Jennifer Allan's Selling to Your Sphere of Influence - No Sales Pitch Required!

Anytime my name is mentioned, I just have to re-blog ;-]. But what Ruthmarie says here is absolutely true - the customer service at IXACT is great - very personal and reliable - and I've literally sent hundreds of agents their way. Anytime we've had an issue - something that slipped through the cracks - they're all over it and end up creating a fan out of the person who was a little grumbly at first ;-]

I endorse very few outside providers, but IXACT is one of them. They offer a free 35-day trial (but it will only take you a few hours to figure out if you love it) - and you can extend that trial to 60 days if you use the special Friends-of-JAH enrollment link: www.ixactcontact.com/ja.

Anyway, thanks for the mention, Ruthmarie!

Last week we did a show-n-tell webinar in the SWS Virtual Studio about contact management - specifically what to DO with your contacts once they're loaded. Because, as nice as it is to have a place to safely store your precious sphere of influence contact details, having them in storage certainly isn't enough to justify either the effort it took to get them there, or the cost you'll incur to keep them there.

If you'd like to watch the video from the show, you can do that here: www.sellwithsoul.com/cms-contacts. It's a long one - nearly 90 minutes, but there's some good stuff there if I do say so me-self!

If you don't have the patience to sit through a 90-minute tutorial (I know I don't), here's the Cliff's Notes version...

Step One: Print out a report of all your contacts, including their spouse's name, home address, email address, phone number and birthday.

Step Two: Go through the list with a highlighter and identify any missing bits of information. Don't DO anything with the missing bits just yet - just identify them.

Step Three: Go through the list again and identify your Group Ones (the people you'd feel comfortable asking out for coffee; i.e. your social network). Put a "1" next to your Group Ones.

Step Four: If you imported your contacts from an old database, identify anyone on that list that you don't know with an "IDK" (I Don't Know). These might be old web leads or people you met at open houses five years ago, for example.

Step Five: Everyone else on the list, who isn't a Group One or an IDK should be a Group Two (people you know, but who aren't in your social network).

Step Six: Go BACK through the list (yet again) and identify members any sub-groups that you see - for example - family, service providers, dog-lovers, fellow bikers or hikers, little-league parents, members of your church, high school or college friends, etc.

INTERLUDE

All this printing and highlighting and scribbling may sound a little low-tech for today's world, eh? Surely there's a faster, more efficient way to do these things without expending all this manual effort?

Yes, of course there is and most contact management systems will allow you to do most of these steps directly online, without printing and highlighting and scribbling.

BUT

I believe there is something magical about "touching" the names in your database on a regular basis. When you print out the list and go through it, name by name and really think about each person and who they "are" to you, good things happen. First, you'll likely be inspired to reconnect with many of the people on that list, and second (as airy-fairy as this may sound), when you think about someone, I believe you send out a vibe to them, and if you're thinking good thoughts (!), I believe they'll feel it... and might be inspired to reconnect with YOU! I think every real estate agent should go through their database, name by name, at least every six months.

Okay - I'll continue this later this week with what to do NEXT after you've printed out and scribbled up your list... Stay tuned!

Just a quick announcement of an SWS webinar next week... we're doing it specifically for IXACT Contact users, but even if you use a different contact management system or are considering signing up for one, it might be worth an hour or so of your time to attend.

We're going to do a show-n-tell webinar about what to DO with your contacts once you've loaded them up. Sure, it's nice having contact information for your sphere of influence all in one place, but if that's all you do with it - that is - store it, you SO won't get your money's worth from whatever program you're using.

And I want you to GET your money's worth from any program, system or tool you spend your hard-earned dollars on, especially if it's a program, system or tool I advised you to get in the first place!

So, if you'd like to join us, we're meeting on Tuesday, August 9th at 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern. You'll need to be sitting at a computer with speakers so you can follow along. Again, you don't have to be an IXACT Contact subscriber to attend and benefit from the material.

To register for the webinar, just go here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/744266937.