Every businessperson wants to win clients for life and for a good reason: It costs energy, time, and money to gain a prospect’s awareness, win his attention, convince him of your benefits, and bring him into your business circle through an initial sale. If that first sale is the only sale you ever make with the prospect, your sales investment has only a one-time payoff. But if that client buys from you on a repeated basis — and refers others to you as well — your investment grows with each transaction and money-making opportunity.
The key to winning clients for life is to avoid suffering defections, such as when a customer decides to buy or sell with another agent or when a client doesn’t join your referral team.
Professionals in other businesses sometimes have an easier time keeping clients in their business circles simply because they have more opportunities to see and serve their customers. For instance, a car dealership sells a car and then, even if the buyer doesn’t purchase another car for an entire decade, the dealership has the opportunity to see the customer face to face every time the vehicle is due for service, oil changes, or tire rotations. Like a car salesperson, a real estate agent makes big sales to clients on an infrequent basis. The difference is that in real estate, after-the-sale service isn’t automatic. You have to create strategies to keep in contact with your clients and to continually remind them of the value you deliver.
As a real estate agent, your success depends on the quality and durability of the relationships you build with your clients, and the one and only way to build solid, enduring relationships is to deliver excellent, unrivaled service. To be an outstanding agent you need to lavish your clients with service that exceeds their expectations. The challenge is that not all clients expect or want the same kind of service. What constitutes excellent service to one client may seem inadequate or even like overkill to another. You may not believe it, but an agent could sell a client’s home in less than one week, at full price, and still have a dissatisfied customer due to some action during the negotiation, inspection, or closing that simply didn’t match with the client’s service expectations. To avoid service mismatches, figure out each person’s service expectations
- Find out each person’s service expectations
- Customize and personalize your service delivery
- Never become complacent
Some agents are successful in spite of their arrogant approach to service delivery. Rather than focusing on customized service and long-term relationships, these agents prefer to serve a stream of here-today-gone-tomorrow clients that they acquire through relentless prospecting and high-volume lead development. While this approach does create sales, it does not build business for the future. This approach creates fewer referrals and less leverage, so the agent will need to prospect relentlessly during their whole career.
As an agent, your prospect universe is limited, and your customers aren’t apt to become repeat customers unless you treat them with the kind of unparalleled, consistent, and customized service that turns them into clients for life.
