Scripts, scripts, scripts!

Scripts, scripts, scripts, scripts and dialogues, too many of you are grossly under estimating the power of them. In the last couple of weeks this has come up a bit with some really talented agents by the way who said, “I don’t use scripts. I just speak from my heart. I just say how I feel. I think about how the consumer feels. I talk genuinely”. I’ve really heard it all. I’ve heard even some people in the last couple of weeks say, “I’ve been at this 30 years, I’ve been at this 20 years, and I don’t use any scripts”.

It finally hit me tonight because someone come and commented on Crush It and it was a good follower, good guy, good realtor. I don’t really know him personally but I know of him and I’ve heard nothing but good things. He says, “Well, I’ve been doing this 30 years. I don’t use scripts.” It finally hit me, and I thank him for doing it. I said to myself, “I know what the problem is.” People don’t understand what sales trainers mean when they say scripts. They don’t understand it. They look at it like some crazy sales tactic, some way to pull the wool over people’s eyes and fool them and not do what’s best for them. It finally hit me.

Maybe I’m overreacting a little bit with those reactions doing all this stuff, but obviously I’m just thinking it through and it hit me that people are really under estimating them. I want to spend a few minutes talking about that. Folks, scripts and dialogues in knowing what to say, when to say and how to say it is the single most important part of sales. That does not mean bullshitting. That does not mean lying. It doesn’t. It means learning the proper way to articulate a point.

Us Realtors all know when homes don’t sell and they’re listed correctly with good pictures and they look good and other homes are selling, it’s more often than not the price or always the price, let’s be real if all those other things are in place. Many sellers, they don’t believe that, they don’t want to believe that so they mad. When you learn how to talk to them correctly and explain things correctly and utilize words and sentences that make them go, “Geez, I never thought of it that way”, that’s how you can be more impactful. In the end that script that you’re using is better for them, it’s helping them.

The same thing with buyers, we have some scripts that we use to convince buyers to come into the office for a consultation as opposed to just running around showing the buyers houses from the beginning. What’s better for a buyer? Is it better for a buyer to have a consultation, lay out the expectations, explain the home buying process, connect them to a system that will automatically send them the properties that match their criteria or just run them around rampant and show them all kinds of properties and let the buyer keep looking on Zillow, looking on Trulia, looking on realtor.com, folks we know what’s better.

When you call the doctor and say, “My knee hurts”, they don’t say, “I’ll see you in the OR next Tuesday.” You call the doctor and say, “My stomach is sick I need to have my appendix out. Can you take it out tomorrow at 4:00?” Doctor doesn’t say, “Okay, see you there.” No, they explain why you need a consultation. Well, if it’s a doctor they’ll probably just be like, “Come into my office if you want me to consider operating on you”, but you guys get my point.

What has hit me tonight, and it’s great that this happened and I love that people made comments, because what hit me is people are looking at scripts the wrong way. They don’t understand, they don’t understand the value of– This isn’t everybody. I’m not talking to all of you, but people aren’t understanding the value of knowing what to say and knowing how to explain it. That’s a struggle for some. Folks, I’m a D personality, okay? If I know 20% of the subject matter I can probably get myself through a meeting. The majority of personalities can’t do that.

Take S personalities for example, or C personalities for example, if they don’t know each and every single aspect of what they’re meeting on and what they’re supposed to be explaining, they’re overcome with nerves and they can’t do a good job and they can’t even do as good of a job as they could even though they’re right. How often as a salesperson– My ex business partner, great guy, he used to say, this is the only business you can be completely right and make nothing. I don’t know if that’s true that it’s the only business but it’s sure true.

It’s like when you tell a seller they need to come down 30 grand on their price they don’t listen. They’ll hire another broker. That broker tells them they list the property, the property sells. Well, you were right but you didn’t make shit. I want people to think about that, because guys, the value of scripts is tremendous. I’ve been a big believer in this for many years. We have a book of scripts this thick. We have a book this thick for price adjustments. This thick for buyer scripts. This thick for seller meetings. This is especially true for those of you that want to be broker owners or our broker owners or our team leaders.

Guys, people on your team in your company more often than not most of them are not going to be able to speak as eloquently or articulate things as well as you can. You’re the owner, your names on the door, you also get away with a little bit more because of that. You’re in the position you’re in because you’re probably especially good at it in most cases, not all. Plenty of owners out there who are good at the brokerage aspect but not at the sales aspect, but you guys get my point.

If you have some scripts to work or say some sentences and some meetings that you go, “Wow, that resonated with the seller. That resonated with the buyer”, start writing them down, start recording them, because guys, all the scripts that we have that’s how we did it, we put them together.

To this day our top agents come into training and say, “Hey, I said something the other day to a buyer and it really seemed to make sense to them”. I’m like a vulture, “What is it? What is it? What did you say? What worked?”, and we add it into our book of scripts.

You all should think about that because I suppose it’s easy to say, “I don’t use scripts. I’m above scripts. I’m better than scripts. I speak from the heart.” No folks, you’re mistaken.

You’re mistaken if you don’t think they’ll have a dramatic impact on your business.