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This is one of those things you just have to get for it to make sense: if you hunt your customers down to find them and ask for referrals, you are likely to get some, but not a lot of them. If you HUG your customers – surprise and delight them as Mike likes to say – they will be inclined to give you even more referrals than you would get by simply asking for them. It’s a strange dynamic, but it’s true.

In another post, we shared the mechanism by which we HUG everyone we know – Send Out Cards. It’s an inexpensive, but powerful way to get in touch with and stay in touch with your customers in an automated and easy-to-use manner. Yes, we do other things to hug our customers. I have given some of my best customers tickets to Oklahoma University football games and Mike takes his best customers out for lunch or on fishing trips to Lake Texoma. The type of hug doesn’t matter as long as you do it.

Our Raving Fan Club is an example of an ongoing hug program that we use to make working with our companies more enjoyable. Plus, it keeps our past clients and sphere of influence coming back to use our services and find out what else we’re bringing to the table on a consistent basis.

Best of all…it brings in lots of repeat and referral business. On average, Jay does about 45 to 55% of his business each year with people from his sphere and book of past clients. That equals as many as 200 sales per year from that group of people. Not too shabby (thanks Adam Sandler).

We do a lot of hugging with our Mastermind and Elite Coaching clients, too. We do everything we can to acknowledge the good things and the bad things that happen in their lives as consistently as possible. There would be no Kinder Reese without them, so it’s important to us to care for them as we can because honestly, we care for them dearly on so many levels.

Unfortunately, even though we knew about hugging our customers, we didn’t really know a lot about the theory behind it, so we sought out an expert on the topic a while back. His name is Jack Mitchell and the name of his book, not surprisingly, is Hug Your Customers (get your copy at the NAEA library) . He was kind enough to do an interview with us and tell us exactly what he did to create two of the most successful clothing stores in Connecticut.

Here’s a description of his book:

If you work at a Fortune 500 company and live in southern Connecticut or New York’s Westchester County (two of Manhattan’s most affluent suburbs), chances are you buy your suits at Mitchells (in Westport, Conn.) or Richards (in Greenwich, Conn.). These two independent clothing stores are some of the most successful in the business and outfit CEOs from Chase, GE, IBM, Merrill Lynch and Pepsi. Mitchell, whose father started the business, shares the secret of his success in this unoriginal but cheerful guide to keeping customers happy. Hugging your customers, he says, has nothing to do with being touchy-feely around them and everything to do with offering them over-the-top service. For Mitchell, that means literally offering a customer the coat off your back, if that’s the only one left in the store in the customer’s size and preferred style and color. It means going to customers’ homes to tie their bow ties for big events. It means serving coffee and bagels in the store and giving away hot dogs in the parking lot on summer Saturdays. Some might view this as fawning, but for Mitchell, it’s the best way to keep customers coming back. His advice-know your customer, think outside the box, have a “no problem” attitude – is hardly groundbreaking. But those who work with customers daily have much to gain from this chipper, inspiring handbook.

What he shared opened our minds to incredible new opportunities regarding customer service and retention. We think it will do the same thing for you.

Soooooo….below you can listen to a recording of that very call. We hope you like it and enjoy it as much as we did.

[audio:http://kinderreese.s3.amazonaws.com/allaudio/10_ICI_07_JackMitchell.mp3]

In a previous blog post, we highlighted the scene from Facing the Giants that talked about what we needed, internally, to see things through to the end while growing our real estate businesses. It had a lot to do with raw determination, perseverance and a commitment to making things happen.

We also promised at that time you’d be able to find out what it takes to be successful – wildly successful – from one of the greatest actors of our time, Will Smith. Before you ask yourself “What could I personally learn from Will Smith?”, ask yourself, “Is it possible that Will Smith could teach me at least one thing that I might be able to use in my life and business?”. The answer is an emphatic yes.

The guy is the first rapper to win a Grammy and his movies make the movie studios $10 for every $1 they pay him. Imagine what it takes to become that valuable to a business that they make a 10-1 profit on the investment they make on you virtually every time. It’s safe to say that we could all learn something from that guy.

At last year’s Kinder Reese Exponential Growth Summit, we shared this video with the roughly 400 people in attendance and it was met with rave reviews. It’s one of the first times we’ve seen people watch a video for enjoyment and start taking notes a minute after it started playing.

Honestly, it kind of blew our minds.

As leaders, it’s our goal to not just find a bunch of followers, but to actually create more leaders too. We want the people on our real estate teams and at Kinder Reese to be leaders in whatever they do. That kind of result takes an above-average commitment. In fact, we think Will Smith puts it best here: “Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.”

It’s kind of profound; he ties the commitment and perseverance the we find in Facing the Giants with the importance of being highly skilled, an expert, at what you do. We think that ties nicely into our strategy with the National Association of Expert Advisors, but we’ll save that for a later post.

There are people we have met in our travels like Jay Abraham, who you heard in a previous post we put out there, that not just at the top of their profession, they ARE the top of their profession. It takes what Will Smith shares in this video we’re providing to you to get and stay at the top. We hope you like it as much as we do. Enjoy the video, it will take about a 10-minute investment of your time.

Frank Kern once told us that people want to business with those people that they know, like and trust. While it’s important that you have a great set of systems, programs and strategies to offer to someone when helping them buy or sell a home, you will get virtually nowhere with your prospects if you do not build enough rapport with them so that they trust and like you.

In Anthony Robbins Mastering Influence, more than a quarter of the program covers the importance of building rapport: how to do it, why you do it, what happens if you don’t do it and how doing it makes the difference between being an average sales person and a successful one. We stress the importance of these elements of being a great sales person to our agents each and every day.

Here’s an overview of what bonding and trust do in your sales business from Sales Expert Les Garnas and some tips on how to do it:

High Trust Selling

Superior selling techniques focus on trust as a time-tested bond between customer and salesman. Good sales techniques start with your first order followed by accurate, on-time delivery. Your trust tools build as sales and orders continuously meet and exceed customer expectations. With time, a salesman’s selling techniques and trust shift to sales insight, continuous attention to details, competitive intelligence-gathering and interest in the customer’s business, which leads to solid trust tools, customer satisfaction, and loyalty.

Trust Enables Selling Techniques Development

Your sales techniques will benefit from a relationship of selling. Self-confidence will increase; and self-awareness, as a result of bonding well with customers, should provide satisfying rewards. Selling techniques should expand beyond order-taking to matching orders to the customer’s business development strategies—making you a more important part of the customer’s team instead of just a vendor or salesman.

Optimizing Advanced Selling Techniques with Trust

Customers buy from people they like. Being a salesman customers like, helps distance you from your sales competitors’ sales techniques and which leads to customer loyalty. Loyalty leads to giving you larger orders because of your more sophisticated selling techniques and trust. Long term, satisfying relationships depend on trust and consistent sales techniques. Trust becomes a lifetime practice of successful salesmen.

Business Trust is Linked to Ethics

Trust is either enhanced or undermined by your personal ethics in dealing with customers. Salespeople who have strong trust bonds with their customers measure their action not by what they can do but what they should do for their customers. Over time, customer response is most usually trust and loyalty.

You know we’re huge Tony Robbins fans…if you didn’t know; now you know. Of the millions of things he teaches us that we can use in business and in life, the one thing that sticks out for us is his belief in the power of modeling.

Modeling is the act of learning how to do get the same results someone else got by modeling – doing the same thing they did – their strategies, approaches and actions. The benefit of modeling is that you can usually get similar and even better results in less time. It’s kind of what we hang our hat on here at Kinder Reese. Our coaching clients simply need to model what we’ve done in our businesses in Oklahoma and Texas and they can get the same results we have. Many of our clients have gotten better results, which is always cool for us to see.

Below, you can get access to some amazing strategies and systems that a few of our top clients used to combat the insane market over the last few years to be successful. The people in the video you’re about to watch have consistently sold between 150 and 300 homes per year – every year – from 2006 until this year. That’s pretty good stuff if you ask us; especially in light of the horrible market we’ve had.

When we caught back up in the early 2000’s much of Jay’s success was the result of relentless learning from and modeling the success of agents he met and coached with along the way. When it was Mike’s turn, he spent his time modeling Jay’s success and he had amazing results in a very short time. As you may remember from the earlier blog post about Jay Abraham, you learned that Mike made his first million in GCI in half the time it took me.

Today, when you watch this video, take copious notes and see how many strategies you can pick out from these proven producers that you can take back to your business to start getting some serious results. If you get 10 or more, then you did a great job taking notes. There’s another post spotlighting time we spent with Jay Abraham where you’ll learn even more things for you to model, so be on the lookout. For now, however, watch this video intently and put all the good ideas to use ASAP.

Ahhhh, the dreaded Average Frustrated Agent (AFA); waiting, lurking like a hungry animal looking to pounce on uneducated, unsuspecting buyers to help keep their dying real estate business alive. It’s an all-too-familiar scene in the real estate industry today that’s robbing buyers of their current and future opportunities to gain serious equity with their home purchases.

How is that possible you ask? It’s simple. The AFA in today’s real estate economy doesn’t have the systems, strategies or education necessary to put today’s buyers in position to secure the best possible home for their specific situation…so they can buy a home and have an equity stake the day they move in.

The real estate market is one of the few places where you can buy something at a fraction of the current cost and start your investment process in the black. Cars lose value the minute you leave the car lot and stocks and bonds are sold at whatever the current value is the day and time you buy them. Real estate, on the other hand, gives you the best opportunity to be in “the cat bird’s seat” from day one.

In a prior blog post, we talked about the importance of having a solid strategy when negotiating for our clients and the same holds true when it comes to helping buyers buy a home and move into it with not just potential equity, but actual equity. Today’s Certified Home Buying Advisor™ (CHBA), has a proven set of strategies and programs that accounts for the 115 variables that occur during the home buying process so that a home buyer gets the best possible home for their personal situation.

In addition to guiding buyers with solid knowledge of the real estate process and amazing interpersonal skills, the CHBA is able to get secure homes for their buyers at better prices (and help them get better mortgage rates and terms) so that they are literally ahead of the curve on savings and equity the minute they leave the closing table.

It sounds unbelievable, but it’s the honest truth.

In another blog post, Jay talked about how to differentiate yourself from the other agents in your market place to get more business. For now, though, enjoy this video I did on the New Masters of Real Estate television show – seen on CBS, NBC, CNBC, CNN and Fox – where I discuss about how agents can differentiate themselves in the eyes of home buyers simply by doing a better job than the AFAs in their marketplace. Click play below and enjoy the show…

Prior to 1994, there was no explicit agreement that told buyers they would have their rights represented in a real estate transaction. The Exclusive Buyer Agency relationship was born out of a lawsuit – Bokusky et al. vs. Edina Realty, where a group of plaintiffs launched a class action lawsuit against Edina Realty in the US District Court in 1993.

The court awarded the plaintiffs $20 million in 1993 (worth $31,845,674 in 2012 dollars) because it felt that the buyers were led to believe they were being represented when they really weren’t. Buyer agency, as you can see, came at a very high price and yet today, buyers don’t get the attention, support, direction and results they deserve when making the biggest investment in their lifetime.

It’s a shame.

The good news is that the National Association of Expert Advisors™ will be releasing a new designation in the next few months that gives agents who want to be top buyer agent representatives, the opportunity to lead the pack in working with buyers. The designation, Certified Home Buying Advisor™ (CHBA), means a better real estate transaction for buyers and more streamlined and profitable transaction for the CHBA.

There are more than 115 variables that have to be managed in a real estate transaction and the agents who are able to handle them with the most ease and highest level of success will be the ones who garner the most buyer business. Average Frustrated Agents (AFA) who don’t tap into the strategies and systems used by the CHBAs are doomed to be left behind, or worse, to be out of business.

The CHBAs and their associated programs will be the industry standard by which buyers will purchase homes. As such, buyers will seek out CHBAs to help them buy a home to ensure that they a) get the best possible price, terms and conditions on their home and b) receive the best treatment they can get during the home purchase process.

We both use the CHBA strategies at our offices and it works. Last year, Mike broke the record for his office for buyer controlled sales with well over 75 buyer deals for $16 million in volume. It was an amazing year for his team and their off to an even bigger start this year.

In another blog post, you’ll see a report on the Death of the Real Estate agent and how as many as 82% of agents and small business owners will be OUT of business by the end of 2013 because they can’t or won’t keep up with what’s happening in their industry. Not being able to compete with a Certified Home Buying Advisor™ just may be one of the things that squeezes a bunch of real estate agents out of the market.

Check out this video I did on the New Masters of Real Estate – seen on NBC< CBS, ABC, CNN and FOX – where I talk about the changes agents and home buyers can expect in the future regarding how homes will be bought using highly-specialized and qualified buyer agents. It’ll blow your mind. Click play below and enjoy the show.

Recently, we released a thought-provoking report titled, The Death of the “Traditional” Real Estate Agent. In the report we explain why traditional agent strategies are not enough to survive in today’s real estate industry. The agents that get ahead in today’s market have a willingness to share ideas, become masters in other trades that help their business and get to know their market area better than any other real estate agent. Long gone are the days where agents can simply place a sign in a client’s yard, put an ad in the newspaper and take home a fat commission check…and still survive as an agent.

Real estate has always attracted agents due to its low barrier to entry, ability to be your own boss, and high income potential. For many years, agents were able to make money putting in a minimal amount of work – they even had the ability to work part time and make a decent income.

More recently though, the average income for agents has fallen and the real estate industry has seen an exodus of agents who have found it hard to survive with the changing economy. This gave way for a new breed of agents that we call Expert Advisors™. If you read our blog post on our webinar with Jay Abraham a while back, you’ll be able to hear a little more about this topic, too.

Oddly enough, real estate is not the first industry to go through rapid changes and hardships. The travel industry, local hardware stores and the local mom-and-pop coffee shops are also examples of businesses that have not survived their competitors’ “better, stronger and more diverse offerings”. He later warns traditional agents that if they do not begin to change and become more agile, they will, too, be swallowed up by their competition. You might be saying to yourself “What does a traditional agent look like?” A traditional agent keeps all of their best secrets to themselves for fear of competition. They work in silos to keep everything away from the competition, instead of believing in sharing ideas to make the industry better.

In contrast to the traditional agent, the expert advisor™ believes in sharing to prosper and building long-term relationships. They are not only committed to their own success, but also the success of others around them. This doesn’t come easy though, as expert advisors™ need to understand a variety of things in addition to real estate, such as marketing, people, sales, etc.

Here are seven key hallmarks of an expert advisor™:

1. Market Expert: Agents who arm themselves with every piece of information about your current real estate market.
2. Differentiator: Agents who understand the need to be different; and therefore seek information and feedback from a variety of sources.
3. Marketer: Agents who know how their clients search for homes and how to get their listings exposed through those mediums.
4. Relationship Manager: Agents open to fostering strong, long-term relationships with other agents in their area.
5. Optimizer: Agents who make sure leads are handled quickly and efficiently.
6. Negotiator: Agents who understand the art of negotiation.
7. Implementer: Agents not afraid to take action and implement an idea.

We’ve included the whole report for you to read here. It’s not for the faint of heart or people who get insulted easily. The reason is that this report speaks the truth. Print it out and feel free to share it with some of the agents you work with. It’s a real eye opener.