Every salesperson fancies himself a sales trainer, a sales manager, a sales ‘guru’ of sorts.   I am, I guess, not different in this regard.   Part of this desire is innate; the same skills that lead us to want to enter sales (i.e. wanting to connect, wanting to help) make us want to help other salespeople.   Part of the desire is ego; there are times that salespeople get too little recognition and times when they get too much.  Ego comes in.

Everyone in business should do pure sales for a year or two on the way to their chosen career.   Understanding the perspectives from the front line workers, the customers, and how it feels to engage in company policy  is vital to keeping a humble attitude.  Famously, the engineers of Ford never drove a Japanese car until the late 1980′s.  Once they understood what it felt like to drive a Japanese car, they stopped thinking it was the press that had turned on them and understood that they had to make changes to their own cars.  More front line time could have kept the American industry competitive longer.

Great Salespeople Don’t Always Make Good Managers

One killer mistake that organizations make is take awesome sales people out of their environment and make them into Managers and Trainers. Compensation programs should be designed such that this perverse incentive doesn’t exist. The jobs are radically different.  Being a good salesman has different elements than being a manager.  Success in one is not necessarily success in the other (but in most cases managers should have had some direct sales experience).  Some of the qualities that make a salesperson great are in fact things you DON’T want. 

A maverick personality is great when it’s him in the field, but when he’s trying to lead other people to success, and can’t accommodate different personality types, it hurts the organization by subtracting a good player…and adding a bad manager. 

Drawing out a famous example:  Phil Jackson and Michael Jordan.   PJ was one of those “scrappy” guys.  On the roster for a couple of Knicks championship teams, but was not a star NBA’er–or even a starter.  He had to wring every ounce out of his body; he was severely limited offensively, and hung around the NBA through tenacity on defense.  (Not a small feat.)  By popular logic, then, this guy shouldn’t be a coach.  He was never a superstar, and there were many better players to choose from to become a coach.

By consensus logic, Michael Jordan should have been taken out of the field early on and made into a coach of some sort.  Both ideas are dead wrong.  A superstar salesperson should always be paid better than almost every sales manager.  The skillsets are radically different; a salesperson doesn’t need to have as much administrative acumen, doesn’t need to focus as much on recruiting, doesn’t need to focus as much on

Being a salesperson should be a DESTINATION career–not a waypoint..   Companies should carve paths, complete with ideal compensation and recognition that make that possible.  What makes salespeople chose management roles is the recognition of excellence that the title confers.   There is a lot of need for e  In lieu of that, recognize them in OTHER ways.  I.E.  have them record their strategies on an MP3 (real simple) and play it for new hires.   Set them up as an authority, but also ensure that the company culture keeps people from siphoning off his/her energy.

Recognize performance and customer satisfaction.  Compensate what makes money, long term.  The best salespeople should have much higher compensation than most sales managers.  The Best salespeople are more valuable, and must be treated like that.   Like Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson.  Both were the best at what they did.  Phil’s Job was to ensure that the best player in basketball wasn’t bogged down by the other team.  Michael’s job was to cause chaos on the basketball court and make it impossible to double team anyone else.  And Michael made 30 million a year to Phil’s 3 at the end of his career. 

What did Phil have?  He had MJ’s trust.  MJ trusted Phil to take him out of games when they got rough.  MJ trusted Phil with matchups and gameplan strategy.  He knew when to let Paxson or Kerr hit 3′s, and Phil knew when to slow it down, and call for Michael on an isolation.  He managed the minutes and made sure that MJ was useful as often as possible.  Phil left, went to the Lakers, and turned an underachieving team with Shaq and Kobe into a mini dynasty, and then came back AGAIN to post one of the most successful coaching seasons

MJ then went into management–and despite being one of the “arguably best ever to play the game,” he didn’t have much success with the either the Wizards or Bobcats.  The skill that he had didn’t translate into coaching or management.  

Recognition is needed for salespeople.

Right now, I’m enjoying life. Thanks to Tim, and with the support of lots of people, I’ve changed the game in Real Estate. I’m working less, and making close to the same cash I was before. By less, I mean RADICALLY less. My job is mechanical, but as Mike Ferry and other people say…repetitious boredom pay off.

The gist is simple: Each morning, I call 30 Realtors. These are from lists of properties that MLS’s send me automatically. The search I’m looking for? Back On the Market. When a property goes back on the market, it’s for one of a few reasons. Most of the time it was expired and renewed. That’s a big part of it. But much of the time, it’s because some dirt bag loan officer is a salesmonkey and didn’t know his problems.

So, what I do is call the listing agent, ask for a referral to the selling agent to put the deal back together.

And you know what? I can average an ap or more a day. And a database entry, someone that I’ve tried to help.

Imagine this: If you’re a Real Estate Agent, and you’ve just had a listing not close. You’ve given up and returned the property to ‘active’ on the MLS. You get a call from a friendly guy, offering to put that back together…but first of all…offering to tell you the TRUTH.

Would this not appeal to you?

Would this not be a reason to work with a new loan officer?

It is, and it has been. One of my (currently) best referring agents is someone I called like this, and couldn’t get the deal done for. I pulled credit, took an ap ,and said, “This loan was fine in 2006, but there’s no longer a program…that will fit. There’s nearly no chance that this gets done, and your sellers should not… waste any more time with this buyer.”

The agent was relieved. Of course, they woudln’t mid a call every few months. Of course I could help.

I was a 50-house-a-year Realtor. I sold a ton in 2003-05, when you stuck a sign in the yard and answered your phone, and that’s all it took. Deals fell apart due to lender communication problems. So, let’s fix this.

Zillow? Are you Listening? You can make the RE commuity a better place if you respect Push a little bit.

I was accused of being “shady” once by another Realtor.  It got to me.  I was doing the Mike Ferry thing, and calling people for listings (this was before I knew who the heck MF was).   I was calling targeted neighborhoods when I had buyers.  “I have a buyer–do you know sellers.”   I got listings out of it (because the rule of thumb: the more people you talk to, the more listings you get).  This is when I was in my mid 20′s.  Anyway, apparently someone else had talked to someone I happened to call.  It was instantly assumed that I played dirty pool.  I was the new agent in the office, and Agents (salespeople, really) are high drama types.

Faster than the Internet turned on Greg Swann, I was an outcast.

I was stealing clients, a cardinal sin in a Real Estate Office.  I had–as a new licensee–11 or 12 listings really quickly.  This was novel, and people had a target on me. 

I was also keeping my method of client acquisition secret.  I’d made some gaffes in my new arrival as a RE/MAX agent, and the non producing majority was jealous, and looking for an excuse.  I figured if I let the cat out of the bag that you could call clients and get business then everyone would do it.  I thought that me pulling a list of people to call, scrubbing it against the DNC, calling it, making friends, listing their houses and making sales was easy.  Push marketing works, kids.

Anyway, the mistrust the incident had fostered made it literally difficult for me to work in my office.  My lack of skill at handling it compounded it.  After all–how could I have made this happen if not via crooked methods?  How could I get 11 listings in my first month with a brokerage without spending any money on advertising?

That’s when I learned…

Transparency Creates Trust.

A thought occurred to me: it was then hard (as it is now) to prospect for business.  I could show my methods, and people wouldn’t copy me.  Because few people would have the reserves to wade through the ‘nos’ to get to a yes.  So the offending agent, I took into my office a while later.  I said, “we had a misunderstanding, and for my part, I am sorry that I called a client you were working on–I never meant for that to happen.  I wanted to show you how I came across the number.”

Then I showed him my excel file, the calls that I’d made, and the notes that I’d taken.  He saw that my guy was just part of a list.  He didn’t have the mea culpa that I wanted, but he came to respect what I was doing to get business.  He didn’t pursue me from that point–he knew it was an honest mistake.  I invited anyone else to start hearing about what I was doing to gain business.  It wasn’t really a freak coincidence; I’d pulled a well targeted list, and was calling on people likely to close. 

So from that moment, I didn’t hide any of my methodologies, and I learned (though I didn’t have the name for it) that Transparency was really important.  Because information desires to be free, there can normally be few secrets or long term competitive advantages.  And, even if you told everyone every nuance of your business plan, a pale echo of what you’re doing is never going to threaten you.  You can’t replicate passion, soul, verve, moxie, desire, love by following a script.  As Scott Ginsberg said–there are no cover bands in the rock and roll hall of fame.

OH, By the way:  Monday I should have the my header done.  I learned an absolute TON about photoshop from “You Suck at Photoshop” so Thanks Lani via Bloodhound Blog.  It’s fun to do stuff like this, and it builds more skill than playing DTD

And In Case You Missed it:

April Rocks

So Do Todd And The Radical

Athol Kay Shows He has a Big Beating Heart behind all the pith and mirth.

Finally Ben Folds, Iron and Wine and The Postal Service all rock.  But Ben Folds?  All of his covers rock.  He could be the only cover band in the hall of fame.

Salesforce is a darling all around.  They have exciting stuff, good user interfaces, apparently. I’ll never know.  Why?

Because in a world of transparency, glastnost, openness…their website doesn’t give you pricing details.  30 days is not long enough to try out a CRM.  It’s long enough to learn some of the features of a CRM, but not long enough to learn the actual CRM.   When you go to "Enterprise Edition," and click tell me more?

You don’t get the info.

You can’t shop.

You don’t get price info (which we work backwards from: X per month, and oh, what features does it have?" 

You get this link:

http://www.salesforce.com/products/editions-pricing/professional-edition/

And it has no informaiton about pricing.  None damn it.

Now I know it’s 4475/month.  And @ 900 a year it’s not outrageous, really.  But– I won’t do business with a company that takes pains to conceal it’s pricing.  The ethos that they have is so alien to me: Try it for30 days THEN we’ll give you the price. It’s a crack dealer’s mentality.

Yet it claims to be $12/month. 

The way that they sell indicate that they will be a most unpleasant company to deal with, and the way that they do business is against the Gitomer Ethos: people love to buy/hate to be sold.  

So screw them.

On to the hunt:

I want a SIMPLE CRM that:

–> has hot key contact insertions (like ACT!–hitting INS to insert a contact kicks ass)

–>allows me to fetch my data however I want it  and do whatever I want with it (look up contacts: created between 6/2/01 and 6/30/05…export…or append the phrase: old).

–>Has workflow rules.

–>Will kick out mail merges to word.

–> can be adapted to do ecommerce/web form entry & set it and forget it drip mail campaigns.

–>has groups.

–>works like ACT 6.0 could have. (Oh, ACT, you’ve become such a disaster).

Not all of these things are vital; i loathe using the mouse to add something because it is poor planning; i like tabbing through.

The candidates:

zoho

freecrm.com

sugarcrm

Are there more I should check out?  Am I doing something wrong? I don’t need all of my features…just some.

"I’ll have to go stated," the guy on the other end other end of the phone said.    I was then given a list of demands from this individual, from coming to three houses he wanted to purchase  from a friend (for 25% more than comparable sales were going for) to the fact that he had a 690 credit score and thus didn’t want to pay a lot of money for this loan.    "Other lenders," he said, "Didn’t want to work hard and get creative to get deals done in the new market." 

I was obviously not the first lender he’d worked with.  He has received training of all sorts, more on getting the house then on managing his cashflow.  He found a seller willing to shovel some money at him if he bought at last year’s prices.  This would net him some cash. 

From what I could surmise, he had been in the business of selling/rehabbing and flipping houses for 2 years.  He’d done about 10 transactions, and was carrying 3 unsold properties.  He wasn’t behind, but he’d been carrying them for a while.  He had a job with the State, and that was a stable income in the high sixties.  Besides the houses, he had no other debt, but he was burning through money at $4k/month, with probably 60 days to survive before he’d default.   He claimed he had additional resources, which might have been true, and he probably had the means to extend himself with his local bank.  Still, he was structuring the transactions to go get cash back, and angling for time.

Oh, and he was going to make it easy for me by transferring his own appraisal to me.

He had a stunning knowledge of underwriting requirements. "My LLC will be 2 years old in the middle of January, so we should schedule a closing right after that, OK?" and "In my 401k I have 6 months PITI".  Because of his attitude, and my shift towards providing incredible service to what I consider "good" borrowers, I told him:  "I’m sorry, but I don’t have any programs that suit your needs right now, but I wish you the best."

He called me a few names on his way out of my world, as all failing investors do for people that don’t suit their immediate needs.  Buddy, I hope that you don’t leave a scar in the world.

If this experience was novel, I would probably just shake my head and move on.  However, something like this happens to me two or three times a quarter.  A desperate investor comes to me, puffing themselves up and concealing their really shaky situation and cash flow problems, with this structured deal that will be a panacea for them.  (Much of the time, it is predicated on the fact that Title Companies will be complicit, but it also hits up appraisers and other folks for fraud).  There’s a new wrinkle every time.  Some go on a savings account with their Mom to meet the PITI requirement.  Some have a "2 year old dormant LLC" to get the Right to 100% investment property stated income financing.

But No–it’s not Fraud…Fraud is for Crooks, Right?

Nobody considers these lending hacks "fraud," not even today.   "Going stated" is an acceptable thing to do if someone’s in a business with depreciation, expenses, or otherwise hidden cashflow.  It’s not a right, though.    If anyone in the transaction brings up the "F" word, you’re impugning someone’s character, and they’d go on to the next practitioner after an unpleasant exchange.  Over time, people people wore down, and started coaching investors as to how to accomplish some of these goals.

Fraud was rarely in the form of falsified documents.  The programs never required calling black white.  They instead found a way to ask the question: Could this black sock potentially be bleached to eventually become white?  The market learned how to game itself, with the investors a step or two ahead of the underwriters.  Nobody is singularly responsible for where we are today.  Nobody put all the moving parts together.  No, instead, everyone took a small toll as bad deals floated down river.  I’m guessing that we’re still adding more bad loans of uncertain quality to the pile.   Here’s to ’08.

When not having dour thoughts about the Mortgage industry, Chris Johnson is the leader of the Ten Day Team, in Westerville, OH.  He can be reached at chris@tendayteam.com.

I don’t see my self carrying on as a low-leverage sales practitioner in this industry indefinitely. There will be mortgage people for the next 6-7 years, so far as I can tell. So far as I can tell, there will be folks that explain the mortgage process, help get files gathered and underwritten.

I’m guessing the fee per deal goes down.

I’m guessing that there are fewer people/groups doing more deals per person. I’m hoping for some sort of industry-wide optimization, because the lack of inegrated/integratable standards is really bizarre.

I think that, for 5-6 years, it will be roughly business as usual. There will be a need for more velocity. (Our process lends itself to sloth, because each…outlet requires a wholly different set of paperwork to deal with).

We need RIDICULOUS speed–Jamie Dimon level speed in this business.

So–for now: Leverage my contacts, my ability to meet people on a predictable basis. Grow my Realtor Contacts.

10 Day Mortgages/10 Day Service…is a powerful idea. I have to brand that idea AS something shortly. I like it because it’s succinct, it’s specific, and it makes a specific promise to my customers.

And…FOR MY NEXT TRICK: RightRightNow.com

With solid systems, I can lower my involvement in the mortgage business from 40-45 hours (down from 60-65) to 15-20 per week. As soon as all of my main systems are in place (Lead Generation, Application Handling, Processing, Closing, CRM, Post closing), I will move to market myself as the owner of a technical services company. This won’t take long; I think by April 08, I can get that accomplished.

There’s a lot to do–but the gist of what I want to develop–the “right right now” idea is small project custom consulting. I think I can get an average ticket of $3500 bucks.

I’m branding under “right right now,” because I want to limit the things that I’m perceived to do. I want to specialize in rapid delivery IT projects. Since I’m only going to be getting them, I need to start with small, safe projects–and grow from there. I think stuff like “$900-1000 cusotm wordpress implementations” will be where I start.

What I want “right right now” to do, ultimately, is to be the company that helps other businesses do things FASTER and with more confidence. GTD has probably had a geometric effect on my productivity, red

Finally…blogging?

I’ve established this as a “rough draft” site, more or less. Not trying to be on topic or particularly interesting; this is mostly a place to write down ideas for development a little later. For that–it’s working. I ditched “livejournal” for this site and Google Reader. Instead of the repetitive whining of below average people that gained access to my mind by virtue of sharing an interest….

…I get insight from world class experts that are still willing to interact with me.

I’ll maintain this blog, but not advertise it much, not deliberately, at least. I will produce the best stuff I can, but this is really a “first draft/rough draft” place. I will also maintain “columbusmortgagenews.com” or it’s equivalent.

The rest? I’m not an expert yet, but I think that “speed” as a concept is a niche I can fill. THere are “efficiency” sites, and “personal productivity” sites, but I think being oriented around speed is a dynamite concept to sell and share. Keeping 2-4 posts per wek, on topic…about that idea…is a way to teach ME how to be speedy. Being the “speed” guy is probably a ridiculously effective application.
And, I can throw my insights about sales/general business here, and some of ‘em will rise to the top.

More tomorrow.

Shutting down tonight.