New Home Sales Training

This week’s article is an excerpt from Jeff’s book: Tough Market New Home Sales.

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”  Winston Churchill

The problem in a prolonged healthy market lies in what I refer to as an “entitlement mentality” on the part of new home sales counselors. This mentality says, “If I show up for work and handle the rush of stuff that comes my way, I’ll get my fair share of sales.” It says, in a nutshell, “The market will come to me.”

If entitlement is the mindset to avoid, what is the most advantageous mindset to adopt? The word to dwell on is this: maximize! You must maximize every sales office opportunity. This is the practice of top professionals.

They maximize sales opportunities in two specific ways:

1.  Top sellers maximize their opportunities to sell in a tough market.

Top professionals take advantage of every conversation and advance every sale as far as possible. Look at it this way. When a customer comes into a sales office and leaves without buying, it means that someone stopped the sale. Read more…

“I’ve always been an optimist. Frankly, I never saw much use in being anything else.” Winston Churchill

Psychologist Martin Sigelman discovered a strong link between optimism and results in a detailed study with sales professionals at Met Life Insurance. The study concluded that those who ranked in the top 10% of the organization when it came to optimism outsold by 88% those in the bottom 10% of the company.

That statistic may not surprise you, but think through the underlying aspects of the study. These were salespeople, and they were hired because they were optimistic people in the first place. Those in the bottom 10% still would have considered themselves to be optimists, and compared to a lot of other professions they probably were.

What does this mean for the top 10% of the salespeople in the organization? It means they were more than optimists – they were super-optimists. These were people who did more than pretend. They were optimists in their core, and they carried that optimistic purpose into every sales encounter.

Read more…