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.”

South Georgia is known as the quail hunting capital of the US. They have these big hunting plantations with lodges, staff, hunting guides, shooting ranges, all the food you want and just about everything you could expect on a hunting excursion. I have been many times because the whole experience is outdoor heaven. These quail farms have hunters come in and stay in the lodge the night before the hunt and they serve dinner (family style fried chicken) and a breakfast the next morning that would choke a horse. All the fireplaces have logs burning, cigars are lit and the conversation and atmosphere is hunting at its finest. When I go with a group, we always spend more time on the skeet/trap range than we actually do hunting. We usually have 6-8 guys and we have shooting competitions on the skeet range and basically see who is the top dog-smack daddy in the group. The actual hunting part where you shoot birds, I can take it or leave it but the environment and setting is what I go for.

There are two kind of quail bird dogs. Pointer and flushers. Basically the pointers run around like crazy until they get a scent of a bird at which point they freeze, raise their tail and point toward where the birds are. The flushers are the ones I really like because once the pointers have identified the location of the birds, the flusher just runs and jumps into the bush where the birds are hiding which causes the birds to fly. You then shoot at the birds in flight and that in summary is quail hunting.

If I was a dog, I would want to be flusher and not just a pointer. The flusher is the ones that get called in to do the job where as the pointers just run around crazy until they find the bird. Another thing is that the flusher is usually not a barker. He just takes his time and saves his energy until he is called on. The pointers are usually skinny dogs because they are always running around whereas the flusher is usually a beefier dog.

You already know where I am going with this don’t you? Ha

In life there are the people that just point to what is needing to be done and then there are the ones who actually do the doing. In business, sales, life, churches and most any other group that exist, there are the ones that see the opportunity but don’t want to do it and then there are the ones that jump into the bushes of life because that is where life is lived at its best.

In my humble opinion, we shouldn’t just point to what needs to be done and hope someone else will do it. It is much more fun to jump in and flush it out. KT

In business and especially the sales business, you can learn a lot from an old hound dog.

When the dog is hunting he is focused and running hard and has one goal in mind. Get it. When that same dog is laying up on the porch of the hunting cabin he yawns and scratches at his fleas. The difference is when he is at idle, he is focused on his problems. The dog that is hunting never stops to scratch his fleas because he is fully engaged in hunting. In fact he doesn’t even know he has fleas until he is laying on the porch with nothing to do.

There have been many salesman over the years that could have been great but they never got off the porch. They were always complaining about something that wasn’t going their way and how someone hurt their feelings. You can see this in most office environments when everyone wants to meet and elect a committee and draft documents and analyze where everything is at.

Don’t get me wrong. Some meeting are very important. When the Army wants to meet before an attack, there is a good reason. What I am talking about is the need for meetings when we really need to be selling. John Galbraith said it so well when he said, “meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

Put yourself in the hound dog’s mind. He is the happiest when he is doing the thing he does best which is hunting and looking for birds or squirrels. He is the most unhappy when he is at idle and laying up on the porch with nothing to do. We as humans are a lot like dogs in that we need to be doing something to be happy and something we can feel a part of. It can be a job or volunteer work but we all need to be involved and to be in action mode versus porch mode.

Harmon Born once said, “The only way you can coast is downhill.” Isn’t that so simple to understand? So if you are in sales like I am, the most joy is when you are on a new deal, a new client, a new sale or a new idea. Wet wood will not burn and sometimes we just need to go get some fresh wood. Meaning, you can spend all your time trying to get some people to what you want to do but at some point you just need to go get some fresh wood. KT