As time goes by, your green line begins to climb. And because you are prospecting, you make listing appointments, so up goes the burgundy line. And when the listings go up, results follow. The orange line climbs too.

Guess what happens next. Now you have sellers listed with you – Vendors. To please those sellers you make sure that buyers go through their properties. Now you are busy giving feedback to your sellers, and taking out buyers as well.

You forget that the reason you are now busy is that you went looking for that business in the first place and the first thing that gets dropped off when a salesperson gets busy is the very activity that got the salesperson busy in the first place – you got it – Prospecting. So down goes the green line.

And when the green line goes down, so does the burgundy line – Listings – and when the listings fall, so do results.

Duh!

But how often do we fall for this trap?

So we wake up to the falling results and do some more prospecting. Up goes the green line – for a while – and the stock level goes up – for a while – and the results, too, increase – for a while. But with each cycle of busyness, the prospecting slips and so do results.

This is a cycle – a self-induced cycle. And being self-induced, it can be broken.

Over the years I have noticed that salespeople shirk two important tasks when they become busy. They allow their prospecting levels to fall to dangerously low levels. They also allow their visits with their listed sellers to fall, and in doing so they fail to obtain sufficient Asking Price Adjustments on their stock.

Buyers still get put into cars, but sales don’t happen. That’s the consequence of taking good buyers through overpriced properties: they look, but don’t buy.

Do you notice something about these two tasks – prospecting and obtaining Asking Price Adjustments? Both require courage and skill. And these are the first things to be shirked. Show me a call reluctant salesperson and I’ll show you one who is scared to prospect and to obtain APAs.

These are the salespeople who go looking for activities that give them the appearance of being busy, without them having to perform tasks that make them feel uncomfortable. But you cannot escape the inevitability of results. When you haven’t got them, everybody notices.

So mediocre people invent