I can remember a sales trainer telling me to sit at the listing presentation until the sellers either signed the listing or physically removed me from the house. Really!

In 1985 when I started in real estate, they taught us a lot of tricks that would coerce and manipulate our prospects into doing things we wanted them to do. Did it work? Sadly, it did much of the time. Information was scarce in those days and it was easy to be perceived as an expert.

Most people would agree that selling has changed. The internet has disrupted the traditional selling process because it has changed the way people behave when they are hiring a realtor or making any buying decisions. They still make the decision on a combination of logic, emotion and trust but how they evaluate these important factors has changed.

They have access to all the information, they will consult many people in their decision making process and they have the confidence to take the lead instead of blindly following the perceived expert. For salespeople to thrive in this new environment, we need new sales skills.

New school sales skills involve demonstrating value and building trust.

It’s the human and cultural context that will win them over rather than the mechanical or systematic process. Using and building your emotional and social intelligence is critical in our evolving world. Here are some examples:

Old School – Make a cold call and see if you could uncover the speakers desire to move in the next 12 months. You’d have a script that was loaded with persuasion tricks that you had perfected. The idea was to keep them on the phone long enough for them to feel that they owed you an appointment if they did have any thoughts of selling their home.

Objective: Get Appointments.

New School: Find opportunities to have a conversation that involves things that the speaker is interested in, one of which would ideally be real estate. You will lead the conversation in a deliberate pendulum between questions, listening and offering insights.

Objective: Build Rapport and trust.

Improving your emotional and social intelligence is a compelling journey. Daniel Goleman, author of the landmark international best seller, Emotional Intelligence,  says the most important factors in obtaining success are self-awareness, self-management and empathy.

These are the human skills essential to high integrity sales.