According to NAR, there are 1,334,668 Realtors in the US. You need to be able to answer the question that goes through every buyer or sellers mind. “Why should I work with you?” There is not only a record number of Realtors as competition but more alternatives than ever available for today’s client. By communicating a quality value proposition to your prospects/clients you can beat your competition without having to sacrifice your commission.
Remedy = Value Proposition
This is an interactive portion of the blog post. You will want to get out something to write with or open a doc on your computer. We will walk through the steps to building your value proposition so you can optimize your communication and maximize your ROI across all of your marketing.
1. Crafting Your Value Proposition
Your value proposition is the key element to edge out competition and alternatives. It is also known as a unique selling proposition (USP) or point of differentiation. The value proposition is the ultimate reason why. It is used on your website, listing presentations, phone scripts, emails, and everything you do. All of your content should flow from this core message. It should include at least 1 only-factor (something that only you can provide). To start crafting your value proposition, write down the answer to the following question from your client’s perspective.
Why should I buy/sell with you rather than any of your competitiors or alternatives?
2. Top Values Provided
Now we can move onto identifying 5-10 potential claims of value that you provide. These values support your value proposition and build credibility and trust with your prospects and clients. They are essential for use on your website and all other marketing collateral.
Write down 5-10 potential claims of value that you provide.
We will be rating each claim on a scale of 1-5 by using 2 metrics. The first metric is Appeal which is essentially how attractive that claim is to your ideal prospect. The second metric is Exclusivity. This is often the most difficult for real estate professionals as there are generally many similarities between competitors. Ask yourself, “How rare is that service that you offer?”
Rate each claim from 1-5 for Appeal and then from 1-5 for Exclusivity.
3. Supporting Evidence
The supporting evidence provides clarity and credibility to your value proposition. These 2 elements can make or break a prospect working with you or moving onto the next Realtor. Think about this… If you have the best value proposition in the world but prospects can’t understand it, you have nothing. The same goes for credibility. If you have the best value proposition in the world and people don’t believe it, you have nothing. That’s why credibility and clarity are multipliers in our value proposition formula. If you have 0 on either element, the result is 0. Put this in terms of sales. If you aren’t clear or credible you will have no sales. Scoring low on either one causes your sales to suffer greatly. To avoid that hurdle of hurting sales, let’s build some credibility and clarity for your top provided values.
Take your top 3 claims of value and provide evidentials for each one.
4. Putting Everything Together
To put everything together you can use a formula to determine if a prospect will respond to your marketing. Your value proposition and supporting value statements should be something you revisit consistently as your business evolves. Even now at this point in the exercise, I recommend implementing content from steps 2 & 3 into what you originally wrote in step 1.
5. Evaluating
Finally, review the equation and make adjustments to your value proposition in the areas that need improvement.
Some additional food for thought to more clearly communicate additional value to your prospects and clients.
– What is the root problem(s) for my typical client?
– How can I help solve that problem(s)?
– What can you change or add to your business to increase value or uniqueness?
When the value outweighs the cost (in the prospect’s mind), then you have a client. If your commission outweighs the prospect’s perceived value then you will lose that prospect or deal with an unhappy client.
As an example, at Liberty AI our value proposition includes exclusivity, clarity, and appeal… The only company [exclusivity] that analyzes 25+ billion data points per day [clarity] with self-learning AI software so you can optimize your marketing strategy [appeal] and dominate your market [appeal]. That typically provides enough value to get people to move forward in the process to set up a demo or discovery call. We then provide credibility in the form of our production numbers and case studies.