Gabrielle Jeans’s Weblog

Average producing real estate professionals typically think there are big differences between who they are and how they run their business and who a top producer is and how they run their business.  In reality, the differences are usually not that great at all.  Top producers usually only do a few things differently than average producers, but get much greater results.  Consequently, the little things these top producers do must be of great importance to yield so much greater results.

Isn’t it encouraging knowing top producers aren’t geniuses or born great at sales?  You can achieve the same success as top producers just by changing your business in a few ways.  This article series explores these ways and why things work this way.

These ideas are echoed in the best selling book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (a book I’ve read twice), most saliently in Gladwell’s phrase “little changes make big differences”.  A tipping point is the moment where some sort of social phenomena begins spreading with unstoppable momentum.  The point where it goes from a small, local phenomenon to suddenly becoming a large, international phenomenon is called the tipping point.  It’s become known popularly as viral marketing.

I’ve written about the idea of momentum before.  The first type of momentum you need to be successful in real estate is achieving momentum with your business plan, and I explained how to achieve that with my 5 part article series Passion + Planning = Momentum.  Most new real estate professionals never achieve this momentum, and so their business normally goes along in fits and starts, usually running out of steam within a few months.

After creating your own personal momentum with your business by personalizing your core business plan, you then need to create marketing momentum.  This is where we can look to Gladwell’s The Tipping Point for much insight.

Gladwell noticed information circulates amongst people very similarly to how viruses spread amongst people.  Some messages and viruses spread only moderately, only ever attaining a local presence and not much beyond, growing at a fairly steady rate before reaching a plateau and sometimes declining but never becoming much more.   But messages and viruses which reach a tipping point quickly become national or international phenomena, spreading like wildfire from person to person at exponentially increasing rates, achieving a momentum far beyond what seems possible.