Top 5 Books Realtors Should Read Right Now

So, number one is, when I read a business book, I always have a highlighter with me, and I highlight the parts, or I underline them if I've just got a pen or whatever, but I usually have a highlighter with me. And then I mark the page inside the front cover. And then when I'm done, I go back and I look at all those areas, and I pick the ones that are really the most important and keep them on that front page inside that cover. And if they seemed important at the time I was reading them, and maybe they weren't really all that important in the long run, that's when I will just kind of scratch that out or erase it. And now, if I open up a book, I've got inside the front cover the pages that really have something that I think is impactful.

You're not going to, I mean, these books I'm going to give you today, they're great books, all of them, but, you know, you may take one or two really practical things out of a book. And if you do, then I feel like it's a book that was worth reading. Some of these are going to have more than that, but they're the reason they're in the Top 5. But, you know, my thing is if I'm reading a book and I can get one or two things that are really practical and applicable in my business, then I feel really good about having read that book. And it wasn't a waste of time. It was an investment of time. And we take our notes and we try to implement the things from that book to help us get better. So we're going to jump in to book number one on my list, a classic, a book that's been around forever and been popular forever, which is probably why it's been around forever.

And that is The Greatest Salesman in the World by Ogmandino. So if you're not familiar with this book, it's told in a parable fashion, which I actually kind of like. And there's another book in here we'll talk about in a minute that is the same. It's told in a parable fashion. It's a story of a young man whose master passes away and he thinks he's inheriting all of his wealth and everything. He goes in. There's these 10 scrolls that impart wisdom. And each scroll is different and covers a different part of your life. And the trick with this book, if you read it one time, great. It's a great book. It's got some really, really profound things to help you kind of come back to a center and focus on the important things that are really going to serve you and serve your clients well.

So the challenge in this book is that you take each one of these 10 scrolls and you read them three times a day. Once when you wake up in the morning, once at lunch, and once out loud at the end of the day. And you do that for 30 days and then you move to the next one and you do that for 30 days and you move to the next one and so on. Until you've done 10, essentially 10 months of reading scrolls. So I did this a couple of years ago. And it was super interesting because I had picked up and read this book on multiple occasions, right? I've read this book probably 20 times. I got to the scroll marked one, the very first one. And it's today I begin a new life.

I shed my old skin that suffered, suffered the bruises of failure, the wounds of mediocrity. I'm born anew. And my birthplace is a vineyard where there's fruit for all. And you just go through and it's about setting up habits and becoming a slave to good habits is what it talks about. Well, so three times a day for 30 days, I mean, that's a lot of repeating a, you know, five-page scroll in a book. But what I found is that as time went by, different parts of the scroll spoke to me differently. And so, you know, I just blew through this failure no longer will be my payment for struggle. Just as nature made no provision for my body to tolerate pain, neither has it made provision for my life to suffer failure.

Failure is alien. In the past, I accepted it. Now I reject it. And I'm going through this whole thing and I'm like, holy crap, that's the most important part. But yet I was in these others, not failing, savor the grapes of the vines of success, all these different things. But really, that one paragraph struck out and was like, oh, hey, okay, now I get it. But then 10 days later, another paragraph jumped out and hit me in the face. And I was like, oh, man. And so, I actually called Verl Workman, who gave me this book for the first, well, he was the first person to give me this book. I called Verl Workman and I was like, dude, I'm doing the challenge. And look, this is this, this is that. And he's like, yeah, that's kind of the beauty of it. And you'll get a different meaning based on circumstances going on in your life. And so, that's why I love this book.

And I love referring back to it. You can see if you're watching the video version of this, I've got each scroll flagged in this book. I've almost worn the cover off of it. The good news is it's like $5 on Amazon. So, if I need another one, I can get another one. We actually pass this book out to everybody who joins our brokerage. When they get, when they come in for their new higher orientation, they get a copy of The Greatest Salesman. So, that's book number one, The Greatest Salesman in the World by Ogmandino. Number two, Ninja Selling by Larry Kendall. If you're watching the video, you can see that I don't even have the dust cover on this book anymore because I think I ripped it because I carry it around all the time. Listen, I am on something of a kick these days on sales training, on understanding the psychology of sales.

And in real estate, we don't have a lot of people who came from a sales background, who've actually been through an organized sales training. By organized sales training, I don't mean real estate training like in a brokerage or something because even at my brokerage, we teach real estate training, but we don't teach the true how-to of sales from things like mirroring and NLP and how you pace and visualizing what somebody's doing and trying to associate words with it and the psychology piece of it. And even the practical stuff like tie-downs and trial closes, we just don't teach that. And we did this year a two-day little seminar that we called Value, V-A-L-Y-O-U.

It was really trying to teach agents how to communicate their value in different aspects of a transaction. And when we did it, it was great, amazing content. We had people like Dan Stewart. We had people like Eric Sachs from Breakthrough Broker. We had a bunch of people come in to town and speak and present, and it was really phenomenal. I wanted to follow that up in the brokerage with actual sales training, how to take that, this is how you communicate it, and really make it more impactful by understanding some of the basics. And so my coach and I started looking around for some sales training or we were going to create our own and just kind of hit the high points of what we felt like our agents need to know this, this, this, and this, that kind of thing.

And so we started reading books. We started reading books like To Sell as Human by Daniel Pink. We read a bunch of the old school original, you know, selling books by guys like Jeff Gittimer and people like that. And Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, you know, we've read a lot of those books. And so we kind of started putting lists together and somebody turned us on to the Ninja Selling book. We read it and we're like, well, this is ridiculous. No need to reinvent the wheel. Let's just do this. And so that's why this is on my must read list. I think it's very, very practically applicable. I think you can literally read a chapter, go do what you need to do in your business to, to use that element of it and build it into your business.

Come back, read another chapter, go back, do the same. It's got great statistics that prove what you're trying to achieve is worth your time. And it's just a really, really great framework for selling real estate at a high level. I, it is, you know, Larry Kendall is a broker in Colorado. He, he wrote the book. So it comes from a real estate background. And I think that that is important. And so I love it. I actually went to a Ninja installation this year. I wanted to do one. We're actually going to bring one into town for my brokerage, but I wanted to see one first. And so I went to Great Rapids, Michigan, and I went through four days of Ninja selling installation.

And I will tell you, it's hard for me to sit still for four days and listen to someone else talk. Like the idea of being in a four day training is kind of rough on me, honestly. And I called my wife as I left and I said, if there was a fifth day, I would have stayed for it easily. It was that, that good. So I'd look around if you were ever interested in something like that, look on the Ninja website and see if you can attend a, an installation. It is really game changing. And I enjoyed being in a different market and getting to hear and see what they were doing from a sales standpoint as well. So highly recommend Ninja selling. All right. Next up on the list is, I think, mandatory reading for every real estate agent. And I will tell you, this is one of two books, the greatest salesman in the world being the other, that I have extra copies on my bookshelf just so I can hand out to other people.

And that book is The Seven Levels of Communication by Michael Maher. Michael is a real estate agent as well. He writes this in what he calls a power parable. I just would call it a parable. But it's a story. He tells a story of a struggling real estate agent and meets, you know, kind of the guide, right, the coach. And it changes some of the basics that he's doing. The thing I love about this is, you know, in real estate, we often get caught up in a, oh, this is the shiny new toy. This is the new marketing service. This is the new tool. This is the new technology. Whatever it is. And this is almost like what sales looked like before the Internet.

And I love it because of that. Because it really is about relationship-driven sales. It's about building your business based on the people that you know and going out and serving and doing things for them. So, I love this book. I probably read this book at least once a year. It's not a long read. It's not a hard read. In fact, the funny thing is the first time that I read this book, I didn't take any notes. I didn't highlight. I didn't underline. I didn't do anything. I just, I got so into the story that I read it and then I had to come back and read it again to actually take my notes. That's how good the story is on its own without having to take on a bunch of note-taking and going to try and do this.

When I reread it, it sank in a little bit more. And I was able to take some notes on things that I wanted to implement in my business. It's about that person-to-person, face-to-face contact. That's the key. And you'll see running themes of that in Ninja Selling as well. You'll see it in my number five book because in order for you to know what to say now for real estate agents, you need to know, you need to actually be talking to somebody. So, seven levels of communication, whether you're in real estate or not, if you're listening to this, I just think that it's a phenomenal book on not wasting time, not wasting money on things that aren't going to impact your business and really how to sit down with someone and build your business off of strong relationships that lead to referrals.

So, seven levels of communication. Michael Marr, definitely, definitely, definitely get that. All right, so I already, oh, I gave away the number five book, but we'll come back to it. Number four on my list, and I don't have a copy of it if you're watching because I'm actually rereading it right now and I left it on my desk at home, is Atomic Habits by James Clear. I love this book. I am a huge believer in systems and processes to drive excellence. I am not by nature that person. Like, my nature is, let's just go. Let's just do it. But over time, what I have found is that if I take the time and I put in the work and the discipline to set up a system and I follow that system, I'm much more free and I'm much more stress-free.

And I have never been a great goal setter. I am just not really a big believer in setting these firm goals. I think it's important that you have milestones to measure yourself by, but my feeling has always been just keep making improvements and those improvements will compound. And so when I'm sitting there reading Atomic Habits, that's essentially what the book talks about is goals are goals really kind of set us up for failure. But if we create habits in our lives and create systems in our lives that form those habits, we will continuously, even if it's 1% a day, 1% a day improve. But the opposite is also true.

And so the book has a lot of information on how to stop bad habits. So I think that it is 100%, you know, you have to read this book if you're in real estate because I think that it looks at a number of things. It looks at some of the self-sabotaging things that we do and how to stop doing that. I think it sets a beautiful framework for creating improvement systems in your business and in your life. Truly. I've talked about this before. I try to be a morning person. I'm really bad at being a morning person. I prefer being a night owl. And I, instead of just saying, okay, well, I'm going to get up at 6 a.m. That's not my norm. My norm is I get up around 7, 7.15. Well, what if instead of I get up at 6 a.m.

Or my goal is to get up at 5.30 or whatever that is, what if I just woke up five minutes earlier? And this week, I woke up five minutes earlier. So instead of 7.15, I woke up at 7.10. And next week, I woke up at 7.05. And the following week, seven. And you get it. You're constantly building on the improvement from the previous time that you executed something to the point where you ultimately either reach or exceed what would have been some sort of arbitrary goal. The other thing I would tell you about goal setting, and if you've ever read the book, Gap in the Gain, which I highly recommend by Dan Sullivan, we tend to measure versus this arbitrary goal as opposed to measuring from where we started, right?

And that's kind of the gap in the Gain and the way we talk about that and the way our minds work with that is I want to sell 50 homes. Last year, I sold 20. And let's just, you know, the good example, somebody wants to sell 50 homes. Last year, they sold 20. And this year, so far, they're at 25. And they're feeling bad because they're not getting closer to that 50 goal. But what they really ought to be looking at is I started at 20, and now I'm at 25. And I'm only halfway through the year. And if we're talking about right now, they ought to be feeling really great about that, really great about I've already exceeded my previous production by five transactions. That's phenomenal. But we don't do that. We measure against this arbitrary goal that we don't know if we can hit.

We don't know if we've put systems in place to hit it. And so, I think that, you know, the framework from Atomic Habits really sets you up for a longer-term success. So, I highly recommend that one, James Clear. And also, I would tell you, every Thursday, James Clear – I'm not a huge sign-up for newsletters. I already get enough email. We all get enough email. We get, you know, just garbage in our inbox all the time. Every Thursday, James Clear sends a newsletter called 321. It's three ideas from him, two quotes from others, and a question. And I enjoy it. It's an easy, easy newsletter to read because it's literally six things, and they're kind of bullet-pointed. But also, it's stuff that gets you thinking, and I really like that.

So, I appreciate the newsletter. You can go to jamesclear.com and sign up for it if you're interested. It's a good one. I like it a lot. All right. So, I gave away book number five earlier, but it's exactly what to say now for real estate agents. So, this is one of those where the book Exactly What to Say Now exists, and two of my favorite guys in real estate took it and went to the author and adapted it for real estate. And so, Jimmy Mackin and Chris Smith went to the author of Exactly What to Say Now, and they built out this Exactly What to Say Now for real estate agents. And I think it's great. You know, I think Chris has been on this show. So, I think Jimmy and Chris are just two of the smartest guys, and they're always pushing way ahead from a thought process standpoint and from a how to implement that in your business standpoint more than just about anybody in the industry, in my opinion.

So, I love watching their content. I love watching them and the things that they're doing with Curator, and I really enjoyed this book. I don't have a copy, a physical copy of it because I listened to it, and I think that actually the Audible version, I'm not really great with Audible because, again, going back to that whole sitting still for four days and listening, I'm not good at that, and I get distracted or my phone rings or whatever. So, really, the only time that I listen to books is if I'm on a long drive or I'm on my tractor, and I'm mowing, and I've got a couple of hours, and that's when I listen to books. I listen to the entirety of this book on a trip back to Houston from Austin. So, it's not long. I think that it plays out better audibly first because you get to hear the conversation.

It's almost like they're role-playing in the book, and so I liked that about it. I liked that presentation more than I liked a physical book, which is usually not the case. I can name one other book, and that's Green Lights by Matthew McConaughey just because you want to hear McConaughey read his own book, right? That's the only other book that I have actually enjoyed more on Audible than I have in a physical form of a book. I think we struggle often, and I talk about this with a lot of people. I think, number one, as an industry, we've done a terrible job of how we train prospecting, and by virtue of that, we have created this monster that nobody wants to tackle, right?

It's the first thing people put off. It's the first thing I procrastinate or I don't do because I want to pretend like I'm working over here or I want to get caught up in the minutiae of this transaction or whatever that looks like. And I think it's because we've set people up for failure by the way that we talk about this. The industry standard is if you're going to prospect, the only way to quote-unquote win at prospecting is either to get an appointment or get a referral. Those are like the two wins. I don't hold that to be true. I really don't. I think that if I'm engaging a client in some way, I'm engaging a prospect in some way, if I'm setting up for in-person meeting, if I'm setting up for, even if that's not an appointment to talk about real estate, just I'm going to go to coffee with somebody.

If I'm moving the relationship forward somehow, I don't look at sending an unanswered text. I don't look at sending an unanswered email. I don't look at leaving a voice message even really as moving that forward. I'm having a conversation with someone. So if I were in your shoes and I'm prospecting in real estate, I would count the conversations that I have more than I'd count the appointments and referrals. Obviously, we want to get an appointment. Obviously, we want to get a referral. But really what I want to do is deepen the relationship with the person I've got on the other end of the line. And whether that's, you know, obviously the face-to-face meeting is the number one. But if I'm having a conversation, a voice conversation, that's great. If I'm texting, okay. But really the driver here is I want to get in front of somebody, but I really just want to continuously engage and continuously engage.

And I think when you think about that from the standpoint of that's how I want to prospect, number one, it changes the words you use, especially in how you end your conversations, where you're setting yourself up for the next element of whatever that communication looks like. So if it's an email, you're asking a question, that's the last thing you do in an email is ask a question so that they respond. And you just keep moving it forward. If it's over the phone, you're asking for either an opportunity to call back or the opportunity to see somebody. And you're setting that up for essentially giving yourself permission to call back. If we did that, we'd be a lot more successful and we'd actually prospect more. That's the real thing. We'd prospect a whole lot more.

So what does that have to do with exactly what to say? I think one of the things that we are all oftentimes hesitant about because we feel like we have to get an appointment, we feel like we have to get a referral, is what the hell do we say to people when we call them? Instead of just taking it easy and being their friend and talking to them, we feel like there has to be some sort of an agenda. So there's kind of an agenda in Ninja Selling, if you read that book, on how to do a prospecting call. But the reality here is we need to know some of the basics. I am not, by my very nature, a huge fan of scripts. I don't like them. I think they sound fake. But I am a huge fan of scripts from guidelining, from taking that script and saying, okay, I get what I'm trying to get across.

Now let me completely rewrite this script as though I was talking to my mom, as though I was talking to my best friend. And so you're rewriting it in your voice, how you would actually talk to get the major points of that script across. And I think that if you do that, you're a whole lot more likely to be successful when you're speaking to someone rather than just reading a script in a book. That said, exactly what to say now for real estate agents gives you some great content and some great openers and just a bunch of lines to use and make your own so that you're prepared when you call somebody. I love the book. As soon as I got out of my truck from that drive from Austin to Houston, I immediately posted a link to the Audible in the Facebook group for my brokerage because that's how impressed I was.

Which, I mean, I shouldn't have been impressed because Chris and Jimmy always put out good content. But nonetheless, it was terrific. So highly recommend that. And again, I recommend it on Audible versus hard copy. So, all right. I told you that I was going to give you a bonus book. And I'm going to give you a bonus book. This is not a book that has really anything to do with real estate in particular. And if I'm being completely honest with you, I expected to not like this book. I expected to not like this book. And I have read this book more times than probably any other non-specific to real estate book that I own. I first heard about this company and this person when I was reading Daniel Coyle's book, Culture Code, which is also a great book, where he talks about a bunch of different companies from Pixar to this restaurant group, Union Square Hospitality.

That I think it just gives you a real great insight on how to build a great culture. And I think that there are some takeaways from that book. Not that we're sitting, not that that's the book. But from Culture Code, I think there's some takeaways that you could put into how you interact and build your community, if you will, from your past clients, from your sphere of influence, from all of your major referral sources that are great takeaways. So, there you go. Maybe we're doing top seven shit. I don't know. But the book that I am talking about is a book called Setting the Table by Danny Meyer. Danny is the CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group. He runs some of the finest restaurants in New York. And he also, by virtue of a charity event they were doing, where they were literally just selling hot dogs to help raise money for a park that's next to one of their restaurants, ended up founding Steak Shop.

Or Shake Shack, or Shake Shack, sorry. And it's a really cool story about that. But after I read about them in Culture Code, I went and I watched his TED Talk, which is, if you're not in the fast, casual dining industry, maybe one of the more boring TED Talks of all time. And then, frankly, I read the introduction to this book, and I will tell you, I was expecting it to be a very egotistical, terrible book. And then I got in, and page 11 was where I was like, okay, I'm hooked. Let's go. So, inside of our brokerage, we have a saying, we have had a saying for a very long time called, do four, not two.

We like to do four people, not two people. And I'll just read this real quick to you. On page 11, it says, hospitality is the foundation of my business philosophy. Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side. Converse is just as true. Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions, for and to, express it all. Man, I was like, holy crap, maybe we're doing something right around here. When I read that, and I never really thought about it from a hospitality standpoint.

I did think about it from a feeling standpoint, from an experience standpoint. But this just reinforced it. And it goes into talk about how, at their restaurants, and how, through systems, they are able to provide just world-class service and world-class hospitality. And some specific examples of when things went wrong, and how to deal with negative feedback. And make it a winning experience for someone, even if they felt like something was done to them. And so, I loved this book. I just, I honestly, as crazy as it sounds, I thought about changing the name of our, holding the company that owns my brokerage, from, you know, the cleverly named Chance Brown Real Estate, to some sort of hospitality group.

Because I felt it was that important. I talk about this inside of our brokerage a lot. But when I was growing up, my mom told me not to get into cars with strangers, and not to take food from strangers. And now I push a button on my phone, and both of those things happen in like five minutes, right? And so, we've created this experience economy, as Gary Vaynerchuk would call it. And in that experience economy, there's a need for immediate gratification. But more than that, there is a need for experience. There's a need for how I feel about something. And if we're not keeping that in mind, as we build our sales systems, as we build our customer journey mapping, as Mark Davison talked about in last week's podcast, if we're not keeping those things in mind, man, I think we're really shorting ourselves on the things that we could do, because it's not huge changes.

It's small changes that mostly have to do with messaging, and what we say, and how we say it. And I just think that this idea of bringing hospitality to your real estate business is a pretty cool parallel. I really do. It's hard when you sell a service for there to be tangibility to it. And as much as we want to say, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, until we actually do it, we don't prove ourselves up. But if we have a system in place that we can show somebody how it works, and part of that is how they're going to feel through their transaction. To kick off this season, I did an interview with a couple of guys who run a restaurant in D.C., Michelin star restaurant in Washington, D.C.

And one of the things we got to talking about was, would you rather go to a super fine dining restaurant and not have a great time, or would you rather go to a restaurant that has, you know, average to above average food, but you really enjoy the experience? And the truth of the matter is, most people would like to have the experience over the food. Maybe the experience actually makes the food taste better sometimes, right? And so even these two guys who, you know, they've eaten at some of the best restaurants in the world, worked at some of the best restaurants in the world, and they'd rather be able to have a good time when they go out to dinner than they would just to go get amazing food and not have a fun time, not have a great experience. And so I think that the idea of transforming your business through hospitality and having a hospitality mindset is really the takeaway from setting the table.

So going back through them, we had greatest salesman in the world, ninja selling, seven levels of communication, atomic habits, exactly what to say now for real estate agents, and our bonus book of setting the table. I hope that helps. I'm always looking for good books. If you have any suggestions, hit me up because I would love to add to my library. I've got a bunch of books that I'm reading, but I really am always looking for a good one. So if you've got any books, let me know. I'd love to read them. Hope that you have enjoyed this. We will be back next week with a special guest that we are going to talk about coaching. And we've talked about coaching before on this show, but this time we're going to talk about coaching from the agent standpoint, not from the coach standpoint.

So it should be pretty interesting. It's going to be me and one of my agents who, between the two of us, we've been through a million different coaching programs and seen a whole, whole lot in our combined, oh, let's call it close to 40 years in real estate. And we're going to talk about what makes for a good coachable agent. So it should be pretty interesting. Hope you enjoy it. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen, to stop by and watch this episode of Top 5. We'll see you next week.