RLRE – Objection Handling – “Not Now”

Pablo Rener: Thank you for having me.

DS: Thank you. You’re very welcome. So if any of you agents across the country watching this ever need a referral for the Newport Beach area, remember to get ahold of Pablo. His website, very easy, rener.com, R E N E R dot com. So we’re going to continue this week what we’ve been doing for the last little while here, is just talking about objections that agents run into on a pretty regular basis.

PR: Perfect.

DS: And one of them that they get on a pretty regular basis is “Not now.”

PR: Right.

DS: Right. You go through your questions and they say “Well, we do want to sell, but just not now.”

PR: Correct.

DS: Or they say they’re going to do something but not now. Again, you get a lot of that when you’re prospecting, do you, on the phone, or at the door, right?

PR: Kind of push you off

DS: Kind of push you off, yeah.

PR: Cuz they’re like, hey, I’m getting sold, yes.

DS: Don’t sell me. I’m going to do something later but not now, so you can just leave me alone, Mr. or Mrs. Salesperson. Right? So let’s work on that one just a little bit, ok?

PR: Ok. Perfect.

DS: Ok, so we’ve done what we’re going to do, and you say the “not now.”

PR: Ok. Yeah, you know, Dan, we’re gonna, we’re not, not right now, we’re going to wait a few months.

DS: You made that one too easy. Sometimes they get it, if they say you’re going to wait a few months, then I bet you guys are “oooh, that’s a lead, it’s only a couple of months!” Right?

PR: Ok.

DS: So that one, I think you work through, but oftentimes they actually leave it a little bit more vague. You call them up and you say “Hey, it’s me” and they say “Oh, no, we’re not going to sell right now.” Something pretty vague. So let’s do that one.

PR: From the beginning. Ok. All right. So, you know, Dan, we’re not going to sell right now.

DS: You’re not going to sell right now?

PR: Nah.

DS: Fantastic! Good for you! So let me ask, when you say “right now,” are you talking like, you know, 3-6 months? Or are you talking more 6-10 years?

PR: I think probably less than a year but probably at least 6 months.

DS: At least 6 months, maybe up to a year. Somewhere in that time frame, right?

PR: Sure.

DS: Ok. Stop the roleplay real quick. So what we want to do in the very beginning, here, and I want to mention it now. I gave him a pretty big option. Lot of people say “not now,” we don’t know what that means. If they say “a couple of months” like he did the first time, we don’t mind, that’s an ok lead. But if they give us that not now, it’s kind of to get us off the phone, and we say “oh, not now,” or at the door, and we say “oh, not now,” “well, have a good day,” and we leave. So we want to get through what that “not now” means. So by offering a 3-6 month time frame and then offering one on the real big other end of the spectrum, which is 6 years to 9 years. Which kind of “not now” are you talking about? It makes them give us a little bit of an honest answer. And if it’s 6-9 years, so be it, it’s not a lead. But when you give that option, you’ll be very surprised, people are like, “I’m talking like maybe 3 months.” “I’m thinking maybe next month.” We have heard this one time and time again. So he gave me a pretty good time frame, some time between 6 months and a year. Now I know what I’m working with. I just wanted to explain that before we move forward, ok.

PR: Ok, so are we saying, this is when you first call and say “if you could get your price, would you sell?”

DS: And they say, oh, not right now.

PR: And they say not now. Ok. All right. I got it.

DS: So it’s a how to dig it out. Cuz you get a lot of those, don’t you?

PR: Yeah, yeah.

DS: And so we don’t know, does that “not now” mean “I’m going to do it in the spring with the person who happens to get lucky and calls me that day,” or “I’m not going to do it until my kid gets out of school and they’re in kindergarten.”

PR: Perfect.

DS: So we’ve got 13 years left of academics, right? So we want to figure out what that means.

PR: So I’m going to have to go back and watch this video.

DS: There you go.

PR: I tend to hang up and go to the next.

DS: They say “not now” and you’re like “oh, you’re not selling, and you give up.” Right?

PR: Right.

DS: And not all of them will become ok leads. But you have them on the phone, they’re talking to you, it makes sense to ask them that one more question to delineate near future or far away future.”

PR: Absolutely. Because if you get one of them…

DS: If you get one of them a month.

PR: Perfect.

DS: Twelve extra, that’s twelve extra sales a year. That’d be pretty good, wouldn’t it?

PR: It would.

DS: Ok, so. I say “What do you think?” and you say “Six months to a year.”

PR: Six months to a year.

DS: Fantastic. So, I have a question for you, what’s stopping you from doing it now? Now, I’m going to stop the role play again, sorry, a lot of stuff going on here. But you need to go and look at the 7 Ws on my website if you haven’t. They’re cleverly disguised on the right hand side of the page with a link that says “The 7 Ws.” So go there and read the 7 Ws, question # 5 of the Ws is always the “what’s stopping you.” And what that one does is it brings out objections, right? It actually puts the problem on the table. Now we don’t like that, right? We think “Aaaaaah, objection! Bad!” But we really need to hear it. So I’m going to ask you what’s stopping you, is it a good reason, a condition that’s stopping it, you can’t do it because you’re retired, or is it some other reason that you’ve just got to wait, or it might be something else. So you give me a reason when I say “What’s stopping you from doing it now?” And then we’ll see how I act based on what you give me.

PR: Perfect. Ok.

DS: So, what’s stopping you from doing it now?

PR: Well, you know, we’ve got a lot of clutter. We’ve lived her a long time. It’s going to take me that long to clean the house, to get it ready to sell it.

DS: Ok, so it’s going to take you a while, 6 months, 9 months, something like that before, “ok, my house looks really good and I know I can sell it now and get top dollar.”?

PR: Right.

DS: Fantastic. Now, do you actually, in a perfect world, would you be sold in 6 months, or would you just start the selling process, if it were up to you?

PR: Well, I think I gave myself the 6 month time frame to clean up, but if I could be sold in 6 months, I’m out of here. I mean, we’re ready to go.

DS: So if you can get sold, or cleaned up faster, and then sold, and moved out in 6 months, you’d be ok with that?

PR: Absolutely.

DS: Ok. Now, I want to do a little exercise with you, ok? It’s not a lot of fun, it’s just time frames. So if you wanted to be sold in 6 months, all right, and what is that, that would be, let’s just pretend that we’re in the beginning of October. Ok, so that would be the… November, December….

PR: March?

DS: That’d be the end of March, beginning of April.

PR: Ok, let’s say April.

DS: Beginning of April would be the six month period. So I say to you, cuz whenever you’re doing this with a live person, you don’t just use October automatically, that’d be weird. Use the month you’re in. And then go forward. Ok, so I say: Ok. So we’re thinking beginning of April. However, you’re going to be in, probably, cuz you want some time to move and not be rushed, right?

PR: Right.

DS: So, it’s going to be somewhere around a 45-60 day escrow. So that takes you back to the beginning of March, beginning of February.

PR: Ok.

DS: So you’re actually, it’s sold and you’re just going through the process of getting your money and moving out.

PR: Ok.

DS: Now, you have to be on the market for a period of time in order for it to sell, though. It doesn’t – you put it on the market and sell it that day, especially because you want top dollar, right?

PR: Right. Yeah.

DS: Ok. So, if you’re going to be on the market, average time on the market right now is about 2 and a half months.

PR: Wow, ok.

DS: I don’t know if, did you know that?

PR: No.

DS: How fast did you think they were selling?

PR: I was hoping they’d sell in 30 days.

DS: Ok. The market’s a little bit slower than that right now. So, let me see, we’re at the beginning of February, so we go back to the beginning of January, beginning of December, and we’re in the middle of November. So you’d have to list in the middle of November to be out by the beginning of April. Does that make sense?

PR: Yeah.

DS: However, there’s some stuff that we do as real estate agents to get your home ready to sell. I have to have the photographers out, I’ve got to get all of the advertising done, I’ve got to get all of my bells and whistles, dot my Is, cross my ts, right. And that takes, how long do you think it takes for us to get your home ready to go?

PR: 2 weeks?

DS: Two weeks. If, you know, if I do a pretty shoddy job it’d be two weeks, but really it takes about a month to do the bang-up job

PR: Wow.

DS: that you really want. You want a serious marketing push, not just sort of somebody like trying it.

PR: So that’s putting it in the middle of October.

DS: So that’s putting you in the middle of October. Oh my goodness! And it’s October the 1st already, we just decided, right?

PR: Right.

DS: So that’s really, you have about two weeks to get it on the market in order to get it sold in April. Now I know you want to do some cleaning up, but let me ask you. If you could sell the home without having to do a bit of cleanup, would you mind?

PR: No.

DS: Not at all, right.

PR: If I can get the home sold, absolutely.

DS: So, we have two options here. We can keep it off of the market for the entire time that we’re getting it cleaned up, and then start trying to sell it after that, or we can have it for sale as we’re cleaning it, and if nobody comes along and buys it, we’re no worse off, we were going to wait anyway, correct?

PR: Yeah.

DS: But if somebody comes along and buys it while we’re going through the cleaning stage, because they don’t mind, now we’re a couple of months ahead of the game. You see that? So, I’m not asking you to commit to me right now, but I am asking which is a good time that I can just come by and we can talk about this in a little bit more detail just so you understand your options. It’ll just be a 10-12 minute conversation one day. Would some time maybe this afternoon, or tomorrow, later in the week work better for you?

PR: Any time. I’m available this afternoon.

DS: You’re available this afternoon? All right. So how about 4:30 this afternoon, just swing by for a few minutes so we can talk about this in more detail. Ok?

PR: Sounds good.

DS: Ok. So you see what we did. We identified the time frame, then we went and asked some questions. See, that’s the key to objection handling, everybody, is asking questions. I wasn’t telling him anything, even though I sort of was telling him in question form. I was making him sort of agree along the way with my questions. That make sense?

PR: Yeah.

DS: And you kind of just, you were with me along the way so by the time we got all done, it was just the natural conclusion that at least we should meet and talk about it, because what you’re saying sort of makes sense. And we took all of that from “Not now.” And most agents just giving up and saying “ok, thank you.” All that came out of just that “not now.” It won’t always happen like that, but it will happen a percentage of the time. And like I said, even if it’s only one time a month, 12 extra listings a year, 12 extra sales. That’s pretty good money in your marketplace, isn’t it?

PR: Yeah, and I wonder if you talk to 100 people a day, you know…

DS: Maybe you’ll get 3 or 4!

PR: Some of those working with you now, I know, are doing that kind of numbers. You know, we’re talking a lot of people.

DS: A lot of people. A lot of opportunities.

PR: Yeah. Absolutely.

DS: A lot of opportunities to just swing the bat. So, ask a lot of questions. Don’t give up on a stall tactic question, a push-off question, “not now.” That’s not a give-up, that’s a “let’s define what “not now” is. And then decide if we want to work with them or not. It’s not really up to them. We’re going to make that decision: “I want to” because it’s short term, “I don’t want to” because it’s long-term. Ok? Hope you guys and gals learned something from today’s video. Thank you very much again for being here and helping out.

PR: My pleasure.

DS: If you’d ever like to attend one of my events, come to one of my seminars, sit in on one of my workshops, sometimes they’re as low as $20. There is a full calendar of events available for you. Go to my website, versatilityinsales.com. On the right hand side it’ll say “upcoming events,” click there, takes you to an entire calendar and description of everything that’s going on and when it’s going on. So hopefully I’ll see you at one of my upcoming events some time soon. While we sign off this week, I want you to think about this, remember this, see if you can put this into practice: To get what you’ve never had, you must do what you’ve never done. Make it a great one.