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Predicting others' preferences can result in a distinct advantage for a salesperson, especially through creating choice sets based on clients' implicit and explicit wants and needs. Oftentimes, these predictions must be made with almost no information about the client's preferences, so the salesperson may have to rely on previously observed behaviors.

Have you ever felt insecure in your career? Have you ever doubted your ability to fulfill your job duties? If so, you are certainly not the only one in your field experiencing these emotions. While most are unwilling to admit their insecurity or discuss their self-doubt with their peers, insecurity is common among sales professionals.

In his book, Fearless Public Speaking, Patrick King explains exactly what it takes for you to confidently prepare for a talk or presentation and command the stage once you're there.

Throughout our daily lives, we have many options. We can change our jobs, our bosses, our cities, and try endless news sales methods. However, unless we undergo personal transformation ourselves, external changes will not propel us where we want to go or help us become who we need to be.

The art of being a successful real estate agent largely depends on the need to interact socially. How you interact with your own clients indeed effects their opinion of the services you provide and ultimately shape their opinions about you or your company.

Delivering an effective sales presentation to a prospective real estate client will impact attaining your desired outcome for most client interactions.

In every field of study, there are moments when looking back helps us better understand where we are now and the path forward. In an effort to uncover key takeaways for salespeople, we reviewed the lessons gleaned from the past 35 years of sales research.

A basic objective to any selling engagement should be the buyer’s success, however that may be defined by the buyer.

Forgiving a transgressor plays a monumental role in team or group dynamics. At a team level, forgiveness can impact the cohesiveness of the team or collective action.

During the housing crisis, many homeowners continued to ask unreasonably high prices for their homes. This reluctance to lower asking prices created an excess supply of more than 6 million homes.

The modern real estate agent's business relationships today transcend obvious interactions with customers and now also include the internal business team and external business partners. The successful agent must skillfully manage these three relationships to complete the transaction.

In their new book, Sales Growth, authors Baumgartner, Hatami, and Valdivieso lead the reader through a series of strategies designed to help sales executives and their organizations continue to grow in a continuously changing world.

Salespeople will be more successful when they understand that the point of selling isn't selling. A salesperson's job is to help his or her customer make a better buying decision.

Boasting by real estate agents can produce negative and positive reactions from their clients. However, boasting combined with a strategy to develop trust can be advantageous to a real estate agent.

Decision making is all too often an aversive experience. In fact, work in cognitive neuroscience shows that decision making is often interpreted in similar ways as actual pain.

Your partner just walked in and you can tell from her facial expression that something is weighing heavy on her mind. You ask what's wrong, and right as she begins to tell you, your phone rings.

Many people are driven to perform and succeed, especially when that drive comes from competition to outperform others. Competition and personal performance can be beneficial traits to people in performance-driven professions. But, how do people alter their drive to compete when they become members of a team?

Professional services sales encounters are a two-way street between the client and the service provider. Such encounters require input from both parties to mutually find the best fitting professional service for the client.

Do you know that what people say about you on the Internet impacts your business? Having a strong online presence is becoming increasingly important. So, how do you accomplish that?

In his book So, You're New to Sales, Bryan Flanagan lays out every detail, step-by-step, that is necessary for the novice to become a professional agent.

In the book, A Beautiful Constraint, the authors, Adam Morgan and Mark Barden, take us through a series of real-world examples that show how constraints can positively impact a project and, in turn, help develop successful sustainable solutions.

You have probably experienced situations where buyers, homes, or entire neighborhoods have been stigmatized. The emotional reactions created by stigmas can prevent your buyers from making smart decisions and can limit your sales opportunities.

The buying center is comprised of various individual influences that shape the buyer’s purchase decision. Since a successful selling process is about enabling the buyer to make a quality purchase decision, understanding how to productively manage the buying center’s influences and efficiently guide the decision-making process can be critical to the final buy or no-buy outcome.

Salespeople with higher levels of emotional intelligence (EI) are better salespeople, right? After investing a great deal in the training of EI, firms are starting to wonder if those investments are well spent.

Salespeople’s roles are far from failure-proof. In fact, approximately 50% of salespeople fail to reach their annual sales targets.

It’s no secret that a positive outlook can have dramatic impacts on a person’s day-to-day activities. In fact, according to the Mayo Clinic, positive thinking can result in increased life span, lower rates of depression, and better psychological and physical well-being.

Productivity is a wonderful business buzzword, but what real-life impact does it have? For Charles Duhigg, this question can be answered with three simple words: Smarter, Faster, Better.

Author and blogger Chris Bailey claims that productivity is not about how much you do. Instead, productivity is all about how much you accomplish.

For sales professionals in real estate and other industries, life in the digital world presents numerous challenges. Since mobile devices are the norm, work extends far outside the boundaries of the office and expectations are high for immediate response.

It is well documented that real-estate markets fluctuate over time, but since the financial crisis, real-estate markets have begun to fluctuate across geographic regions as well. One leading contributor to this disparity is public policy that seeks to encourage entrepreneurs and business leaders to locate in a state, or a specific community within a state, over another.

Failure can have a profound impact on a salesperson’s effectiveness. Research has shown that failure affects a company’s bottom line through salesperson performance and turnover.

Customers can pose challenging questions, for which salespeople (despite their best intentions) may not know the answer. We define obfuscation as a providing a response that dodges the actual question and provides a pseudo-answer with irrelevant, tangential or vague information. Obfuscation could buy the salesperson some time, and could potentially limit damage to perceptions of expertise and credibility.

Every relationship has moments that define the expectations and feelings of the individuals in that relationship. Business relationships are no different. Specific events act as fundamental building blocks of those business relationships and are essential in shaping the relationship development.

In his book You Don’t Have to Be a Shark, Shark Tank’s “nice shark” Robert Herjavec seeks to provide techniques for salespeople to sell themselves effectively, leveraging their greatest asset (themselves) in their daily life.

In Own Your Day, author and sales coach Keith Rosen examines how sales leaders can put a dent in the stress and exhaustion. Rosen outlines strategies on how to refocus, minimize distractions, properly manage the precious little time we all have and create an ideal life.

One of the most important issues associated with building a high-powered real-estate organization is hiring the right people. According to the 2012 Economic Census there were just over 86,000 offices of real estate agents or brokers in the United States. How can your agency rise to the top of this crowded field?

People develop attitudes and opinions toward many different things, but we know that not all attitudes guide our behaviors.

Common wisdom and psychological research alike advise that it is critically important to make a good first impression: the human mind is adept at drawing inferences about others from even the slimmest amount of information about their actions or appearance, and these impressions can impact decision-making.

For real estate professionals, success is measured by performance – how many homes you sell or how many customers you reach. One thing, however, is certain – the real estate industry is complex and requires strong motivation to remain successful.

Oftentimes, life provides us with challenges, some of which require life-altering decisions just to get back on track and start living life again. A number of circumstances could occur, and there may not be a clear-cut answer to solve these problems. One possible method for recovery is through what best-selling author, Fawn Germer, calls a reset in her newest book.

One thing is certain about the business world of tomorrow: it is changing and the change is happening at a faster rate. When you hear the word change, what emotions come to your mind? If excitement is first on your mind, then you are positioned to handle the business world. If fear or reluctance are your dominant emotions, then this article will help you to prepare for change in the real estate industry.

Standing out from the competition by initially capturing the attention and the imagination of the buyer can oftentimes decide the fate of a sales call. Sometimes referred to as the attention getter or the opener, the theme offered at the beginning of a sales call is vitally important.

There's no doubt that trust impacts an organization's reputation and culture. Building and growing trust in the workplace can lead to great success for an organization, rooted in employee satisfaction and genuine, authentic interactions among supervisors, employees, and customers.

A salesperson’s or agent’s toolkit is a set of tools designed to be used together for the purpose of earning a win-win value-adding purchase decision. During an interactive professional sales exchange, several tools are needed to shape and achieve this desired outcome.

The average worker would agree that breaks, although not necessary, are helpful in making a workday more manageable and possibly enjoyable. Research has shown the benefits of evenings, weekends, and vacations on employee health and performance, but surprisingly little research has investigated breaks during the actual workday itself.

If I were to propose a trade to you, the two statements “My X for your Y” and “Your Y for my X” may appear to be completely equal. However, in a real world negotiation, those two proposals are perceived diffe­rently.

Sales professionals make judgments of their customers' preferences and tastes throughout the selling process – at times without being conscious they are doing so. These judgments enable effective selling.

The old adage tells us that the customer is always right, but does the customer always feel in control?

It is said that people hate to spend money, but that they love to buy. But why? Why do we buy what we buy?

To be a master storyteller, a real estate professional must master the customer conversation. In the book "The Three Value Conversations," authors Peterson, Riesterer, Smith, & Geoffrion focus on how to master the customer conversation.

The concept of developing value for a buyer in order to gain a purchase decision should not be thought of as a static event or a single step in the selling endeavor, but rather a critical and dynamic factor or process...

Complexity threatens organizational competitiveness. Nearly 70% of executives attribute rising costs to excessive complexity, and many firms are aggressively combating complexity...

Decision-making and loss as a result of decision-making may afflict every individual, industry, and profession. However, decision-making and loss are not the most pleasurable experiences. In fact, decisions are often described as painful...

For real estate professionals, the word value comes up in professional conversations everyday. However, value can oftentimes be very narrowly defined from the firm’s perspective, prompting the agent to miss opportunities to connect the broad definition of value to the real estate purchase experience...

Recent academic research shows that two types of salesperson or agent behaviors play important roles in creating successful sales organizations. The question motivating our research is: what can the people who lead sales groups do to further encourage these behaviors?

Our decision-making processes utilize two systems in our minds that function very differently, yet work together to help us analyze situations and draw conclusions. Dr. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow explores the interaction between the automatic system and the conscious system...

For most people, sales agility is a new term. Top sellers are agile learners who know what it takes to dive into a new situation and figure it out quickly...

We make connections every day, in person, over the phone or email, through Linkedin, and even via Snapchat. Every opportunity we have to meet people is another connection to a new prospective client.

Is there a connection between neuroscience and selling real estate? By exploring key functions of the brain's decision-making processes, Simon Hazeldine has discovered a way for sales professionals to increase the likelihood of closing a sale.

Sellers want to find a good home for their most cherished possessions and may be willing to sacrifice personal profit to ensure that this objective is met. Their willingness to accept an offer can depend on whether they agree or disagree with how the buyer plans to use the product.

Michael L. Mallin, PhD Sales managers have a vested interest in hiring, developing, and retaining sales professionals who have a propensity to be proactive since research shows proactive behaviors among salespeople as a key factor in generating higher levels of sales performance.

Communication, the effective conveying of information, is a critically important buyer-seller activity to achieve successful interpersonal sales performance.

Predicting consumer behavior is crucial to success in any business, including real estate. Our research identifies that a key way to predict consumer behavior is through a consumer's level of what is called lay rationalism, which refers to the weight a consumer gives to feelings versus reason in the decision-making process.

Companies spend over $3,300 per hire on recruiting and the cost of not recruiting well results in poor performance, dissatisfied employees and high turnover. Little research has addressed sales force recruiting at this stage of career and the motivations of a millennial salesforce in their job searches.

As much as we might like to think that we are wildly different than everybody else, our DNA is actually 99.9% the same as everyone else’s. We’re 99.9% average. As odd as it may seem, our individuality and personality only makes up .1% of us.

When entering the work force, new employees face a learning curve associated with their new positions. Real estate agents face the task of establishing themselves as a credible assets in the community and understanding the dynamics of working with clients.

Have you ever imagined yourself in an exotic vacation location, experiencing all the benefits of a luxury resort? Real estate agents use strategies while persuading buyers to invest in a house. The implicit belief behind these sales strategies is that consumption-related self-imagery is a powerful persuasion tactic.

The goals in professional selling are to build relationships and to sell value resulting in win-win outcomes. To do so, certain critical skills are required, including: relationship management, effective communication, and value-adding capabilities.

Acknowledgments and thank yous are given every day in nearly all professions, from real estate to acting to retail shopping.  Though such thank yous are common, people rarely put much thought into how various forms of such acknowledgements might be received differently. 

When it comes to the art of selling, there are two sharply opposed views: some view salespeople as individuals who are born with the "right" attributes, who can easily sell different products and move from firm to firm with little difficulty, no matter what is being sold.

How do you convince potential clients that what you’re selling is best?  How do you bridge that gap between real estate salesperson and my real estate agent?  Ron Willingham says it is in how authentic you are with your potential clients.

This article features sales expert Andrea Dixon, Ph.D., executive director of Baylor University’s Center for Professional Selling and the Keller Center for Research in Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business, who advises salespeople to narrow their customer databases and develop “personal touch portfolios,” which rank the best candidates for a salesperson’s most personalized marketing and highest level of attention. “We are limited in bandwidth as individuals,” Dixon says. “You want to target the people who it makes the most sense for that individualized follow-up — those for whom seeing, hearing and feeling from you will evoke a positive personal response.

By treating the commercial real estate buying decision as an investment, these buyers are unlike residential buyers who often make purchase decisions by relying, perhaps unwittingly, on less rational dynamics like emotion.

The salesperson having a dynamic, learning or growth mindset is managing from the perspective of incremental productivity progress and potentially unimaginable opportunities.

Strong communication, good group dynamics, and collaboration are all cohesion goals for which real estate professionals and their team members strive.

Professional selling is a learned intellectual skill where more knowledgeable sales personnel, ceteris paribus, should be expected to be more productive due to their superior client interaction and persuasion skills.

Search engine tools such as Yahoo!, Google, and Bing, as well as international versions of these such as Baidu in China or Yandex in Russia all provide consumers with answers to any of their questions in a matter of milliseconds.

John Tran, MBA Candidate In the Generosity Generation, we can spend our time, energy, effort, and money on people we actually like and trust. In the end, those are the ones who are most valuable to our business.

When a millennial is confronted by someone trying to sell them something, he or she almost immediately becomes closed off.

The effectiveness of salespeople depends on how they interact with customers. Sales organizations recruit and train salespeople so that they can identify and satisfy customer needs in the long-run...

Salespeople constantly seek ways to communicate persuasively. Storytelling is a type of communication that you and I use every day. It is so common you may not even think about it when telling or hearing a story. Stories are such an important part of the fabric of human communications that failing to use them effectively in sales can be a serious handicap...

With the advancement in storage technology and the rise of Internet and social media, more and more information is becoming readily available to both customers and agencies. Today, customers are able to get almost all the information they need to make a purchase decision through websites both of the focal company and their competitors, feedback and ratings of other customers and users, through blogs, online product reviews and social media...

According to the Borrell Associates report, 2013 Real Estate Outlook, real estate advertising was projected to grow by 9.7% to $27.2B, while the online advertising category was projected to grow by 16.9% to reach $15B in spend. These estimates make the real estate industry number one in the online advertising marketplace...

It’s a fairly common experience - that desperate moment when you search the crowd for whoever said your name. We are constantly clued into our names, especially when it’s added to personalized greetings or comments. People use our names as a way of engaging with us and getting our attention...

Research by Saber (2014) highlights the challenges facing residential real estate agencies as additional information becomes available to consumers. Saber outlines strategies for agents to emphasize the value of services they provide to their clients, and the importance of “keeping the agent’s name and good work in the mind of the client” even after the real estate transaction has concluded.

As cognitive beings, we possess a unique ability to recognize and understand non-verbal communication. We have the ability to study and analyze the non-verbal signals of our friends, family and clients, and then use that information to communicate more effectively with each other...

Real estate professionals can and should leverage social-media platforms to humanize their branding efforts and connect with consumers. Utilization of visual storytelling will drive consumer engagement with the brand, encouraging traffic, referrals, and ultimately loyalty and revenues...

Do you check your cell-phone every 6.5 minutes and up to 150 times a day? Do you have 6,234 Facebook friends? Or, spend the majority of your waking hours with your cell-phone on your body?

Are you curious about the likelihood of clients using your real estate services in the future given pervasive '"e-information?" There is definitely a mouse in the house and action is imperative...

Communication skills are the single most important determinant of effectiveness in both sales and sales management. Poor listening behaviors by sales personnel contribute significantly to performance failure...

The real estate industry is fiercely competitive. Since the 1990s it has not only been a competition between individual agents but one between agents and realtor teams...

On April 30, 1943, at the height of World War II, a fisherman stumbled across a corpse floating in the water off the coast of southwestern Spain. The body was that of an adult male, Major William Martin of the Royal Marines...

What makes your work satisfying? Does what drives you to succeed ultimately lead you to be satisfied with your job? Compared to most other things, which of these best describe what motivates you to reach your goals?

Bridging current academic research and the real estate practitioner audience, the Keller Center Research Report plays uniquely in the knowledge marketplace. Our Keller Center team identifies cutting-edge rigorous research with interesting implications for the real estate market...

Do you have a balanced work and family life? For many, this question is difficult to answer because the definition of “balance” varies. Regardless of the definition, it is clear that the demands of work can impact an individual’s...

Are extraverts are the best candidates for sales positions? Despite the proliferation of this assumption in numerous sales organizations, studies have shown that there is a weak and inconsistent relationship between extraversion and sales performance. In fact, recent studies indicate that...

Efficiency, process improvement, and value creation are not just buzzwords in today’s business world; they have become the foundation for real, sustainable competitive advantage. However, the path to achieving or improving upon these fundamental concepts is not always clear...

Internet-based applications are very commonplace within business and personal contexts. Online banking, chat-based customer service, and shopping are just some of the e-functions that permeate our day-to-day lives. Some consumers, though, show great resistance...

This article is written to help “unmask” the qualities of high-performing salespeople in the context of task and time management preferences to help managers and agents achieve the greatest business outcomes. Understanding an agent’s task and time preferences can help increase...

When looking to add new agents to your agency, finding individuals who can add value immediately is important. Additionally, finding the right person who will fit your job and your agency will increase the probability of...