How To Be a Better Buyer's Agent

Over the years as I've interacted with great salespeople, one of the things that I have noticed about them is that they are naturally curious. Hey, my name is Chance Brown. I'm the broker owner of CB&A Realtors and I make video content for agents because I'm passionate about helping them build great businesses. One of the things that I think that we could do better as an industry in order to build great businesses is ask more and better questions. So, we're currently doing a sales training exercise here inside of our brokerage. One of the sessions is almost entirely devoted to asking great questions. I think we tend to do a few things. Number one, I think we tend to ask very surface level questions. How many bedrooms do you need? How many bathrooms do you need? Do you want a big yard or a small yard? Do you need a pool? You know, okay, great.

But we don't ask the follow-up questions to kind of figure out the why. And that is I think very very important. Number two, I don't think that we connect the why to really what's going on in their lives and what they're hoping for, what their dreams are when they move into that house. That limits our ability to do a very good job connecting what's going on in the homes that we actually show to the answers to those questions. I think we tend to ask a lot of closedended questions, meaning questions that either have a yes, no, or like a one-word answer, like how many bedrooms do you want your home? It's a safe question to ask because they're going to give you a number and you don't really care about the number. It could be two. It could be 10. Doesn't matter. We need to ask open-ended questions. Tell me about how you'll use those bedrooms. And here's the problem with open-ended questions is they're scary and they're dangerous because we can't control what comes next. We need to let go of that control and just go with the flow because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what we think and what we're trying to control. We need to slow things down and ask more questions and ask better questions. Because as we start to ask more questions, what we what happens is we start to understand the emotional motivations, the dreams, the aspirations, the fears even of what's going on inside their brains.

We're listening for the that fear or that anticipation of gain. Man, that is such a huge difference maker in our ability to then connect that to the home that we go show. If we can connect that to the home we go show and instead of walking on the house and just start pointing things out, we can say, "Hey, remember when you told me you wanted to do this with this bedroom? Well, I thought that this home would be perfect for that because look, that is an enormous difference because it goes to show that you were listening, that you care, and that you are specifically finding things just for them. The other things it does is it creates a lack of buyer remorse after the fact. It creates increased satisfaction on their part. And and nobody wants to hear this. If we have to hit reset, it gives us the opportunity to really hit reset from a position of strength where let's say we go show five or six homes to somebody, none of them work. And it's because there was a misunderstanding or they weren't being honest or they weren't being forthcoming because we need to connect it to this over here. or it could just be they're a first-time buyer and they see something and now the reality is different than what they thought it was going to be or they haven't bought or sold a home in a long time and the same is true. But it gives us the opportunity to hit that reset button from a position of let's go back and reconnect. This is what you told me.