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Constantly finding new business – motivated buyers and sellers – comes second to your commitment to providing great customer service to your existing clients.

• Note the word “continuously”. This is not a time block. This is not a task to be overcome and done. It’s a lifestyle and a way of thinking. This is your priority.
• Note the word “motivated”. You have to be constantly trading and looking to find people who are ready to trade.
• Agents waste an incredible amount of time with people who are not ready to do business. Thousands of people, at any time in any market, are ready. Go find them.

The list doesn’t end with these, but here are some of the most important components to keeping your business alive and well with new opportunities:

1. Provide stellar service

Future referrals come from great customer service. If you are not prepared to provide great customer service, you will be very frustrated with this business. Providing excellent customer service is the foundation of any successful agent’s business. The best of the best create passionate fans for life.

2. Take action

It’s about action and you have to act to learn. One of the biggest traps that agents fall into is, “I need to learn more, take more courses, read more before I start generating new business and doing transactions.” This is a trap.

If you wait until you know more before you act, you’ll never act. You will never know it all. You learn every day.

3. Try something new

Knowledge comes from trying new things and testing them, seeing what works and what doesn’t, then iterating and trying again. If you “set and forget” people, they will quickly “set and forget” you.

It’s a busy, noisy world. A world full of advertising and attention seeking. An economy powered by views, impressions and likes. There may have been a day when canned, unmanned, set-it-and-forget-it campaigns worked (I doubt it, honestly), but those days are gone. We were all forced to ignore them.

If you want marketing campaigns to work, roll up your sleeves and get ready to do it, because a gimmicky spam campaign won’t do it.

4. Don’t be afraid to work

They call it work because it’s hard. If it was all “fun” they wouldn’t call it “work” and you wouldn’t get paid for it.

5. Put the database together

If you don’t have an organized, evolving, healthy “database” (the central place and system where your clients and prospects live), you don’t have a business, you have a hobby.

Be on purpose, not by accident.

If the size, scale and health of your database correlates with the size and health of your business (it does), then how do you increase the size/health of your business? You develop and maintain new relationships and put them into your systems to do so. You are expanding your database.

6. Work 1 is the leader

Make lead generation a non-negotiable (in the morning hours). Generating new business is hard work. Emotional labor. It’s a belly-to-belly business with lots of interpersonal dialogue. I don’t know of a single agent who successfully and consistently generates leads in the afternoon. The day is already too scattered and chaotic. What is more important? We don’t have the energy to do that.

Side note: I don’t believe in time blocking. I believe in prioritizing. What is the difference? People who have three or four blocks during the day say they have three or four priorities. In my experience, we have the opportunity to manage one priority per day, at best two, rarely three. Never four or more. This business is too variable and you have to adapt to changing conditions. That doesn’t mean you throw it all out the window and let chaos reign, but it does mean you can’t afford to be too rigid about your activity periods.

7. Focus on the 80/20 rule

The Pareto Principle states that approximately 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of causes or activities. In other words, a small percentage of activities have an excessive effect on results.

Did you know the same goes for your referrals? Eighty percent of your referrals come from 20 percent of the people you know.

Who is responsible for 80 percent of your referrals? If you don’t know, you better find out. This group of people should be a separate classification in your CRM and need VIP-level attention, or they will stop being responsible for 80 percent of your referrals.

Relationships are not equal and according Dunbar’s number, as well as basic time constraints, you cannot maintain the same level of connection with very many individuals. You have to prioritize. who is the priority

Your pipeline in 180 days is a reflection of the work you do today. Based on the work you are doing now, what do you expect your pipeline to look like in six months?

“The customer’s perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie

Nick Schlekeway is the founder Amherst Madison, a real estate brokerage based in Boise, Idaho. Connect with him LinkedIn.