If you’ve been following me and my Launch Your Farm program for any length of time, you may have heard of me talk about my concept for having a healthy farm. It’s called C.P.R.
C.P.R.
No, not the life saving procedure! But the type of C.P.R. I’m talking about could be life saving for your farm. It stands for Community, Positioning and Relationships.
In my humble opinion, the core principles of real estate geographic farming comes down to these three things. But before I dive into what C.P.R. is all about, I want to start with what farming ISN’T.
In a recent newsletter I sent out, I busted 3 common myths about farming. I made the case that farming isn’t “post cards and door knocking”. Those are just strategies. Postcards and door knocking are not the core of what farming is about. While it may have been how many agents have farmed in the past, it’s not what makes farming work.
Just like many people have built businesses using postcards and door knocking, there have also been just as many who haven’t. So what does this all have to do with C.P.R.?
Everything…
The reality is that it doesn’t matter what strategies you use, well it does, but I mean there is no standard strategy that works best for everyone or every farm. But what does matter is that you follow C.P.R.!
So let’s take a few minutes and dive into it. (Hopefully I can change your mind about it!)
Community
The community is the key starting point for success in your farm. But most people farming think that just because they have an area picked out that they have the “Community” part figured out. The reality is that just because a group of people live in the same area, it doesn’t mean there is a strong community.
As an agents, we have a real opportunity to bring our community together and create a ton of value. Many of the super successful agents I have interviewed on the Launch Your Farm Show have figured this out. They have done amazing things in their community to bring them together. They have created events, fundraisers, highlight local businesses and generally focus on how they can bring the community together.
Now, you may already have an active and thriving community already, which is great news, and you may wonder what you can do if its already a thriving community. The great news is that there are probably already opportunities to get involved and help the community grow even more. However, some agents don’t have a very active community, and that’s great news too!
The best part is, with a little effort YOU can be the catalyst that helps pulls the community together.
Many people think that community involvement can’t happen because no one is doing anything in their community. They feel that no one will want to get involved or that they aren’t going to have an impact. I’m sure you’ve heard the quote from Gandhi – “Be the change you want to see in the world”. I’m here to tell you, you need to be the change you want to see in your community.
Just because it’s not happening YET, doesn’t mean it can’t. You have an opportunity to create change in your community by being that change. So now is the time to start thinking how you can be that change you want to see, or how you can enhance what’s already being done in your community.
Positioning
Positioning is something that many agents struggle with. Their first thought is to position themselves as “the best” agent. They have seen other agents do it, so its gotta work, right?! They send a bunch of post cards and run some online ads saying how great they are.
Their message is all about how great they are (or how great they want their farm to think they are). They talk about how many homes they sell or what awards they receive. They show off their company brand or they show off their face and an amazing logo they had created!
The reality is, almost every other agent is doing the same thing. So, you aren’t really positioning yourself to stand out. You are actually blending in. Why would you want to do what everyone else is doing?
The best way to position yourself in your farm is to be different than most agents.
The type of positioning I’m talking about is positioning yourself as the community expert and ambassador. I can tell you from experience, most agents don’t even understand this concept. That’s great news for you! Both of these positioning plays are very different. The great news is that these can both be achieved in a much more efficient way than just trying to get your name out there.
Let’s start with being the ambassador. The great thing is if we start with our first part of the C.P.R., the community, it becomes extremely easy to position yourself as the ambassador. What does an ambassador do? They look after their community, they give back to the community, they do what’s in the best interest of the community and they strive to make an impact. (Be sure to follow the blog and my training on how you can do this in your business)
Now the expert part. This is actually one of the easiest ones to do but is usually done incorrectly or not at all. A lot of agents think the only way to be an expert is to sell the most homes in the area or to have the biggest brand or to spend the most money on marketing. The reality is, you can learn position yourself as the expert and never have even sold a home before. You may be asking “How can I be an expert if I’ve never sold a home?!?” That’s because most agents think you have to be a top agent to be an expert.
The reality is you should learn to position yourself as an expert before you even sell a home in your farm. Becoming an expert in your farm will help speed up your success, eliminate a ton of objections and give you great content to create effective marketing in your farm.
How do you do that?
You can do that so many ways, you can be the ambassador, like we talked about earlier, you can be the go-to for community events and things to do in the area. You can master the sales stats and trends in your area. You can become the go-to knowledge broker for all the builders, floor plans and models in your farm. You can learn all about the schools and parks. You can focus on the local businesses and help give them a voice. You can be the connector in the community or become the expert in anything that brings value to your farm.
If you don’t have sales in your farm, you shouldn’t let that stop you from becoming an expert, but I will add that you can’t position yourself as an expert if you don’t know the information, so you probably are going to have to start learning and practicing now.
Again, many of the agents who I’ve interviewed that are crushing it in their farm have learned to become the community ambassador and the expert which has allowed them to really stand out from the competition as well as add value to the community. So what’s stopping you?
Relationships
The last and most critical part of the success formula for farming is relationships. The strength of your relationships is the strength of your business. Going back to the beginning, we talked about sending out post cards. Post cards don’t build relationships. To be honest, most agents marketing doesn’t build relationships. It just pushes their message out there.
To be truly successful we need to create a plan that has conversations WITH our audience, not have a conversation AT our audience.
If you were at a party and someone was just talking about themselves and you never had a chance to even say anything, you probably wouldn’t stick around, or worse, you’d never talk to that person again.
Our marketing can have this same effect if we just focus on getting our message out there. Everything we do should be designed to build relationships. We do that by connecting with people who want to hear from us, we add value to them, we communicate WITH them, we educate them and we focus on what they want.
What we don’t want to do is what most agents do, and that’s force a boring message down their throat. We don’t want to just send them a real estate message month after month and hope that will build trust. Now don’t get me wrong, this strategy can work, and it can work well, but sending out marketing messages works best when you have a relationship and want to hear from them.
We’ve all gotten unwanted spam before. Our first response is to block and delete. Now think about a company that you absolutely love. One where you get excited to receive their information and their promotions. You probably ASKED to sign up for it. You probably got something in return for signing up for it. It’s probably a company that you support and that has similar interests as you. We support businesses that support us or at least support causes we care about. And we support businesses that build relationships with us.
The key to any farm is building relationships. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can start succeeding.
Conclusion
So you may be overwhelmed by all this, and that’s ok, that’s normal. The reality is if you want to build a farm you are going to have to master all three of these, but you don’t have to have it perfectly figured out before you start. I always suggest starting with looking at how you can provide value to the community first. From there, you can learn how you to properly position yourself and once you’ve done that you can start to build relationships. Think C.P.R.!
You may need to go back to the drawing board and start making some big changes in your farm, but I promise you, if you want to revive your business, you are going to want to learn to implement the right C.P.R. strategies into your business.
Happy Farming!
Ryan Smith – Founder/Creator
Launch Your Farm
Be sure to check back on our blog and show to get awesome information about geographic farming!
Blog – http://www.LaunchYourFarm.com/Blog
Show – http://launchyourfarm.com/category/interviews
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