Real Estate Success Secrets from Darren Hardy's Guaranteed Sale

Hi there, it's Kevin Ward with yes Masters Real Estate Success Training, helping you get more yeses and more successes in your business and in your life. So a few weeks ago I had an opportunity to have a conversation with Darren Hardy. Now Darren is the publisher of Success magazine, which was an awesome magazine. And he and I were at an event together that we were attending a few weeks ago and I had an opportunity to visit with him. And a lot of people don't realize that before Darren Hardy became the publisher and, and editor of Success Magazine, that he was actually a real estate agent. In fact, he was a top producing real estate agent for years and years and was one of the best in his market. And so I asked him about that and it was something very surprising to me when I, and I'd heard about this in the past on one of his CDs that comes with the Success magazine every month, and that is that, that Darren Hardy offered a 100% satisfaction guaranteed to all of his clients. Which basically means his guarantee was, if you're not 100% satisfied with the results that deliver, I will give you the commission back at closing. 100%, the commission back at closing. That was his guarantee. Now I had really never even heard of that before. And so when I met Darren, I just had to ask him about it. I said, tell me about that. How did that work and what made it work for you? And Darren was very gracious to share with me some of the stuff that he did as a real estate agent that helped him to become one of the biggest producers in his market. And it centered around this whole concept of offering a 1,100% satisfaction guarantee. In fact, he was kind enough to actually send me a copy of his old satisfaction guarantee program. It includes with his 12 questions to ask. Every Realtor had a bunch of testimonials and then he had his action plan, which I've kind of shrunk down here on one page. But his, his 100% satisfaction guarantee was just awesome. Now, do you, I can't. You're not going to get a copy of this. Do not ask for a copy of this. I did not get Darren's permission to share this with you. Number one, because it's his material. Number two, said, look, it's pretty straightforward if you know how to perform and you know how to deliver the result. So here's what, here's how he started his satisfaction guarantee. If your real estate agent is not offering a commission back guarantee on their service, ask them why not? Or simply call Darren Hardy and Find out why he does. Darren Hardy delivers satisfaction, guaranteed 100% satisfaction or my commission back. And it was very straightforward. And I asked him, what's the catch? No catch. He just offered that. He said, I believed in what I was doing enough to make that happen. So I asked him about it. We talked about what is it that made his satisfaction guarantee actually work. And that's what I want to share with you on the video today, is what made it powerful for him to help him to become one of the top producing agents in his market. And then, of course, I'm going to answer the big question, and that is, how many times did he have to give the commission back? How much did it actually cost him? Whenever he had to do that, how did that work and did he ever have to do it? And yes, he did. And how many times and how much did it cost? Because nobody wants to give their commission back, right? So the first thing he said was that if you're going to do a guaranteed a satisfaction guarantee, he says, number one is you've got to believe in it enough to be willing to champion your guarantee. You got to champion it. In other words, he says, you've got to make it. It's got to be your badge of honor. It's got to be the thing that you put out there that says, this is how I am different. If you don't champion it, as he called it, if you don't put it out there in your marketing, stand behind it and say, I believe in this and this is who I am. And if you don't, if you don't make it a part of who you are, number one, it's not going to get you listings. And number two, it's not going to differentiate you from other agents in the market. But when you offer this kind of a commitment, and that's what he really said it is, this is really. It wasn't about the guarantee as much as it was about my level of commitment to get delivering results to my clients. He says when you champion that, you separate yourself right away in the market. So if you're going to do a guarantee, he says, you got to champion it. Don't try to make it something that you hope nobody, you know asks about, because it's a bait and switch thing where you kind of put it out up front and then you try to hide behind it and shovel it back. Once you get an appointment, you don't want to talk about the guarantee. He says, you got to champion it. If it's not the real deal, don't play with it. This is not fluff, gimmick, or hype. It was a legitimate 100% satisfaction guarantee. Number two, he said, look, if you're going to do that, you got a lot on the line, you got a lot at stake. So he says, number two, you've got to have a killer selling process, which just simply means if you don't know how to deliver the results, the guarantee is going to kill you. So think about it. If you're buying online, if you're buying a product, how many products can you buy online nowadays that have a 100% satisfaction guarantee? Well, virtually all of them. Right. Why? Because you want to make sure if I'm buying from somebody, something I've never bought before, somebody I've never bought from before, I want to know I'm not getting taken. I want to know that I'm going to get what I paid for. And so he said, that's what you do. And if you don't deliver, what's going to happen? You're going to get your request for your money back all the time. If the quality of the product or the service sucks, you're going to get requests for your money back, which is a lose lose, not a win win, right? And so you're looking for a win win. So he says you got to know what you're doing and how to take a listing and get it sold. And so you've got to develop and have a killer selling process. Number three, he said, happy sellers don't ask for their money back. So he said, here's a big one. He says, you got to communicate with your sellers all the time. You got to talk to them, you got to let them know what's going on, make them sure they know you're in the game. It's not so much a matter of delivering fast results. He it may have taken me a long time to get a house sold, but as long as they knew I was working at it and I was doing what I said I would do, he said they were happy and they didn't ask for their money back. So he says you got to communicate with your seller all the time. Number four, here's the first one that gets painful, he said. Number four is he said, you've got to be willing to honor your guarantee if you're not willing to give the commission back 100%. No fine print, none of that. He said, if you're not willing to give it back, don't do it because it's going to hurt you. It's going to hurt your reputation in the community like that. If other agents found out that you don't honor the guarantee, guess what? They're going to champion it against you because you're full of bs. You're a bait and switch kind of guy. So he says, you can't do that. You got to honor the guarantee. Now, here was my question to you. So how many times did you have to give your commission back? And he said, it is amazing. I know. He said, in all of the hundreds and hundreds of listings. And he said, I took literally hundreds and hundreds of listings because of this guarantee. Hey, look, if you're not agent the agent, other agents you're talking to are not willing to offer 100% of their commission back. Ask them why not, or simply hire me because I'll guarantee it in writing, no questions asked, no hassle, no fine print, just your satisfaction or the money back. And he said, I got hundreds and hundreds of listings. I had to give one commission back. That's it. And what happened was, he said, I got. Took the listing, sold the house. We sold it pretty good, but it came up in the inspection with some lender, required repairs that nobody knew about, nobody was expecting, and they turned out to be fairly significant repairs. And so basically, the seller was going to end up having to pay for it. Seller was not happy about it because he's like, that's less money than I want it, more money than I want to spend because I'm going to get less money. So at the end of the transaction, he said, okay, Darin, you said if I wasn't 100% satisfied, you'd give me my commission back. I want the commission to cover the cost of those repairs that I had to make. So what did Aaron do? He honored the guarantee. But here's what he said. He said, look, I got hundreds and hundreds of listings because of the guarantee, and it only cost me one time. Now, here was the beauty of it, he said, if you're going to do it, you got to give the commission back. However, the beauty of it is just don't just give it back and go with your tail between your legs like you got beat. He said, here's what you do. He says, anytime that happened, he said, I made the decision to leverage the failure. In other words, if I failed to satisfy the customer, the client, which only ended up happening once, he said, I decided I was going to leverage it. So here's what I did. He said, obviously, I gave him the commission back. However, I told him, okay, I'll Give you the commission back. Because that's the guarantee if you'll write a letter testifying or basically a testimonial affirming that yes, I actually gave you the commission back. And then he actually, when he wrote the get the commission check back to the seller, which he actually wrote a check, he actually took a picture of him handing the seller the commission check, handing him his commission back. Now isn't that amazing? And here's what he said I did, he said I took and I leveraged that failure. And that $8,500 commission became the best $8,500 marketing investment in my entire real estate career. He says, because now I could champion in my marketing, I could champion the fact that I, I put my money where my mouth is. Here's an example of a seller who is not happy, who is not satisfied because of an issue in the transaction and here's me giving him his money back. So now it became an undeniably powerful testimonial that he used to continue to get him more and more and more business. So in today's world, what Darin said is look, shoot a video, shoot a video of you giving your commission check to the seller and basically just to show that yes, you are a person of your word that you actually deliver. Because look, what are people looking for in a real estate agent? They're looking for somebody that actually knows how to deliver results, that will communicate, that will shoot straight and that will actually do what they say they are going to do. Now that is a powerful process. Most real estate agents, guess what? Are going to be terrified to do that. Why? Because they're afraid of losing money or because they're afraid they don't know how to get results. Right. Or if you don't do this stuff already in terms of the communicating and doing what you say you're going to do and know how to get stuff sell, you're going to be afraid to do it. So if you're watching this video, this is stuff that I teach in the 100 day list master challenge. People ask, well, how do you do a guarantee? I actually teach four different types of guaranteed sales. And this is one of the guaranteed sales that I teach you in detail. How to do that I do in that the coaching and obviously the selling process. How do you get every single listing sold? I teach you that as well. But the whole concept of this is so, so powerful. And here's the last thing I want to leave you with is think about Darin Hardy is it's not just the mechanics of the guarantee, it's that Darren believed in his ability to deliver result and he was willing to make a commitment to have that happen. Which simply meant Darren was not led or motivated by fear of failure. And if that's what's stopping you, that's the biggest jump, that's the biggest breakthrough that you've got to overcome. And so it's no surprise that a real estate agent who started out as just a normal realtor like you and me, working for Century 21, that's where he was, he had his company and that he just started as a normal realtor and is today one of the, one of the success thought leaders in the world, the publisher of Success magazine. So it's not just what he did, it's how he thought and who he became. And that's what you really got us focus on, is who you are as a real estate agent. If you need help, if you need coaching or support to help you in terms of your mindset or how to actually execute that stuff, that's what I'm here for, that's what real estate training and coaches, great ones are here for, is to help you do this. You can deliver these kind of results, get this kind of a business built and offer a satisfaction guarantee because you deliver satisfaction quality service every single time. And so here's the deal. If you'll use this, you can engage opportunity and you can always expect, yes.