LISTEN INTENTLY. Professional listening skills leads to happier customers and more referrals.
Last week, I wrote about the importance of maintaining an emotional dialogue with your clients throughout the sales process. Part of this includes what is often coined “selling with integrity”—in a nutshell, listening to your clients and responding authentically to their needs.
Delving into this area a little deeper clearly demonstrates the importance of truly knowing your clients. You need to go beyond what they’re looking for in a property, and understand what is really driving them to make such a significant purchase.
Emotional Connections Require Authentic Interest and Open Awareness
The old sales adage that people buy on emotion is just as true in real estate as it is anywhere else, especially amongst luxury buyers. A primary or second home purchase isn’t about simply securing a place to live or making a solid investment, but means something different to every prospective buyer.
Finding the underlying emotions that are driving your clients’ interest in a new purchase enables you to present properties in a way that satisfies those emotional needs, making your job easier and more rewarding for everyone involved.
Past and current insecurities, concerns about the future, family pressures and social advancement—these can all contribute to a client’s desire to buy.
If you’re not listening properly, you may miss the reasons behind your clients’ wish lists, and you’ll unquestionably miss out on opportunities to connect with them on a personal level. Once that emotional distance enters your relationship, it will remain a key feature of their decision-making and can only prolong and interrupt the sales process.
Again: ask questions, not just about the property your clients want but about their past experiences, current needs and their future plans. Really listen to the answers, with an honest appreciation for their own unique perspective.
With true understanding, your sales efforts will focus on each client’s needs and desires and help them make the best decisions faster, while representing yourself as a professional salesperson.
All too often, emotional selling is presented as a package of tricks meant to goad the unwilling and/or unwitting into making a purchase.
Ethics aside, this shallow approach works less frequently and won’t earn you referrals.
Authentic emotional selling built on a foundation of integrity will keep clients loyal and singing your praises precisely because it is not manipulative, but rather creates genuine good feelings and emotional satisfaction during and following a purchase.
That’s the kind of return your buyers are most interested in, and those are the commissions you ought to be chasing. A property well sold will continue paying dividends for years.
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Clearview Elite creates emotion and professionalism for high-end real estate developments by replacing PDF brochures with visually elegant and informative web Presentations. Learn more here.
About Eric: Real Estate Sales & Marketing veteran. Founder of Clearview Elite and driven to make life easier for real estate salespeople. He’s a very lucky husband and Dad, slightly above average golfer, and a food and wine fan. Lives in Boise, Idaho with wife Julie and kids Nicholas and Grace.
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