If you want to buy properties at steep discounts, especially from off-market sellers, you NEED to get good at sales and negotiation. We’ve created a two part article series to help you become a sales and negotiations expert.
We interviewed Chad King, one of our resident experts, to get his invaluable knowledge on sales tactics you can use to level up your sales skills pretty much overnight so you get MORE contracts signed!
We are going to start at the beginning with the 2 things you need to master to become good at sales (even if you’re not a “natural salesperson”), and how to structure a conversation that uncovers the seller’s needs.
Basic Sales
Real estate is about selling a service and selling ourselves. How you engage with, listen, and get to know the seller is going to determine whether or not they sell to you instead of another interested buyer. We are going to boil it down to two simple yet necessary aspects you must bring to the table to cover the basics in sales:
1. Emotional Intelligence
2. Asking Great Questions
If you can do those two things you can write your own checks because you understand how to listen, relate, and discover the actual needs of the seller. Most of the time these are not offered up to you on a silver platter, it takes your skill to uncover the real motivation behind the sale. When you can lean in and form a deal that cleverly caters to the seller's unique underlying needs, you will beat out other buyers every time.
Structure and Strategy
In a basic sales process, you must have the same strategy going into each house. The sellers may change, but your strategy stays the same. There are two types of sellers, emotional and logical. The emotional seller is motivated by their distress, and the logical seller needs facts and clear and aligned math. This strategy works for both types of sellers.
1. Set a frame or agenda for the conversation. Think about what you want to accomplish, what the acceptable outcomes are, and from that information build your frame. Having a frame roots the conversation before you even sit down.
2. Embrace the discovery process by learning to ask the right questions and using the right active listening techniques. Socratic questions and mirroring are two tactics you can use to dig deeper. You want to use your questions intentionally to discover who you are in front of and why you are in front of them. Is this a logical seller or an emotional seller? What problem are they looking to solve in their lives?
Active Listening Techniques
Socratic questioning is restating their words and then asking a question. For example if a seller says ‘This place is a real problem for me.’ You would respond, ‘When you say problem, what do you mean?’ Using their words to frame your question incentivizes them to elaborate and give you more information.
Mirroring is a similar technique where you repeat back the last few words of a person's point or sentence to them. This establishes you are listening and correctly understanding the information they are giving you.
Why is this important in sales?
Because the first part of your conversation with the seller is going to be surface level. Most people are going to keep their cards close to the chest early on. Part of embracing the discovery process is skillfully warming up your seller so you can peel back the layers and get to the true motivation.
Great questions to ask are:
‘What made you decide to give us a call?’
‘How do you see this ideally playing out?’
‘How can we help you?’
Discovering the seller’s real motivation is the golden key to the sale. Unfortunately that is only the beginning of the negotiation process. Next, you must proactively handle objections. In the second part of this blog we will cover negotiation tactics and how to handle objections before you give away your leverage.
Understanding how to discover a seller’s real motivation and using these techniques to negotiate deals is an absolute game-changer in winning contracts. We want you to go into every negotiation with the knowledge and skills you need to walk out with a deal that meets your needs and the seller’s needs!
