Do you know what the busiest day of the year is? Christmas? Thanksgiving? Black Friday?

Nope. It’s tomorrow.

Everything’s going to happen “tomorrow.” We’ll start exercising, eat healthier, stop smoking, work harder, read more, study better, close that sale … tomorrow. As the saying goes, “There’s no time like the present to procrastinate.”

We all drag our feet occasionally. While there are tons of tips you can find about time management and how to stop procrastinating, it really boils down to three words:

Think.
Plan.
Do.

Think about the task or goal. Plan the best way to achieve it. Take action. The vision must be followed by the venture or it’s just wishful thinking.

To quote Martin Luther King, Jr.: “You don’t have to see the whole staircase to take the first step.”

If you keep waiting until tomorrow to begin, it won’t be long before “not now” becomes “never.”

Posted In: Personal Development

Tags: achieve, action, goal, Martin Luther King Jr, think

Sitting in the airport a few weeks ago waiting for my flight, I watched a little girl about six years old read a joke to her mother from a book she was holding.

“Knock. Knock,” the child said.
“Who’s there?” her mother replied.
“Opera.”
“Opera who?”
“Opera-tunity!” the girl said with enthusiasm.
Her mother laughed.

My stream-of-consciousness thinking went something like this:

Opera. Singing. It ain’t over until the fat lady sings. A colloquialism meaning don’t assume the outcome of something until it is actually finished. Not counting your chickens before they are hatched.

Opera-tunity. Opportunity. Knocking. Only once or until the door falls down?

I recalled that, while the expression “fat lady sings” is usually considered an opera quote relating to Brunnhilde’s final aria, many researchers believe it’s a remnant from the Victorian days. Conductors aboard steam trains would tell the young man stoking the engine, “Come on, boy. Put your back into it! It’s not over until the fat lady sings!” The “fat lady” being the train’s boiler and the “singing” being when her whistle blew, signaling that she was fully stoked.

Putting it all together and relating it to new home sales, I concluded that, regardless of what we hear in the media, the housing market isn’t done. In fact, it’s building up steam and we need to stay fully stoked … to put our backs into it … until the housing market is singing again.

Obviously, I was a little bored that day in the airport.

Posted In: Personal Development

Tags: housing market, New Home Sales, opportunity

When people refer you to someone, what they are saying is, “I like the way you do business and am willing to put my reputation on the line for you.”

If you are not getting referrals right now, it’s either because (a) you don’t have a strategy that you’re following or (b) people aren’t comfortable lending you their reputations.

Here’s a game plan that addresses both situations and will give you a 1-in-3 return. Follow this process and, for every three sales you make to a walk-in, you will get one additional sale from a referral. If your goal this year is 20 sales, you’ll get 27. The key to its success is understanding the importance of looking after your existing buyers.

Step 1: Weekly or biweekly, send or e-mail your buyers a few photos of their new home while it’s in different phases of construction.

Step 2: Take your buyers lunch on move-in day and give them a subscription to the local newspaper.

Step 3: Send an anniversary card every year on the date of their purchase.

Step 4: Depending upon their religious affiliation, mail them a traditional or nontraditional card at Christmas time.

Step 5: Throughout the year, call or visit them and casually ask if they know of any relatives, friends and colleagues who are thinking about buying a home.

Step 6: Keep an up-to-date journal of referrals, with notations about their preferences and housing requirements, along with personal notations from you.

Step 7: Call the referrals. Explain your customer-care commitment and what you can offer them.

Step 8: Schedule an appointment. Anticipate cancellations so always have a back-up plan.

Step 9: Be punctual, polite, passionate, principled and purposeful. Show up on time. Say please and thank-you. Have enthusiasm about your homes and community. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. Work your plan.

In his book “How to Master the Art of Selling,” author Tom Hopkins said, “Because I understood that building relationships is what selling is all about, I set a goal to send ten thank-you notes every day. Guess what happened? By the end of my third year in sales, my business was 100% referrals.”

Posted In: New Home Sales, New Home Sales Management Training, New Home Sales Process, New Home Sales Training, Personal Development

Tags: myers barnes, referral, relationships, selling new homes

What is the difference between those who succeed, and those who do not? The difference is in the challenges, the setbacks and the mistakes that you are going to have, and how you handle them and move forward. It’s not a matter of whether things are going to happen. They are going to happen. It’s how long you allow yourself to recover from a certain situation.

The key issues are not if it’s going to happen, it’s when it’s going to happen.

You have to be able to let go, you have to be able to move on. The comedian Gallagher said, “If you fall on your face you’re still moving forward, and if you fall on your back you are still looking up.” It’s not a matter of the challenge or the setback, it’s a matter of how fast you can recover. Recover quick.

Posted In: New Home Sales Training, Personal Development

Tags: Challenge, disappointment, failure, Gallagher, Get-Over-It Factor, letting go, moving on, recover, Succeed

Do you want to increase your income? You have to set a standard to increase your income. Most people settle for far less than they are really worth.

Why does one person in a sales company earn 6 figures and another makes significantly less? What is the difference? One person’s comfort zone or standards are set higher than the other. One person settles for no more than, and one person settles for no less than.

You can do more, you can be more, you can become more but it’s all about your standards.

Posted In: New Home Sales Training Video, Personal Development

Tags: increasing your income, myers barnes, sales training, standards

The only way to make a change is if you feel some degree of pain. That may not sound motivational, but until the pain of remaining the same outweighs the pain of making the change, that’s when you will change.

So how do you make that change? You have to do what you have to, when you have to, whether you feel like it or not. This concept by Elbert Hubbard, American writer and Philosopher gets to the root of how to make a change. It’s discipline.

If you want to change a behavior you have to do things that you don’t want to do when you don’t feel like doing it, whether you like it or not. Otherwise you spend your life in one of two zones, the pain of discipline or the zone of regrets. Do you want to look back at your life and say I wish I had done? What zone are you going to live in?

Posted In: New Home Sales Training Video, Personal Development

Tags: change, discipline, Elbert Hubbard, motivation, regret

Greyhound racing is a betting sport that draws crowds from across the country who sit in the stands and watch these sleek, graceful dogs race around a track chasing a mechanical rabbit covered in fur. The speed of the rabbit is controlled electronically by a person in a press box, so it remains just out of the dogs’ reach.

After one of these races, a reporter noticed a young greyhound dog sitting in the stands next to his owner, a white-haired man dressed in overalls. He walked over and started talking to him.

“Isn’t that a greyhound?” the reporter asked, pointing to the dog.

“Yep. Full-blooded,” the farmer replied.

“Did he ever race professionally?”

“Yep,” the man said. “Jasper competed for years. Won 100 races. Lived like a king. Earned lots of money.”

Surveying the dog, the reporter observed, “He doesn’t look old enough to retire.”

“He isn’t,” the farmer replied. “He could have raced for several more years.”

“Then what happened?”

“He just quit,” the farmer said, giving Jasper an affectionate pat on his head.

“You mean he just suddenly stopped running? Why?”

The farmer looked at him. “Well, one day he was racing in Florida when the mechanical rabbit malfunctioned. It came to a dead stop right there on the track. Jasper caught it, sniffed it, found out it was fake. He was never the same dog after that. Almost like he was embarrassed to have spent all those days chasing something that wasn’t real.”

Can the same thing be said about you? Are you spending all your energy and time chasing something that has no value? It may look like what you want until you get it and discover that it’s just a cheap imitation.

Like the broken mechanical rabbit, your way of life is no longer working. Your goals are out of focus … out of order … out of reach. Somewhere along the way, you lost your vision; and the rat race isn’t the right race anymore.

It’s time to quit. Stop chasing what’s worthless and pursue what’s priceless.

Posted In: New Home Sales Training, Personal Development

Tags: focus, goals, greyhound racing, rat race, value, vision

A 2×4 and focus go hand in hand. Most people can’t achieve their level of success because they just cant maintain their focus. They allow themselves to be diverted. If I were to take a 2×4 and lay it on the ground and tell you to focus walk, focus walk, focus walk, you’d probably be able to focus on that 2×4 and walk its length. Why so? Because you are focused. There’s nothing else to distract you.

Now if I took that same 2×4 and stretched it between two 40′ buildings, would you be able to walk it then? No, because you’d lose your focus. Instead of focusing on the walk you’d focus on the fall.

We don’t think of the possibilities, we think of the impossibilities. What do super-achievers do that others are unable to do? They keep their focus and walk their walk. Focus on the outcome you are looking for, not the situation you are in. Focus.

Posted In: New Home Sales Training Video, Personal Development

Tags: focus, Personal Development, possibilities, success, super-achievers

A business associate hates to travel on major highways. She prefers side roads, although it may take her longer to get where she’s going. She also likes to take different routes whenever possible. She admits to being “directional dysfunctional,” even with a GPS, so she often gets lost. That’s okay. Eventually, she finds her way. By taking the roads less traveled, she says the traffic is less and she benefits by experiencing different sights, sounds and smells.

In new home sales, you have multiple opportunities to take a different route … to try new sales processes, to search for prospects in different ways, to explore better methods of communicating with buyers and brokers.

The pathways you choose – and all decisions you make – are determined by three things: the knowledge you have in your head, the information that’s available to you and any restrictions that apply.

To demonstrate what I mean, a few years ago, my goal was to get proficient on the computer. To do that, I had to start at the keyboard. Although each key is labeled with a letter or symbol, I had never memorized their positions. So I was forced to use the hunt-and-peck method of typing. This was slow and laborious. It wasted a lot of time that I could have used more productively.

I had head knowledge of the keyboard, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to get more external information that I could convert to internal knowledge, so I took a typing course. My knowledge increased, my speed improved and here I am today…typing 40 words a minute without looking at the keyboard. Now, if I had not owned a keyboard on which to practice, that would have been a restriction that I needed to overcome.

While there is an unlimited amount of information in the world, psychologists have identified only two kinds of knowledge: declarative and procedural. Declarative knowledge is facts and rules. It’s easy to learn and teach. Procedural knowledge is more challenging and time consuming, but it’s the one that helps us accomplish our goals. The best way to learn it is through demonstration (watching something or someone) and practice.

As you grow in knowledge, the pathways you choose may be more of the less-traveled side roads than the crowded highways. Regardless, each one will serve some purpose and take you somewhere. The trick is to stubbornly follow the roads that are dead-on and not those that are dead ends.

Posted In: Personal Development

Tags: declarative knowledge, learning, New Home Sales, New Home Sales Process, procedural knowledge

Ambiguity has no role in business. If you can’t make a decision, you just can’t make it in new home sales. By putting off making a particular decision, you’re actually making another one … a decision to procrastinate.

As Henry Ford pointed out, “Indecision is often worse than a wrong action.”

If you’re in management, you need to be able to offer a solution when your salespeople come to you with a problem. If you’re in sales, you must be able to make solid decisions that advance your career and aid your clients.

For every decision you put off … or pull off … today, you will have 10 more tomorrow. If you delay decision-making until the end of the month, 300 decisions will still be hovering and you will have nothing to show. On the other hand, being decisive will push you closer to achieving your goals.

“Hold on,” you say, “What happens if I make a decision and it’s wrong?” Hey, that’s a given. You will make bad, wrong, inappropriate, untimely decisions. When that happens, remember “execute and evaluate.”

You make a decision. You execute (do) it. Then you evaluate the result. If it isn’t what you want, start over. Make another decision based upon what you now know.

Unfortunately, what usually happens is that we force a bad decision to fit the result we want. When it doesn’t, we offer an explanation … correct or not … as to why this didn’t turn out as we expected. There. Problem solved. We did something, identified why it didn’t work, and that’s that. We lapse into an uneasy form of contentment.

However, our brains aren’t so easily fooled. They know the score. Deep within those little gray cells is a tiny voice saying, “You screwed up. You should have started over and made a different decision that would have sent you in another direction toward the same goal. Instead, you ran with what you had … bad idea. It isn’t surprising that it didn’t get you where you wanted to be.”

Indecision is the thief of opportunity. Don’t let it rob you.

Posted In: New Home Sales, Personal Development

Tags: goals, Henry Ford, indecision, myers barnes, New Home Sales Training

Depending upon which economist is being quoted in the newspaper, housing sales are either so far down there’s no hope for recovery or they are on the uptick. The reality is that, regardless of where they fall, either situation isn’t permanent.

Therefore, your strategy must be to ignore the doomsayers and headlines. They change moment by moment and most of it’s bad news anyway … maybe even exaggerated bad news. As George Bernard Shaw once observed, “Newspapers are seemingly unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.”

By believing all the headlines and what “the experts” say, your brain cobbles together the different statistics, predictions, polls, remarks, facts and figures. Then you try to patch all this into an action plan that will work for you; but what you end up with is a makeshift mindset. While it may serve a purpose for a day, it’s only temporary. Tomorrow, the scenario will be change … and so will the headlines.

The reality is that you can’t afford to care whether the economy is up, down or sideways. Your focus has got to be steadfast on selling and marketing new homes the best that you can. Period.

Follow the advice of George Marshall, who was described as the “organizer of victory” by Winston Churchill because of his leadership during World War II.

America’s third Secretary of Defense advised, “We must stop setting our sights by the light of each passing ship; instead we must set our course by the stars.”

Focus on the big picture. Not on the press.

If you work in the new home sales industry and you’re looking for training tips from the top consultant in the business you’ve come to the right place for New Home Sales Training. Thank you, and keep following me — Myers Barnes | New Home Sales Trainer and Real Estate Consultant

Posted In: New Home Sales, New Home Sales Marketing, New Home Sales Training, Personal Development

Tags: home sales training, meyers barnes, myers barnes, new home sales consultant, new home sales trainer, New Home Sales Training, new homes sales training, Real Estate Sales Training

In 1870, a young man named Thomas Adams was trying to find a cost-effective substitute for rubber. He began experimenting with the sap from the Central American chicle tree, but every attempt to convert the sap into rubber failed.

He became so frustrated, he threw a piece of the sap into his mouth and began chewing. He liked the taste. Instead of continuing along the same road to rubber, which he felt would keep producing the same discouraging results, he changed direction. Adams used the sap to create the first mass-produced chewing gum in the world. The original name was Adams New York No. 1, but we know the gum today as Chiclets.

It’s natural to get frustrated .. tired … disillusioned in today’s housing market. You remember all those awards and top-salesperson-of-the-year plaques you won in the past and you wonder … what happened?

The short answer is “life.” Life happened. Life with all its uncertainties, challenges and unexpected twists. It rocks your boat and shakes your foundation. What can you do?

To begin with, forget the past. Ignore the awards on your wall. They can be anchors to your past and visual reminders of how sales used to be.

Then do what Adams did. Chew on your problems, chart a new direction and change course. Every day should be viewed as a new beginning … a new zone to explore. That zone isn’t the past or even the “just present” because as soon as you blink, the present becomes the past.

The zone you’ll be inhabiting is the future … the time ahead that’s filled with prospects, expectations, opportunities and your destiny. And the best part? The future comes at you one day at a time. You can handle that.