News

The sales environment is rapidly changing. The real estate sales environment is also becoming more complex and competitive, and is being driven by a rising number of...

Long-term customer relationships are the building blocks of a firm's success. Practitioners and researchers have long recognized the positive effects of close customer ...

Imagine the 60-foot-long boat of the U.S. women's national rowing team cutting across a crystal-clear lake in a heated 2,000-meter race. As the team synchronously rows their ...

In his book 100MPH Marketing for Real Estate, author and real estate veteran, Mitch Ribak, details the formula for Internet marketing success in a no-frills approach that ...

Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business has published its latest quarterly Keller Center Research Report, an online source of academic articles focused on residential real estate research and summaries of scholarly journal articles and books relevant for real estate sales agents. The report includes topics such as seller financing, social media, and customer relationships and sales performance through moral judgment...

To be successful in today's challenging economic conditions creates significant pressure on salespeople's ethical behavior. Moral judgment, a precursor to ethical behavior ...

In many service provider-customer or seller-buyer contexts, it has been assumed that the service provider or seller must exhibit a positive attitude towards customers, and may...

Many sales organizations focus on measuring or tracking outputs or results with less emphasis on inputs, which is akin to telling a football team to stop the opponent from scoring without working on essential defensive skills such as tackling and pass coverage.

Pinterest has all the elements for a right brain, visual thinker. Images, pin boards, minimal word content and high quality visuals that makes staying on the site feel like you are ...

With banks applying stricter guidelines to conventional real estate mortgages, many buyers have found it difficult to qualify for home loans. It is estimated that forty percent ...

Today's customers are savvier than ever before, largely thanks to growing accessibility to information through technology. Selling to these customers has become a challenging ...

The Greek philosopher Socrates identified happiness as the ultimate goal of all human activity - everything we do is with this end in mind. And, because happiness is the ...

In real estate, as well as other sales-related jobs, creating strong partnerships between buyers and sellers is one of the keys to business success. Understanding the types ...

Buying a house is a complex and involving process. The process is much more significant than just deciding on a location, a space, and a set of features. The home purchase ...

Both buyers and sellers desire win-win outcomes; however, most salespeople have a natural bent toward win-lose thinking. Our culture has too often indoctrinated ...

Loyal staff, engaged clients, impressive brand recognition; these are adjectives that managers and leaders hope to ascribe to their business. In his book ...

Rachel Watson, JD, MBA Candidate Due to the recent downturn in the economy, the use of short sales has risen in the real estate market. A short sale occurs when a property is sold and the lender...

We are inviting you to participate in a study concerning how real estate professionals help home buyers navigate the process of buying homes.

Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business has published its quarterly Keller Center Research Report, an online compendium of academic articles focused on residential real estate research and summaries of scholarly journal articles and books relevant to real estate sales agents. The report takes a look at distinct marketing approaches to...

Given the highly competitive market in which real estate agents work, striving to attract and retain valued customers is important. Understanding what makes a client want to ...

When it comes to utilizing professional services, consumers have a choice: perform the service for themselves or outsource the job to a service professional. The purpose of ...

What is the right approach method for the professional salesperson to lead a buyer-seller interaction and achieve effective, efficient and consistent sales results? The pragmatist ...

As a culture, we encourage young people to sample and engage in a variety of activities. The goal is, in essence, to understand one's gifts and talents, thereby finding those...

By now, most consumers are familiar with social media. It is easy to track how many Facebook friends, Twitter followers and LinkedIn connections exist on an individual ...

Whether a consumer knows it or not, using a search engine to browse content on the Internet automatically engages him with the world of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) ...

Over the past 50 years, groups of people in the United States have been classified into generational categories to better understand how age groupings tend to behave ...

Joe is a highly successful broker in northern Virginia. Until a month ago, his life seemed ideal. He enjoyed a professional reputation for integrity and insight. Scores of agents ...

Real estate agents must undertake a variety of tasks to establish, sustain and develop a clientele base. Acknowledging the complexity of their job, most agents recognize the ...

Charles Fifield, MBA Whether it is the first or a subsequent meeting, salespeople must have a clear understanding of their call objectives and how they plan to achieve their desired ...

Leslie K. John, PhD Why does a plane ride create such an intimate setting, often inspiring strangers to exchange life stories and share intimate personal information without regard for privacy ...

Any salesperson will tell you that the ideal method for generating new clients is through word-of-mouth and referrals. No advertising or cold calling is necessary with this strategy ...

The Baby Boom Generation, born between 1946 and 1964, has played a dominant role in the residential real estate market over the past four decades. As this generation enters ...

How have you set yourself apart from other agents in your market? Consumers have many options to consider when selecting a real estate agent. Experience level, services offered ...

When a salesperson commences a face-to-face sales interaction, certain call priorities must be the central focus of the early interpersonal exchange. First, the salesperson ...

In competitive selling environments, brand identity is an important differentiator for both the sales professional and the consumer. For service industries such as real estate ...

In order to overcome the challenging housing crisis, real estate professionals have had to become more innovative in the way they reach prospective customers. One of ...

Would you like to receive more referrals? In his 2010 book The Lunch of a Lifetime, the world's most referred real estate agent, Michael Maher, reveals his secrets to ...

Customers have more power in the buyer/seller relationship than most people think. The relationship is dependent on how a customer relates and reacts to the salesperson ...

In today's fast-paced, competitive marketplace, effective information management is arguably the most powerful non-employee lever to trigger sales productivity and ...

With a constantly changing market and a new generation of home buyers on the rise, value-based service quality will play an important role in customer satisfaction. Service ...

Real estate professionals must leverage social media but engaging with potential customers via the right social media can be complicated. In addition, making sense of ...

To increase sales productivity, salespersons' interacting with the right prospects is an essential core competency to success. The inability or unwillingness to effectively...

Runners to the starting blocks... Take your mark... Wait for the starter's pistol. A sprinter knows the drill. S/he begins a race so many times in ...

Assessing the developmental needs of a sales organization normally involves measuring behaviors against a set of competencies or performance metrics, in order to pinpoint ...

One of the leading business speakers in the nation and bestselling author, Patrick Henry Hansen, draws insightful conclusions in his novel Sales-Side Negotiation, Negotiation ...

Salespeople have myriad experts within the organization whom they can recruit to create a successful customer engagement. However, in companies in which experts are ...

We all know someone who has enjoyed extraordinary personal or professional success in their life: a classmate from high-school who has become a corporate executive, a ...

A two-sided study of emotional intelligence with agents and clients reveals that only 26% of the pairs operate on the same "emotional wavelength" and 46% of agent-client ...

The sales function has probably the greatest single operating impact on the financial results of business. What business needs is a salesforce driven by productivity ...

In most service businesses customers' perceptions of a corporate brand depend highly on the behavior of frontline staff. Service firms face the challenge of having employees ...

Sales force retention is a critical objective facing managers. The costs of high turnover rates can be substantial and include lost sales, abandoned sales territories and costs ...

Culture influences many aspects of an organization. Unlike the tangible outcome measures that determine profitability, market share, or the value of good will, culture ...

There is a longstanding belief in the service industry that in order to gain loyalty from customers, companies must "delight" them with customer service that goes above and ...

In business organizations, the relationship between marketing and sales personnel is often sub-optimal. Marketers view their sales counterparts as short-term, tactically-focused while ...

There are two different types of sales managers, those that wait and react to a situation after it occurs and those who proactively engage themselves to ensure their sales team ...

Research has often failed to find a relationship between customer satisfaction with salespeople and sales performance. Some research shows that as satisfaction levels ...

What is self-awareness and why is it important? Self-awareness is critical for buyers and sellers because self-focused attention makes people more conscious of their attitudes ...

The sales process is how a sales organization chooses to effectively transform its throughput flow of inputs into outputs. In the case of real estate sales, the process ...

The past decade has witnessed a number of well-publicized ethical misconduct disasters, including accounting fraud at Enron and WorldCom, product liability at Firestone, and ...

As any well-seasoned agent knows, creating a connection with the client is essential. Connections can be made in a variety of ways and usually hinge on some common value ...

How can I achieve higher sales and develop better relationships with my clients? What are some hidden obstacles that are slowing my growth as an agent? In The Optimal ...

Sales management gurus, William T. Brooks and William P. G. Brooks, co-author an insightful novel entitled, Playing Bigger Than You Are: How to Sell Big Accounts Even...

How successful are you at closing sales? In their book, Selling to Zebras, Jeff Koser and Chad Koser use an analogy of a hunt in the African savannah as the key to selling ...

Highly effective personal selling begins and ends with the salesperson's or agent's right attitude. Football Hall of Fame coach, Vince Lombardi, is quoted as saying, "Winning ...

Recent polls suggest that the public continues to hold a dim view of the sales profession and to rate commissioned salespeople as dishonest and unethical (Gallup 2006) ...

What causes most sales professionals sleep loss? "Satisfying my current clients" is frequently close to the top of the list. Yet, while many sales agents focus on current ...

Does insincere flattery actually work? How can understanding the psychology behind flattery allow an agent to maximize his/her ability to attract more clients and close ...

Extensive research has been undertaken to define the relationship between client satisfaction and client retention. Despite the widespread findings that client satisfaction ...

Why do people go into sales? To make money. That’s no secret. It fits the stereotype. But, that doesn’t make it wrong or improper. One of the most common motivators for ...

Agents are often advised, encouraged, and even admonished to gain the trust of the seller, the buyer, or both. This advice is based on a wealth of research that shows ...

Being an agent and having a career involving personal selling is essentially a for-profit business enterprise. Therefore, the basic goal of personal selling is to make money, net ...

Individual agents with whom clients interface are often the most critical vehicle for developing and maintaining high-performing buyer-seller relationships (Palmatier 2008) ...

Marketing professors, Dr. John D. Hansen and Dr. Robert J. Riggle, conducted a cross-sectional study of 206 purchasing agents to evaluate the implications of ethical behavior ...

Approximately one in every six hours of a salesperson's or agent's time is spent dealing with conflict (Bradford and Weitz 2009, p. 35). The difference between losing a client ...

Satisfaction has been identified as a central determinant of client retention, and its effect on client retention has been intensively discussed within the paradigm shift from...

Good salespeople are still hard to find and keep over the long haul. The national turnover rate for real estate agents remains high and many individuals do not survive in the...

In this age of emerging technology, the modern homebuyer holds countless devices to discuss his experiences with other peers. Tools from blogs, videos, consumer websites...

December 2009Dr. Louann Brizendine provides the technical perspective on the obvious physical differences between the minds of men and women in her appropriately titled book...

Sales is a profession in which one must not be a stranger to failure. Being a successful agent depends, in part, upon the ability to respond effectively to failure...

"Relationship Marketing" (RM) refers to a long-term and mutually beneficial arrangement in which both the buyer and seller focus on value enhancement with the goal of...

How can the relationship between the buyer and seller prove to be more efficient? How can both parties benefit in the short-term and long-term from establishing a relationship?

How does the awareness of emotion impact interaction between buyer and seller? In "Perceiving Emotion in the Buyer-Seller Interchange: The Moderated Impact on...

Today's market offers home buyers and sellers an abundance of choices for selecting a real estate agent. In this increasingly competitive environment, communicating...

If you placed the business cards of agents at a real estate conference in a fishbowl, and then put the business cards of the people in the conference room next door in another...

Two and a half thousand years ago the grandfather of modern philosophy set out his thoughts on the science of persuasion...

How does emotional intelligence affect consumer choices? In Emotional Calibration Effects on Consumer Choice published in the Journal of Consumer Research in December 2008...

When we buy something, we're really buying a story. A salesperson's job is to tell a story. For example, last year Americans bought six billion dollars worth of bottled water...

Leads are the lifeblood of any successful real estate agent - there's probably not a single agent with any experience who hasn't heard that in one form or another. Yet most create...

What DISC behavioral characteristics best describe individuals who have an ability to sell? Who has the least confidence in their selling skills? In our latest studies examining...

For the business in which personal selling is an integral component of its strategy for sustainable market success, the three most important words to guide its future...

How does emotion impact the purchase decision? In Consumer Emotional Intelligence: Conceptualization, Measurement, and the Prediction of Consumer Decision Making...

How can referrals affect your business positively? Conversely, what is the significance of the damage they can inflict? Referral reward programs can play a considerable role in...

Is there a way to tell ahead of time how likely a listing is to sell? In The Probability of Sale for Residential Real Estate (Journal of Housing Research) Ken H. Johnson, Justin D...

How do you manage friendship in your business? If the answer is "I don't," then this study may change how you do business. The effects of friendship on business...

Is franchising in the residential real estate brokerage market efficient? What are the impacts on firms by franchising? What are the benefits for firms when franchising?

How do your agency's marketing campaigns influence not just your customers but your agents as well? In Linking Cause-Related Marketing to Sales Force Responses and...

Are you stressed? Are the people you work with stressed? Undoubtedly, we all feel somewhat stressed these days. However, stress is not universally bad...

Housing prices are likely to stop falling by the end of 2009, say nearly three-fourths of economists in a recent survey. In addition, life-cycle issues, such as needing a home...

A national study was conducted to explore the approaches that real estate agents use to influence their clients in face-to-face meetings. Findings revealed the following insights...

Does an agent's behavioral style influence performance? Do groups or offices work better if there is an appropriate mix of individuals with different behavioral styles? What is a...