just this chase agent, to becoming an attraction agent. They become a bit of a magnet for other listings coming onto the market.

Gavin Rubinstein is a perfect example of using attraction as a big source of getting business. What you'll notice is attraction is about traditional, digital, PR and social. What you're basically doing is creating a buzz around you, and when the heat's on with a listing or a sale, you amplify and magnify it to get the attention of other people in the marketplace.

Lisa Novak also uses attraction in her marketplace and uses social media to amplify. The words you use, and the new tools of trade, can magnify your success.

4. SOCIAL MEDIA

With social media, you can build an incredible profile, and become the digital mayor of your marketplace in a fraction of the time it used to take. Josh Tesolin writes a million bucks, and does about 90 sales out of Quakers Hill. He's a classic example of using social media to educate his marketplace. 

He does live wraps on a Saturday afternoon, and live is good. Facebook algorithms and Insta algorithms love the live streams. The market loves vulnerability and authenticity. He'll do vendor testimonials and create cover case studies on how he sold a property that had been sitting on the market with a competitor for maybe three months, and what he did to get it sold.

Social media can also do the opposite. If you're a dickhead, if you're a show-off, if you're the sort of person that is really posting content to impress other agents and not your marketplace, it can actually backfire. People can turn around and say, ‘What a douche bag. We don't want to deal with him or her’. Social media is not there to show that you've got a six-pack, or show that you’re living an affluent life, or show that you’re doing better than another agent. Use it to show authenticity. Show what you are like as a person, on and off the court. Show what you are doing to actually improve the lives of the community members and vendors and buyers who transact with you. That’s what people want. People want a bit of vulnerability. They want to see what you're really like as a person.

There is a new breed of real estate agents that have got this combination of high tech, high touch. They still talk to the people. They don’t sit behind a computer saying, ‘Oh, this post reached 10,000 people. I don't need to talk to anyone’. What they're doing is, they're using marketing to get noticed, and then they're using traditional sales skills, which is voice-to-voice, belly-to-belly to have useful conversations to drive people and progress forward in the process.

5. DIALOGUES AND SCRIPTS

If you're a real estate pro, you've got to understand that you're getting paid for what you say, how you say it, when you say it, and what it sounds like as it comes out of your mouth. You're not a tennis player hitting a tennis ball, right? You're not a basketball player shooting hoops, right? You're not a gymnast doing your thing. You're a person that is using language and dialogue to influence and help better buyers and sellers transact. So, make the decision to go pro, and learn dialogue and language in a way that is not robotic, so that it sounds like you having a coffee with a friend, and it seems seamless. That's how good you've got to become. It's got to get to the stage where it doesn't ever sound like its framework scripts.

Never use 1000 words when 50 will do, and to me scripts and dialogues are telling the truth efficiently. And what good real estate agents have is the technique to actually understand that consumers are time-poor, and they want the short version of the conversation.

A good agent sits there and is intelligent and says to a client, ‘Hey. The cheapest agent and the best agent are generally not the same agent’. Another real estate agent that has no technique might turn around and say, ‘Oh, look. I know that you said the other agent would do it for half a percent less, but listen. You know, you really want to get the best price. If they can't negotiate their fee, how are they going to negotiate the price? List with me. I've been around for 10, 15 years’.