Page 102 - Social Media Marketing

Assembly Line Selling 83

home inspected to making sure both buyer and seller show up at
closing time. Since we deal with so many transactions, she has a few
dozen open files on her desk at any given time; these are all deals
that are between initial agreement and final closing. She'll go over
those files in detail every week to make sure nothing slips through
the cracks.

Do I need to be involved in all those details? Hardly-our closing
coordinator does her best to keep me out of the process entirely. She
says it runs better that way! Does that mean I am unavailable if they
need some direction? Absolutely not. Make sure you are always
approachable and that whenever your assistant needs your help
you can use it as a training opportunity and add it to your training
manual.

It's important to let your assistants stamp their own personality
onto your systems. For example, our closing coordinator noticed
that she was constantly looking in some files just to see if they were
open or closed. With hundreds of files each year, she can't keep track
of them all in her head. To save the trouble of pulling a file that's
closed, she created a little note that she sticks to the top-left corner
of every closed file. With a quick glance, she can tell immediately
whether a file is open or closed. She's proud of coming up with
an idea that made her life easier and helped our office run more
efficiently.

Expanding Your Business with Systems

Several years ago, a friend of mine from Philadelphia named Allan
Domb urged me to open my own mortgage company. Allan is the
top condominium salesman in the world. He works exclusively in
a marketplace of about a dozen high-rise condo buildings, a market
of some 5,500 units with a 0 percent annual turnover. Allan controls
more than an 80 percent share of this market, and his income runs
well into six figures. So I listened when he told me, "Ralph, if you
don't open a mortgage company, I'll come over there and open it
up for you!"