Overcoming Objections and Attitudes

This is part of my series on selling to Real Estate Agents. I’ll assume you’ve already viewed my posts on Setting Appointments, Benefit Fulfillment Sales Techniques, Profiling Real Estate Agents, and The Decision Pendulum. All are available in my Training Center. We are almost ready to close the deal, but now we need to overcome any final attitudes and objections.

Maybe the most likely of all hurdles to overcome in the sales process is indifference. If, up until now, you did all of the talking and very little listening, indifference means you haven’t shown the agent any real need for them to work with you. You can have all the coolest programs in the world, they only care about the one or two that will directly help their client. Remember all of those leading questions I told you to ask. Hopefully you uncovered a missed niche/benefit that you can fulfill. You need to continually reinforce the fact that you can help them in this case. Once you get one deal under your belt, you can fight to expand your pipeline based on that success.

Another attitude that comes up is disbelief. You’ve found a way to help them and told them so, but they’ve herd it before from a dozen other loan officers without it ever coming to fruition. You need to prove to them that you can deliver on what you are selling. No amount of arguing/sweet talking is going to get you passed this attitude. Instead, you need to let your past performance do the talking for you. Providing proof of performance can come from a variety of sources. These include testimonial letters from other real estate agents or clients/borrowers, magazines or newspaper articles, or even a good word from 3rd party sources like title reps or appraisers. Offer this proof sandwiched between two statements of your own like so;

1. State your commitment to this agent with emotion. 2. Provide proof of your performance. 3. Go back to step one.

This technique not only offers proof, but establishes your enthusiasm and commitment to working with the agent.

In addition to these attitudes, there are hidden objections that also need to be rooted out and overcome. The first type of objection is a simple misunderstanding. As you are explaining benefits that you feel the agent will accept, make sure they understand why it benefits them. Ask them if they think it will benefit them. If they say no, ask them why. Most of the time, they simply misunderstood what you are offering. Correct them and keep selling.

It’s also possible they have a real objection. In order to handle this, state the objection as a question. for instance, “So, you only work with brokers that offer FHA”? Get it out on the table. In this case, if you can’t do FHA, you need to reiterate the other benefits that you know are of value to the agent. Make them weigh the pro’s and cons to see that it’s still worth it to work with you. What you do not want to do is, argue with them over the importance of their objection. For instance, “No, we don’t do FHA because it’s a rip-off for the borrower.” All you have done is insulted the values of the agent. It wouldn’t matter if it were true or not, you just killed a lot of good faith and reinforced their level of disbelief.

Once you feel that you have uncovered and addressed their attitudes and objections, it’s time to close!

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