4 Crucial Steps to Platinum Club

Associates looking to earn membership into the exclusive – and elusive – Platinum Club, listen up. It’s time to start dreaming big and achieving bigger. And it helps to have something, well, big to work toward.

Jay Pitts, Broker/Owner of RE/MAX Premier Properties in Louisville, Kentucky, knows the importance of ambition – and hard work. He is a perennial Platinum Club member, having earned between $250,000 and $499,999 in gross commissions during a single year.

“Like anything that’s worth achieving,” Pitts says, “the Platinum Club requires a plan of attack.”

Here’s that plan.

1. Be Accountable

Hire a coach, find a mentor in a Broker/Owner or Manager, or use a spouse as a sounding board. The key is to be held accountable – to answer to someone other than yourself.

Pitts, who entered the industry at a young age without a large sphere of influence, credits coaching with shaping and propelling both his personal and business development. When it came to choosing a coach, he interviewed all the major outlets before selecting Tom Ferry’s Elite Coaching and then Team+ programs.

“The exposure to other topflight agents around the country and the honest assessment as to what worked and didn’t work within my business is what moved the needle,” Pitts says. “Coaching gave me the courage to make the tough decisions because I had a second rational opinion weighing in before execution.”

Attitude also played a role, and Pitts cautions against becoming complacent – or discouraged.

“What I’ve achieved in my career is a result of adopting the mindset of never being a finished product,” he says. “It allows you to remain positive when the industry attempts to kick you off your chair. You adapt.”

2. Be Intentional with Your Time

Schedule management is one of the first issues Pitts’ coach brought to his attention. Many Realtors don’t know what they’re doing on a daily basis, when they do it and how they’re doing it, he says. But managing a schedule needn’t be difficult.

“What you need to do is get really simple about it,” Pitts says.

The simplest concept is time blocking, which Pitts color codes by category on his calendar. When Pitts has an appointment outside of its designated block, he marks it a different color to signify he’s making a conscious choice to be off his regular routine.

“It highlights to me that I need to step up my game and be more purposeful with my time,” Pitts says. “The first step to mastering the concept is realizing you are your own worst enemy when it pertains to time management.”

3. Generate Leads, Generate Business

For two hours a day, five days a week, Pitts’ team meets to prospect. After all, if you’re not engaging your sphere of influence to generate leads, according to Pitts, you’re not generating business.

“You have to reverse engineer your business,” he says.

“We have a system built within our team CRM to prompt us to contact our sphere of influence members via the appropriate channels. The calls and emails are done manually because we want those interactions to carry the highest possible value, but the prompts are automated.”

As for other lead sources, Pitts says they practice inbound, direct response marketing on social media and the Internet, and can reliably predict how many leads per month their efforts will yield.

“We know there are certain metrics and conversion ratios that dictate that those leads will produce ‘x’ number of transactions per month,” Pitts says. “We simply have to measure the ongoing effectiveness of our marketing efforts, and tweak and test as needed.”

To get started, determine where business needs to come from, then establish how many conversions are required from those lead sources to reach an income goal.

“Once your budget is determined and it’s in line with the level of income you’re looking to make, you have to track all the numbers to know your progress,” he says.

Of course, it’s also necessary to balance that against costs – such as marketing – to convert leads. Pitts’ team has been successful generating 60 percent of business through repeat and referral clients they reach with low-cost mailers and emails.

4. Convert Leads with Persistence

Making contact with a lead takes time. And patience. And persistence. But it serves a purpose – and it can pay off.

According to Pitts, most agents quit after one or two contact attempts with a prospective client, but his office makes eight to 10 attempts. In fact, there’s a person whose sole job it is to follow up on leads and try to connect.

When it’s all said and done, though, conversions happen when an agent understands that he has to reach prospective clients when the timing is right.

“You’re not going to get the young mother at the supermarket with her 3-year-old to talk about real estate,” Pitts says. “But when an Internet lead comes in, our office reaches out within 90 seconds because we know that person is in the mindset right then.”