In the 1999 thriller, The Sixth Sense, a boy communicates with spirits that don’t know they are dead. I highly recommend this movie – but strongly suggest that you don’t let others know you plan on watching it, as someone will inevitably give away the final twist; which is one of the best in movie endings of my generation.
Most would look at this as simply Hollywood storytelling; and while I recognize many believe they can speak to the dead, I am not one of them. However, I do have the ability to see living commercial real estate brokers whose careers are actually dying; and like those poor souls in the movie, they don’t know it.
To stay consistent with the Sixth Sense, I will share with you the 6 common traits of CRE professionals whose careers are on life support that I have seen over my 30+ year career working with 1,000’s of commercial real estate professionals. If you have one or more of these traits, it’s time to make some serious changes in your daily business habits.
6 traits that indicate your commercial real estate career is on life support:
- You have no documented annual goals – no direction, no plan, and no keeping score. You’re simply going by gut until you realize you just had another below average or average year and can’t explain why.
- You have no personal development plan – the barriers to entering commercial real estate are low. However, consistent commercial real estate success requires consistent personal growth.
- You have no defined prospecting plan, which is exemplified by the inability to articulate who your targets are for this quarter, this month, and this week – and how you are going to attract them.
- You have no personal marketing plan for getting known by key influencers in your market. You are invisible, and like those souls in the Sixth Sense – you are a ghost.
- You do not leverage other people or resources. You believe you can do things better and faster than most, or look at outsourcing as an unnecessary expense.
- You have no personal margin in your life. You feel if you don’t work, you will not get paid. You justify working excessive hours as the only way to provide for your family. You don’t recognize (despite any level of success) you are still not present.
The good news is, all these factors can be treated. There is no simple, quick fix – but there are proven approaches to resurrect your career. For an example of how we assist in building thriving commercial real estate careers, click here.
Also, we are holding our second Great CRE CRM Debate on Thursday, June 1. To register for this free webinar, highlighting the most popular CRM platforms in our industry – click here.
One Response
We’ve tried them all including the latest hyped up and super expensive Apto. In my humble opinion nothing we have tried compares to Clientlook which was built from the ground up for CRE, not on top of someone else’s generic platform. I wish it had a few additional modules for detailed marketing plans,tracking the company pipeline, and for year over year production comparisons, but nonetheless, you would have a hard time getting me to move suggest to staff that we leave Clientlook for another platform. If you have a sizeable database,making a CRM change is costly both in time and in money so I suggest that people look closely, think long and hard, make a list of all they need the software to do, push hard to ensure that the sales rep can prove that that their software can do what they say it can before making a commitment to change. I promise you that there at a lot of software companies promising far more than they can deliver.