Sales Tips for New Sales People: Get Your Buyers Off the Fence
Say you have a big meeting at work and decide to skip lunch one day. You might feel a bit hungry, but it isn’t a pressing matter, and you’re able to hold off until dinner with no sweat.
Imagine, though, that you have gone 24 hours without food. The urgency to eat becomes stronger, and instead of reaching for your usual healthy meal, you pull into a drive-through and get the greasiest burger they sell.
Probably not the best option, but hey—you were hungry.
Now, imagine yourself out in the wilderness. You haven’t eaten in four days. You’re lightheaded, irritable, sluggish, and your stomach feels like it’s eating itself. You see a cicada latched onto a tree, and suddenly something you never thought you would eat looks incredibly scrumptious. You are ravished, so you pick it off and eat it because, at this point, you’ll do anything to quell the ache in your empty stomach.
Your own hunger is a motivator for change in this situation, and you’ll do anything to make that change happen. Even things you may not have considered before.
That’s dissatisfaction.
I once had a woman walk into the men’s room at the concert’s intermission and say, “Sorry fellas, the line to the women’s room is too long, and I just can’t wait.”
Again, dissatisfaction.
In the decision to move, there is no more powerful factor than dissatisfaction.
But wait—it gets better because not only does dissatisfaction prove to be a powerful motivator, but dissatisfaction is also the driving force behind urgency. Just like the urgency experienced by the person who hasn’t eaten in days or the woman who used the men’s room because the line to the ladies’ room was too long, clients who are dissatisfied with their home have that same emotional thought pattern. They need to move, and they needed it to happen yesterday. If you can answer the call of their urgency, you will be their hero.
In my work with real estate companies around the world, I am constantly hit with the same question: “How come we can’t get these buyers off the fence?”
That’s a good question, but I have a better one: “What got them on the fence in the first place?”
Figure out what got them on the fence, and you’ll figure out how to get them off the fence.
If you’ve ever wondered what makes customers get off the fence, start with their dissatisfaction. Learn more about understanding dissatisfaction in my book The 4:2 Formula® Getting Buyers Off the Fence and Into a Home.
If you want to go even deeper with understanding dissatisfaction, sign up for our next 4:2 Formula® Academy and/or learn alongside your fellow real estate sales pros in Sales365.
