Keith’s Musings Vol. 7: Finding the Shore

The most important thing in a shifting market is your client’s “why”.

This is the foundational element for working with buyers (or really any client but I’ll use buyers in this example) in a shifting market. Because things are by nature changing (I mean that is what shifting is right?) its very natural for people to be worried, scared, confused and more. The more you can understand WHY they are thinking of buying right now. Buying a house is stressful. Buying a house in a shifting market is even more stressful. They’ve gone from “I may never be able to buy a house” to “is now the right time to buy a house”. You’ve got to discover their why because we either move towards pleasure or away from pain. To help them thorough the process you’ve got to understand the pain they are experiencing, the pleasure on the other side of buying and moving and do those equal enough desire to move forward in the current market conditions.

This is helping them see the shore. There is a famous story about Florence Chadwick who  was the first woman to swim the English Channel- a round trip… there AND back. And she did it. After that she decided to swim across the Catalina Channel and she swam for 16 hours in the fog and was just a half a mile away from the shore when she quit. She is even quoted as saying: “Look, I’m not excusing myself, but if I could have seen land I might have made it.” She quit because she couldn’t see her “why” and she didn’t know how close she was to the shore. A link to her whole story is here.

Not to wax poetic but our role is to be the wind the blows the fog out of the process so they can always (or usually) see the land. So they can understand WHY they are going through all this. At it’s most simple that is what we do. You’ve got to get really good at understanding, discovering and sometimes helping them discover their “why”. And then push as much out of the way of their vision (aforementioned fog) so they can see the shore.

We all get programed with default answers to questions. The things we say are often not a lie their just the mental scripts we’ve developed for answering questions. To really get to someone’s “why” and get past their mental scripts they have I have found two things to be really really important:

Be Present

Eliminate all distractions. Put your phone away. Clear your mind and for that time just be full present in the moment with your client. Be a very active listener and focus all your energy on them. Listen. Listen hard. Like to the point where you’re scooching forward in your seat to hear better. You’ve got to literally and figuratively “Lean In” to the conversation.

Be Curious

One key to this conversation is to ask a ton of questions. Have a real desire to learn about them. Ask them to restate things if you don’t understand or even if you do a simple “tell me a little more about that” can often help them to articulate it better or open new doors. I had a trainer once who said “Just ask them questions and they’ll give you all the bullets to load your gun when it’s your turn to talk”.  Yuck. That is just gross. Like super icky yucky nasty gross. That isn’t what curiosity is at all. There is no “gun loading” there is only how to serve them better. In real curiosity there is no space for manipulation. Period. Just keep asking questions until you have a firm image of what is important to them. And remember its usually not the first thing they tell you. Those are those mental scripts we talked about earlier.

So show up. Be present. Ask questions. And most importantly help your clients see the shore.

Keith