Just as the best athletes in sports have coaches, the best real estate professionals also have coaches. Real Estate Coaches help provide the insight, real estate training, methods, and even the systems you need to accomplish your goals. With so many different styles of coaching available to the real estate professional, how do you select the one that will get you to your goals?
Before deciding on which coach will help you, I invite you to consider what a coach can’t do for you. Consider the following:
- A coach can’t make phone calls for you
- A coach can’t do your marketing for you
- A coach can’t make sure you show up to work on time
- A coach can’t check to see if you are following up on every lead
Often when speaking to real estate professionals their vision of a real estate coach is one that they will pay and all of their problems will go away enabling them to have a flood of business easily. This expectation often leads to disappointment after just one or two coaching sessions and the agent keeps joining different programs hoping the results will change (but they never do).
What to Look For In A Real Estate Coach
Although there are many real estate coaches out there, each one, has a specialty. Some are great with cold calling scripts, others are masters at direct response marketing, and still others are a combination of traditional marketing and internet marketing. With all of the options, which one do you select to invest your hard earned dollars?
Before researching coaches, take time to evaluate your needs as this will allow you to compare your needs to what the coaching programs offer. Consider asking yourself the following questions:
- Will I get to speak to “THE” coach or someone else?
- When you want to hit the highest levels of success you want to speak to someone who has been there. If you want to hit 20 million in production and you are speaking to someone who has only ever done 5 million and they are giving you advice, how come they couldn’t follow their own advice?
- Do I want systems or just coaching?
- Some coaching is purely on the phone with the coach telling you what to do. They might tell you to send out a new postcard, run a new ad, etc, but what do you put on the postcard or ad? If you don’t want to spend time figuring it all out, which can be very expensive, you might want to get into a coaching program that provides you templates for advertising so you don’t have to guess on what works.
- How much coaching do I need?
- Consider how much coaching and accountability you need as the more coaching you need, the more expensive it can be. When you are great at holding yourself accountable, then maybe you just need 1 call a month. When you need more help then consider a program that gives you more interaction and access to the coach.
- How will I judge the success of the coaching?
- The ultimate evaluation of the coach should be the impact to your business, but that can take time. It would be unfair to judge your coach’s efforts in a month because your production didn’t go up; as that would be like judging your trainer’s impact after 1 month of gym workouts. Ask yourself (and your coach for that matter) what the path to success looks like. There should be a steady plan and checkpoints to evaluate your progress. Those could range from conversation counts, appointments, and more.
- What type of feedback do you respond to?
- Coaching can take all forms and different people respond to different personalities. If David Goggins (world Famous Navy SEAL, Endurance Runner, and Bestselling Author) was your coach you’d have to be comfortable with some yelling…and that works for many people, but not everyone. While your real estate coach won’t likely yell at you, try to determine if you need more positive reinforcement or more “tough love” and understand why that works for you.
Taking the time to simply ask yourself the above three questions will save you time when searching for a real estate coach. When you find the right fit for your personality then your goals will feel easy to achieve. To your success.
