Do You Give Away Too Much For FREE?

As real estate professionals we are programmed to give away free stuff.  But when are we giving away too much free stuff?  Can we put a price on information?  To us information is just that.  We don’t see the value in it because we haven’t looked to discover how much we really paid for it in time and money.

Lets take your continuing education or designations.  Did you pay for it?  How much time did it take you to acquire the information?  You will quickly see that we pay a lot of money and most important, a lot of time for our information.  So why do we give it away so freely?  Is it because we are hoping that the prospect we are trying to attract will use our services and we can eventually get paid?

Let me share a little marketing secret that I learned on how not to give away too much for free and get your prospects coming back for more time and time again.  This little marketing tip will show you exactly what you need to do to make sure you don’t go beyond giving away too much info for free.

What you do is give your prospects salt.  What does that do?  It makes your listener or reader thirsty for water.  The salt is the teaser or your prospects curiosity and the water is the solution or answer.

This is how to salt your conversation.  You create curiosity about what you are going to say before you say it.  For example, when I told you that I was going to show you exactly what you need to do to make sure you don’t go beyond giving away too much info for free, I had just salted you about the hooking technique before I reveal the technique.  Then I left you hanging wanting for more.

When you reveal the technique you keep out the key element that will give away how it all works.  This will protect your information and make it appear valuable to your prospect in that you will not just give it away for free.

When I was new to the real estate business I was amazed at how many agents would give out CMA’s for free.  I figured that a CMA was the same thing as an appraisal and should be something we charge for and not just given away for free. 

Now as a seasoned real estate professional I wonder if I was correct on my initial thinking as to why we give free CMA’s.  Then I started to wonder if someone way back when decided to offer Free CMA’s because everyone was charging for them.  Now sellers expect to get a CMA for free, so that item has lost its value.  So when I see an advertisement for a FREE CMA I don’t believe that they are getting any takers because that doesn’t appear as a real value in the eyes of the sellers.

Lets not continue to put ourselves out of business by offering too much for free because as you can see now, buyers and sellers are seeing less and less value in our services.  If all of the sudden no real estate professionals were giving away Free CMA’s then the public would all of the sudden see CMA’s as something to value.

Do you give away too much free information?

To learn other hot business building tips go to www.fuelyourpipeline.com TODAY!