Making Your Calls

“If you fail to make your follow up calls, you don’t deserve to make it in real estate” — Suze Cumming

See this picture? This is Sibylle Stipp, Cutco Closing Gift’s rock star salesperson. We snapped this shot of Sibylle making her calls outside of the Certified Negotiation Expert (CNE)® course at UBC last week. She has been a top salesperson at Cutco for over 21 years, and this is why — she never misses a follow up call.

I learned this lesson myself when I was a newbie agent in Toronto in 1986. I was presenting a buyer’s offer to a local power agent at one of the power offices in the central core. Her big hair and impeccable style oozed of confidence, success, and money. Intimidating? You bet!

While I waited to present the offer to the sellers, the agent shuffled me into a small closing room. As she turned to leave, she said, “There’s a phone in here — you can make your calls”. Remember, this was in the days before cell phones.

She closed the door and there I was: alone, staring at the phone, and wondering what the heck she meant. I was there to sell a house, not make phone calls – right?

I sat in the office for a few minutes, staring at the phone. The minutes seemed to stretch into hours, and I contemplated her comment. “You can make your calls,” she’d said. So what, like, call my friends and see what they’re doing tonight?

Eventually, I pulled up my pager (yes, a pager – see below for a picture of this relic) and glanced at the small screen. A couple of agents had left messages for me, so I picked up the phone and called them.

A funny thing happened when I connected with these agents: we spoke. Sure, it wasn’t anything earth shattering, but it got me thinking. Over the next few weeks, it really began to sink in: making calls is what sales is really all about. 

I wanted to be successful, just like the power agent. That one simple comment had made the act of making phone calls seem so basic and so fundamental. I understood what I needed to do to succeed: the power agent had normalized the concept of “making your calls”.

The world has certainly changed a lot since the crazy days of pagers and pay phones. We saw the first generation of car phones back in 1987 (at the mere cost of $4,500), and the first true mobile phones didn’t arrive until the 1990s. Today, we have countless communication options. Both email and text messaging offer an easy and convenient alternative to the telephone, but believe me: every single successful salesperson will tell you that the most effective tool, by far, is still the good old fashioned telephone.

We work hard to make contacts, build relationships, and find people who are willing to speak with us about buying or selling a property. Don’t compromise your hard work by failing to make your phone calls. Establish a follow up system that works for you, but even more importantly, commit to making your phone calls – no matter what.

If you keep coming up with excuses why you can’t or won’t follow up with your phone calls, then it might be time to find something other than sales to occupy your time.

Sibylle Stipp at Cutco Closing Gifts is a generous sponsor of our CNE and MCNE courses. We invite Sibylle and her team to our events because we strongly believe in the product, the system, and the people. When you systemize the repetitive parts of your real estate practice, it frees up time and energy to deliver better service to your clients. We strongly recommend you take a look at what Sibylle and her team have to offer that will benefit you and your clients. Cutco Closing Gifts