Turbocharge your results and work with the clients you want to serve

At the end of 2023, I spent some time jotting down my Dream 100 list—that is, the top 100 relationships that could truly elevate my business.

And let me tell you, I'm already seeing huge benefits from this simple exercise...

So, after delivering a training session on this topic for our members, and seeing how it's also helped them, I'm ready to show you how to make it happen as well.

By focusing your efforts on nurturing meaningful connections with your most important prospects and clients, you will generate more relevant opportunities and notice a significant uptick in your conversions.

It's all about quality over quantity, and creating a Dream 100 can turbocharge your results - helping you to work with more of the clients that you want to serve.

If you'd like to make this happen, join me for episode 173 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

Episode transcript:

At the end of last year, I spent a couple of hours writing down my Dream 100.

These are the 100 existing clients and prospects that I would most like to do business with.

Maybe you've developed a top 100 list before or you've worked in a company that had those lists. I think it's a really good use of your time to develop that list.

And there's a particular I guess, framework around the Dream 100 concept, which I want to share with you.

So, let's talk about what the Dream 100 is, how you can apply it in your business, and then what you can do with that Dream 100 lists of clients and prospects once you have created it.

Hello, and welcome to episode 173 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm Darren Krakowiak. I'm your host.

And I'm here if you want to make your business bigger, and you work in commercial real estate, this is the place to be, this is what I'm here to do to help you make your business bigger.

And if you want some more help with that, including, we've added a three-part video series about the three persistent problems that stop commercial real estate leaders from making their businesses bigger.

It is included with Multiplied Growth, our commercial real estate leader’s business growth guide.

So, if you haven't downloaded yet, make sure you go ahead and do that.

Because it now comes with this three-part video series plus everything else that's always been in there, including the spreadsheet that you can apply to help activate more organic growth in your business and an instructional guide on how to use that spreadsheet plus the e-book itself, which is called multiply growth. You can grab that at cresuccess.co/growth

So back in November, I did a training for my members on ideal prospects and high value relationships.

Now if you're wondering, what's this training that you're doing for members?

Well, with my one-on-one leadership clients, we also assist them with developing their people by putting five of their staff into a membership that we run for commercial real estate agents where we do a monthly masterclass.

Each month, we do different topics like prospecting, personal branding, time management, developing your own personal excellence in goal setting, dealing with clients, etc.

We have those people in that. We've also got, of course, our Top Performer members, which is our digital course.

And we have a six-module digital course for commercial real estate agents and brokers.

Those people in that program also get to come to our monthly training. And a monthly training we did recently was about ideal prospects and high value relationships.

And as I was creating this training, it's funny how these things work. I created the training.

And then about three days before I was due to deliver that session, I discovered this idea of the Dream 100 by Chet Holmes.

And it's from a book called 'The Ultimate Sales Machine'.

And full disclosure, I haven't read the book, but you don't have to read books in order to understand or at least to glean things from them.

So, I heard about the concept on a coaching call and a coaching program that I'm in for business coaches, and I realized it was essentially a top 100 list.

I've worked in companies where we've had top 250 lists, top 50 lists, and I realized that, "Okay, this is the top 100 list that they have called Dream 100. It's from a book. What can I find out that I can then share with my members, because I'm already doing a training on this."

And well, we found some stuff about it on YouTube, I found some articles about it, and I got enough information to one, create some training for my members on it, but two, also to create this episode for you.

So, a quick tip for you is that you don't need to read the whole book in order to get the concept. You can get out there and find information. (It's better if you read the book)

But if you don't have time, or if you want to learn things from books, there are other ways to do that, including on YouTube, reading articles, etc.

So, let's talk about the top 100 right now, the Dream 100. It's the top 100 relationships that can significantly impact your performance.

And I think the big idea here is that rather than trying to go out there and make 100 cold calls every single day or every single week, we identify the top 100 people that we want to turn into clients or that can help us get clients.

And then we focus on developing a relationship with them.

So, you know how you sometimes you prospect people, and then if you don't get anywhere then maybe you don't have a system or process to continue to follow up with them or then to make sure that we're following up with them again, in two or three months.

What we're doing here is we're prioritizing the top 100 or whatever that number might be for you and I'll talk about that in the moment.

To make sure that they are always high priority that we just keep going until we get to a point where we can have a meaningful conversation with them. That's the point of this exercise.

To engage in a meaningful conversation, and to start to develop the relationship.

What we're trying to do with the dream 100, and the way that Chet puts it, is that we want to take people from, "Hey, never even heard of this agent" to "Hmm, who is this agent that I keep hearing about?"

To, I think I've heard of this agent or broker, and then we say, "Oh, you know what they've heard of us?" Or they say, "Oh, yeah, I've heard of them."

And then finally, we get to a point where they're doing business with us.

Or, if they're a high value relationship as opposed to an ideal prospect, there's someone who is helping us win business, because they're a strong advocate for us.

So, to reiterate the idea of this is that it's more effective to focus your sales and marketing efforts.

And actually, I should say, marketing and sales, because we're doing marketing. And then we do such great marketing that sales become easier.

We want to focus it on a smaller number of clients, rather than trying to reach a large number of prospects who may or may not be ideal.

So, we do some work at the front and we figure out who are the most ideal, and then we go after those with more purpose.

And I think this is kind of related to the Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle, of course, says that 20% is responsible for 80% of the results, right?

So, 20% of the clients are responsible for 80% of the revenue. Not always true, but sometimes true.

Certainly, if you haven't done the exercise of going through all of your clients from the past year, from the past three years, and just seeing who's responsible for what revenue?

That's a really powerful exercise, because you can find there are sometimes some clients who are taking up a lot of time, who aren't actually contributing that much financially.

And then there are some people contributing a lot financially, who perhaps we're not giving enough love to.

So, what we're doing is deciding which ones are going to be the most impactful, and then we're going after those with a purpose.

Now, it might not be 100 clients for you, depending on the market that you're in.

It might only be 25, for example, it could be 50, it could be more than that. If you're in a more of a volume market or a volume business, then it might be 250.

But whatever it is, we say if we want all of these, or many of them, it would have a material impact on our business.

And that's what determines how it is that we're going to put clients’ prospects into this list.

And I created my own Dream 100 list, as I said, at the end of last year. And I got up to kind of like 70, 80, pretty easy, right?

And then I kind of had to wrack my brains a little bit to think about, "Well, who would be the other 20?"

And then I started going through my CRM. And another reason why I should keep a CRM is so you can go back and see who you've prospected. I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that one, that one, need to follow up with that one."

And the funny thing is, and you should be including existing clients on this list as well, because just because someone's in an existing client doesn't mean that they're also an ideal one, right?

So, existing clients also go on the list. But if you find that some of your existing clients don't make your top 100, then that's something for you to consider.

Are you doing business right now with clients that aren't even making the cut of, let's say, it's the top 100, whatever the number is, that you need to have a material impact on your business?

And that can help you then decide, "Well, maybe I need to shift my focus directed towards attracting more ideal clients."

So, we figure out who our ideal clients are. And then we come up with a strategy that meets their needs based on the approach that we believe will have the most direct impact on them.

Because we direct our marketing and sales efforts towards winning those dream clients.

So, we really research them. We understand their decision-making process. We understand how they approach the market in which we're in.

And then we create sales strategies, which are tailored specifically for them.

And I think the wonderful thing is once you know what your ideal prospects look like, you can spend more of your time targeting them directly through your non leveraged prospecting activities.

So, that is through direct outreach, trying to engage with their content on social media, attending events where you believe that you're likely to be able to perhaps see them.

But you can also do it indirectly through your more leveraged prospecting efforts, so for example, for your content.

Now, the Dream 100 is very much a tailored customized marketing and sales strategy.

But when you also start to talk to your Dream 100 in your more leveraged forms of communication, online email blasts, well, what you're going to do is you're going to also attract more clients who are probably quite similar to your Dream 100.

Perhaps ones that you didn't put on the list because you underestimated your own ability to win those clients.

Or, perhaps you just weren't aware of them that weren't in your orbit, and you'll start to attract more of those clients, which are actually like the ones that you put on your Dream 100 in the first place.

So, that is the Dream 100. It's about ideal clients. But also, you can make it about high value relationships that could potentially create business for you.

You want to get these people in your network, you want to start building a relationship with them.

And I think as you start making more progress in working towards building a relationship with them, well, you're going to be more efficient in the way you spend your time.

Because you'll be focused on high value relationships that can have the biggest impact on your business.

So, as a leader, this is something that you should have for yourself, you should have it for your business.

You recommend that also in the people in your team, have these lists for themselves.

There'll be times where there is some similarities, or there are matches between who has been prospected by the business as a whole and by individuals in the business. And then we can have a coordinated strategy towards winning more business for these clients.

If you want to know more about the Dream 100, like I said, you don't have to read the book you could if you want to.

But there's heaps of information available on YouTube and online, Dream 100, or just top 100 list, you could google.

The best thing that you can do though, is do what I did, which is once I learned about it, I then just made the list.

And once you start to make a list like I said, you'll get an understanding of who isn't currently a client, who would like to make a client, but also, who is your client that perhaps doesn't even make the cut of the top 100 I'm going to leave it there for today.

That is our episode. Thank you so much for listening. And I will speak to you soon.