How Long Should I Practice Scripts Before I Start Prospecting?

Summary

QUESTION from a new Agent: Would you recommend that I take this first week or so to learn the scripts and work through the different modules, or jump right into prospecting and lead generation?
SHORT ANSWER: Jump in immediately.

PRINCIPLES OF CONVERSATION TRAINING:
1. Spend 3-4 hours a day training on the scripts in the afternoon and evening.
2. In the mornings, role play for 30 minutes and jump right in.

TRAINING FAST START:
1. Practice first Prospecting Script 1 hour and then Start. (Each day or so you can add a new one.)
2. Get an appointment, practice the Prequalifying script for 1 hour, then prequalify.
3. Practice any objection for 30 minutes.
4. Practice listing presentation 1-2 hours every day.

Full Transcript

The ability to really master something starts when you actually jump into the water. If you want to learn to swim, you need to jump into the water right away.

Hi there, it’s Kevin Ward, the founder of YesMasters Real Estate Success Training, and the creator of Agent Power Launch, online training for brand-new agents. And the author of the number one bestselling book, The Book of Yes. I’m only telling you that because we’re going to talk about it in this video, which is about practice.

This is primarily in response to a question I got from a brand-new agent that had just joined my Agent Power Launch. This is a very common question I get from new agents, and this is the question. Would you recommend that I take this first week or so to learn the scripts and work through the different modules, or should I jump right into prospecting and lead generation?

Short answer … Great question. Short answer: jump right in. It is on-the-job training. The ability to really master something starts when you actually jump into the water. If you want to learn to swim, you need to jump into the water right away because it gives you a context for learning faster than the other way.

Now, what it also guarantees, is it also guarantees you’re going to make mistakes. So, as a real estate agent, you have to embrace the fact that if I want to make money fast and I want to grow fast, you’ve got to make mistakes fast. The faster you fail, the faster you succeed. What a lot of agents do is they make the mistake of wanting to succeed without failure. They don’t ever want to make a mistake because, after all, in school, we were taught that the worst thing that could happen is to make a mistake, and then you get a bad grade.

Well, in reality, in real life, the way you succeed is by failing, failing forward. Just like a child never learns to walk until they face the risk of falling. Guess what? They are going to fall down. It’s just part of the growing process. So, that’s the same thing as real estate. I want to talk, first of all, about the principle of practice and training as a new real estate agent. How do I master the art of conversations and scripts and dialogues when I am talking to people as a real estate agent? Whether it’s prospecting, lead follow-up, listing presentation, whatever it is, how do I do it?

First Principle

If you want to get good fast, you want to practice three to four hours a day of actual practice and training on the scripts. Now, if you don’t have good scripts, get a free copy of my book, The Book of Yes: The Ultimate Real Estate Agent Conversation Guide. It’s got all of the key scripts that you need to make a six-figure income in your first year in real estate.

Go to thebookofyes.com and you get a free copy. All you do is pay for the shipping and handling, tell me where to ship it, and you can get it. So, just to let you know, that is available for you. Now, once you get that, here’s the deal: three to four hours a day practicing and training on the scripts. I recommend that you spend at least an hour a day actually role playing with somebody else. Then, the rest of the time you can spend actually in personal practice.

Now, I know what you’re saying. You’re thinking, “Three to four hours a day? Are you kidding me? That is … I don’t have time. Nobody does that.” Well, here’s the first thing you need to understand. Nobody does that, not one in a thousand real estate agents are going to practice three to four hours a day. Now, that is true. The question is, do you want to make the amount of money that most of those agents make, or do you want to make a lot of money, because while this is true in the real estate industry that most agents don’t practice, if you wanted to play junior high basketball or football, guess what? You would practice three to four hours a day.

When I was ten years old, when I decided I wanted to play the piano, I had to practice. My wife was a concert pianist, and when she was in junior high, she would practice three to four hours a day just to prepare for a recital in junior high. By the time she was in high school and college, she practiced five to seven hours a day.

An Olympic athlete, or a professional athlete, will practice six to eight hours a day to master their craft. Now, we’re talking about you being able to go out and sit down with homeowners and do an interview and audition for a $10,000.00 paycheck. You get a listing, priced right, $10,000.00. That’s an average commission check in America right now, $10,000.00. If it’s only 5000, still you go into a listing presentation, boom, take that listing, sell it. You make 5000, 10,000, $20,000.00 from one meeting, from one listing presentation.

Do you think it’s worth investing some hours to do that? Three to four hours a day. I know that is unheard of in the real estate industry, but it’s because most agents are amateurs, not pros. Pros train like professionals train. So, three to four hours a day, period. When you tell your broker, other agents, you’re practicing three to four hours a day, they’re going to laugh at you. Yet, I’ve got coaching members right now that make six-figure incomes their first year, 10x their business in their second year because of this, because they train, unlike other agents who are not willing to train.

Starting today, you take three to four hours a day to practice. Now, when do you do that? After you do your prospecting.

Second Principle

The second principle is, is every single day you jump right in. Here’s how I want you to do it, is you warm up and then you jump in. When I say jump in, you jump right into the game of actually prospecting. Warm-up, I recommend you warm up for 30 minutes in the morning. Just do a 30-minute role-play. That’s your warm-up, 30 minutes of role-play, and then prospecting immediately three-plus hours a day. Right there, is you jump in actually prospecting that day. Boom, that day.

Go right now, start doing it every single day. Guess what? In those three hours, you are going to learn a ton. Then, if you don’t get an appointment that day, you’re going to spend the rest of the day doing that. Now, there’s a lot of other things you can do, but if you master conversations, my friends, you master the conversations that lead people to decisions, to set an appointment with you, and then to hire you, you win. This is the fastest way to make money fast as a real estate agent.

If you want to get faster, how should this play out on a daily basis? This is the fast start practice recipe that I’m going to give you. This is the perfect cocktail. Day one, I’m just getting started. Tomorrow is my first day, or today is my first day, what do I do? You pick your first prospecting script. What is going to be your prospecting script that you’re going to use today? Pick it.

Okay, so you get your first prospecting script, and I want you to practice it. Let’s say you’re going to call for-sale-by-owners today, you get the for-sale-by-owners script. You open up to it and you practice it for one hour. One hour, just practicing. That’s a long time. 30 minutes may be enough. After an hour, you’re going to know it about as well as you can know it to start. Print it out, post it in front of your prospecting station, and then you start calling. So, practice for one hour with the prospecting script you’re going to use, and then start. Jump right in.

Now, the next thing that’s going to happen. As soon as you get an appointment, because you’re going to start prospecting now, as soon as you get an appointment, you’re going to take the pre-qualifying script, and you’re going to practice it for one hour. I’m going to practice it for one hour, and then I’m going to call them back and pre-qualify them.

Now, when you’re in The Book of Yes, it’s called the seller sheet or the pre-qualifying script. That’s the seller sheet, which is actually your pre-qualifying script. Then, you practice it for an hour. Just practice doing it, role play it, however, you want to do it, but get it done for one hour and then actually call those people and say, “Hey, before I come out, I need to get a little more information from you so I can do my homework. Do you have a couple of minutes?”

Great. Then, you go through the whole script. That’s all in The Book of Yes. It explains all that for you. Practice that for one hour. Now, every day as you’re prospecting, as you’re in the game, you’re going to get objections, so every objection you get, if you don’t know how to handle it and you get stumped and they hang up on you or you end the call and you didn’t handle it, that’s going to happen, that’s a failure, but it’s the fast way to learn because now you go like, “Okay. Whoa. That one stumped me. What do I do?”

You find the objection, and then you practice that objection so you take that objection script that you just got. That objection script, you take it and you practice it for 30 minutes, that one objection for 30 minutes. Now, after you’ve read it a couple of times, you go like, “Okay, I got it.” No, now you got it, now I want you to master it. So, practice it over and over and over again. Practice the lines, say it with somebody, make it conversational. It has to be conversational so that you’re actually talking to somebody.

You’re going to practice that for 30 minutes, and if you get two objections today that stumped you, there’s an hour right there of practice. I’m going to practice the first script for 30 minutes and then the second objection script for another 30 minutes. Then, every single day, starting today, starting today you’re going to take the listing presentation in here and you’re going to practice it, your listing presentation, for one hour a day, one hour a day for the rest of your career.

Now, if you get a day where I don’t have any objections that day, then you can practice your listing presentation for two hours. This is going to, every day it’s going to give you three to four hours a day to practice, because after you do this, once you’ve mastered it, you’ve practiced it an hour a day for a few days, then I’m going to practice the pre-qualifying script for a few days. Then, you add your next prospecting script, so now this may start with for-sale-by-owners or your personal circle script, calling the people you know.

Let’s say you start with the for-sale-by-owner script the first day and you’re like, “I need to call people I know,” so the next day, you’re going to practice your personal circle script for one hour. Then, you’re going to start calling your personal circle. Expired script, the same way.

Then, every day, you warm up with 30 minutes of role-playing that script, your prospecting script, that day. Once you start getting leads, you’re going to practice, you’re going to add in your lead follow-up script. Practice it for an hour and then do your lead follow-up. So you’ll add all that in here, so every day, you’re going to have three to four hours a day to practice.

Now, am I going to do this for the rest of my career? Probably not, but here’s what you are going to do. You’re going to do three to four hours a day until you have two … your prospecting is generating so many appointments that now your day is taken with prospecting, warming up, role play, prospecting, lead followup and then you’re going on appointments, taking listings, negotiating offers, and all of that.

Then, I’m going to cut back to two hours a day. I recommend until you are making six figures, and probably a pretty good six figures, that you keep practicing two hours a day. There’s not a profession in America where performance is the standard, which means you get paid based on how well you perform. Just like in real estate, in real estate, it’s about how well you perform. That’s how you make money. The better you perform, the more appointments you’re going to set, the more listings you’re going to take, the better results you get. That’s how you do it.

You’ve got to master these conversations. You need to practice it every day. A piano player practices every day. A tennis player practices the skills every single day. A surfer, whatever it is, they practice the skills every day. They practice more than they actually work. They actually practice more than they perform. Practicing is, for most professionals, the work when performance is the standard by which you get paid. In real estate, performance is a standard, baby.

You perform better than everybody else, you get better results and you make more money than everybody else. This is the fast track. It is not an easy path, but it is the only path that is guaranteed to win. So, do this. If you have questions about it, make sure you post them in the comments below. I want to help you master this. Don’t be an amateur. Go pro right now. It will change the game for you, and you’ll always be able to expect yes.

Also, if the video helps you and you like it, make sure you give it a thumbs up. Share the video with other brand-new agents that you know, and if you have not done so yet, subscribe to the channel, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.