Introduction/Instructions Letter

This is the introduction you will receive with the Plans. We've included it here to give you some additional insight into the quality and comprehensiveness of them.

Even if you don't buy "Trans-Plans" - feel free to use this as a means to better understand how to build and use your own.

These plans are a compilation of “Activities” put together from many sources. The first is my own business, when I was an active agent. In my last year I did 43 transactions with a part-time assistant. Some agents did more, many did less, but it was certainly enough to be able to construct, implement, and refine these core listing and transaction management “plans”. My plans were then expanded when I automated an operation for an agent that did 140 transactions that year.

The plans continued to improve with input from the many agents and teams in varied markets around the country with whom I’ve worked over the years, who were gracious enough to share the results of our 'Activity Plan Building' Tech-Speed sessions with me. The end result of these dozens of sessions is 'Trans-Plans', a combination of the ever expanding Plans I brought with me; and the activities unique to their market, which were added to what I had.

Creating the following Plans & Letters would take the average agent a MINIMUM of 200 hours. That’s assuming you can write a good letter J The following preparation will only take about an hour or two. Just a little better J

Please understand that these plans had to be created in Top Producer 6i, and transferred to 7i. That being the case, there were some limitations that could not be overcome. Hence some of the following preparation.

Getting Ready to Use Trans-Plans:

You MUST complete steps 1 & 2 before launching any plans.

Step 1)

You need to open each email for these plans, and key in a ‘Subject’ for that email. You may also want to consider removing all the merge fields at the top of each email, other than the “Contact.letter_salutation” field. While this may at first look like a major task, it really should only take 15 or 20 minutes. Remember – you only need to add subjects to the ones that you will use – either “–Agent”, or “– Team”, but not both. There are 26 of them.

Step 2)

Now go to “Setup”, “Plans Setup” start with the plans in the “Listing Plans” tab, and then move on to the “Closing Plans” tab. Just go down the list of activities in each plan, and delete the ones that are not relevant to you. As you're going down the list, while the majority of the things you do will be on the list, you will undoubtedly see that there are some things that you do, that are not. Add the ones that come to mind now, and then continue to improve them as you use them.

Now you’re ready to use the plans, but there are still some things you NEED to know. Please read on.

Letters and Emails in the Plans:

Notice that there are two sets of plans. One set uses letters that are worded as coming from a single agent, and the other set uses letters that are from a team.

The two types of letters/Plans are denoted by “- Agent”, or “-Team” at the end of each one. The emails used in the plans are the same as the letters, but are located under the “email messages” tab. There are 26 of them.

Reading through all the letters in one sitting, and editing them to your liking is one way to go about it. That makes it seem like a big chore though, and you may put it off. What may be better is to edit them one at a time, as they come up on your calendar. When one comes due, go in and edit it before you mail it. Once edited, you may want to remove the “- Agent” or “- Team”, so you know you already edited that one.

Go to the Mail tab, then Communication library, Letters tab/email messages tab, from the “List of Categories” drop down window, select “Trans-Plans”.

When you launch a plan, if you indicate that you are representing the buyer, then the letters or emails will be addressed to the buyer. Likewise for when you choose the seller. If you have chosen “buyer and seller”, then the letters and emails will be addressed to both. After you launch a plan, you must open the letter/email activities, and click on “Contact” to assign that letter or email to the correct party. The bulk of them will already be correct, but in other cases they will not. For example – a Thank You letter to a referring agent, would have to be changed from the seller, to the referring agent.

Automatic emails:

I DO NOT recommend setting the emails to go out automatically. Listings and Sales transactions are not lead generation or follow-up. They are very time sensitive, and therefore each letter or email should be weighed on the day it is due out, as to whether or not it SHOULD go out.

Contingency Activities

How many days do you typically allow for the home inspection and other contingencies? They're not always the same, which is problematic for standardized activity plans in any Transaction Management scenario. There are 2 ways to deal with it here. You can change the number of days for the contingencies in this plan, to the number of days most common in your transactions. Then, after launching the plan, you can change the contingency activities to the correct number of days, one by one, if they differ from what is in the plan. The other way to deal with it is to use the 'Copy Plan' button to copy this plan, and modify the plan to use a different number of days for the contingencies. Simply name the new plan accordingly. In other words, this plan could be the standard, and the other one could be 'My seller closing-12' - meaning it has 12 day contingencies in it. Note that some seller agents prefer to let the contingency deadline go by if there is no word from the buyer's agent, to give the sellers a negotiating advantage. Some prefer to give the buyers notice that this is the last day, to avoid disagreements, which can mean time and potential trouble. The "Collaborative" style of negotiating, most cited as the best style, would favor the latter. Plan your number of days accordingly.

Misc.

If there is an activity that you do not do, but which you plan to eventually implement, consider leaving it in, so that when it keeps coming up on your calendar, it reminds you that you want to implement it.

Agents in different states have vastly different responsibilities depending upon whether or not they have the buyer or the seller; whether or not they use title companies; always use attorneys on both sides, or have a conveyancer available to them. Also, the closing plans always assume you check on everyone else’s progress, not leaving it up to chance that they are doing the things for which they are responsible. If you don’t want to do that, delete those activities from the plan.

Print out the plans, and use them in your presentations to the buyers and sellers.

All activities are assigned to ‘Current logged on user’, as no other assumption can be made. If you have an assistant, you must re-assign the appropriate activities to the assistant.

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The Plans/Letters are available separately for OTHER programs too!

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