This past week, I gave a presentation at the Inman Connect Conference in New York with the great Steve Harney on “10 Things” real estate agents should do in 2010. My feeling was that agents are already doing too much, so I decided to talk about five things that agents should STOP doing.

Given that the conference is largely about technology, and that one of my main points was that agents should stop embracing technology, I thought it went rather well….

There’s also a short clip of Camilla Sullivan of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate interviewing me about the Five Things to Stop Doing in 2010 here.

1. Stop Annoying People, Start Helping Them.
Stop annoying people on social media like Facebook and Twitter. In the last year, real estate agents (and other salespeople) got into social media in a big way, on the theory that this new frontier of networked communications would help them break through the barriers that clients have put on phones, email, or direct mail marketing. But all that agents have managed to do is provoke their contacts to create those same barriers in social networks, the same barriers that people put up to emails of listings they’re not interested in, or phone calls. They are deleting (or even worse blocking) your emails, and they’re using call screening to avoid your calls, because they don’t see the value in what you’re offering — random listings that they don’t care about. No one cares about your new listing that you posted on Facebook, any more than they cared about it when you emailed it around. All you’re doing is annoying people, who are now blocking you or using new tools to screen you out. If you want to be effective in social media, listen to people and respond to them, and provide them with information they actually need. Don’t barrage them with marketing nonsense they could care less about.

So what should you do instead?
• Get the real estate agents out of your Facebook account. If you need to, set up two Facebook accounts, or master the new techniques they’ve created to provide different “faces” to the world.
• Read what your clients are saying, and respond to it. People like it when you post comments on their postings.
• Post minimally, and only when you have something people would want to read.

2. Stop thinking about sales, and start thinking about service.
How many people here would list their home with more than 50% of the agents in your market? That’s amazing. We’re in a business where even the sales professionals don’t have a high regard for the people in the industry. It’s amazing to me that sales training is still so focused on sales techniques that were developed 50 years ago or longer. Sales training should be all about service training. We all need to do a better job for our clients, because in the future clients are going to choose us based on the service experience of our past clients, not based on our marketing pitch or our ability to talk fast and use personal power to influence them. If you do a great job for your clients, you’ll be rewarded. If you do a lousy job for your clients, all the sales tricks in the world aren’t going to save you.

How do you get there? Establish a set of bedrock best practices for how you will run your business, everything from a checklist for what you need to do when you get a listing to a set of protocols for how to communicate with clients. And apply that to not just your transactional clients, but your sphere. Everyone needs a great real estate agent, even when they’re not buying and selling.

So what should you do instead?

• Set expectations for your clients, and then meet those expectations.
• Find out what your clients want, figure out how to give it to them, then execute.
• Look for opportunities to “Bring the Wow” to your clients – opportunities to blow them away with one particular bit of service attention.

3. Stop talking, start listening
Whether you’re online on Facebook, or sitting in someone’s living room, you need to stop talking. Natural salespeople like to talk, because they’re good at it. But we all need to listen more. The biggest complaint I hear from sellers is about agents who come in with a canned presentation and talk for 45 minutes without stopping for a breath. The first thing you should say to every client you meet is, “tell me about yourself, and what you would like me to do for you.” Just like you enjoy talking, so do they, and there is nothing more flattering or engaging than a person who asks you about yourself. Stop thinking about your client meetings as “presentations” and start thinking of them as “consultations” in which you’re going to ask questions, and they’re going to tell you what it is they want. The more they talk, the more they confide in you, the more you’ll naturally build credibility with them. You can’t manufacture “rapport” – it comes naturally by showing a genuine interest in people and what their concerns are.

So what should you do instead?
• Approach any meeting with a client with questions, not statements. Stop presenting, start consulting.
• Anyone you meet, in any situation, find out what their needs are, and then figure out what you can do to help them.
• Post less, comment more.

4. Stop doing things that provide the false security of productivity without actual productivity
In real estate, we measure productivity by whether the activity has the tendency to generate opportunities for you to obtain a new client or better service an existing client. Business development activities are productive. Going to see the inventory is productive. Taking a class is productive. Reading a book that teaches you something about the business is productive. But blogging about your experiences as a real estate agents is not productive. It might be fun, and you might enjoy it, and you might be able to justify it because it gives you pleasure, which is fine, but don’t fool yourself that it’s productive. And stop telling yourself that you’re blogging about the joys and miseries of real estate because you might get referrals. If you work in Manhattan, or retirement communities in Arizona or Florida, you might generate referrals. But the chances of you writing about your real estate career in Des Moines, Iowa or Monroe, New York is going to generate a referral – the idea that someone reading your blog in Utah someplace is going to happen to have a client moving to Des Moines Iowa is just too remote to justify the time expenditure. Don’t do things that give you false senses of security – look how much I did today – without actual productivity. Agents talking to each other is not anymore productive when it’s online than when it’s in the coffee klatch.

I constantly hear from agents in my company who have this great idea of how to develop their business. They all have one thing in common: they eliminate the need for the agent to actually pick up the phone and call someone. Why? Because calling someone is uncomfortable, and hard, and people don’t want to do it. That’s fine. Accept the fact then that you don’t want to do anything hard to build your business. But don’t fool yourself that you can be successful in the real estate business without courting rejection. And don’t finish up your day feeling like you accomplished something when you didn’t do anything to generate a real opportunity to obtain a new client or service an existing client.

So what should you do instead?

• Identify the activities you engage in that actually generate new business for yourself, or help you service existing business.
• Lock in times in your schedule to engage in those activities. I don’t care if it’s an hour, or three hours, or whatever, but lock it into your schedule just as if it were an appointment with a client.

5. Stop embracing new technologies unless they help you do something you’re already doing.
New technologies are exciting and seductive, but they can also be massive time- and energy-suckers. Here’s the rule: if a new technology allows you to do something you were already doing, but to do it faster, cheaper, or easier, then it’s a great technology and you should learn how to use it in your business. Examples are voicemail, emails, facsimile, scanning, digital photography, GPS. All those things allowed us to do things we were already doing, but to do them better. So what’s a bad technology: one that seduces you into doing something that you never did before. You have to ask yourself – why is it that I never did this before. If you used to send out reports on the market that you’d write yourself, then blogging technology is probably great for you, because it allows you to do something you were already doing, but to do it better. But if you’re not a natural writer, if writing is hard, and if you’re not particularly good at it, then why all of a sudden are you blogging? Why are you using a new technology to do something that you never did before? The fact that the technology exists isn’t a good enough reason.

For example: Facebook. Facebook is a great way to connect with your network. But we’re already seeing people mis-use it , and my experience the bloom is already off the rose. You join, you link up with people you haven’t seen in years, you exchange some emails, but then you quickly realize why you lost touch with them, and now you don’t communicate anymore. A lot of fun, but if you’re making some massive time commitment to Facebook, you’re probably being seduced by a technology you shouldn’t be.

I know people hate it when trainers talk about getting back to basics, so I’m not going to say that. But we need to do a better job with the technologies we already have. We all know that most brokers do a TERRIBLE job marketing their listings just on the fundamentals: bad pictures, old pictures, not enough pictures, incomplete descriptions, abbreviations from the classified ad days, incomplete information. Put it this way, if you’re not writing good, solid, appealing descriptions of every one of your listings, you have no business spending time on Facebook.