You’ve got a lot on your plate. There’s endless paperwork, calls to make and loans to close. You have prospects to nurture and referral partners to woo. And somewhere amid all of that chaos, you have to be a person, too.
The truth is, there are more than enough tasks to keep you busy until you die. Giving yourself over to the busywork, however, rather than making headway in business, doesn’t do you any favors. It’s time you learned how to grow your income with strategies that actually move the needle.
Create momentum
Creating time for impact is a great way to be more efficient and focused. This is a single hour per day dedicated to doing only the things that bring in money. If you want to create momentum, get off the hamster wheel, break through your income ceiling and make your power hour a priority. During this time, you’re focusing on revenue-generating activities. Here are just a few ideas of what that can be:
- Follow up with leads.
- Meet new leads and prospect.
- Call referral partners.
- Post content that drives business to you.
By creating a time for these activities, you can knock them out quickly and save yourself from the 5,000 distractions that fight for your attention all day long. To get the most out of your power hour, make an impact list. This list should include all of your revenue-generating activities. This way, you always know what to focus on when you’re in this mode.
Define focus
Don’t worry about getting your power hour into the beginning of your day. You want to make sure you’re at your best whenever you’re digging into revenue-generating activities. If you’re not a morning person and people often mistake you for a gremlin until the afternoon, do not force yourself to do these tasks in the morning. It’ll lower your conversions and it will feel like the longest hour ever (no joke).
Instead, focus on the time of day that you really shine. When do you feel your best during the day? This is the time you’re going to be on your game and create the most momentum. Not to mention, when you feel good, it’s more likely that your prospects and referral partners will feel good. So, be intentional about when you get in your power hour.
Once you know when you’re getting your power hour in, you can decide how to go about your power hour. The two main ways are batching and listing.
When you’re batching, you’re putting all of the same activities into one period of time. For example, if you want to make all of your follow-up calls one day and do all of your prospecting another day, that can help you get further ahead because you’re not switching from task to task. You can get into one particular mode or mindset and run forward with that.
Listing means you are checking things off a list, which may or may not be the same type of task. These may be in order of importance or deadline driven. Maybe you have two leads who are looking to close sooner rather than later, and you have to follow up with the prospect you sent the contract to a week ago because it’s still not signed. These time-sensitive tasks should be at the top of your list.
The best part of batching and listing is that you can use them together. You can batch all of the specific types of activities you want to accomplish during your impact time and then list them in order of importance. That will give you the mind space of batching with the momentum of listing — the best of both worlds.
Relationships generate sales and revenue, but you have to genuinely be invested in them and offer value to the other person.
Deliver results
There are a few ways to make the most of your impact-driven time. First, when you’re talking to real estate agent partners or prospects, stop saying the same things as everyone else. For example, Realtors constantly hear this line from loan officers: “I’m going to help you build your business.” Is this a bad thing to say? No. Is it overused to the point of being ineffective? Yes.
Figure out how you can actually help your Realtor partners grow their business and extend that offer. For example, if you’ve got an eye for marketing and you can see where your partners need help, you should create a monthly marketing workshop for them to attend, where they’ll walk away with unique ways to market themselves that are specific to their brand.
Maybe you run a once-a-month luncheon where your partners can get their bookkeeping up to date while you eat lunch, catch up and build the relationship. The possibilities of how you can serve your partners are only limited by your imagination.
If you want to start thinking outside of the box even more, think about other people who can be referral partners who are not Realtors (try not to gasp). There’s a huge market of telecommuters who work from home. They may or may not belong to local groups of other remote workers, but on average, their online marketing skills and connections are great points of leverage. If you host a lunch-and-learn or create a mastermind group where these workers can receive support, you’ve just created new potential streams of income. These people can give you inside information to pass onto your Realtor partners when selling homes to people who work remotely.
The key here is to make time to build relationships. Relationships generate sales and revenue, but you have to genuinely be invested in them and offer value to the other person. Sometimes, that value has nothing to do with mortgages. Maybe you learned something cool that will be interesting to your referral partner and you want to share. Maybe you saw a movie that would be perfect for them to see with their significant other. These are the touchpoints you give to your partners that say, “I see you. I was thinking about you. I care about you.” They are the details that make all of the difference in your income.
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You want to create a power hour where you’re focused and actually doing the things that generate income. It’s easy to get lost in the paperwork and shooting the breeze with your favorite people, but when you create a container that’s built for momentum, you can accomplish much more in less time.
