Clients and customers deserve to be heard. They desire to be listened to.  The people we do business with each day want to be treated with respect and understanding when transacting, so they can feel enlightened and causative through their goal-oriented decision-making process.  Clients don’t want to be manipulated, distracted and pressured into making quick decisions they’ll regret later.  A client also wants to come out of a business experience feeling good about the transaction and the people they interact with.

But for decades, the real estate industry, as well as sales trainers in many other types of business fields, have pushed high pressure sales approaches and aggressive sales tactics onto their students, that end up leaving clients and customers feeling less respected, and less powerful as people.  These sales techniques were often taught by business consultants and coaches who focused more on creating a mega coaching business instead of providing knowledge and advice on how to truly serve a client’s needs while granting the client their “beingness”, i.e. respect as the human being they are through the transaction.  These coaches’ techniques consisted of pushing agents and sales people through superficial, repetitive drills exercising a technique called “HARD SELL.”  Hard-Sell consists of high-pressure salesmanship that pushes buyers to buy immediately, and sellers to list their property quickly, often without giving the client and customer ample time to make informed choices and to fully think through their actions, goals and desires.  This hard-sell technique, and general lack of care for people, has created a less harmonious, mature and value-driven environment in today’s business world and society in general.

For many years, instead of teaching sincere, authentic, thoughtful communication skills, many business coaches taught forceful, insensitive objection handling and rote script practice to the real estate community, causing a less sincere and meaningful client exchange between the client and agent, and less chance the client would choose to interact with their agent or sales person again in the future.

Creating an atmosphere of calmness, trust and respect through effective and astute "people to people communication" is the best path to providing a client with the safe space to make intelligent, insightful decisions while allowing the client to maintain his or her self-respect.  Effective communication skills allow the client to more easily achieve client goals with the least amount of conflict possible, both during the transaction and after.  It wasn’t until the authors of the national condo and HOA certification and designation course introduced empathy and sincerity into the process of communications between agents and their clients in their real estate programs and training years ago, that a new style of real estate service began to take place in the real estate industry.

All said, a real estate transaction or any other business or data exchange between human beings that focuses on “building relationships” is, and will always be, quality human interaction, an interaction that involves human empathy coupled with effective communication skills that brings understanding and accomplishment.  Everything else is just another form of machinery or “AI.”

For more information to participate in The SincerelySpeaking™ Coaching Program:  The Authentic Approach to Providing Effective Real Estate Services, please call The Council of Condominium Specialists®/Real Estate Investors Institute® (REII®) at (214)998-3237 or contact us by email at:  info@CertifiedCondoExpert.com.

Definitions:

Empathy - The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Rote Learning - Repetition rather than understanding the underlying concepts.
Authentic - Genuine, truthful, sincere

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