You're Never Taught How to Sell as a Realtor

I consider myself a salesman and I actually take great pride in that. I think in a lot of places salesman is kind of looked down on. The truth of the matter is everybody's a salesperson. Hey, my name is Chance Brown. I'm the broker owner of CB&A Realtors and I make video content like this to help real estate agents build great businesses because that's what I'm passionate about doing. Being able to sell is an art form. I think that it is a craft that needs to be practiced. It is something that I take great pride in being able to do and I've been very fortunate along the way to have been trained in sales. I also know that most people in the real estate industry cannot say the same. And part of that is because we get people from lots of other careers coming into real estate, but the real reason is we don't really train sales in real estate, which is crazy considering that's the majority of our business. So, we're kind of at the end of the year here. people are doing their business planning. If I could give you some advice on something to maybe add into your mix next year, sales training, proper sales training, not real estate related, whether that's just you reading a ton of books, because there are a ton of books, or that's you going and taking a course from somebody, whatever it is, I highly recommend it.

In the real estate industry, we train how to write contracts and we train how not to get sued and we train real estate transaction process and the technologies that we use and we train all of these things. We don't train pure sales. We don't train things like mirroring and pacing and tie down closes and assumptive clothes. Like we don't train the stuff that people in other industries who sell things go to training classes for. I was fortunate very early in my career on to have received some phenomenal sales training that helped me along that way. But then I've read damn near every sales training book there is out there. I highly recommend that you add this to your business plan for 2026 and beyond because I really truly believe that your ability to sell, your ability to sit and actively listen to what your client is saying, your ability to then take that and shape it into the properties that they're looking at, this is meets this need. It's gamechanging. It's incredibly different. But instead, what we tend to do is walk through a house and just point at things. Hey, look at the crown molding. I mean, yeah, no [ __ ] I've got eyes. I can see the crown molding. I get it. There's crown molding. Is that important to me? Maybe. Maybe it is. But maybe it's certainly not. Maybe I don't like it. Maybe I want all solid surface floors, no carpet. The assumption might be that that's because of allergies or who knows what. It might be just because my dog is fat and wants to lay down on a cool floor. You never know unless you really do a really great job at discovery. And I don't think we do that well in the real estate industry. We don't ask enough questions. We just ask kind of the how many bedrooms do you want? How many bathrooms do you want?

How far from work or whatever, but we don't really get into the emotional needs of our clients. We don't really get into the things that are very important to them by asking deeper level questions. When we forego that, our service suffers because we're not prepared. When we ask those questions, what a difference it makes to be able to walk into a home and be like, "Hey, remember when we talked about this a few days ago? I picked this house specifically because of this." Even if it's not the home for them, the fact that you did that for them because you listened? It's a whole different universe. So, I would love to take the stigma away from the term salesman or saleswoman. I would like to take the stigma associated with sales away because the truth of the matter is I was having this conversation with my son the other day. Whether it's him trying to rez up a girl or it's my daughter trying is trying to get a job in college right now. Those are sales that's selling people on you. My friend is a teacher.