The Most Crucial Lesson in Sales

The truth is without a meeting you can only be compared to the materials you have sent. This is a risky game for the following reasons: Your content may be the best but you aren’t in control of whether they read it from top to bottom and you definitely aren’t in control of whether it’s the best. You have just lost control over whether they learn all there is to know about you and your product. Even if they like the content you cannot control whether they will sign the contract by remote. When it comes time to signing, they may seek input from someone else and you have no control over what is discussed. Doubt can very easily be sown from here. In summary, control the things you can. Do this by placing yourself in front of your prospects at every step in the sales process thereby increasing your chances of closing the sale.

Main Outcomes/Learnings:

✅The benefits of removing the threat the meeting may pose to your prospects
✅The mindset required to remove the threat
✅The effective dialogue for closing more meetings
✅High percentage meeting setting process

 

About the Speaker

In 1994, I began my real estate course after selling several different things. I sold artificial plants, vacuum cleaners, furniture, water purifiers, timeshare, and magazine advertising space. I felt that I was bringing transferable skills into my new career. In equal measure, I also felt that my success was a given and that it would happen quickly. I came in way too cocky and failed miserably for the first 12 months. Let me share those early days with you.

In August 1994, I completed the Registered Sales Persons Course and applied for and landed a job with Roy Weston Hillarys (Roy Weston was one of the largest franchise groups in Western Australia then). In those days, most started their career on commission only, and on occasion, you could land a job with an agency that paid a retainer. I had several interviews with others, but only Roy Weston Hillarys was prepared to offer a retainer of $200 per week. I needed something to survive, or so I thought.

Because of my advertising sales background, I wasn’t afraid to pick up the phone, and in the first few weeks, I worked hard making calls and doorknocking, which resulted in a few half opportunities. I had some selling skills, so I convinced a few people to list their homes with me; I listed 7 in my first month. This sudden burst of what looked like immediate success was, in fact, not and was very short-lived. All the properties I had listed were on the basis that if they got a price that turned out to be ridiculous in the market at that time, they would happily sell. I had no idea how to manage this situation or appraise a property. As it turns out, the only thing I knew how to do in a real estate context was make outlandish promises that could never be fulfilled.

Needless to say, none of these properties sold with me. Some may have sold later with someone else, but I wasn’t tracking them. What did happen, however, was I quickly began to lose motivation. I didn’t know what to do to fix the situation; my Sales Manager at the time didn’t know how to teach me, and so began this downward spiral where I lost all enthusiasm for doorknocking and telemarketing.

By Christmas time, I was feeling all sorts of pressure due to my failure to perform, yet I could not find the motivation to do anything about it. I could not pay my share of house expenses as my car repayments were more than half of my retainer. I felt pressure at home, which, in fairness, was not coming from my wife. It was because I was too proud to let her pay for everything without me paying her back one day. As a result, a debt began to mount with her and my retainer debt to my employer, so my confidence hit an all-time low. I met up with one of the guys I did the course with at Hillary’s Tavern, and he asked me how it was going. I told him how bad it was and asked about him. To add more damage to my already battered confidence, he described how well he was doing and how many sales he was making. He had just been appointed Sales Manager at the Joondalup Roy Weston office and suggested I may get more support there.

Over the next month, I decided to leave Roy Weston Hillarys and start working part-time for my mate at Joondalup. I was not getting a retainer there, though, so I did some freelance selling Dining Club cards for a friend of mine and worked casually as a waiter for a catering firm to survive. This went well for a time, and I began to think that the problem wasn’t me but this loser’s industry called Real Estate, and maybe it was time I did something else. The immediate decisions that followed from that moment are why I succeeded in Real Estate. There is more background to fill in, so I’ll return to this later.

Until this point, I have left out one detail. While I was completing the real estate training, I was also training as a Dale Carnegie instructor with the Perth franchise of the program. I had completed that course before going into real estate. As the story goes, they were training three instructors, which is the number needed to make it viable to fly in a regional trainer/assessor from the head office in the USA. One of the three had pulled out at the last minute, and they contacted me to see if I would like to fill the spot. I will never know if they called others or if I was their first choice. However, I was proud to accept, pay my fees, and learn how to instruct this program.

So, back to how this connects to my real estate career. I am at the point of blaming everything other than myself for my failure in real estate. Because I am now qualified as a trainer with Dale Carnegie and have been doing this for a few months, the logical conclusion was that I should get a job selling the Dale Carnegie Course. I set up a meeting with the Perth franchisor.

In that meeting, I explained to him how I have the proven ability to train the course. This, coupled with my self-professed incredible selling skills, meant I should be considered for a position selling the course. What happened next changed the trajectory of my life. He told me the course was incredibly difficult to sell, and he did not feel I had what it took. When I challenged this position, he outlined all my failings and gave me the biggest dressing down I had ever had – so much so that I left that office in tears. This was my last hope, and it had been crushed in that moment.

As I said earlier, the other things I was doing for a while had worked, but by the time I got to this meeting, the wheels had also fallen off. Real estate hadn’t picked up, mainly because I was now a part-timer, so this door getting shut in my face was devastating. As I write this, I think another detail is needed to paint the picture of how bad things were for me at that point.

Just before I moved over to Roy Weston Joondalup, I decided to leave my wife. The pressure I was under perhaps caused me to make some questionable decisions, and leaving my wife at the time was one of these. This meant that my financial support was gone, and I didn’t have a home to live in. I wasn’t earning any money, and I could not find the money for a rental bond, let alone any money to pay the rent. I was also three months behind in my car payments, so as you can see, the Dale Carnegie job felt like the only way out, and this door just got slammed in my face.

So here I am, walking out of this man’s office after the dressing down of a lifetime, with tears welling in my eyes. I got in my car and drove from West Perth to Kings Park. The weight of despair I felt in that moment was crushing, and for a moment, I considered ending my life. I cannot tell you how or why my thinking cleared; all I can say is as I sat there for the next three hours, I started to think. This moment, which began with me walking out of that office, sparked a resolve that, up until that point in my real estate career, had eluded me.

That evening, I called the owner of the Joondalup office and told him that I was determined to make it in real estate and that I was ready to do whatever it took. He told me to meet him the following day at 8am, and we would outline the plan to get my real estate career back on track.

We met the following day, and his advice has stayed with me ever since. This was not to go home each day until I had made an appointment with someone. He explained that if I adopted this practice, I would turn my career around pretty quickly. I followed his advice, and my career took a complete about-face. I would say the only reason I am in real estate today is because of those two crucial meetings, one of devastation and one of direction and hope.

My success in this business has been far greater than I could have possibly imagined in those days. While my attitude was better and my work ethic had turned a corner, my knowledge was very underdone. This led me to find answers on how to do real estate. I discovered that most teaching was about how to market yourself better to get listings, but there was very little about the process of managing sales and listings. The general theme was to list at any price; if you carry enough of them, you will succeed. This approach doesn’t work today, and given what I have observed throughout my career, there is a more authentic and enriching way to do it. Thanks to one significant person at the beginning of my career, my mate, the newly appointed sales manager, I chose a very different path.

I was hungry for knowledge; I watched how he did real estate and modelled myself on his approach. What I learned in those days was the foundation of this training material. He educated people on price and, as a result, priced them right, resulting in better listing-to-sales ratios. I didn’t know it then, but this was very different from what most were doing.

These days, some high-quality agents are good educators; however, there is still a vast population of agents doing it the old-school way. For me, though, the seeds of applying an educational method lead to learning better ways to educate clients and the people we employ. I believe that the parallel pathways of learning to be a trainer at Dale Carnegie and a real estate agent simultaneously mean I look at everything we do from a real estate and training aspect.