I recently attended the RE/MAX R4 international convention in Las Vegas. As always @RE/MAX LLC. puts on a great convention with top notch speakers and education.
My favorite was the opening session where they lined up @Brian Buffini, www.buffiniandcompany.com, who is probably the most premier real estate coach in the country followed by +Gary Vaynerchuk, garyvaynerchuk.com who among other things is a social media guru.
Both of these guys are hugely successful in there industries and are amazingly similar in their differences. Buffini came to America a broke Irish immigrant and became a hugely successful Realtor, invested well and now teaches other Realtors and Mortgage Bankers how to do what he did. He preaches that the old way of doing things i.e. cold calling, door knocking, mass mailing both email and snail mail don't work any more and that most people do business with someone they know and trust or get a referral from someone they know and trust. His philosophy is to be the hub of your database so that whenever people have a need they think of you and you provide great service to generate referrals thus growing your database and generating more referrals.
Gary V's philosophy is that we are moving into a major shift on how we get data and information from a push marketing society to a pull marketing society. That instead of people being marketed to they go and find the data for themselves and the only thing anyone in the sales or marketing business will have is expertise and great customer service and that we need to provide content that is valuable, useful and readily available for our consumers.
It's really cool to read between the lines to see two super successful people say the same thing is such a different way. Both built their business by giving consumers what they want and how they want it. I know that my school teachers from the 80's and 90's won't be big into social networking but will move 3 or 4 more times in their lives and I know that my 20 something buddies and clients won't open a newspaper or a mailed marketing piece and will move many times also. I want to thank both Buffini and Vaynerchuk for the idea of customizing my marketing plan to how my consumers wants to receive it. You guys are awesome!
Any body in sales or marketing should read everything they have written.
