It is unfair, but…

It is a little unfair really, but I always give brokers and often give sales trainers a bad time in my blog. I used to think that I have a problem with authority, but hey, who doesn’t? Almost nobody likes being told what to do. Authority corrupts, and absolute authority corrupts absolutely. But with sales trainers and brokers it is not about authority. It’s about something else. It really comes down to the difference between talking and doing.

I’m not talking about my own broker. He’s great. He hardly talks at all. He’s a doer not a talker and we are doing good and interesting things at TheRedPin. I’m talking more about every other real estate broker (of record) I’ve met, talked to or heard about. The way the real estate brokerages are set up encourages headcount. More agents mean more income for the brokerage. More agents mean more new agents and that means a lot of questions that brokers and sales trainers have answered many, many times before. It must be very boring for them.

The difference between talking and doing

I’ve been in sales along time. I’ve read lots of books about sales and I’ve been through lots of sales training. I can say without a doubt that a lot of the sales training is the same. It’s the buyer seller dance. I say this and they say that. I present. They delay. I follow up. They disappear. It’s the dog and pony show. It’s the shove through. How to handle objections. Smart goals…It’s good stuff if you’ve never seen it before.

But we have all seen it before.

With many sales trainers, real estate sales trainers office managers and real estate brokers in particular, the difference between the talking and the doing though is most about timing. What I mean by this is that they train and teach new real estate recruits as if it were still 1999. Their techniques are all about interrupt and annoy, build up your database of future clients, spend two hours a day prospecting, send postcards, or do door knocking or maybe write personal notes are the flavour of the month. There are the old favourites of “list to last” or club joining or floor duty. They say that the agent that the home seller is going to list with is the last one they spoke with. Be top of mind. Fake it till you make it…

It is all so tiresome. It is all so part of the established playbook.

Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.

That is unfair also that I say this but I’ve sat in sales training sessions held by formally successful real estate agents and the message they send me is, “that’s great advice. It will take all of my energy and then I will burn out”. That’s what happened to them, that is why they are now talking and not doing.

It is surprising to me that industries like ours are still doing things the way they did 20 years ago. Momentum, I suppose, has something to do with it. That and entrenchment. Personally, I can’t believe that we still have newspapers and cable TV either. I guess I appreciate change more than a lot of people. But that is for another blog post.