One of the most frustrating prospects on your lead list is the homeowner who wants to sell – once they know where they want to move to. These indecisive homeowners can linger on your contact list for months, even years, with no guarantees that they’ll list with you.
So, what’s a resourceful agent to do? Watch this latest objection handling video by real estate coach Dan Smith (versatilityinsales.com) and top producer Pablo Rener (rener.com) to find out.
Pablo Rener: Perfect.
DS: So here’s what we’re doing. Last couple of weeks we’ve been doing this, we’re going to keep them going. We’re doing some objection handling. Things that you guys and gals, you real estate agents are going to get on a hopefully a daily basis, because if you’re prospecting every day, then you’re getting objections every day. And there’re some that you get more than others, and so we’re trying to work through some of those for you. So you’ll just have some other ideas of how to deal with them. So the one we decided to do today – we kind of made a list of all the things that people get, and this was one that you said you’ve been kind of getting, and you actually got today…
PR: I got it this morning.
DS: Was one, and when they say to you. I’ve gone through, I’ve done my 7 Ws, you’ve already had a great conversation with them, but there’s an objection that comes up, and that objection is:
PR: In this particular case, they didn’t know where they were going.
DS: You don’t know where you’re going. So, you don’t know where you’re going. That’s fantastic. I have a question, though.
PR: Yes?
DS: If you were to have to guess, where do you think you’re going to go?
PR: Yeah, you know, it’s weird. We’ve narrowed it down to two places, complete opposites, right? One is Alabama, and the other is Arizona.
DS: Wow! Those are almost as opposite as you can get!
PR: Exactly.
DS: Arizona and Alabama
PR: You can see the trouble.
DS: Yeah. So tell me why Alabama? Why is Alabama even in the mix?
PR: Alabama is, we grew up in Alabama, my wife and I, so we’ve been thinking of going back there, and Arizona’s been, you know, the climate’s a little bit better, it’s not as humid. It’s still hot, but we don’t get the humidity.
DS: Ok, so you have to kind of choose between going back to the roots a little bit and then still going to a new place, but maybe a great retirement destination.
PR: Exactly.
DS: Ok. There’s no way it’s 50/50. Which one are you leaning towards the most?
PR: That depends on who you ask.
DS: Depends on who we ask. So you or your wife. And how long have you guys been kind of hashing this out?
PR: You know, for years, when I was working, we decided once we retired we were going to be making this move, and we’re both retired last year. So it’s something that we talked about, but we knew we had to wait until retirement, which was about this time.
DS: And so now you’re still trying to figure it out.
PR: So now we’re getting the house ready, we’re definitely going to move, we’re just not sure where.
DS: Ok. So you’re getting the house ready to sell. Will you sell it prior to picking a destination?
PR: Uh….. I’d probably say no. I’d say we’d have to have a place in mind.
DS: So you’re going to have to know at least which state you’re going to, and then go check out different options of what you can get there, and then once that’s all done, then you can talk about selling the home, right?
PR: Correct.
DS: So, I’m going to stop the role-play, because this is a really interesting one, which is why I wanted to do it. You can’t motivate an unmotivated person. If they have no motivation, I don’t care what you do, you cattle prod them, it’s still not going to motivate them. It might make them jump, but it’s not going to motivate them. And so it’s really hard, isn’t it, to work with someone who isn’t motivated enough to make a choice.
PR: Correct.
DS: They want to go some place, and I’m sure you guys and gals out there have run into this. They want to go some place, but, I mean, they’ve been talking about this for years, apparently. And they still don’t know. And so you are going to drive yourself a little nutty trying to do something with them. Until they have a destination in mind, they’re not going to do anything. They’re going to sit back and continue to talk about it. Now, they will someday do something, but until they have that place in mind, we’re kind of stuck just a little bit, aren’t we? Well, do you want to get here? I don’t know. Don’t you want to go there? I really don’t know if I want to go there. How can you close with this giant cloud sitting in the way, right? And so, it’s very important – now, I asked some tough questions in that conversation. You people out there, right? Your job as a real estate agent is to ask questions. You need to make sure that you don’t just – because here’s what we do. We hear them say that, and then we think to ourselves, “I don’t want to push them, because I might turn them off, so I’m just going to…” Have any of you been in followup purgatory? Well, I’m going to just keep following up with them every two weeks. And, you know, it’s been like 8 months now, and you’ve followed up with them like seventy one times. And they keep saying “no, we don’t know yet, we don’t know yet,” and you keep never asking the tough questions. See, if you ask the tough questions, then you’ll know how to behave with them, what’s standing in the way. Is it something you can help, work with, offer advice to, or not? But if you don’t ask the tough questions, you’ll go into that followup purgatory, and you’ll do it forever. We’ve all done it, right? You’ve got people in your database for a year that you’ve talked to on a regular basis that are in the same place today that they were a year ago, and we can’t figure out, why aren’t they moving? If we don’t get the answers to those questions, we don’t know how to act. So this one isn’t really about handling the objection, but it’s when you run into this type of objection, how to keep digging, how to keep probing to get the information that you feel is vital so now you know how to behave with these people. And know what to do with them.
PR: I think it’s important, because otherwise, like you said, you follow up, you follow up, they become a lead for somebody else because they’re telling the story to everybody, you know? And you get stuck following up for a year where you could have maybe worked on somebody else.
DS: Yeah, and it’s just time wasted. It’s frustrating.
PR: Absolutely.
DS: So, that’s the objection handler this week. Isn’t actually an objection handler, but when you get that objection, realizing it’s not really an objection, it’s more of a condition. They’ve got to find a place to go before they’ll do any other sort of commitment, and that’s just sort of a way to kind of figure that out and get a little bit into it. Ok. Real quick. Versatilityinsales.com – that’s my website. If you go there, on the right hand side it says upcoming events, future events. Click on that link, and it’ll take you to a ticketing site of mine with a bunch of information about all the upcoming events I have going on, where I’m going to be speaking, what I’m going to be speaking and training on, how much the events are. A lot of my events that are on that site are just $20 to attend, as a matter of fact. So when you get a chance, make sure you go to the website and check it out. Until next week, remember: to get what you’ve never had, you must do what you’ve never done. Have a good one.
