It was the last session on Friday afternoon at the NAR Convention in San Diego.  I walked into a much bigger room than expected thinking “no way” this room is going to fill given the modest convention attendance and the beautiful afternoon soon-to-be weekend weather.  Yet by the time I started speaking that venue was standing room only.   In fact, the Fire Marshall prevented additional people cued outside the door from entering for safety reasons.

My speech was called “Convert Online Prospect with Email and Web Scripts“.  Clearly this really resonated with the people at the convention.  Yet what I find so funny is that I’ve been teaching these same principles to this industry for nearly 15 years!  One could argue that old habits die hard (which is usually true), but I think there is something else going on here.  You see, most sales professionals still prefer the visceral thrill of working with people face-to-face or on the phone, where they, not the consumer is in control.  However if they try to apply those principles online, they will literally drive the online consumer away from them.

One of the more popular strategies I shared with them is my “Critical First Response Email Script” which has a proven track record (over many years) of instantly changing the relationship between the agent and the online prospect.

Now this is where it gets interesting.  You see, Brad & Bobby Carroll of Dakno Marketing (good friends and colleagues of mine) were LiveStreaming my presentation to viewers all over the Net just using Brad’s laptop camera and microphone.  Well, it turns out some of these folks really paid attention because it started a Twitter storm with one virtual attendee (who immediately put the email script to work) remarked:

“Please tell Michael that I used his sample letter (that you were kind enough to twitter post) to respond to a net inquiry. WOW! It worked!”

Joan

Everyone in the session had a great time (especially me ) and I  loved seeing the enthusiasm from so many agents when so much of the industry is down in the dumps.  This just goes to show that if you enter into something fully engaged and with no expectations, you can be pleasantly surprised.