Top 6 Ways to Make Your Sales Team the Best 'Athletes' They Can Be

What's the key to being the BEST at what you do? Natural talent helps, but the difference between a good athlete and a GREAT athlete is CONSISTENT discipline. Olympic athletes train EVERY day, usually two or three times more than their peers. They do whatever it takes to get a competitive edge and they do it regularly. Michael Phelps, 28 time gold medalist, is credited with training harder than any of his peers – 365 days per year for six years, including holidays, weekends and even after swimming meets.

So, as a broker what can you do to help hone the skills of your sales athletes?

Here are the six steps to success according to Michael Phelps from a great article in Entrepreneur Magazine:

1. Set Goals

If you don't know where you want to go, you won't know if you're getting there. Every salesperson has to spend the time to set their annual, quarterly, monthly and even daily goals. They need to be as specific as they can be, too. They need to be aspirational and maybe even a little scary. The best salespeople are very clear about what they are trying to accomplish. There's a great, FREE business planning tool offered by realtor.com, for example, that can be downloaded here.

Ideally, your managers are working with every one of their agents to ensure they are completing this important step. First, the manager needs so set their own measurable goals related to their office success with you as the broker-owner. Before any of this work can take place, you as the owner need to create your own set of goals for the company, yourself as the leader, and each of your offices, ideally.

2. Visualize

The best athletes see themselves breaking the tape first in the race or winning the championship or hitting the buzzer first. They see success. They dream success. They celebrate success in their minds – even before it happens. They send good energy to themselves to build confidence and to BELIEVE it really can happen. Real estate athletes need to do the same thing before they go to the listing presentation, or before the open house starts, or when they get up every morning.

3. Prepare for Every Scenario

We all know that real estate is anything but routine. Every deal is different. Every client is different. Every real estate market is different. The best sales athletes anticipate challenges, objections or hurdles and do whatever they can do to be prepared no matter what the circumstance. They also learn how to stay calm no matter what and find ways to get themselves motivated EVERY day.

4. Be Resilient from Bad Performances

No agent hits it out of the park every day. What can you as a broker do to help them recover from the lost listing, mortgage rejection or disloyal client? Brokers and your managers need to help each of your agents recover from their negative situation. Here's a great article from Business Broker Down that outlines 20 ways to motivate yourself in a time of failure. This is a great article to discuss during your next sales meeting.

5. Learn from Your Mistakes

The best way to get smarter and more successful faster is to make as many mistakes as you can as fast as you can. Attached is a great article from IQMatrix about how to learn from your mistakes.

6. PRACTICE

The single biggest way to get better at your job is to practice, practice, practice. The best agents prospect every day, work with clients every day, reach out to past clients every day, send out communications regularly and find tools to help them make sure they are working on the highest priority projects and tasks every day. There's a reason that Michael Phelps works out 365 days per year. He is serious about being THE BEST! He uses applications, coaches, equipment and his ridiculously strong work ethic to get it done. In real estate, there are great client relationship management tools that help agents be the best they can be.

If you want your agents to be the best they can be, then join me on a webinar I am hosting on Tuesday, July 24 at 10am PT/1pm ET. On the webinar, we will be talking about how client relationship management solutions build sales discipline – the kind of focus that elite top producers use. As a salesperson myself, I know how it works. When I work my sphere consistently using my client relationship management software, I kill it! When I don't follow these sales disciplines, my business starts to fall off.

Bottom line, this stuff works! If you and your team are not using CRM software yet, you're missing out. If you have CRM software, but aren't seeing the results that you would like, then this session is for you, too!

Register FREE HERE!

To view the original article, visit the WAV Group blog.