By Tim Harris

I received a great email from a coaching student. This agent had been taught that real estate was all about contacts….not people.  They said that they were told by their last coach that real estate is just a numbers game.

This person had built a prospecting based business and they were selling 40-50 homes a year, which is fantastic.

This agent from Florida went on to tell me that their market changed and the prospecting was less effective. They thought their only solution was to prospect more, call more…in other words work harder….. at what wasn’t working.

In this market in order to get the same results they now had to make 100+ contacts a day. That means they would have to prospect for 5-6 hours per day. They were worried that they couldn’t continue grinding away on the phone for 5-6 hours per day.

I told them was something they didn’t want to hear. I’ll tell you the same thing. I’ll do it in a story.

I have a ’57 Porsche 356  Porsche. Don’t be impressed. If you were to see it believe me, you wouldn’t be impressed. I’m in the garage fixing something that is wrong with the car…using a wrench that is probably older than the car itself. I’m trying to tighten some bolt that is holding some important widget on the engine. I notice that the wrench was slipping over the bolt head and it’s eventually stripping off the head of the bolt.

I’m using this wrench, cranking away and I stop myself and thought… this is stupid. This wrench may have worked great 30 or 40 years ago, but its sure doesn’t work now. I was on autopilot thinking that this was the wrench I was supposed to use, thinking this was the effort that it was supposed to take and it was normal to have to put in that much effort.

I stopped, put the wrench down, went to my tool box, found a new wrench and it worked great. I had the job done in about two seconds. There I was wasting all of that time using this old wrench that should have been thrown out a long time ago. Had I used the right tool I could have turned that bolt and accomplished the same job in seconds.

Guess what? That exact same parallel works in your real estate business. If you find yourself using tools that no longer work you too need to throw them out. Tools in the real estate business are scripts, objection handlers and techniques.

You need to change the system, change what you’re doing. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting that you’re going to get different results.

If you find you’re doing something that worked two years ago when the market was different and it’s not working now the problem isn’t you. Get that in your head. A lot of people are thinking that somehow they’ve lost their edge. Agents, you haven’t.

The problem is what you’re saying, your scripts, your objection handlers and techniques. Many of the things you’re doing and maybe some of the thoughts you’re having, simply like my old wrench need to be set aside and replaced with new ones. If you’re feeling frustration, like you’re beating your head against the wall, chances are the problem isn’t that you need to work harder. You simply need new tools.

The challenge is you need to accept the fact that this market requires new tools.