In business you will beat 90% of your competition if you just show up with a smile on your face. You stand a good chance of winning over the other 10% by showing up prepared.

I am big proponent of the face to face. I have so many personal flaws such as speech, education, writing, spelling that the only chance I had of getting hired was to show up face to face when the other competition wouldn’t. Many of my competitors like to make phone calls and hide behind emails. There is nothing wrong with phone calls and emails but the quicker you meet in person the better your chances are of getting the business.

I remember one deal early on that I have to laugh about when I think about it. I was in the business for about 3 months and I barely knew how spell the word hotel. There was this group in Summerville South Carolina that had 8 Holiday Inn hotels. I had sent the owner a letter introducing myself and low and behold he called me back. In those days there wasn’t the internet, email and cell phones. I asked him if I could come up the next day to meet with him. He said sure, so I cowboy up and drove over to South Carolina the next day to meet him. We really bonded up that day because he was a fellow Christian and we developed a mutual respect. Side note, that would have never happened on the phone and only happened because I drove 6 hours to meet him.

He asked me to put together a presentation on the 8 hotels and come back. This is the part where I laugh when I think about. I literally did not know what to put in the presentation. I put together 8 separate folders with the hotel name typed nicely on the outside and on the inside, typed out the information I could get from the Holiday Inn book on the numbers of rooms, what businesses were nearby, how old it was and any general information I could find. I had also driven to see all 8 hotels so I could talk about them. I had copies of his profit and loss statements but I didn’t know what to do with them or how to understand them. So I go into the meeting with my briefcase and pulled out these nicely typed folders on each of the hotels and just started talking about his hotels as though I knew what I was talking about.

To my surprise, they decided to hire me. Ha. That was the largest portfolio the company I was working for at the time had every listed. The funny thing was I still didn’t know what to do but I figured it out along the way. Those clients remained good friends for many years thereafter and we worked together on multi occasions.

The point is, I knew I would never be able to earn his confidence on the phone so I did the only thing I could do and that was to go see him.

In life I believe many tough and stressful spots can be smoothed over if we are prepared to physically sit down face to face and talk about it. This goes for business and personal situations alike. There is something magic about telling a person that they are important enough to meet with. In my line of work there have been hundreds of meetings I went into where I didn’t know how it would turn out but the importance and magic of getting in front of someone has never lost its advantages.

Even in the bible, the word “go” is listed 1,542 times and the word “stay” is only listed 62 times. KT

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.”