Deliberate Conversations

I had some great feedback from last week’s post – No More Sales Calls. Seems many of you are interested in learning more about how to have conversations that are natural and not salesy and help you to find people needing to buy and sell real estate.

This is an important skill to develop. It is sales mastery.

I call them Deliberate Conversations © and the new program I am developing called Move More People © aims to help sales professionals gain these skills. Interestingly, it’s not a simple process of say this and do that. It’s a mix of mindset, expertise, experience, emotional and social intelligence and practical empathy. There is no short cut to mastering these skills.

Scripts are the sales industries attempt at a short cut. Are scripts worth using? As I’ve said before, having conversations using scripts is better than having no conversations and scripts are better than untrained conversations. If you need to start out with a script in front of you it may not be a terrible thing, but ultimately if you want to be masterful at communicating with people and building a remarkable real estate practice you’ll need to develop the far more effective and sustainable skills of Deliberate Conversations ©.

Where do you start? They say awareness is 60% of the solution so let’s start there:

Mindset: Our default mindset is often pretty judgmental and this doesn’t really attract people to us. We have the power to choose a mindset of curiosity which opens up a world of possibility and when exercised with sincerity, will invite people to trust us more and share more of their thoughts with us; these are both very important factors in the sales process

Expertise: To be trusted, people need to not only know you are honest and ethical, they need to know you will do an excellent job. To build trust, you need to be flawless at the process of buying and selling real estate. Learn everything you can and when you don’t know, don’t fake it – find out.

Experience: Ideally, good solid experience in real estate but if you are new, use your experience in other fields or bring in a mentor who is experienced.

Emotional Intelligence: Awareness of and management of our own emotions and their impact on ourselves and others.

Social Intelligence: the ability to get along well with others, and to get them to cooperate with you.

Practical Empathy: The ability to understand what other people think and feel.

The next step is accepting the journey to mastery is significantly an internal journey. If we look to art, music or sports, most of us are aware the difference between being good at something and being a Master at it doesn’t come from improving the mechanics. Once you can play the guitar well, the next step to producing moving music is allowing your heart and soul to communicate the music by getting out of your own head and letting the music flow naturally.