Does your team often wonder why all your efforts aren’t showing the results you expected? You door-knock, prospect, hold open houses, follow-up with leads and even remember your clients’ birthdays, and yet, your sales are still flat.
If this sounds familiar, you may have some silent sales holdbacks that are impacting your bottom line. Here’s a quick checklist of business activities that may be sabotaging your profitability.
1. Failure to hear what the prospect really wants. Stop talking and start listening. Learn how to ask the right questions by performing a value-based needs analysis instead of a simple discovery session. When the client or customer feels that you understand their wants and needs, you are on your way to building trust.
2. Not providing options or solutions. If you’re begging for business, but not providing solutions or unknown options, you’ll never get to “yes.” To thrive in real estate today, agents must develop hyper-local market knowledge, become a trusted advisor and a solutions provider. Doing this will allow you to answer your clients’ questions and concerns with confidence.
3. A what’s-in-it-for-me service attitude. Switch from being transactional to informative when you offer information about housing. Provide the most up-to-date information that will help your prospects and clients make an informed decision for their needs. They may not be aware of the higher value of their home or options to use that equity to their best advantage, so it is a perfect opportunity for you to be their resource. People will clamor to work with you when they feel that you have their best interests at heart.
4. Failure to build engagement. Do you assault your prospects with quick, generic questions and slick answers in an effort to appear knowledgeable? If you do, you may drive them away. They may not be ready to buy or sell, but using a proven, systematic engagement process is the way to keep the connection. Staying consistent and providing specialized and relevant information will help you maintain the connection and make more sales.
5. Unwilling to stand apart from the competition. If you look, sound, act and deliver the same way everyone else does, you’re just another option…and probably not the agent who gets selected. Developing your specific value proposition and how you market, engage, deliver and deploy that value proposition is key to establishing yourself as a leader. When you can stand apart from the crowd and become the go-to real estate professional in your area, your sales will skyrocket.
Your mindset is the single most powerful source—or barrier—to getting more sales. Eliminate these costly mindsets that create sales holdbacks; they’re costing you more sales than you realize.
Terri Murphy is an author, TED Talk speaker and master coach with Workman Success Systems. She is the author of five books and the founder of the Women’s Wisdom Network. Contact her at Terri@TerriMurphy.com.
