In 2012, a study by researchers at Princeton University explored personal network sizes and found that that average person knows approximately 600 people by first name. This includes acquaintances, friends, colleagues, and family members.
However, according to the “Dunbar’s Number,” a concept made popular by a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar, most people can maintain stable social relationships with only around 150 people. These are individuals closest to you and you maintain regular social contact with them.
Many individuals get into the real estate business and try to capitalize on this group of people, commonly known as your sphere of influence, and are lucky to convert 10%, or roughly 15 people.
Once warm leads are exhausted, the frightening reality is that all future deals will come from people you haven’t met yet, and your success in business hinges on how frequently and consistently you talk to strangers every day.
Although we can all agree that prospecting is the most crucial activity in our business, the vast majority of agents don’t understand why they struggle at it, despite all their ‘attempts’ at doing it.
So we’re going to break it down here and give you some things to think about.
Mastering Prospecting Is Not One Task; It’s Actually Three.
Agents see prospecting as a singular skill to conquer, but it’s actually made up of three subcomponents that come together. If an agent is unable to master all three, then the ability to be good at prospecting collapses. Let’s examine each one separately.
Your Fear Of Rejection (don’t skip this)
When we talk about prospecting, it could refer to cold calls, door knocking, attending social events, or any other activity involving the act of introducing yourself to a stranger and asking if they’d be interested in your real estate services.
Lets face it, people don’t have a need for real estate services every day in their lives. It’s the equivalent of asking a total stranger if they want you to be their personal trainer. The odds of finding an interested customer is far less than asking someone if they would be interested in buying a box of freshly baked donuts.
And here is the first problem.
Most agents, prior to getting into the business, have never experienced the overwhelming volume of rejection that they face when they’re prospecting for real estate clients.
Agents have unreasonably high expectations that someone is going to say yes, and that doesn’t align with the true reality of prospecting.
Prospecting is not an activity of steady success, it is an activity of frequent failure.
People are not saying no to you because they don’t like you. They are saying no to you because that’s just the way it is.
It’s the same reason why if I asked you to guess what number I was thinking about, between 1 and 100, you likely wouldn’t guess it after many attempts.
That leads us to our second problem.
In sales, we make an offer to a prospect and if we’re lucky, the offer fits a need and it gets accepted. But most of the time, the offer will be rejected for a few reasons:
- You’re making the wrong type of offer (your offer doesn’t match their needs).
- It’s the right offer but the numbers don’t make sense for them.
- The timing isn’t right for them (they don’t need your offer right now).
Our fear of rejection is almost always rooted in the feeling of personal disapproval.
Think about it this way. If someone doesn’t personally like you, there’s really not much you’re going to change because your personality is fairly fixed. You simply go and find people who align with your character.
In prospecting, if someone rejects you, there are precise things we can identify to improve our chances of getting better results next time. This could mean becoming better at conveying our offer, or finding people who are more likely to say yes.
Stop associating rejection with your identity, and attach it to the offer.
Weak Sales Skills (And Knowledge)
Many years ago a door-to-door salesperson rang our doorbell and was selling water filters. I wasn’t interested because we drank from the tap and it was safe water.
He looked me dead in the eye and said, “I think you’re going to be shocked what the water is like in this neighborhood. I can show you if you give me a glass of water, it’ll take 10 minutes.”
Of course now I’m super curious and let him in.
Over the course of the next 15 minutes, he tests my tap water and to my horror some scary numbers pop up on his testing machine and I start to see dark gunk forming at the bottom of the glass. He then tests water out of a brand new unopened bottle of water from my fridge and it still registers ‘stuff’ in it.
Then he hooks up his filter to my tap and tests the water that comes out and it shows up as completely clean. Dammit.
He then turns to my wife and asks her if she has dry skin in the house, and she replies that she’s constantly using moisturizer. A few more tests later and it shows that our water is too hard and we need it softened.
I’m pretty good at sales, but every objection I had, he handled like a pro. He was calm, knowledgeable, and knew how to hit all the right pain points. He played to my wife’s emotions and backed up everything with sound logic. She wanted it more than the vacation we were saving up for.
$8,000 later, we just bought ourselves a water filtration system with water softener, all for a low monthly payment with no interest. Quick and painless.
There are two important highlights from this:
- You have to intimately know what you’re selling. (Study more)
- You have to know how to present it as the best solution to someone’s current problem. (Roleplay more)
It’s not enough to be only good at one – you have to be good at both.
Having product knowledge without the sales skills is useless. That’s why experienced people lose job opportunities by failing at the interview.
In real estate, you might be door knocking looking for listings. How well do you know the market activity for that particular street? Are you familiar with the other listings in the area? Do you know why some houses are selling while others are still on the market? Do you have a unique strategy to squeeze out as much money as possible for a particular home? Do you know why someone should hire you?
You Don’t Believe It’s Going To Work
I covered this in a previous article called Turning An Awful Lead Into A Sale where I touched upon the cognitive behavior model behind our procrastination.
Essentially, our Thoughts > Feelings >Actions >Results.
If you’re thinking that prospecting isn’t going to give you results, then you sabotage the entire chain of events following that thought.
Basic human physiology shows that if the average person wants to lose weight, they just have to eat less and exercise more. This is a universal formula that applies to almost every human being on the planet.
And yet, the vast majority of people struggle with keeping a diet or exercising regularly. In short, people give up because they go all-in for a quick period of time and don’t see drastic results, so they decide that it doesn’t work.
Once you’ve convinced yourself that something isn’t worth doing, you’ll fight every urge to trade your time and effort for no reward. We don’t like to be uncomfortable unless we’re paid handsomely for it.
When you’re prospecting, all the signs will be flashing failure. You have to commit to a longer period of pain before you stumble upon a successful encounter.
And then, you’re going to go through it all over again, and it only marginally gets better. This isn’t easy on creatures of comfort like us. Your brain needs to be primed and re-primed to handle this state of scarcity, and it gets tougher as the rejections pile up.
There are several ways to tackle this:
- Watch someone who is better than you accomplish the task. This reassures your brain that it works.
- Measure your results based on more attempts rather than less. In other words, instead of expecting to get x number results from 10 prospects, change it to x amount of results from 50 prospects, or 100 prospects. Stick with your outreach until you accomplish speaking to that number of people, and then reflect on your results.
- Ask yourself if you honestly have something better to do. If you hate the idea of door knocking, are you prepared to phone prospect instead? If neither one of those work for you, what other methods of prospecting are you willing to do that will give you consistent results? If you can’t find any, what options are you left with? Coming to grips with how you’re going to routinely find clients will help you come to terms with prospecting.
- Have a time goal instead of an outcome goal. Instead of committing to calling 20 people a day, commit to being the agent that spends two hours every morning religiously prospecting. It’s much easier to accomplish a time goal with 100% success than it is to achieve a results goal in a low-conversion activity.
Assembling The Parts To Be A Prospecting Machine
Okay, I admit this is a little bit overdramatic.
But here’s the important takeaway.
Habits, belief systems, and skills are stackable. They may exist independently of each other, but put together, they can create high-return (or disastrous) outcomes.
Prospecting doesn’t just require several soft skills – it requires an abundance of patience and resilience. Nobody likes to get slapped in the face once, let alone 30 times in a row. People are just not accustomed to that length of discomfort. Ironically, the highest paid people in the world are the ones that can endure the most amount of discomfort.
This is why most agents will never get good at prospecting.
But you’re different.
You’re an agent with a plan, and you’re going to conquer the industry.
*High five*