Welcome to Marks & Associates Real Estate Sales Training!

There is a reason that many sales courses do not achieve long-term desired effects. They are often designed by people that have not worked in the real world - or worked there too long and have stopped growing and learning. It is true that almost any sales training is better than nothing and even the most basic sales skills can lead to improvement. However, with the investment that you have in your time for selling it is imperative that you receive the very best training that is available. Many courses are designed to give short-term motivation or to educate. That is really off the mark. Training is not education; training is designed to change behavior patterns! That is what Marks & Associates consultative selling classes achieve. Your results will be immediate and long-term.

> Are Real Estate Training Seminars Worth the Time?
> Philosophy of Selling Real Estate
> What is Consultative Selling?  The Transition to Becoming a Real Estate Professional

Are Real Estate Training Seminars Worth the Time?

A frequently heard comment about most real estate sales training sessions is, “I have been to quite a few sales training seminars, I suppose they are ok if I learn even one thing. But really, does that make it worth killing a whole day when I could be out getting listings?

Another comment is, “It seems to me that they spend a lot of time selling me more training.”

Sales training should be about YOU. You are the one who is investing the time to be trained. You are the one that needs the skills. You should be getting a full day’s worth of value for your investment, not a few scattered ideas. Why does this happen?

Most training classes for real estate professionals spend much of your classroom time teaching you marketing tricks, not sales technique.

But aren’t they really the same thing?

There is a big difference between marketing and sales training. While both are important, Sales training is specifically designed to teach you how to prepare for calls, handle objections, answer and ask focused questions and most importantly, close listings and sales.

Agents often hear, “Get on the phone and call. If you don’t call, you wont sell.” But what do you say when you are on the phone? Once you get an appointment, how should you specifically prepare for the call? When you are calling “for sale by owners” or “expired listings,” do you handle them the same way? What should you say that will really work?

How do you sharpen your skills? By simply calling prospects? But wait, if you are not doing it right who corrects you? How do you get better? It is really necessary for you to learn from your mistakes on your own? If you reinforce bad behaviors and lose sales opportunities you don’t know how to fix it. You may not even know what is wrong. Would the medical industry ever send out med students to operate on live patients?

If you decide to go into the market and place door hangers, what are you going to say if someone opens their door and asks you what you want? Do you know how to convert that surprise into an opportunity? You have to know the words to say, not just a general statement about being a realtor.

You need to learn how to use good sales technique right now. Not tricks, not cute, clever phrases, but real technique that will serve you your whole career.

Marks & Associates Consultative Sales Seminars are all designed to help you master good sales skills and focus on the “prospect.” Whether you are trying to get a listing, sell a property or gain a referral, there are professional techniques that will help you. No one wants to sound slick. You are a professional, you should sound and act like one.

• Strong inductive reasoning skills to understand the key issues in the customer/prospect firm
• Superior closing skills based upon the diagnostics used in the engagement
• Substantially improved ability to sell more deeply into each relationship
• Greatly improved sales presentations skills
• Reduced reliance on old and tired techniques
• Greater ability to understand opportunities and how they tie to still more opportunities
• A huge increase in confidence

The old saying, “The customer is always right” does not mean they don't make bad decisions, it means their needs come first. A better way to look at this is, “The customer is always the customer!”

Our job as consultative sales staff, is diagnostics. We need to find out what is best for the client and to make sure they understand how that solution can benefit them. This is a process of discovery and it is unreasonable to expect the client to always know what they want. They often ask for the wrong things or object to the correct solutions.

You don't gain a customer’s respect or trust by focusing all your energy on explaining why you are right and they should follow your advice. They must understand the advantages your suggestions create in terms which are comfortable for them. That is how you convert product advantages to customer recognized benefits.

Sell Benefits, not Features, but what does that mean?

Only the prospect can identify a benefit. You can display product advantages and test them against their needs, but only they can identify the benefit.

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Philosophy of Selling Real Estate
PDF Version - 142kb

Selling is about the buyer or seller’s needs not about you or your desire to close the deal. A good salesperson’s job is to focus on the desires of the target audience, understanding what caused those needs (motivation) and finding ways that you can satisfy them. Unfortunately, no matter how well intentioned you might be, without the right diagnostic skills to uncover changes, needs and wants, your ability to translate those into recommendations and present acceptable solutions will fail more often than not. The hard truth is that discovering what you think is the right property is trivial. The real challenge lies in discovering the exact benefits that excite the buyer or seller, and making them feel the pain of not having those benefits. When the prospect acknowledges the specific problems they will want the solution.

While most sales people can list potential benefits, they may not be sufficiently adept in questioning technique to discover what those benefits mean to the buyer or seller. They don’t translate words into real life. And, they generally try to close a sale as soon as they identify what they think is the right property. In truth, their real sales work should just be beginning. The result of trying to close too soon is a lot of deals left on the table and buyers or sellers left without the best solutions to their needs.

The place to start working with a prospect is to identify what motivates them - then move through the potential impacts noting opportunities and thinking about how that will affect their lives. The Marks & Associates Sales Model, illustrated below, succeeds because it forces you to consider change, emphasize benefits and close at the appropriate time.

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What is Consultative Selling?
The Transition to Becoming a Real Estate Professional
PDF Version - 57kb

In business, a consultant's primary job is problem solving. Good problem resolution is based on doing a diagnostic before making recommendations. The realtor, to be really successful, must copy the consultant and diagnose the buyer or seller’s needs to really understand what they want and what will move them to action. The key is understanding the buyer and seller - their goals and their problems and the realization that they may not be clear on what they want. The role for the consultative sales person, the real estate professional, is to offer solutions that are based on what is best for the principals in the transaction. The result is a prospect that feels a sense of added value from the realtor and the understanding that they are aligned with their goals. Goals they may not have realized they had until the consultative salesperson helped them think it through.

Think of the consultative sales person as being like a doctor. Doctors have two primary functions, diagnosis and then treatment. The typical real estate agent, both commerical and residential, focus on the treatment exclusively. That is, getting the sale and not much else. This kind of behavior can succeed, but at such a low level of client satisfaction that it does not build the kind of trust and value that many realtors talk about but don't actually deliver. They have to rely heavily on pricing because they don't add any other value. If you don't have diagnostic skills you can't ally yourself with a prospect's needs because you never really learn what they are. Any doctor can write any prescription. The key is not the ability to write the prescription, it is to determine the CORRECT prescription. Value comes from what the buyer or seller sees is the value, not what the realtor wants it to be. This is such a simple concept, but so few really understand it.

Typical Real Estate Salesperson vs. The Consultative Sales Professional

In summary, the typical sales person goes into a discussion with the buyer or seller with the goal in mind of either getting the listing or selling the property quickly. If that helps the customer in some way, that is fine, but it is not the primary goal. The primary goal is to move on to the next deal. The consultative salesperson goes into the discussion with the goal of helping the buyer or seller meet their goals. It is through this approach that the consultative salesperson realizes full potential as a resource the buyer or seller can trust over the long and short run, which not only closes more sales but generates many more referrals. If you do not understand your client’s goals, even those on which they may be unclear, you are not doing your job.

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