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Get Better Results With These Techniques
Countless books have been written on the subject and most of you have seen conferences offered on how to become more persuasive. Every day we are inundated with persuasion to buy a product, dress a certain way or to join a social cause. To save you the cost of an all day event let’s look at seven ways we can be more persuasive in our daily business and yes, even our personal life. The following is from a recent article by Robert Locke.
1- Use EQ, Emotional Inteligence. Our presidential speechwriters are a shining example of using emotional arousal and appeal. Martin Luther King employed this technique in his speeches moving his audiences to a higher level of thought and commitment. Practically speaking we can flex our EQ by being tuned in to our surroundings when meeting with potential borrowers or in a social gathering.
2- Body language. Words may fail us at times. Body language can pick up the slack or better yet, reinforce our verbal message. Be mindful of your posture, the use of your hands, leaning forward when your prospect speaks and more.
3- Try a sit-down. Emails, texts and phone calls are convenient but not always the most effective means of…
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4 Comments
Good presentation Shannon. If I had to add to the list I would add, “Finding the need”.
To find the need of your prospect you must follow your suggestions but you have to ask pointed questions.
You would not be sitting in the home of a senior if they did not have a need for your product and services. Once the need is defined, then proceed to continue to build their trust in you, follow all of the pints you brought up Shannon and close the transaction.
You should walk out of the home with a happy senior and a hug!
John A. Smaldone
John,
You are so right but finding and defining that need is harder when working with the mass affluent than when working with those who have much more CURRENT need.
When seniors with low monthly cash inflow is in trouble meeting reasonable budget goals, the HECM solution is generally easy to sell. Discovering and being able to bring some urgency about the discovered need to those who meet or exceed their monthly budget goals and otherwise have sufficient cash reserves for the near future are a much more difficult proposition unless they are already trying to solve that need.
Many of the needs of the mass affluent are real but are in the future and like the needs based prospect, when there is time to cure the problem the reaction is to delay looking into the cure until the need is a lot closer.
Those originators who will excel with the current HECM will be those who can passionately explain why getting a HECM today is far superior to getting one in the future when the need is there.
It is not folly to reach out to financial advisors but when you go, be prepared. Financial advisors are very proud and protective of their reputations. Do not expect them to see advising a client about a HECM the same way you do although some will. For many clients especially those who have not done as well as others through the advice of the financial advisor, solutions using a HECM with its upfront costs may sound more like a last ditch effort by the financial advisor to keep the client. On the other hand those with whom the financial advisor has been successful may see the solution as all but admitting that the current plan will not work. So originators should make efforts with financial advisors slow but steady and do not expect immediate results. Remember not all financial advisors will see things your way or the way just presented but most will.
Shannon has once again distilled the essentials out of an important topic.
Shannon has also clarified why we are not educators but salespeople. We simply use education as our style.
Any religious preacher who is not selling just educating will soon have a congregation of two, the preacher and the preacher’s spouse, if any. Rarely has any financial product ever been put in front of a prospect and the prospect looked through the document with no explanation and purchased that product. Other financial products are like HECMs; they are sheets of paper which contain printed words that make little sense to anyone but salespeople and the attorneys who wrote the words.
The best school teachers sell. My best teachers were passionate about what they taught. In the early seventies, one professor was emphatetic that if we did not master discounted cash flows we would end up not understanding the mathematical basis for mortgages, the method of valuing income producing assets, and other financial transactions. If now was when I was in business school, HECM set asides like LESAs and servicing fee set asides might be found in that list.
Unlike industry leadership, whose voices have generally remained dumb, it has not been pleasant to watch our industry’s endorsed sales volume fall to less than half of what it was in 2009. For over 6 years our numbers have been miserable. Yet in that time home values in all but a few large metro areas in the country have all but recovered. There are approximately 20 million more Baby Boomers in our market and the economy although tepid is still moving forward. Home sales have returned to almost historic norms and we are daily barraged with stories from the news media pointing to the need of more cash sources in retirement.
Yet the best we have gotten from leadership is that our volume is returning to 100,000 next year or 300,000 by 2018. It seems they have failed at even getting our volume up by an allegedly collaborative campaign that lacked both substantial cooperation or coordination needed to succeed. Where was the burning passion for the success of the Extreme Summit? If leadership did not own it, no one will. It seems our leadership is losing heart.
We do not need educators or administrators at our helm right now. We need real sales leadership that knows how to take an industry in a downturn and turn it around. As someone correctly predicted, if we are expecting financial planners to take us out of our downturn, then we are sailing on the wrong ship. No matter how many Realtors the misguided H4P advocates “educate” significantly higher H4P endorsements are just like a sleeping giant. Giants are little more than figments of someone’s very fertile imagination so how can you wake them?
Good message. I let people talk. There are lots of pauses in our conversation. They need time to collect their thoughts.