Creating Dissatisfaction

How do you sell a home to someone when there is absolutely nothing wrong with the home and the situation they’re in right now?  You don’t, actually.  You cannot sell a home to people who have no dissatisfaction in their current situation.  We call those people “non-buyers”, and they don’t even make it out to the sales offices.  People aren’t in your office because they have nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon.  Talking to salespeople for kicks is not exactly high on the list of non-motivated customers.

But every real prospect has some sense of dissatisfaction in their current home or situation, even if they don’t yet realize that! And that’s the key.  The great salespeople will help a prospect to clarify that dissatisfaction.  They will help the customer to understand how their life can be improved.  (If life improvement is a possibility, it must mean that a dissatisfaction lies waiting to be found.)

So how do we help the prospect identify a dissatisfaction?  There are a number of ways to do this, but perhaps the most effective method is to show them something spectacular that they don’t have now.  Surely you’ve fallen in love with a kitchen (or a pair of shoes, or a golf club) and before you saw that kitchen there was no dissatisfaction with what you had.  The emotional pull of what you saw created a dissatisfaction with what you had.

Don’t take a prospect at face value when they tell you they’re “just looking”, and they have no intention of purchasing.  Give them a chance to create an emotional attachment to your product, and then see if that attachment doesn’t all create a dissatisfaction in their current situation!