Browse Archives by Keyword

The Value Game is not just your normal game encounter, but rather a real-life experience in which sellers and their supporting teammates, the sponsoring company and the products/services being offered, engage with prospective buyers to reach a win-win game outcome.

Do you take the time to request feedback from your clients and customers? If not, you could be missing out on an opportunity to boost repeat business. Research has shown that merely soliciting a review from customer increases repeat business.

Stigma is inherently problematic for any worker but is particularly detrimental for real estate agents and other sales representatives. Stigma can be detrimental to agents because job performance and personal well-being depend greatly on favorable interactions with customers.

Firms often prioritize frontline employee job satisfaction, hoping that satisfied employees will lead to satisfied customers. In real estate, this implies that improvements in agent satisfaction are expected to increase client satisfaction. According to our research, these agencies may be missing an important opportunity.

The need for fantastic sales professionals is greater today than ever before. Increasingly, clients demand sales professionals provide exceptional customer service that coincides with meeting those desired results. To this, motivation is key.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Previously, providing information was a key way that salespeople created value for clients. Now, sales professionals must adapt the value creation process to address changing client needs by...

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...

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...

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...

How can a salesperson improve her performance? This is a question that sales management researchers have spent a great deal of effort and time trying to...

For real estate professionals, neutralizations are of great relevance. A sales role presents challenges and pressures that may sometimes cloud good ethical judgment. Given the knowledge of neutralizations and the principles presented, real estate brokers and agents can begin to...

For realtors and other providers of professional services, customer referrals are one of the most important sources of new business. As service providers, we want customers saying...