About Kinder Reese
There are plenty of so-called real estate experts out there teaching agents how to succeed even though they haven’t sold a home in decades, if at all. But Kinder Reese is different. Founders Jay Kinder and Michael Reese have collectively sold more than 6,270 homes over the past two decades, they still have thriving real estate practices, and they love sharing their proven systems and processes with other agents who are serious about growing their business.
Sign Up to Our Newsletter
All Your Information is Protected When You Sign Up

5 Steps to Creating A Powerful Value Proposition
Published by Jay Kinder 
“Why should I choose you, over the competition, to help me with my real estate transaction?”

It’s a question that you need to answer for every prospect that considers you as an option to help them sell or buy a house.

When asked this question, a lot of agent say things like:

“I’m a good listener”
“I care about my clients”
“I’m honest”
“I’ve been in the business for XX year” 
“I answer the phone when you call”
“I live in this neighborhood, subdivision, city, etc.”

If any of these are what you think makes you different than other agents in your marketplace, I’ve got some bad news for you. You see, most of these are minimum requirements of simply being a real estate agent. They are not, however, iron-clad, value-laden reasons as to why someone is going to sign their name to a listing or buyer agency agreement to commit to you and only you.

Today, more than ever, it’s crucial that you have a compelling value proposition that makes it easy for potential buyer and sellers to;

1. See why you are the clear choice for them and 
2.  How your solution solves their problems(s) faster, easier, and more economically than any other choice they have.

What’s hard for many folks is that they either don’t know what a value proposition is or they don’t know how to develop, and then employ, a powerful value proposition in their marketplace.

The good news is that the process is easier than you think and I’m going to take you through the 5 steps to creating a powerful value proposition for your business.

What the heck is a value proposition?

Simply put, a value proposition tells prospects why they should do business with you rather than your competitors, and makes the benefits of your products or services crystal clear from the outset. Essentially, you’re helping prospects understand the future value they can expect by working with you while helping them understand that there are specific benefits that are more valuable than the investment they will make in working with you.

To create your powerful value proposition effectively, you’ll need to come up with the answer to each of the following five questions:

1. Who is your target audience?

Your audience is the group of people with whom you intend to share your value proposition. They have a specific set of needs -- problems that need to be solved, if you will -- and you’re going to position your message so that it appeals to them as the best solution available. Your audience could be sellers, buyers, luxury sellers, first-time home buyers, distressed sellers, relocation buyers, etc. The audience doesn’t matter, you just need to decide who it’s going to be.

As you go through this process, ask yourself additional questions like:

Who are they?
What’s their decision making process?
What’s important to them?
What do they like/dislike?
Where are they located geographically?
The more clear you are about your audience, the better able you’ll be to create content that will have an impact on the people who comprise it. You need to spend a decent amount of time doing this as it’s the foundation of the process. You need your message to match your audience. If you miss the mark here, the rest of the process will not go well for you and you won’t get the results you need.

To help you with this process, I’ve included a link to a page that can help you build your buyer persona for your value proposition. The article, written by the social media strategy experts at Hootsuite, helps you understand in even more detail what you need to do to really hone in on the end user as you craft your value proposition. The page also includes a template to help you get the job done right. You can get access to it by clicking here.

2. What problem are you solving?

Consider what outcomes your prospects want to achieve by working with you. In doing this, you’ll identify the problem and the challenges associated with solving it. Your message needs to resonate with the members of your audience. It has to be like a dog whistle. Only certain animals -- mostly domesticated dogs and cats -- can hear the high pitched notes from a dog whistle. Humans cannot.
The best way to start this process is to put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and empathize with them as they face the issues associated with their problem. It’s crucial to not make assumptions about what they want or need. You really need to understand them at a deep level so that you can 

1.  show you understand what problem they’re facing, 
2. articulate that problem in very simple terms, and 
3. show them how you have the best solution for their problem out of all the choices available to them. As well, you’ll need to be able to show them what the consequences are if they choose an option other than you to solve that problem.

3. How do you solve this problem better than the competition?

This one can be a little tough at first glance. We’re agents and we all sell homes. As well, we all have access to the same homes in our marketplace. How could we possibly solve a seller’s or buyer’s problem better than another agent in our area? That fact of the matter is that not all real estate agents are the same...the same with respect to marketing, advertising, customer service, market knowledge, negotiation skills, sales skills and so much more.

You have to look at specific situations in which you’ve been involved where you improved the life, financial situation, quality of life, style of living, etc. of sellers and buyers with whom you’ve worked in the past. What did it look like before they worked with you and how did things look once the transaction was complete? What problems did you solve? What was not so good before they met you and what was so much better after they did?
From there, start listing all of the benefits that came from working with you. You have to remember that there is a huge difference between a feature and a benefit. Lots of agents focus on features, i.e., 84-point marketing plan, great customer service, team work, years of experience in the business, big marketing budget, etc. when they talk to their prospects. Doing this completely misses the mark and it will keep you from connecting with your audience.

A customer isn’t buying a drill bit to own the drill bit, they’re buying the drill bit because they need to make a hole in something. The drill bit solves the problem, but we can’t talk about the drill bit itself, we need to talk about how we can help them make the hole that they want.

In the same way, we can’t just talk about all of the things we offer as real estate agents, we need to talk about the benefits prospects have when they work with us and how we help them achieve their desired outcomes.

4. What makes you special? 

Differences sell. The more different you and your solution to your prospects’ problems look, the easier it is for you to get your prospect’s attention. The key here is to make sure it’s easy. If people have to read pages of copy online or need to do a ton of mental gymnastics to see how what you do is different from the competition, your value proposition will not be effective.
It’s imperative that you help your prospect see in their mind what life will be like after you’ve solved their problem. And it should be easy for them to see the difference between your solution and those offered by your competition. Also, you just can’t be unique for the sake of being different, your uniqueness needs to be useful to the end-line consumer.

5. How can you prove that you get results?

Consumers, by nature, are usually skeptical when they first see an offer from a business. This holds especially true for real estate consumers. There are so many messages from so many agents that it’s hard to cut through the proverbial noise so that your message can be heard and then acted upon.
You’re going to be asking prospects to part with their hard-earned money in choosing you to help them with their real estate needs. As such, having them take you on your word, and your word alone, can be hard at times. Now, more than ever, you must be able to provide your prospects with proof that your solution to their problem not only works well, but that it’s going to work well for them.

To do this, you’ll need to show that you’ve helped others just like them accomplish the same goals. In his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini talks about the importance of social proof (also known as like or liking) as a key element of being able to persuade people to choose you to help them solve their problem. He maintains that people want to work with a provider who’s solved problems for people who they like or think are alike them.
More specifically, if you’ve helped luxury sellers get their homes sold for top dollar and got them to give you a glowing review, you’ll be able to use those successes to influence luxury seller prospects to choose you over the competition. People will choose you, and even pay more for your services, if you can show them how you can make their lives better.

I urge you to go through these 5 steps in excruciating detail as you create your value proposition. Creating one without doing the work will result in you getting poor results for your minimal efforts. The good news is that when you do come up with a rock-solid value proposition, it will be extremely powerful in propelling your business to new heights of success.

About Author: Jay Kinder

FB Comments Will Be Here (placeholder)
Share Us on Social Media