Selling with Sandra - how to smash that glass ceiling

The 'Touch it Once' theory - how to use it and why.

June 29, 2022 Sandra Carder Season 1 Episode 11
Selling with Sandra - how to smash that glass ceiling
The 'Touch it Once' theory - how to use it and why.
Selling with Sandra - Top secrets revealed.
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Show Notes Transcript

In this episode I explain the 'touch it once' theory. 

This is the best way to make sure you don't miss any important tasks, emails or enquiries.

The 'touch it once' means you address and deal with a task as soon as you see it.

Firstly you decided if it is a task that can be done within 5 minutes or less.  Then you decided if it it can be delegated or not.

Listen to this episode to find out what to do next.  Once you get into the habit of touching it once,  it will make a huge difference to your over all efficiency and success.

Contact me directly for a flow chart which explains this theory in a simplified way on sandra@milliondollaragent.info

Visit website http://milliondollaragent.live


 



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Do you want to make a million in commission every year? Do you want to know some habits, some tricks and some tools to set yourself apart from all of the other agents in your industry so that you are consistently making more money than you've ever dreamed of, regardless of where you are in the world, this is the podcast for you.

Hey, Hey, million dollar agents. Welcome to another episode of million dollar commercial agent. My name's Sandra  Carder and I am here to make you into a superstar commercial agent. In this episode, we are going to talk about the touch it once theory. Now this is to do with time management. Now in episode five, we went through time management tips for commercial real estate superstars.

And in this episode, we spoke about blocking out time in your diary. So this means blocking out slabs of time to do certain things, whether that be your inspections, your cold calls, your follow up calls your time for your personal self self development. It's basically structuring your entire week. So you're not crossing your own path and you're not wasting your week.

It's being super time efficient, basically. So what happens when people throw things at you or you get in invitations or requests to do things or inquiries through that aren't part of your weekly time blocking session?  You have to deal with those things. So clearly as commercial agents, we're gonna have inquiries coming in and we need to address those.

And we need to manage those because that's where the money is, but there's gonna be other things coming into that you haven't actually projected into your week. So this is invitations to zoom meetings. It might be personal invitations. Emails asking for information emails, asking for advice emails in general, really take up a lot of time, especially if you've got a lot of spam coming in or just general information coming through that you need to manage.

And if you don't manage it, your inbox is gonna blow out control. So you need to be able to do that. You need to be able to have a system in place to manage these things. So this system is the touch it once rule.

Now I had a funny conversation with a client this week. We are working on a pretty big project together, and talking about one of the other parties involved, I was telling this person that out of every 10 emails, I send him,  I only get one  response.  I know the client's very busy, but I was saying to this person, they should really work out how to use the touch at once rule, because I know they're busy and I know it's not, I'm not taking it personally, but it's just that, you know, they're not getting back to some really important emails and we had a bit of a laugh about it because this person uses the 'touch it once' theory too.

So a lot of people are doing it.

It makes you super, super efficient and you need to be that in this industry. So how does it work? All right. 

Well, when I'm talking about tasks, I'm going to generalise. So I'm talking about anything that's coming in that needs zero attention. Okay. So this is how it works. When a task comes in, you have to work out, is it five minutes or more?

Now, if the task only takes five minutes to do you need to work out. Does the task actually need to be done. Now, if the answer is no, then don't do it. Delete the email, move on with your life. Now, if the answer is yes, the task needs to be done, work out. Can I delegate this task? If you can delegate it, email it on or text on, or do whatever you need to do to delegate that task to somebody else.

But if the answer is no, you can't delegate it. You are the one that needs to do it. You need to work out? Is it something that I need to do now? Or is it something that I need to do later on in terms of it will fit perfectly into my diary blocking. So whether that's inspections or callbacks or follow up calls or sitting down and sending out information, if you can allocate that into a slab in your diary, that you've already structured, that's what you need to do.

You need to put that particular task into that. That block out in your diary. If it's something that's going to take less than five minutes and you can do it straight away, get it done, just do it then and there, but make sure you're not going all over the place and deviating from the time blocks. If you are, if you're looking at your diary at that time and you are supposed to be doing something else, make sure you, you try and allocate it into the slabs in your diary.

Don't just run around all over town, trying to get these five minute tasks done. What you do need to do though, is to put them somewhere, opening an email and thinking to yourself, I'll come back and do that later is very dangerous because other things come up continuously and you will not go back to that task.

You will forget it and then someone will say, "hey I sent you an email and you didn't respond?" Because you didn't put it anywhere. You haven't dealt with it. So again, if it's a short task and you can do it straight away, best decision is to touch it once, get it done, get it out of your life. It's also a good way to deal with junk email.

If you have a whole heap of junk email coming in the best touch at once is to unsubscribe, to whoever's sending you the junk mail. So when you see it unsubscribe, and that is a blanket fix for any.  matters dealing with that particular email that's coming in. It's not gonna come in again, because you've got rid of it, but that's a really good way to handle it.

Or if it's stuff that you still like to get those emails through, maybe it's a newsletter that you, you like to read, put a flag on it. So you come back to it later. Most email systems will have a little flag categories that you can give to everything. And I have different colored flags for different things.

I have a color for my personal stuff. I have a color for urgent emails. Red is for the hot stuff that needs to be addressed. And when you flag stuff, it's really easy to go back and find those emails that need to be. Addressed, particularly if it's things that do take longer than five minutes. So what happens if you have tasks that are longer than five minutes, we do the same thing.

Again, we work out, does the task need to be done? Yes. Then we have to work out. If we can delegate it. Can we delegate it? No, we can't. We need to do this ourselves. So then we have to get it into our blocking. So if it's an appointment that somebody wants to see you, a zoom meeting or an actual physical meeting, you need to address it then and there.

Either respond to that email, go and put it in your diary. So, you know, it's coming up and deal with it on the spot. Don't come back to it later. Make sure that you've put that in your diary, because what'll happen is that time will come up and you may not have responded and you you're supposed to be somewhere and you're actually not there.

And again, if it doesn't need to be done and it takes longer than five minutes, do not do it. Do not waste your time, doing things you don't need to do. You have to make sure you're not just doing things for the sake of doing things. Time is precious. I keep saying this throughout my podcast. You, you need to manage your time.

Really, really well to be a super successful commercial agent. So in sales and particularly in commercial real estate, the main tasks that you will be receiving weekly, that you can't control will be the property inquiries that are coming through, or the inquiries for the product that you're selling. So the way to be super efficient at this and to touch it once is to make sure that your.

Filing system is absolutely top notch so that you can quickly access the information and that you've got a go-to list of responses that you can cut and paste and get into your emails and attach the documentation and then get it out of your life as quickly as possible in sales. And I'm talking all sales, not just commercial real estate.

Your response to an inquiry is so important. The response time is critical. If you don't respond quickly, that customer is gonna go and find another agent or another salesperson to deal with because we are in the world of the instant response. People want things instantaneously and I blame Instagram. So if you take two days to get back to somebody that's.

Sent through an inquiry that is far too long. When you get an inquiry through you wanna be responding as fast as you can, as quick as you can. It shouldn't take more than five minutes. In fact, it should take only about 30 seconds. I have a system where I have. Responses  for different types of properties.

So whether it's a project or it's an existing property, I will write one email as a response to an inquiry and I'll copy that and I'll post it into my notes. And then I'll use that again and again. So as soon as somebody inquires about the same property, I can respond with the same email. Thank you for your inquiry.

Please find and attach the information memorandum. Please let me know if you'd like to have a look at that property, yada, yada ya and I just cut paste, attach the documentation, which should be really easy to find, because you have a, should have a super Sonic system that you can quickly find your information memorandums or your brochures and send it off.

It shouldn't take, if it takes more than five minutes, then you haven't set it up properly. So that's the touch at once the inquiry comes in, duh, duh, doo I've responded quickly. It hasn't taken me more than two minutes to do that. Then. I take that person's information and I put them into my blockout for my weekly planner, so that I've got a follow up call for that particular inquiry.

So we haven't just emailed it and forgotten about it and let it go out into space. We have a plan. So that's really the touch it once is getting the inquiry sorted and then putting them into your block out in your diary as part of your plan to call them back and follow it up. Now, what happens if you don't do these things, you're going to end up with an inbox full of stuff that you're not sure what's important and what's not, you haven't prioritized anything.

You haven't flagged anything and you haven't actually dealt with anything. So this is very dangerous as a salesperson. This is when you wake up in the middle of the night with the cold horrors. And you think about an email that you saw, which you never responded to. And by the time you got back to it that person's gone and purchased a property from somebody else or purchased an item, whatever your sales background may be, they purchased it from somebody else and you kick yourself.

And you'll kick yourself for the next week or two, because the opportunity was there and you just didn't address it. So you need to be on the ball, touch it once, deal with what's coming in and make sure that you're not letting things slip through the cracks because that very, very expensive cracks, let me tell you.

So let's just recap on this episode, what is the touch at once theory and how does it work when you get a task coming into you? You need to look at that task and work out. Whether it's a task that can be done in five minutes or whether it's a task that needs a bit longer. If it's a task that can be done in five minutes or less, have a look at it.

Is it something that you can delegate or is it something you need to do yourself? If you can delegate, delegate, flick it over to whoever can do it and get it out of your life. If not, if you need to do it yourself and it can be done in less than five minutes, do it yourself, get it done, touch it once and get it out of your life.

If it's a task that takes longer than five minutes and you can't delegate it and you need to do it yourself. And it's something that has to be done. What do we do? We work out how to put it into our diary block so that we address it later on. There may be something you need to do straight away, such as respond, and then make a time slot to do a follow up call, but do it straight away.

Don't read it and then move on to something else. You need to manage it as you see it. And managing may be flagging that task. It may be responding to the task. It may be doing the task, or it may be allocating a time slot later on. So it's that simple. You have to address it as you go. You do not wanna be going back to an inbox full of things that you've glimpsed at and have not addressed.

You need to send them somewhere at some level.  so it seems pretty simple, but a lot of people don't do this. And I said before, I've had experience where a very, very important client is not responding to important emails because they've got so much stuff going on. So what they're doing is they're probably seeing my emails and just not.

Responding at that time and thinking they're gonna come back to me later, but it's not happening. And it's so frustrating, but you don't wanna be that person. You want to be the person that responds quickly or gets back to that task within the week. Like it shouldn't take you more than one week to get back to any task, whether it's a five minute task or a task that takes longer than five minutes.

And you also wanna make sure that you're addressing incoming meeting proposals or invitations so that you're efficient and you are actually turning up to things that you need to turn up to. So that's a wrap for episode 11 of million dollar commercial agent. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it had a lovely call today from a lady big shout out to Kate who said, she's listening to my podcast.

She's interested in getting into commercial real estate and that she found these Podcast tips really informative. And I was so delighted. So. If you're in the same boat, if you're thinking about getting into commercial, please reach out to me. I'd love to speak to you. My email address is Sandra million dollar agent.info.

You can also find me on LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, and I'm really easy to find. So if you wanna touch base with me and tell me what you're up to, whether you're trying to get into commercial real estate, whether you are. Just dipping your toes in, or if you're curious about what it's like to work in the market, please, please let me know.

Please touch base. Also. I would like to let you know that I'm doing a Q and A in an upcoming podcast. So if you do have any questions and you wanna send me even an anonymous question, just send me an email. Again, that's sandra@milliondollaragent.info and ask me questions and I will address them in an upcoming podcast.

And I'd love to hear from you as well. So that's it again? I'm Sandra Carder. You can find me on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook under Sandra Carder, commercial agent, keep selling hard and smashing that glass ceiling. And remember people just touch it once.