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What are CORE Consultative Presentations?

All the work you do to generate potential clients, and all the work you do refining the great service you provide, will all be wasted if you cannot convince those potential clients to work with you when you sit down with them for your initial meeting. Whether you’re meeting with a potential seller to convince them to list with you, or with a potential buyer to take them out to look at homes, you need to develop the skills to win them over into working with you exclusively.

Sadly, most real estate agents and trainers describe these meetings with sellers as “listing presentations,” which is part of the problem. No one likes sitting through a presentation. They’re boring. They end up being an endless litany of 17-point marketing programs, harangues about why the seller needs to drop his price, and ultimately debates about the value of a sales commission. And very few agents even do a “presentation” for a buyer, because they are used to simply meeting a buyer at the office for two minutes before running off on a buyer tour of what will ultimately be virtually every house for sale in the county. Or even worse, they’re just meeting the buyer at one of the actual houses, without any meaningful prior discussion at all.

The real estate industry is just about the only service industry that follows that horrible methodology. When you meet with a doctor, does the doctor spend 45 minutes telling you about her credentials, the way a real estate agent delivers a listing “presentation”? When you meet with a lawyer, does the lawyer meet you at the courthouse five minutes before your trial to find out what you’re looking for, the way most agents treat buyers? No, of course not! Instead, when a professional sits down with a potential client, the professional listens. The professional finds out what the client needs. The professional counsels the client.

A few years ago, I met with a financial advisor. My wife and I sat down with him, preparing to hear him pitch us on why he should manage our money. Instead, he started asking questions. He asked us about how much we knew about financial products and investment philosophies. He asked us what our long-term goals were, where we wanted to be in five years, and ten years, and in 25 years. He asked about our comfort level with risk in our financial portfolio. And he listened to our answers. The meeting went on for two hours, and I don’t think he spoke for more than a minute at a time. Instead, we talked. We opened up to him. We told him about our relatively meager knowledge about investing. We told him about where we wanted to be in our lives. We told him about what our long-term fears were, and about our goals. We told him about things that we’d never told anyone else, things that in some cases we’d never even talked about together.

And then a funny thing happened. The more we talked, the more we liked him. The more we talked, the more we trusted him. The simple act of opening up to him generated this immense feeling of trust and confidence in him. It was almost as if we were psychologically compelled to trust him, since we were continually confiding in him things we rarely shared with anyone else. In other words, what in the world were we doing talking to him like this if we didn’t already trust him? We had to trust him, since we’d already shared such confidences.

It was an immensely powerful meeting, and no part of it was a presentation. After hearing us talk for two hours, he spent about fifteen minutes showing what he could do for us, and we were sold. We didn’t quibble about the terms, we didn’t need to think it over, we didn’t need to meet with anyone else. Essentially, he followed the same three-part methodology that we teach in the C.O.R.E. system: he identified our needs by listening to us, he explained how he was going to satisfy those needs, and then he got started in satisfying those needs.

That’s what real estate agents should be doing. If you want to win your clients over, stop talking and start listening. Let’s stop talking about “presenting” and start talking about “counseling.” And when it comes to the largely non-existent “buyer presentation,” let’s stop treating our buyers like customers, when for years real estate agents have had the opportunity to be an actual “agent” for buyers, providing them with the same attention and service ethic that they are supposed to give to sellers.

Client counseling is a much more effective way of converting a potential client into an actual client, because the act of asking questions and listening to a client generates a natural rapport and trust with the client. A lot of sales training tries to teach you how to fake rapport with a client, by looking for similar interests (“hey, you like sailboats too!”) or mutating into a psychologically coercive clone of the client by talking fast, or slow, or moving your hands, or sitting still. You don’t need any of that. You simply have to ask good questions, and listen to the answers. The natural tendency of human beings to feel better about things when they talk about their needs, and to start trusting the people they confide in, will do the rest.

Obviously, at some point you’re going to need to talk to them. We’re not saying that you sit mute as if you’re performing the third degree on your clients, waiting until they talk themselves hoarse so you can hand them a listing agreement. You need to be able to speak, and speak confidently, about the services you’re going to provide, the marketing you’re going to implement, and the market analysis you’ve conducted. But the meeting should be 75% them talking, and then 25% you explaining what you can do to service their needs.

The same goes for the pricing discussion, which is the main part of any meeting with a seller. Traditionally, real estate training told you to emphasize your role as the professional in the relationship, and firmly establish a price for your potential clients. That’s just silly. The last thing you want to do is feed into the skepticism that most sellers have that an agent just wants to set a low price to get a quick deal. Instead, you use that same counseling methodology when discussing the price. You show them what’s going on in the market, and ask them what price they think would be competitive with what has sold, and what’s currently unsold. Don’t tell them the price, ask them what they think the price should be.

Moreover, if you actually listen to your clients, you’ll learn what they want from you. No two clients are exactly the same. Yes, every seller client has a basic need to sell her house, but different clients have different concerns about the process, and different levels of expectation for an agent. The more questions you ask, the more information you gather, and the more information you gather, the more effective you’ll be at tailoring your value pitch to their needs.

BACK TO INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS CORE?