Carla Cross, CRB, MA, International Speaker

Are you fustrated because buyers won’t buy and sellers won’t price right? Here are the answers. We agent types like to talk. In fact, many of us became agents because people told us that, since we’re good talkers, we’d make great salespeople! That’s an old idea today. Why? Because consumers, are over-whelmed with sales talk. We don’t just trust anyone because they have a good ‘sales spiel’.

Buyers and Sellers Stall on Decisions

At this moment, I’m in Albuquerque to do my presentation for this emerging market, “From Lambs to Lions: Take Charge of Your Business in Challenging Times”. As part of my regular pre-conference survey, I found that agents are having trouble getting buyers to make a decision—and sellers to list their properties are a marketable price. What’s behind this indecision? Low confidence in the economy—and lack of trust in the agent. So, how do we create high trust in a market that is so unpredictable that no one, in any business (or personal life), has a crystal ball on the future?

Stop Talking and Start Showing

A few months ago, I came across a brilliant article in our local Seattle paper describing how doctors in a prestigious medical center here have just adopted operation room checklists. This simple measure lowered infections dramatically. Now, it seems simplistic, doesn’t it, that highly trained doctors and nurses need checklists for things such as ‘wash your hands’? But, we all get busy. We get stressed. Having checklists reduces stress and increases confidence. (Wouldn’t you feel better if you were going into the operating room, and saw that checklist posted on the wall?)

What This Means to You

The idea for professional checklists comes from the book The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. If doctors and nurses can increase their effectiveness with checklists, I’ll bet we can, too—and dramatically increase our clients’ trust in us.

Listing properties. If you’re finding it increasingly difficult to list properties at the right price, it may be because you’re working too hard  trying to talk the seller into it, and are not working hard enough to show a seller into it. Sellers, like all of us, believe what they see, not what they hear.

Go visual. Instead of trying to tell a seller what you know to be true, back up your statements with statistics, graphs, facts, and checklists.. You do this in your market analysis. But, most agents don’t do this with the rest of their marketing plans. Start now gathering information to back up your chosen marketing strategies.

For example, if you’ve found, through your experience, that open houses do not sell that particular home, start keeping statistics of your open house visitors, their needs, and what happened to them during their buying cycle. You want to provide sellers the information they need to make good decisions, and to support your marketing plan.

The truism behind show, not tell: We believe what we see, not what we hear.

Carla Cross, CRB, MA, is a former master-level CRB instructor, popular international speaker, National Realtor Educator of the Year, and author of 6 books and 20 audio programs. She specializes in ‘people development’—strategies to get highest profitability. Learn more at www.carlacross.com, or contact Carla at 425-392-6914.