This week I received the following email, which reminded me of how good I’ve become at failing:
Subject: TAKE ME OFF YOUR MAILING LIST!!
Body: PLEASE stop mailing ANDY'S PATCH letters to me. I WANT TO BE REMOVED FROM ALL YOUR MAILINGS AND MARKETING LISTS IMMEDIATELY.
“Please, tell me how you really feel about my newsletter, and this time don’t hold back,” I could have replied but didn’t. Ironically in order to send the email she went through my website and at the same time signed up to get on my electronic mailing list. She also provided her phone number, which was quite unnecessary and just plain weird. Needless to say, I won’t be calling her. While I embrace my failures, of which there are many, I am not a glutton for punishment so I removed her from my physical and electronic mailing lists and wished her a nice day.
As a younger Realtor this kind of rejection made me second guess my newsletter approach. Let’s face it, it’s hard being rejected and taking criticism. But failure is human and if you ask any successful person how they got where they are they’ll tell you it’s because they were willing to fail and learn from those failures. In the scheme of things today’s email was a very minor failure, and in fact can be spun as a success. After all, I can now save money stamps. I’ve been mailing her for over ten years, so she’s gotten at least 70 mailings from me. I wonder if she might not have been so liberal with the all caps if she hadn’t waited so long to contact me?
Email and newsletter failures are easy. The toughest failures are when another Realtor puts a ‘For Sale’ sign on your street. It’s even worse when it’s RIGHT, NEXT DOOR. It has happened to me earlier in my real estate career. I vividly recall the indignity of looking at the other Realtor’s sign every time I opened my front door for the six weeks the house was on the market. Not one time did I look at that sign and it didn’t feel like a punch to my gut. Those blows were especially difficult to take in the first few weeks. But you know what, after a while the blows didn’t hurt so badly. Maybe not because they became softer, but my gut hardened. My resolve to do better and overcome my greatest of failures strengthened. The lesson was learned and in 2020 when another next door neighbor was selling I was able to represent him in the transaction.
Let’s face it, if you are going to get good at anything you must be willing to fail. You must fail, especially in the beginning as you learn and grow. Seventeen years of real estate sales and I’m still failing. The truth is the more I fail, the better I do. It means I’m taking more shots and I’m putting myself out there to win and lose. To me a failure is a reminder that I’m that much closer to another success, I learned all that and more from my first broker. It means I’m working and trying. So, if you’d like to not receive my newsletter please feel free to let me know. Just don’t wait a decade until you can’t contain the ‘caps lock’ key and I’ve wasted all that postage.