The easiest listing is the one you don’t need

I have preached for years to our brokers and anyone that will listen, that the easiest engagement/listing you will ever get hired on is the one you don’t need. The easiest job you will ever get or the easiest loan you will be approved for is the one that you don’t really have to have. Sounds crazy, right?

In our business we sell hotels and I learned a long time ago that the best time to make a listing call is when you already have other deals you are working on. If you make a listing when you don’t have other things going, it is the hardest call you make in our business. It is the hardest because you need it and have to have it. Think about that for a minute. When you don’t need it, you are more relaxed because you know you don’t have to have it. If you have to have it to make the next mortgage payment, you will invariably try harder and push harder which usually hurts you. I have told our agents for years that when something good is happening, you need to immediately go get other good things happening. Use the momentum to your favor.

The same holds true with job hunting and loans. It is always easier to get a job if you have a job and regarding loans, it is always easier to get a loan if you don’t really have to it. It is really that way in much of life from friendship, finding love, growing a church, building a business etc. It is even that way in golf. When you play golf, why is it that you can make the perfect practice swing and then get up to the ball and miss hit it? It is because the pressure is not on the practice swing. The pressure is on the real swing that counts. In football, it is the same way. The best plays usually happen right after a momentum shift.

I had no one to teach me this in my early days of brokerage but I actually had a revelation of it by pure mistake. I found out (or better realized) that I did better on a call or in a meeting when I already had other deals working. It didn’t matter whether the current client hired me or not. It took the pressure off and released the stress. I learned to use the high points emotionally to go built the business. I doubled my listing efforts when I was busy because I knew that was when I stood the best chance of getting hired.

The best sales call you will ever make is when you are busy and have other deals going. It is really a strange awareness on the inside of you when you have a revelation of this and I have been a big proponent of it for many years.

I have seen many other salesmen that chose the opposite approach. They get some good monument going and then shut down on all new business. It is like a dog that gets one bone and then carries it off to eat it alone and by himself. This may be a good sound approach if you are a dog but it is not a wise approach if you are in business. The idea is that when you have a lot of bones in front of you, it doesn’t hurt as much if you lose one. I have seen brokers that only work on one deal at a time set themselves up for heartache because if they lose the one deal they are working on, it breaks their heart.

So if you are in sales and good things are happening at work, let it sound off a bell in your heart that says “time to double my efforts because the momentum is with me.”

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