Research Report

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.