I wrote an article for Jeffrey Gitomer’s ezine recently in promotion of his SUCCESS Challenge on the SUCCESS Blog. It’s an article I think you will benefit from too.

I got into real estate when I was only 20 years old. I remember entering an office of 44 veteran agents who all had experienced track records and thick Rolodexes of past clients. One of them even called me a “naive snot-nosed kid” at one meeting.

That did it. I got pissed, and then I got even.

In 90 days I was outselling the entire office combined—with more listings and more escrow closings!

How did I do it?  

I mastered the well-known but rarely practiced Pareto Principle. Most people (especially real estate agents) spend 80-90% of their time performing busy and unproductive activities. Maybe 10-20% of their time directly relates to making money. As in every sales profession, you are only making money when you are in front of a transacting client or a prospect who can become one. I call it the “show time” event. You get paid the big bucks because of what you can do in front of a client or prospect. Everything else distracts you from this goal, thus costing you money.

As a real estate agent, there are hundreds of unproductive activities you can do to rationalize that you’re ‘working’: putting lock boxes on doors, shuffling escrow paperwork, doing open houses, taking “floor time,” putting signs out, driving around “looky-loo” buyers, etc. In reality, there are only three things (“show time” events) you do that make money:

1) pitching a listing,
2) negotiating a contract, and
3) prospecting to get more of 1 and 2.

Everything else that’s a productivity “time suck” can and should be delegated.

I became so obsessive about monitoring my productive time that I would wear a stopwatch around my neck (yes, in meetings, at the store—great conversation starter!). I stopped and started it all day long—“OFF” when going to the bathroom, “BS-ing” in the hallway, waiting for the person to pick up while the phone rings, driving from appointment to appointment; “ON” only when actually engaged in one of my three (see above) high-value “show time” events.

The first day I clocked my productivity, after an exhausting 12-hour day, I was floored when it only read 11 minutes, 56 seconds. At first I thought it was broken. But no, after 12 hours of “work” I had managed less than 12 minutes of revenue-generating productive labor. WOW, did I learn a valuable lesson! From that moment on, I wore my stopwatch religiously every day to improve my actual productive time.

It is SHOCKING to realize how little time salespeople actually spend selling each day. Sometimes I would work like mad all day and only clock 14 minutes. FOURTEEN MINUTES?! My goal became at least 2 hours a day, every day, day after day. As a result of that focus on real sales productivity, I became the No. 1 agent in the office during my first year in the business. I was No. 1 in the city at age 21, and then the entire county of 3,000 real estate agents by age 22 (in a real estate market as crappy as it is today—so no excuses).

What are your few real moneymaking activities? What are your “show time” events? How much time are you actually spending on them? Want to devastate your competition? Are you brave enough to take my “Stopwatch Challenge”? What are some of your favorite sales productivity techniques? Share them in the comments below!

Special invitation: Join Jeffrey Gitomer as he hosts the SUCCESS Sales Challenge brought to you by SUCCESS magazine. It’s FREE! Register here.