Research Report

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...

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 ...

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) ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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) ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...