ERA Top Gun

Real estate company ERA Franchise Systems LLC’s ERA Top Gun Academy is a spaced-learning, listing-based workshop taught over eight weeks.

Real estate company ERA Franchise Systems LLC’s ERA Top Gun Academy is a spaced-learning, listing-based workshop taught over eight weeks. The class is held one day per week. Professional sales skills and techniques are taught and discussed in a workshop environment and then reinforced with role-play. Students are given a Mission Assignment with prospecting and production goals to be completed during the week between sessions to further develop their skills.

Because Top Gun is taught in a spaced-learning format, the advanced skills and techniques are reinforced each week, creating new, effective habits that are the cornerstone for developing better trained and more successful sales agents and brokers. The session content is reviewed annually and held to the highest standards for best practices in the real estate industry.

Program Details

Graduates are required to master a value-added listing and marketing presentation that communicates their company’s services and marketing plan. Top Gun students are able to build rapport quickly and clearly communicate the advantages of their brand, their company, and their services.

Top Gun students learn essential customer relations management skills, beginning with understanding personality styles, presenting to different personality types, and servicing the needs of the buyer and seller through communicating with them using the method and frequency they prefer. Here is an outline of the workship’s eight weeks:

Week 1: Working with Buyers, Lead Management, Strategies to Dominate Your Market, Building Relationships, Prospecting Techniques, and Setting an Agent Business Plan

Week 2: Level of NEEDS, Educating the Seller in Today’s Market. Locking in the Private Seller, Presentation Skills, Business Planning

Week 3: Using the Power of Your Mind, Body Language, Prospecting the Expired Listing, Presentation Skills, Business Planning

Week 4: Understanding the People Around Us, Listening Skills, Personality Profiles, Reading and Understanding the Seller and Buyer, Presentation Skills

Week 5: Closing Questions, Trial, Final, and Tie Downs, Conditional Approval, Handling Stalls and Objections, Presentation Skills

Week 6: Working with Visual Presentations, Simulation Learning, Presentation Skills

Week 7: Developing a Marketing Campaign, Increasing Your Visibility, Visibility Strategies for Working with Social Media and the Internet, Setting a Marketing Budget, Working Your COI

Week 8: Time Management, Goal Setting, Long- and Short-Term Planning, Final on Business Planning, Graduation

Results          

Graduates of Top Gun see measureable increases in listings, listings sold, and sales. These increases occur during the eight weeks of class and continue post-graduation.

The professional sales skills, habits and customer relationship management techniques can be replicated and produce similar rates of improved production irrespective of the market or geographic location. Top Gun is taught nationwide with consistently similar results. Results for 2013 include:

Total Listings: 509

Total Listings Sold: 236

Total Sales: 357

Total Buyer Contracts: 316

Prior Weekly Average/Person: 0.62

Class Weekly Average/Person: 1.83

Percent Increase Weekly Targets: 340 percent

Average Targets/Graduate: 13.07

Average Listings Taken/Graduate: 4.71

Average Sales/Listing Sold / Graduate: 5.49       

ERA Top Gun Academy Units Listings Sold and Sales: 593, a 21 percent year-over-year increase

Lorri Freifeld
Lorri Freifeld is the editor/publisher of Training magazine. She writes on a number of topics, including talent management, training technology, and leadership development. She spearheads two awards programs: the Training APEX Awards and Emerging Training Leaders. A writer/editor for the last 30 years, she has held editing positions at a variety of publications and holds a Master’s degree in journalism from New York University.