Leanne Smith's (highdesertre) Blog

President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 during his First Inaugural Address said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He understood how fear can immobilize us; to keep us from moving forward; to stop us from doing what we need to do and to secure the results we need and want. Years ago, ...

People buy. Realtors sell. Sometimes those who are involved in selling including within the real estate market ignore this premise. To encourage people to buy, they must first buy you. Then they must buy your company. Next, they must buy your sales solution. The fourth “buy” is your delivery. Fin...

A colleague of mine, Mike Weinberg, wrote an excellent posting about how to overcome the FEAR of the corona virus. I mentally agreed with him 100%. As an aside, this past week I had the opportunity to reactivate my semi-retired consulting practice with a workshop in Chicago, Il. The purpose of th...

Much of life is about our expectations, our beliefs. This is a favorite short story of mine and totally relates to real estate. A young man was walking into a town. On the outskirts sat a home with an old man in his rocking chair. The young man walked up to the old man and politely asked “What ki...

Being in real estate sales has a lot of pluses. For example, selling vacant has few inspections, limited amendments and usually a cash deal. The minuses are usually low commissions due to low listing prices and the same amount of paperwork regardless of listing price. This past week I invested ar...

Have you ever received an offer to purchase (Purchase Contract or Purchase Agreement) with mistakes, serious ones? Recently I had the opportunity to review such a contract one of my team members shared as a learning experience. Given I have only been in this industry for only three years, I thoug...

With the 97.7% of U.S. businesses having fewer than 20 employees, salespeople are now also responsible for keeping customers. These small firms including real estate do not have the financial wherewithal to maintain dedicated customer service departments. Salespeople are customer service people b...

Selling only happens after you are speaking with a potential ideal customer. If the marketing has been executed well, you should be speaking with a qualified ideal customer. What happens as other noted sales experts have written salespeople in their desire to increase sales waste a lot of time wi...

When we market our businesses, the purpose is rather simple: To attract attention and to begin to build a relationship. This attraction may begin with a visit to your website to actually walking through your brick and mortar doors. From this simple purpose, the goal of marketing is also two-fold:...

The assessments have been completed. Clarity is now reality. This third step is strategic execution. Research suggests the super majority of strategy execution fails. (2015 article by Candido and Santos in the Journal of Management & Organization). Many of the reasons for failure of strategic exe...