Working with vendors to accept an offer can be challenging at times.
Think of it like a pain-pleasure principle.
As humans, we have a need to avoid pain and gain pleasure.
This pain, and pleasure, can be real or imagined.
It sounds so basic to say it, but if someone does not sell their property with you, they associate more pain to not selling.
Conversely, they also associate more pleasure with keeping the property and not selling it, as opposed to selling it with the current offer and moving forward.
We all have different definitions on what is ultimate pain and pleasure.
As agents you need to tap into your influential communication skills to create an association for your clients that means selling equals pleasure.
Not selling means pain.
I know this is basic, but sometimes you get so caught up in what to say, and how to say it, that you miss the target and lose sight of the real goal.
Sales is leadership.
Not many agents put a lot of thought into the words they use when speaking with vendors and presenting offers.
They don’t seem to understand that words have the power to make or break a sale at any stage.
You could have vendors excited about an offer and ready to go ahead and say one wrong word.
The sale can come to a screeching halt and you aren’t even sure why.
The vendor stalls.
They back-pedal.
They want to think it over.
What happened?
I see it happen all the time.
You have to workout why this offer is an advantage for the vendor to accept, rather than for your own self-interest (commission).
Sometimes our dialogue can create negative emotions.
You create doubt in the benefits your vendor will gain from the sale.
They get scared and create a quick defence barrier to keep the sale from going any further.
You see, words create pictures in our minds.
Those pictures cause us to have certain emotions — either negative or positive.
Your goal is to create only positive mental pictures in your vendor’s mind and, therefore, positive emotions.
Negative mental pictures create fear or cause people to raise their defence barriers against whatever you’re offering.
Be careful of being too aggressive, or pushing too hard on an offer, as this can cause people to lose interest in you and before you know it they’re thinking about using another agent.
The key to closing every opportunity is to eliminate fear in the minds of your vendors.
It works like this:
Words create pictures that create emotions.
People make decisions emotionally.
Then, they defend their decisions with logic.
So, it’s critical to closing that you understand how to eliminate negative emotions and create positive ones.
Vendor empathy is the fastest way to winning more sales!
They need a gap from where they are to where they want to be, and need to feed into the consequences of doing nothing.
It’s the cost of inaction.
We are selling consequences.
Those consequences must become real in the mind of the prospect and the best way to do that is with a properly placed question, asked with empathy and leadership.
Questions to ask to highlight the consequence of a vendor staying where they are:
- How will you feel if you don’t get what you want?
- How will you feel If you make the wrong decision?
- What will happen if you don’t do anything?
- Have you thought about the potential consequences of receiving lower offers?
- Have you thought about what will happen if you see more direct competition for your home and the impact on your final price?
- What will you do if you do nothing, and nothing has changed in 1 years’ time… How will you feel about that?
Big picture:
If you DON’T ask consequence questions, you will lose 30 per cent of your sales.
Also, if you ask them in a wrong way, you can easily break rapport and lose the sale as well.
The power of consequence questions comes from the context you build up in the discovery, when you follow a proven process of asking the right questions and communicating in the right way with your clients.
It’s all about how it lands on the vendor.
