You have a great prospect for buying or selling. You want to be sure they buy a home or list their home with you. If you’re like most agents, you want to have powerful sales tools you can use to impress your prospects. You feel these tools will give you an edge over the competition. In truth, fancy sales aids are usually are no more than crutches and when relied on too heavily, they will ensure you don’t get the business. Some of the best agents in Real Estate come to an appointment with no more than printed research material and an Agreement.

How is this possible? Most successful agents and virtually every successful company has impressive information and material they want to share with their clients. With every good agent sharing quality material, it does nothing more than cancel out the material being shared by your competition. Your prospect gets so confused, that they begin to feel like every company and agent thinks they’re the best. In reality, you’re fancy aids are no more impressive than those being used by your competition.

Let’s look at the typical sales aids, or crutches that agents rely on:

Printed Materials–  4 color, glossy brochures can be impressive, but they don’t sell you to your prospect.

Marketing Materials– Same challenge as above. Take a look at the material given by every company. It’s very similar.

Internet Exposure– Every company and agent promises global exposure via the internet. The truth is that participation on Realtor.com, Trulia.com, Zillow.com, and Homefinder.com, will get you the majority of exposure on the net, so there is no real difference here.

Company Resume -Every company spins the numbers to work in their favor. It all sounds the same to your prospects.

Affiliations– They are definitely good. The problem is that everyone has lots of them. Once again, you sound like everyone else.

Social Media– The next generation sales approaches. Sounds great, but everybody in every industry uses it.

You- Now you’ve got something to talk about, even if your resume isn’t as strong as the competitions.

Points 1-6 above, aren’t going to do the trick because it all sounds like “blah, blah, blah” to your Buyers and Sellers.  In almost every case, people do business with the representatives they can associate with and who they think can get the job done. It’s not the sales aids you bring. It’s what you say and do that makes your prospects be impressed with you. It’s your personality, knowledge, experience, confidence and energy that gets the job done. And, your clients know it. There are 3 parts to every presentation. They are;

The Introduction/Warm-up– Where you sell yourself.

The Presentation– Where you sell the company, area and product.

The Close– Where your prospects give you their business.

Guess which one is the most important. That’s right. It’s The Warm-Up. This is the part of the presentation where you:

Gather Information

Build Rapport by finding common ground

Sell Yourself and your expertise

This part of the presentation always begins with:

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions to get a feel for where you’re at. Then I can be specific in terms of the suggestions I will make and we can see if there is a fit. Is that okay”.

The moral of the story, don’t get so engrossed in the fancy presentation “crutches” available to you. Instead, focus most of your energy on building rapport with your prospects in the Warm-Up Phase of the presentation.