Digging Deeper: Understanding Your Real Estate Prospects

Here are two customer scenarios that come up periodically. The series of questions that follows will help you "get to the bottom of things." The first one is all about identifying your prospect's true motivation; the second one deals with "which agent to choose?"

Scenario #1. Understanding Real Estate Prospect's Motivation

Ever run into that situation when your prospect (buyer or seller) doesn't reveal their true motivation easily? Sometimes they are vague, sometimes they're unclear, and sometimes it appears that they're not even sure how motivated they are.

Regardless, there are six questions you can ask if you want to "dig deeper" and get to the bottom of their motivation. The first three are the standard ones that all salespeople ask (where? when? why?):

• Where are you moving to?
• When you want to be there?
• Why are you moving? (My preferred way to ask this one is "I'm curious, what's taking you to __________________ ?" )

Problem... this is where most salespeople stop. The best agents can sense when they need to dig deeper to get to the real motivation. Here's three follow-on questions that will allow you to do exactly that:

• Sounds exciting, could you tell me more about that?
• What's important about (a bigger house, moving to Chicago, etc.)?
• Here's a final question Mr./Mrs. Prospect. Just so I understand, what will that do for you...you know, moving to ________________ ?

Getting their true motivation is critical to you being efficient with your time. Don't hesitate to dig deeper. The last thing you want is to find out too late that you have been wasting your time with an unmotivated prospect. That's certainly not in your business plan, is it?

Scenario #2. Magic Seller Questions

Lately, it seems that a lot of home sellers are having trouble choosing who to pick to list their property. If you're keeping in touch regularly by using a real estate CRM, you are making lots of contacts. You ask all the right questions, you are making strong presentations, and they still seem to be hesitant about choosing you as their real estate salesperson of choice. It's important to get to the heart of their indecision. Critical Point: usually there is a financial component behind this indecision. Help is on the way!

Here is my list of killer questions to get them from maybe to yes:

1. Mr./Mrs. Seller... how will you decide who you're going to pick? (Note: in this case, it's not uncommon to get some "smoke and mirrors" answer. You need to go now to question #2 in order to get to the real issue.)

2. I'm curious, where does money fit into all of this? How important is the bottom line?

3. Just so I understand, what's more important to you here: the amount of commission % you pay or the eventual dollars in your pocket? (Dig here...it's always the second item.)

4. That's good news Mr./Mrs. Seller because this is where we really shine... let me show you why. Pull out your marketing plan and show them exactly what you do to get them more money than the competition, i.e., internet coverage, prospecting, staging, etc. Make sure they understand that your "advanced marketing techniques" are designed to drive the most traffic and subsequently negotiate the best offers on their behalf.

Be sure to ask these questions in order. Make sure they answer each one before you go to the next one. There is a logical progression here and it really opens the door to allowing you to position yourself as the best choice. This approach really works. Why? Because what you're going to show them is going to generate the most money in their pocket after all is said and done--and THAT'S what they really want. NO Excuses.

To view the original article, visit the IXACT Contact blog.