Rolling Out a New Brand

Hi there,

It's been too long since I've taken the opportunity to sit and blog. So much has happened in the last 3 weeks. For these last weeks, we've been building the marketing strategy, communications, collateral, messaging for relaunching MLSListings.



I have worked with several top notch teams but I feel very fortunate to work with the MLSListings team. It has set the bar very high for intensity, patience, proactivity, attention to detail, vision and action. This group of dedicated people has been able to accomplish about 2 years of marketing activity into about 3 months!



And the results have been outstanding: completely new marketing story, market segmentations (never before done at this MLS), design and development of collateral materials, a completely redesigned public facing MLS website, a powerful presence at the CMLS (Council of Multiple Listing Services) conference, a resoundingly successful presence at the CAR (California Association of Realtors) trade show.

The following people deserve tons of credit and applause for these activities.

• Deb McManus - Director of Marketing Commuications
• Aimee Davis - Marketing Communications Specialist
• Mark Messimer - Manager of Outreach Services
• Alonzo Jennings - Senior Trainer
• Eric Sneed - Outreach Representative
• Geoffrey Lambrechts - Outreach Representative
  
• Nick Lomoro - Senior Account Representative
• Gib Souza - Director of Industry Relations
  

And, of course, to Jim Harrison who gave us the space to run.

To these folks, and the rest of the MLSListings team, I say thanks and congratulations on a job well done!

(And we've just begun... :D )

Best to you,

Jim Herrera

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Your business slogan is worthless ...

unless your business has a valid value proposition!

When asked what they do for a living, most people state their job title: “I’m the president of a bank.” “I’m a consultant.” “I’m a professional speaker.” So what? The same can be said for most “elevator speeches” at networking events — they’re worthless.

In these competitive times, when building brand awareness is critical, what is needed is a concise statement that can be repeated by you, your employees, and your customers that conveys the value of your offerings: a value proposition.

So, what is a value proposition? Well, Drew Stevens of Drew Stevens Consulting, says that a value proposition is a statement that promotes the benefits your business offers to customers. It focuses on the customer, not you or your processes. Simply put, it’s a succinct sentence that can be heard, repeated, and appreciated in a world cluttered with commercial messages.

A value proposition should contain no more than 10 to 15 words and should feature as many colorful adjectives as possible. It should be outcome based (i.e., what the buyer gets), results focused, and appeal to most any industry. Consider:

• A poor value proposition: We help create a fit individual.
• A good value proposition: We have a 7-step program for better abdominals.
• A great value proposition: We dramatically accelerate results that match your individual fitness desires.

Why should you develop a value proposition? There are four main reasons to write a value proposition as part of a brand-building strategy:

1. It separates you from the competition.
2. It distinguishes you and the organization in niche markets.
3. It spurs lead generation efforts.
4. It enables sales professionals to expediently get in front of decision makers.

Developing a value proposition is not difficult, but it takes patience. It’s vital to look at the organization from a customer or competitor’s view. Here are four questions to answer:

1. What does your business do from a benefits or results perspective that distances it from the competition?
2. What results do customers achieve with you?
3. What is the organization extremely passionate about when it comes to meeting customers’ needs?
4. What are your core values that provide results to customers?

If you can’t gain answers from these questions, the next best source is your customer base. Testimonials and case studies are great examples of value. Take customers’ statements and simply develop them into benefit-based sentences for building the brand.

“What gets repeated, gets rewarded,” the old cliché states. That’s especially true for a well-thought-out value proposition. Memory recall is faster and easier. Your employees and customers will repeat it. And, most importantly, it will drive phone calls, emails, and sales leads.

Special thanks to Drew Stevens, President of Drew Stevens Consulting.

Best to you,

Jim Herrera


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CAR Mortgage Protection Program

For those of you who may be looking for a new home or for those agents who have clients looking for a new home the California Asociation of Realtors has deployed a Mortgage Protection Plan.

Through the Housing Affordability Fund Mortgage Protection Program, first-time home buyers who lose their jobs due to layoffs may be eligible to receive up to $1,500 per month, for six months, to help make their mortgage payments. A qualified co-buyer also can participate in the program, and receive a monthly benefit of $750 per month for up to six months. Program benefits also include coverage for accidental disability and a $10,000 death benefit.

C.A.R.’s Housing Affordability Fund is dedicating $1 million toward its Mortgage Protection Program, and estimates that as many as 3,000 families will benefit from the program this year.

“The Mortgage Protection Program was developed to help ease the anxiety of consumers who are concerned about potential job loss and its impact on their ability to pay their mortgage should they purchase a home,” said C.A.R. President James Liptak. “It also provides peace of mind to those buyers who are actively searching for a home.”

To qualify for the Mortgage Protection Program, applicants must:

. Be a first-time home buyer – someone who has not owned a home in three or more years
. Open escrow April 2, 2009, or later, and close on or before Dec. 31, 2009
. Use a California REALTOR® in the transaction
. Purchase the property in California
. Be a W-2 employee (cannot be self-employed)

I hope this helps.

Best to you,

Jim Herrera

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Long Lasting Customer Relationships

In the old days, sales could be approached as a matter of mathematical probability and savvy street hustling. The higher the volume of cold calls made, the more new business could be landed. That kind of treadmill philosophy, however, based on the belief that getting new customers is more important than retaining existing ones. Worse, the belief only led to inefficiency, soaring costs, burnout, and breakdowns in trust.
Sadly, it has also led to a climate where consumers tend to believe they are being sold a bill of goods they don’t need or want. There is a price to be paid for losing trust, and not just in lost sales. In their new book, Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship, Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig note a timely problem, relevant to the current economic climate: companies that use the requests for proposals (RFP) process to overcome a particular challenge. But rather than paying firms for their ideas, they steal them.


“Sales skills are life skills,” the authors write. “What makes us better at sales makes us better in life.” In other words, ask not what your customer can do for you, but what you can do for your customer. The more a customer prospers, the more you will, too. Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play offers many salient points on customer relationship building. Here are 10 worth heeding:

1. Treat your customers like friends you want to keep, not as one-night stands. The sales forces with the highest potential for success are those that position themselves as advocates for the companies they serve. They are not merely peddlers; they are advisers, boosters, and comrades in arms who join customers in the trenches.
2. All sales are not equal. Sometimes, landing a big, seemingly lucrative contract may generate an immediate windfall, but it also can increase costs if seller/buyer expectations and values are not aligned. The authors have worked with companies that have lost hundreds of millions of dollars on pitches they wish they had never made.
3. Stop guessing. When it comes to relationship marketing, don’t assume you can read your customer’s mind or rely on your gut instinct. Schedule regular meetings with interested customers and mutually explore the playing field through their eyes. Moreover, ask tough questions about the direction they want to go in. Their epiphany will become your own.
4. Exercise patience. Before proposing a solution, it’s vital to ask the customer to describe their perceived problems and needs, and why they have enlisted you to address them.
5. Keep an ear to the ground. Listening to customers yields more business opportunities. Business management strategist Stephen R. Covey, writing in praise of the book, says, “This builds a synergistic partnership for future business, taking sales to a higher level — in both high-integrity, trustworthy, win-win relationships and increased business opportunities and revenue.”
6. Abandon cold calling for “warm calling.” No matter how smooth the pitch, cold calls are time-consuming, off-putting, and ineffective. Focus on building a network in the marketplace that convinces customers to call you.
7. Slow down to appreciate the value of “yellow light” moments. When we see a yellow light at a traffic intersection, the tendency is to speed up. In business, if a customer exercises caution about embarking down a certain path, slow down and consider their fears of being blindsided.
8. Inquire about the competition. Don’t believe that it makes you appear weaker or insecure. If you are asked to submit a bid for a project, it doesn’t hurt to politely ask what other firms have been solicited for the work. That gives you a chance to gauge the competition, and it provides insight into the customer’s thought processes.
9. Develop a schedule for meeting with customers. Realize that your job is not only to inform, educate, or entertain customers, but also to help them reach a decision. Meeting plans will shorten sales cycles, help you advocate for better solutions, and enable customers to make confident decisions that will reflect well on you.
10. Look forward, not backward. It’s a new world out there. Give your customers cause to eagerly await your arrival, not a reason to hide.

Once again, thanks to Ken Beaulieu for this wonderful topic and his wisdom on FuelNet.

What do you think?

Best to you,

Jim Herrera

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Where's the note?

The following is a re-publication of an blog post that may be of use to real estate agents and homeowners trying to fend off foreclosure. It was originally written by Rick D. Misitano, Senior Paralegal, Law Offices of James M. Bosco & Associates, Methuen, Massachusetts.

I have not spoken to Rick or to a real estate attorney practicing in California about this defense. But as a homeowner or agent representing a homeowner in this situation, it bears following up. If you don't know a real estate attorney in Silicon Valley, please let me know. I can refer someone to you.

Text as follows:

"When a lender can’t produce the original note, allowing a foreclosure to proceed puts the homeowner at risk of owing that debt again to another party in the future. Therefore, great caution must be taken before a judge can allow someone who can’t produce the original note to cash in on your home.

What if Your Lender CAN’T Produce the Note?

So, what happens when the lender tells the Court it can’t produce the original note, because it is lost? Let’s start with the basics. If a lender wants to foreclose on a property, it has to be able to show that it is, in fact, the appropriate person to whom the money is owed. That right to foreclose belongs ONLY to the person who has legitimate POSSESSION OF THE ORIGINAL NOTE - not a copy, not an electronic entry, but the original note itself with the original signature of the person(s) who allegedly owes the money along with appropriate raised notary seal and signature. So, if you are faced with a foreclosure, you have every right to demand that the person or entity trying to take your property, first prove to the Court that they have the legal right do to so in the first place by proving they have legal possession of the original promissory note.

In my opinion, an original mortgage note is much like legal tender and should be guarded and protected as such by the person holding such an asset. Loosing an original mortgage note is like loosing a $100 bill or a gift card or a lottery ticket. What if I scratched that million dollar ticket and just stuck it somewhere and misplaced it? Do you think I could just show up at lottery headquarters and claim my prize without having the winning ticket? The same principle applies to the person or entity claiming to be the legal holder of an original mortgage note. He who holds the note holds the key.

What the Lender Must Do
What often happens, however, is that the lender claims it doesn’t have the original note, because that note has been lost or destroyed. If the lender is making such a claim, the law requires the lender to prove all of the following under the “Uniform Commercial Code”, which is a set of laws governing commercial transactions that many states have adopted. It contains a specific provision on this subject (Section 3-309) which states that a person can enforce a promissory note without having the original, BUT only under certain limited circumstances.

1. The person or entity has to swear and attest that it no longer has the original note;
2. The person or entity has to prove that it was properly in possession of the note and was entitled to enforce it WHEN it lost possession of the note;
3. The person or entity has to prove it didn’t “lose” possession simply because it transferred the note to someone else (i.e., it’s not really lost); and
4. The person or entity has to prove that it cannot produce the original note because the instrument was destroyed or its whereabouts cannot be determined or it was stolen by someone who had no right to it.

All of these matters have to be definitively proven by the person or entity trying to foreclose on the property. It is not the obligation of the borrower to prove or disprove any of this. The borrower can challenge the right of the person or entity trying to foreclose and demand proof.

The Court’s Important Role
It is up to the Court to determine whether the lender has satisfactorily proven why it no longer can produce the original note. The Court also has to be satisfied that when the original note was lost, the person trying to foreclose on the property had possession of the note at the time it was lost. Until the Court has been satisfied of all of this, the foreclosure cannot proceed.

It is also important for the Court itself to understand that this issue is not merely a “technicality” and the judge should not be satisfied with anything less than full proof of this issue. The Court itself needs to appreciate the fact that if it should agree that an original note has been legitimately lost (and allows the foreclosure to proceed) it is the borrower who is still at risk.

Why? Because incredibly, even if a Court has found that the original note is lost and the foreclosure sale is finalized, if someone later turns up with the original note and proves that it is the proper holder of the note, and not the person who foreclosed on the property, the original borrower is STILL LIABLE.

That’s right. Someone took your home and the Court allowed it because it believed that the lender proved that the note was lost and it was the proper party. Then someone legitimate shows up in the future with the actual note and you still owe that person the money even though your property was taken with the blessing of the Court. Trust me, this is a very serious issue regarding post foreclosures and post pre-foreclosure short-sales. It has happened to three of our own clients! These homeowners had the need to sell their property by means of a negotiated short-sale (so they could avoid a foreclosure) only to find out that the entity claiming to have the legal right and authority to enter into such negotiations and accept such settlements sold their note to another entity and weren’t even aware of it. Several months later, the newly assigned lenders (now claiming to be the rightful owners of our client’s original notes) have since come forward and have also filed suite seeking to recover their entire outstanding principle balances owed to them (prior to the homeowners closing their short-sale transactions with the wrong note holders).

How fair is that?!?! It’s not! And that’s why homeowners need to start fighting back when someone is trying to take their home by foreclosure, especially since an overwhelming percentage of mortgages granted over the last 3 to 5 years have been packaged into securities and re-sold and re-assigned numerous times since the inception of the borrower's original note and mortgage. In some states, homeowners have better than a 50/50 chance of being successful in defending themselves against a completed foreclosure. Why wouldn’t anyone who owns a home do everything in their power to protect and defend it? "

I hope this article has helped. Let me know.

Best regards,

Jim Herrera

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Keeping It Up In a Down Market - Sales, that is

Salespeople are taking a beating in today’s economic environment. Entire market segments have evaporated. Customers and companies have no money to buy and are holding back orders. Sales lead generation opportunities are fewer and farther between. In 2008, many salespeople earned only half the commission they received in 2007.

But not all sales professionals are in a slump. Some are thriving. Some are busy generating leads, growing their client base, and making good money despite the uncertainty around them. And you can, too. Douglas Smith, a nationally recognized speaker and sales trainer, offers these four tips to boost your lead generation efforts.

Don’t wait for the climate to change.
The best salespeople take action and move forward. They recognize that the economy may be in this mess for years, and that waiting and watching is a poor strategy for success. The movers and shakers are setting up appointments, making sales calls and presentations, contacting their current and past customers, and marketing like never before. Their proactive approach is creating opportunities, leads, and sales. In boom times or bad, you can never wait for customers to find you. It’s your job to reach out and find them.

Work harder.
Top salespeople understand this age-old axiom: You can’t make more money with less effort. That’s why they are working harder and putting in more hours than ever before. Think about this: Arriving just 30 minutes earlier and staying 30 minutes later each day equates to an additional 20 hours every month. When you are working 20 hours more than the average salesperson, you can make at least 20 percent more contacts — and even 20 percent more sales.

Talk to the right people.
Some companies may want or need your product or service, but if they can’t make a decision or are constrained by shrinking budgets, it doesn’t matter. Successful salespeople are selective about where and with whom they spend their time. They are out looking for “real” buyers — customers and prospects who have both money and the ability to buy. Every minute you spend with an unqualified prospect is time not spent with a qualified one.

Make more contacts.
Customers are more cautious today, and they take more time making spending decisions. That means to land more sales, you have to make more contacts. When capture and conversion rates go down, to maintain a steady volume of business, your sales contacts have to go up.


Many thanks to Ken Beaulieu and Douglas Smith for the content for this post. If you have any comments, please feel free to add them below.

Enter the conversation!

Best to you,

Jim Herrera


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