Playbook: Using Show and Tell to Win New Clients

Remember Show and Tell from when you were a little kid in school? You’d get in front of the class with something kinda neat and then provide the backstory. It was fun, right? Well, now it’s adult Show and Tell time, but it’s serious business.

Most jobs involve working with the same people for years and years. You get comfortable, understand each other’s foibles and combine to achieve. Not so with real estate sales. You may see the same faces in the office, but the ones who will decide what your W2 looks like every year? They change over and over, from one house sold to the next.

So, you have to be able to sell yourself to potential buyers again and again, and nothing sells itself better than past successes. It starts with having references. Job references for a REALTORⓡ are unlike those in any other field. New employers (clients) won’t want to know what companies you worked for long-term. They’ll want to contact who you worked for short-term, who you represented for buying a home. So having names, numbers and email addresses for happy past clients, who you’ve of course stayed in touch with for referrals and hopefully new business, is important. They’ve been briefed by you to expect a call now and then, and also to be able to explain precisely what your role was, how you led them from the first meeting through to closing.

But even that’s not nearly enough.

Missouri is known as the Show Me state. Well, when it comes to wooing new buyer clients, they are all in a Show Me state, meaning it’s not enough to tell tales of what you’ve accomplished. Many will want to see something for themselves. Presentations to buyer hopefuls are like job interviews. You shouldn’t go empty handed. Everyone else has resumes. Journalists have clips. Marketing and creative types have portfolios. What have you got?

“Show your work…learn how to start showing your work,” says Joe Rand, chief creative officer for Howard Hanna | Rand Realty. “You work so hard and you never let your buyers know what you’re up to, how long it took to get an appointment. They think, ‘Oh, you just called up and you set an appointment with the listing agent.’ Is it always that easy?

“We don’t document that but we need to start. Track the things that you do on a daily basis. Who are you working for? How much time you spent, how many people you talked to, all that sort of thing. And then add it up at the end of the week and add it up at the end of the transaction. Give it to them and say, ‘Look, this is everything I did.’

“Go to one of your recently closed transactions. Find one that’s moderate to heavy in terms of the time you spent, and for a client that will speak well of you. That is one of your references. And then go through and reconstruct everything you did. Find all your emails and all your texts. ‘Oh yeah, I texted on this day. I called on this day.’ Go through your call log. The nice thing about phones is that they are great at documenting what we do every day. Go through your calendar, go through every showing, go through anything that you did. Write the date, the time, what you did and how much time it took.

“Not for that client, but for the next client. Show them a real log of what you did on a deal for a client who they can contact as a reference. Sit down with a potential homebuyer and say, ‘Listen, I know people think that sometimes all we do is open doors. Here’s what I did on one of my recent deals, and this is a report I gave to that buyer so they knew all the work I was doing.’ That’s a killer piece.”

Jeffrey Decatur, a longtime broker associate with RE/MAX Capital in Latham, New York, takes it a step further, providing a new buyer’s package in addition to detailed time and contact logs of successful sales.

“In it I have a resume, testimonials, a guide, lists of mortgage professionals, a questionnaire and a set of future paperwork, including agency and fair housing as required by law,” he says. “I also give them a magnetic to-do list or calendar for the fridge.”

Rachel Gold, a senior account executive with ShowingTime+, opined that potential new clients today are different from ones from even just a few years ago, and must be addressed as such. She urges agents to make sure they are as digitally savvy as their clients, if not more so.

“Buyers today are more and more integrated with tech, and the pandemic really pushed us into a world where we rely more heavily on tech,” she says. “In the real estate space, for instance, that’s when we launched 3D tours as a way for people to see homes when they couldn’t tour in person. And since 2019, the use of smartphones in this process has gone from 60% to 84%, which is staggering. So with that in mind, it’s really important to think about how you’re making your listings reachable to this type of audience.”

“Don’t be afraid to try new things,” she continues. “We’re all navigating a different market right now, and in order to truly differentiate yourself from the competition and to help your clients win, you have to innovate and get out of your comfort zone. Build a really strong value proposition and be able to articulate what you can accomplish for buyers from start to finish. You’re going to be competing against agents who are willing to discount their services quickly. So come up with ways to have that differentiating factor to stand out. Ask yourself what makes you stand out, and make sure you’re able to articulate that to your buyers.”