5 More Selling Tips!

6. Take the best of the past to create the future. The world is full of shiny new toys and methods. It's easy for humanity to get lost in the glitz and glamour of modern technology. Successful people embrace modern tools for communication efficiency and continue to use traditional and rare methods like handwritten thank-you notes to enhance connections.

7. Don't be a lemming. If you are always heading the same direction as everyone else, you may move forward, but you'll have little control of your destiny. Successful people often figure out what everyone else does only to do the opposite, which many times puts them ahead of the pack.

8. Keep a thick skin about rejection. For many each no is like taking a punch in the gut or a slap in the face. The way to get up and keep going is to remember that it's just business. Successful people know that the key to getting life's few brilliant "yeses" is to positively cope with the many "noes" you get on the way to receiving them.

9. Make others feel important. One of the greatest craving of most people today is recognition. Unfortunately, so many people are so tightly focused on their own status and problems they are ignorant to the needs of others. Successful people recognize, support and encourage others on their journey, which brings synergy, energy and satisfaction to all involved.

10. Strive for more. Sales Super Star, Tom Hopkin's overall philosophy for success can be best summed up by his commitment on how to live life: "I commit to learn more, thus I'll serve more, thus I'll build more, thus I'll earn more, thus I'll save more, thus I'll be able to bless others by giving more."

Focus Point

59. Develop a sales approach to buyers that WORKS.

Fortunately, there are classic works on selling that you can mine, and we'll give you a Sales 101 and a Sales 102 in later chapters. And at the end of this book you'll find "Leslie's Library," which lists a few of my personal favorites.

You need to become an expert at overcoming objections, closing a sale, strategic selling, business development (soft sales), planning and goal-setting. You also need to follow through with action steps. We include all these ideas in this book.

Obviously, buyers need to trust their representatives and the information and assessments they supply. This usually means that if you are a representative, you have a fiduciary relationship to buyers that requires you to act in their best interest as they express it to you.

This is pretty serious stuff. It's not about life and death, but it is about economic well-being. Always remember that your buyer is looking to you as an authority on any given transaction. None of us is perfect, and often we can't predict negative outcomes despite our best efforts. But you need to ask yourself questions. Have you given your buyers your best effort? Have you lived up to their expectations? Have you lived up to your own expectations, which should be even higher?

Despite the constant pressure that all of us face to meet and exceed our sales volume quotas, we also must deliver the highest value possible to our clients. For real estate buyers in today's bull markets in hot sectors such as Southern California, our agent or broker might be doing a great job of giving us the small edge that gets us the property we want in a multiple-offer scenario.

Sometimes in such cases, an agent or broker will find a time advantage for presenting the client's offer before the flood of additional offers pours in. Or an agent or broker can do something subtle, such as increasing the amount of the buyer's good faith deposit for the offer from something minimal ($2,000) to something a little more substantial ($5,000-10,000), and that ends up making the difference in getting the buyer that property!

It is a difficult process, but no one said it would be easy. You need to study from the masters and apply their techniques to your work with your buyers. You need to actually deliver on your buyer's expectations and your own.

You also need to have a thorough mastery of your sales practice so you can provide the highest degree of business intelligence to your buyers. This is an especially important point for financial and legal professionals, because that's why their clients are coming to them in the first place.

Finally, in the heat of battle, you need to be able to make the difference for your clients and get them the property or results they seek.

So don't be afraid of becoming a sales "super-hero," because that is what our profession requires!