Kate Simon on the 3 mindset checks agents need before blaming the market

Kate Simon00:04

I coach agents all the time where they’re like, “I’ve been doing it. I just don’t think anything’s going on in the market. I don’t think anything’s going on in the market.” Fine. So what I ask them to do is pull up the MLS to see how many new listings were taken in the last day, how many new went pending, and how many new closed.

00:29And by the way, I also ask them to pull up expireds. How many new deals are happening every single day? And I have them do that to give them proof that whether it’s them or not, somebody is taking listings, somebody is writing contracts, somebody is closing. Now, once I can get them to see, okay, the reality is business is happening out there, then we can have a conversation of how we get them to be one of the agents who takes that.

Loida Velasquez01:02

Welcome back to a brand-new episode of Vulcan7 Coaches and Mentors, where we bring you some of the best in the industry that share with you their tips and strategies so that you can implement in your business immediately. Now, before we get on with today’s interview and training, I wanna ask you, are you doing enough in your business, or do you think that you’re doing enough, and you’re busy, but you’re really not?

01:24How about your clients? Are you approaching them correctly? We know a lot has changed in the last couple months and years. Things are not the same. So with that being said, I wanna bring on today’s guest that’s gonna help me break this down. I wanna bring on Kate Simon. So Kate, welcome.

Kate Simon01:39

Thank you so much for having me.

Loida Velasquez01:42

Absolutely. So for everyone that’s watching that maybe is not familiar, go ahead and give us a little intro about yourself.

Kate Simon01:48

My name is Kate Simon. I am the head coach of Glover U Coaching and Training, which is one of the fastest growing real estate coaching organizations right now, and we pride ourselves on being the coaches that are on the ground with our clients in the market right now, fighting the same battles you guys are fighting.

02:05So my experience is I’ve been coaching full-time since 2018. I have a team of coaches that I also coach so that we can turn back around and make sure that our clients within Glover U are able to hit and surpass their real estate goals.

Loida Velasquez02:20

Awesome, and we’ve had Jeff quite a few times on here, so I know that today’s episode is gonna be amazing.

02:25So for those of you that are listening and watching, make sure to get a piece of paper and a pen ready, because you’re probably gonna be writing down a lot of notes. Now, Kate, before we started and I pressed record, we were talking about approaching clients, and I want you to just share with everyone kind of what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, so that agents know exactly what they need to be doing that perhaps they’re not doing right now.

Kate Simon02:48

So yeah. Thank you, by the way. One of, I say, the benefits of the role that I have is I really get a chance to have a bird’s-eye view of what agents are experiencing all over the country in a variety of different price points and in a variety of different markets. And so of course, I have my own personal coaching load that I coach.

03:07I coach full-time on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but then I have the opportunity to coach all of our coaches. They have their own client load of 20 to 30 people, and so when I’m doing my one-on-ones with our coaches, I’m asking them, “Hey, what are you noticing with your clients? What are your clients experiencing right now?”

03:24So I can expand on some of these generalizations beyond just my own coaching load. And so what we’ve been seeing, and we’ve been seeing this for more than six months now, but it’s really come to a head, is that a lot of the agents right now who might not be hitting their goals or they’re trending behind and they’re getting discouraged, it’s not because they don’t know what to do, okay?

03:48It’s because the volume in which they’re doing it isn’t enough, okay? And so in layman’s terms, they’re not talking to enough people. They’re not going on enough appointments. They are not having enough at-bats to get the results that maybe they were getting two or three years ago with less effort.

04:07That’s what we’re seeing right now.

Loida Velasquez04:09

Yeah, and I’m glad that you brought that up, because I hear it all the time as well. Agents think that one thing is not working, and people aren’t picking up, and no one’s buying, and no one’s selling, when in reality, sometimes they’re just not putting in enough work. So what are some of the things that they need to be focusing on?

Kate Simon04:27

So by the way, yes. And whenever, in a one-on-one scenario when I’m meeting with somebody, instead of me saying, “Hey, you’re not working hard enough,” because let’s be clear, that’s gonna discourage everybody, right? I try to look under the hood at exactly what they are doing and where they can improve, right?

04:45And so one of the first things I do when we have a client come in and they’re like, “Hey Kate, I’m prospecting every day. I’ve been doing it for a month now. I’m really not seeing the results.” I start from the top, and I ask them to check these three areas, and the first area is attitude. I always ask them, “When it comes to prospecting, what is your attitude around prospecting?”

05:08And it could be a general attitude, or it could be an attitude that they have hour to hour, minute to minute. And for anybody who’s called expireds and FSBOs before, we know how quickly that attitude can change. And it’s really imperative and important that if we wanna succeed with cold calling, whether it’s expireds, FSBOs, whatever the case may be, it is imperative that we are taking action with the mindset that we will and can thrive with this.

05:35So we always check the attitude. Now, a couple things I do to help a client check their attitude is, of course, we can start the day with gratitude. We can start the day with something that supports their mindset, which oftentimes is gonna limit the news feed. It’s gonna limit negativity. It’s gonna limit talking to people at the water cooler saying there’s no business out there.

05:54But I’m really, really protective of the mindset first thing in the morning. The second thing I look at when protecting attitude is evidence that it’s working out there. Now, I coach agents like this all the time where they’re like, “I’ve been doing it. I just don’t think anything’s going on in the market.

06:11I don’t think anything’s going on in the market.” Fine. So what I ask them to do is pull up the MLS to see how many new listings were taken in the last day, how many new went pending, and how many new closed. And by the way, I also ask them to pull up expireds. How many new deals are happening every single day?

06:29And I have them do that to give them proof that whether it’s them or not, somebody is taking listings. Somebody is writing contracts. Somebody is closing. Now, once I can get them to see, okay, the reality is business is happening out there, then we can have a conversation of how we get them to be one of the agents who takes that.

06:49So that’s attitude. Let’s check our attitude before we do anything. Now, by the way, this is something you can do every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes, every hour. Do it as often as necessary when you find yourself falling out of a strong, positive attitude, meaning you’re gonna be able to list and sell real estate like every other agent out there.

07:09Second thing we check is approach. Okay? You got a strong attitude, let’s take a look at your approach. Are you distraction-free, or are you texting? Are you taking phone calls? Are you on social media? If you wanna say, “I am fully leaning into distraction-free prospecting,” what does that need to look like?

07:27Well, it should look like a distraction-free environment with whatever scripts and conversations you’re using in front of you. Your cell phone should be turned over, your email notifications should be off, your assistant, your agent, anybody else that needs you, there should be a sign on your door that says, “Stop.

07:42I’m prospecting right now.” Protect your focus, protect your time. But we wanna see six to eight contacts per hour. Could be eight to 10, depending on the time of day, but six to eight, right? Now, you might be saying, “Kate, I’ve never gotten six to eight contacts per hour.” And my question to you would be, what time are you getting in the office and what time are you starting?

08:03If you’re calling expireds, and there’s a list of other agents in your market calling expireds, you better believe they’re sitting down in front of their computer at 7:45, 8, and they are picking up the phone at 8:00 AM. So before we say that nobody’s answering the phone, ask yourself, am I distraction-free and am I calling at eight o’clock in the morning?

08:21Okay, so that’s the approach that I look for and I ask when we’re checking attitude, approach, expectation. Third thing, like I just said, is expectation. Are you expecting this to be easy? Meaning people are just gonna jump up and down and say, “Oh my goodness, Kate, I’ve been waiting for you to call.” Or are you expecting that for sale by owners and expireds are frustrated.

08:44They had a goal, they hired an agent, FSBOs maybe, maybe not, and they didn’t get to their goal. And so how deep are we willing to dig in a conversation or in a script with somebody before we decide that they’re not willing to do something, right? And so one of the things that we’re working on with all of our agents right now is scripting objection handling, but are you closing with somebody five, six, or seven times before they decide that they’re not interested?

09:11Now, while my approach today might be different than it was in 2008, 2009, when I was deep in the trenches calling for sale by owners and expireds, Jeff had a rule that you either had to be closing for an appointment with them or they’re hanging up the phone. But if you let them go without getting to seven closing…

09:30Seven asks to get the appointment or they don’t hang up on you, in his world, you didn’t close hard enough or you didn’t close enough. Now, we can get into the nuances another time on scripting dialoguing so it doesn’t feel like such a sales pitch, but we’re checking first attitude, approach, expectation before we’re evaluating whether or not it’s working.

Loida Velasquez09:52

I love everything that you just said, because even asking five, six, seven times, that’s something that a lot of agents don’t do.

09:58They give up after, like, the first or second time. And the next thing you know, they follow up, and then that for sale by owner or expired ended up listing with somebody else, and they’re like, “Well, what did I do wrong?” Well, maybe you just didn’t ask enough times.

Kate Simon10:11

You didn’t ask enough times, but the precursor to ask for a close and an opportunity to help them is making sure you have enough information about what’s important to them so that you can help them.

10:22And so a lot of the agents who struggle with closing or struggle with what to say when they follow up, it’s because they don’t have enough information about what’s important to that client, how soon they have to be there, what that would do for their life, what that would do for their family. And so when they’re closing, they’re closing on their need to get a contract signed.

10:41They’re not closing on their need to sell their house to move across the state because their family would have a better lifestyle. So if their closing isn’t effective, I would say that the first place I would look is the quality of the questions they ask that client to even give them permission to close five, six, or seven times.

11:00I tell you what, you close five times with the same question of, “Are you ready to get started? Are you ready to get started?” Yeah, they’re gonna hang up on you, because that’s annoying. But if you say, “Hey, how soon do you wanna move across the state to get closer to family?” You know, “Hey, how soon do you want that bigger yard for your kids to play in?

11:15Hey, how soon do you want X, Y, Z lifestyle?” And so when we’re prospecting, we have to remember that if we want them to set an appointment with us, we have to make it abundantly clear that we know what is important to that client, and we have something that can bring them closer to that end result.

11:33Does that make sense?

Loida Velasquez11:34

Absolutely. Yeah, focusing on them instead of yourself.

11:38That’ll lead you.

Kate Simon11:39

Correct. And if you’re struggling with how to close or what you can close on, you gotta ask better questions. What’s important to them about the move? How soon do they have to be there? What would that do for their life?

11:50What does their future look like in this home? What are the pain points in their current scenario that they’re trying to get away from? What would their life look like if they didn’t solve those pain points? We gotta be vision casters for our clients and convince them that we’re the people that they should meet with, because we can help them live this life that’s in their mind right now.

Loida Velasquez12:13

Absolutely. And for those of you that are listening, you might need to rewind the last two minutes, because all of these questions, Kate, that you just said, I think these are really important questions that a lot of agents might be missing and are crucial for you to determine someone’s motivation or figure out how you can help them as an agent.

Kate Simon12:31

Absolutely. And you know, Glover U, we have scripts. You can text the word scripts to 55444. We’ll send you all of our scripts. But what I want you guys to understand around scripting, role play, and all of this is that the script is, like, the foundation of the conversation.

12:47So if you’re looking at a conversation like a house, those are the two by fours. That’s the framing of the house. The magic of it is the questions within the questions. And so, yes, we should have solid framing of the conversation. You might not ask every single question the same way, but there should be questions within those questions.

13:10There is no possible way for you to get to a deep level of rapport with a client just following those 13 or 14 questions. You have to be asking questions to dig deeper within those questions. And so if a script has, let’s just call it 13 questions, you should have a goal of asking 40 questions on that call before you’ve gone deep enough with a client to determine whether or not you can help them.

Loida Velasquez13:36

Awesome. Now I kind of wanna shift a little bit in terms of approaching clients. Because maybe back in 2020, 2021, things were different than how they are now, whether you’re working with a buyer or a seller. So how are you guys training your agents to be much better with their clients?

Kate Simon13:55

There’s a lot of different ways, but I would say the lowest hanging fruit to answer this question is we have to get better at setting expectations with our clients.

14:06Now, by the way, with buyers, and I know this is a hot topic right now, this starts with a buyer consultation, okay? And again, we could do a whole nother talk on a buyer consultation. And then with sellers, it starts with setting the expectations on buyers, setting the expectations on what the market’s doing, whether they can expect multiple offers or non-multiple offers.

14:29And then it’s keeping close communication, like a regular communication plan weekly on what’s going on with the property, or if they’re a buyer, what’s going on with the property search, so that we can stay ahead of any changing or unmet expectations, right? Now, a client is never gonna be mad at you because a certain result happened a different way than you said.

14:51Now, sure, there’s a small percentage that maybe they are, but a client is more likely to be frustrated, upset, or not refer you if we did a poor job of setting expectations up front on how this process might go, right? And so one of our philosophies here is we underpromise and we overdeliver, right? “So Mr.

15:08and Mrs. Seller, I don’t know if this is the multiple offer market anymore, but what we will know is within two or three weeks where we need to be on price and whether or not that price is gonna work for you guys. So I’m not holding you to a price reduction, but what I can say is within two or three weeks, depending on the amount of showings and offers we have, we’ll know where we’re positioned in the market, and then we can have a conversation at that time on what we need to do.”

15:32Right? So it’s meeting with them weekly, setting their expectations that this is not the 2021 market, and how that might affect what they want when they hire you.

Loida Velasquez15:41

So let’s say someone’s listening, they have a seller that says, “You know, I’ve been watching everything that’s going on. I want you to list my house, but I’m not gonna pay a buyer’s agent.”

15:52How would you train an agent to have a conversation with that seller regarding that?

Kate Simon15:56

So first of all, that is a very nuanced conversation, and if you’re okay with it, is it okay if I share a Glover U resource for this?

Loida Velasquez16:05

Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Okay.

Kate Simon16:06

Everybody who’s watching, please go to YouTube, GloverU.com, and Jeff did an entire hour-long webinar on winning with the new rules of NAR.

16:15Now, there’s two parts to this. There’s the conversations we have with our clients right now, because July hasn’t happened yet, at least at this point, and then there’s the conversation that we have after it takes into effect. And there’s an entire book of scripts that he has for working with agents, for working with sellers, and how to move forward with this.

16:33Now, on the surface, though, to answer your question, we have to ask the seller what type of market we wanna open up their home to. Do you wanna open it up to just a segment of people that can afford to pay a buyer’s agent, or do you wanna open it up to the whole market, right? And of course, we’re asking the question of which market do we think you have a better chance of getting the highest possible value?

16:52Now, of course, it’s a question we hope they say, “Opening it up to everybody,” right? And so that’s where we’re gonna double down on why it’s important to pay a buyer’s agent commission and how it can ultimately help generate the supply and demand that they might need for their price or for their special terms.

17:09Does that make sense?

Loida Velasquez17:10

Absolutely. That’s awesome. And we’re gonna make sure to put that link and all of the links that you mentioned and how people can reach you in the description box below. Now to kind of wrap it up, I wanna ask you, what are three things that agents need to be doing right now to make sure that they thrive the remainder of the year?

Kate Simon17:28

The first one, you guys, is pick a plan, pick a mentor, pick a coach, pick a philosophy that you can trust. So one of the biggest things we see in coaching is somebody follows this coach for this, this coach for this, this coach for this. And so they follow something for 30 days and they’re like, “Well, this isn’t working.”

17:47So find something and commit to it for 90 days. Commit to one messaging, commit to one approach, and block out the noise from everything else. This includes playing defense on some negative conversations you might be having with colleagues that might be in the dumps about it, right? You have to make a decision that you’re gonna thrive in this market and be solutions-oriented, which means we can no longer participate in dialogues or conversations that are not aligned with you absolutely thriving in this market.

18:15So number one, we have to make a decision up here that we make our market, not NAR, nothing else. Number two, we need to make sure that we’re getting back to the basics of showing up to the office and putting in a high impact morning every single day. So what this means is, depending on your childcare situation, 7:30 to 8:30 arrival time, a role play, and hopping right on the phones.

18:40Your mornings from 8:00 to noon should just be lead generation and lead follow-up. We’re not servicing the database, we’re not preparing for appointments, none of that. We are focused on finding new business and setting appointments with the ones that we have. And the third thing we need to be doing, honestly, is our skill work, right?

18:59Because the skills that worked in 2021, 2022 need to be sharpened, because the conversations are different. And so what this looks like is two different role play sessions per day. And for those of you out there thinking that’s absolutely insane, you’re getting my version. Jeff’s version is two hours a day.

19:16My version is two 30-minute segments a day, okay? Jeff would say if you’re doing 25 deals or less per year, two hours of skill work every day, that’s what you should be doing. So we need to be getting into conversation with people who are actively prospecting. We need to jump into active role play where our role play partner forces us to close five, six, seven times, and that needs to be the hardest call of the day.

19:38If we can commit to that, and we can commit to that for 90 days without hemming and hawing on is it working, is it not working, what’s going on with NAR, I can promise you after those 90 days, you will have more business than you know what to do with, and I’m dead confident in that.

Loida Velasquez19:55

Kate, this has been an awesome past couple minutes.

19:58Everything that you mentioned, I feel that it’s really gonna help agents that have been listening to this. For everyone that’s listening, go back and rewind and re-watch and replay this episode. But can you just let everyone know where they can find you, the coaching, and any other links that you wanna mention?

Kate Simon20:12

Sure.

Kate Simon20:12

So there’s three places. I’m on Instagram at CoachKateSimon. You can of course follow me. I’m gonna be working with a YouTube team moving forward so I can put more valuable content like this out there. So that’s one of my goals. Number two, Facebook. I’m very easy to get in touch with on Facebook Messenger.

20:27You can add me, Kate Simon. And the third is my email. First name, last name, KateSimon@gloveru.com. So that’s K-A-T-E-S-I-M-O-N at G-L-O-V-E-R-U, as in university, dot com.

Loida Velasquez20:41

There you go, everyone. So we’re gonna make sure to put all of those links also below. Thank you once again, Kate. I feel that we can keep on going for hours talking about this, so maybe we’ll have to do another part two someday.

20:52I’m game. I’m game for this.

20:54Awesome. Well, thank you so much once again. And for those of you that are watching, make sure to catch up on the previous episodes, and we’ll see you on the next one. Bye.

Kate Simon21:01

Thank you so much. Bye-bye.