Marketing Maven

Do you remember your favorite teacher? One of the unique ways to get business from real estate agents is to provide training, seminars and webinars on a regular basis.It's not about lectures or lunches. It's about easy to implement, in your face, regularly scheduled events, where "participation" is the key to get them to not only remember you, but become their favorite teacher.This is article No. 1 (within a series of four ideas) and if you hold every other month, you'll have eight months' worth of events.Hold a "Discover Your Sales Strengths" EventThe book, "Discover Your Sales Strengths: How the World's Greatest Salespeople Develop Winning Careers" by Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano is an easy read-with huge "face-time" impact.First, read the book. It's an easy read. The "impact" is that the book has a website and a unique code to go online, where you can take the "sales strengths" test, which identifies your best sales attributes. (The code is unique and can only be used once.)So, identify six or eight agents, tell them that you just read this awesome book. Ask them if they will read the book within the next 30 days, because you are holding a mastermind meeting with a select group to discuss and compare notes.Tell them that halfway through the book, they'll find the website and special code where they can take their own, personal sales strengths test.Set up a date and time to meet in your office (Olive Garden carry-out is always a winner). Pick out a couple of key chapters and discuss the book with them.When it comes to the "strength-finder" results, you could discuss this one of two ways-as a group-or meet with each one individually. Roxanne Ander, a loan officer from Wisconsin, prefers to meet with each Realtor privately because she compares her strengths to their strengths to see how they are alike, how they are different, and see if how they can work together based upon their unique abilities.The beauty of the strength-find test is that no one sales strength is better than the other. It just shares the top five-how to build upon your strengths-and ignore your weaknesses.Oh, one more thing: Check around for pricing. You can save as much as $10 per book if you buy 10 or more.Karen Deis is president of LoanOfficerTraining.com. She can be contacted at Karen@LoanOfficerTraining.com.