The importance of training is underestimated in sales, and by this I don’t mean just real estate sales. Industries worldwide are staffed predominantly by untrained salespeople.
Salespeople who do not train are doomed to fail.
It need not be this way. We train so that we can learn to overcome all of the common barriers to sales.
These barriers are things like:
- Rushing to make the sale, instead of taking time to understand our clients
- Determining what is important to clients, and demonstrating that we can give them what they need
- Overcoming objections, many created by our competitors
- Delivering an honest estimated price range, despite what competitors may quote
- Proving to clients that we are the best choice
- Closing the sale
There are more, but these, and other barriers, all have something in common. Winners know the answer; untrained people do not:
These barriers are all PREDICTABLE.
And another thing:
You can learn techniques that prevent them from being barriers.
There are no new objections. It is possible to learn every likely objection and learn how to prevent it from becoming a barrier to a sale.
Sure, training is expensive. It might cost $2,000 to attend a seminar to learn how to overcome these barriers. But have you ever calculated the cost of incompetence?
Would it be reasonable to estimate that a salesperson could lose one listing per month through incompetence? If so, the salesperson loses 12 listings per year. Let’s say that half of those would have sold, again conservative. The salesperson loses 6 sales a year. At an average selling fee of $10,000, the salesperson has lost $60,000 in fees through lack of training.
THE $2,000 SEMINAR LOOKS LIKE A BARGAIN BY COMPARISON!
It is fascinating that many salespeople keep hearing the same objections again and again, and are still blindsided by them. With training, they would learn to anticipate these objections and prevent them from arising.
At some point in our sales careers we should ask ourselves, “Am I in, or am I out?” By this I mean, are you a professional salesperson, or are you one of the majority of salespeople who don’t train and who form the mediocre majority?
If the answer is, “Yes, I’m a pro”, then you will train. Hard and often.