In 2023, I rebuilt my entire sales process from scratch.
It took me six months to get it right.
Why?
Because something was seriously flawed in the way we were doing things. We sounded robotic. We were losing deals to others. Sellers were hanging up on us. It was a hard 6 months, trying to re-learn a completely different sales process.
But it completely changed our results for the better.
We started closing more and BIGGER deals. Sellers left us glowing reviews! And we were even able to turn the “price shoppers” into calm, workable sellers!
So below is a 12 point article showing you the principles that make our sales process:
(NOTE the following is based on an interview I did. See the full story and how I built our sales process here):
1. Drop the fake rapport. Sellers can smell it.
The first thing most people want to do is open the call with "Hey, how are you doing today?!" all upbeat and excited. That's commission breath, and sellers pick up on it in about two seconds. They've already talked to a dozen other investors who opened the exact same way, so we don't do it anymore. We get on the phone, say clearly why we're calling, and reference that they requested information about possibly selling their home. No theatrics, no fake energy, no pretending we're best friends already. That one change alone makes the whole call feel different.
2. Always be disarming.
Most sales coaches will tell you "always be selling," but we do the opposite. Every line in our opener is built to lower the seller's guard instead of pushing on it. Instead of saying "I'd like to make you an offer on your home" which usually gets a fast no and a hangup, we say something like "you may be interested in hearing some options to possibly sell your home." Same intent, totally different reaction on the other end of the line. The less they feel sold to, the longer they stay on the phone with us, and the more we actually learn about their situation.
3. How you say it matters more than what you say.
You can have the best written script in the world and it won't work if your tone and pace are wrong. I speak slowly on purpose, and my tone is deliberate the whole way through the call. After I started doing this, the number one piece of feedback I got wasn't about my words at all. People kept telling me how calm I sounded, and one person actually told me I should make tapes for kids to fall asleep to. That's when I knew the message was landing, because the delivery was the message. If you're rushing through your script trying to get to the close, you're losing people before you even get there.
4. Detach from the outcome.
This one is the hardest, and it's the one that took me the longest to figure out. If you're sitting on the call focused on getting the contract, you can't actually hear the seller, because you're too busy planning your next question. We had to train ourselves to stop chasing the contract on the call and start focusing on delivering a real result for the person on the other end of the line. Sounds backwards, but the contracts actually started showing up once we quit reaching for them. Sellers can feel the difference between someone trying to help them and someone trying to close them.
5. Get sellers out of price-based thinking.
A seller who's locked on a number is a seller you can't actually help yet. They'll cut you off with "what's your offer, what's your offer" before you even get a chance to understand what's going on with them. If you give a price too early in that conversation you're done, because they'll just shop it around. Our job in the first call is to move them out of price thinking and into situation thinking, which means asking about what's going on in their life and what they're actually trying to solve. Once they're out of price mode, the whole call opens up and you can actually start helping them.
6. Memorize the script. Don't wing it.
Early on I thought I could improvise my way through these calls and just be naturally persuasive. Turns out nobody is that good, and I definitely wasn't. When you get nervous on a call you revert back to whatever is most familiar, so if the most familiar thing is a memorized script, that's what's going to come out of your mouth. Practice it out loud, run it in the mirror, say it until you can breathe it without thinking. The script is what holds you together when the call gets weird or the seller throws something unexpected at you, and every call eventually gets weird.
7. Listen to your own calls every week.
This is the habit nobody actually wants to do, and it's the one that changed everything for me. Pull one or two of your own calls every week and listen back to them with a critical ear. You're going to find the same mistakes showing up over and over, like talking over the seller, missing what they said because you were thinking about the next question, or rushing through a section because you got uncomfortable. Pick one of those mistakes and work on it the next week. You cannot get better at sales without hearing yourself on the phone, because what you think you sound like and what you actually sound like are two very different things.
8. Don't ditch the process when it gets uncomfortable.
When I first started running this new approach, I lost deals. I sounded stiff on calls. I wanted to throw the whole thing out and go back to what I already knew worked, even if it wasn't working that great. Most people do exactly that, they run a new process for two or three weeks and decide it's broken. It took me six full months before this thing felt natural and started producing the results I was looking for. If you're going to rebuild the way you sell, you have to give it real time, otherwise you'll just keep cycling between half-broken processes for the rest of your career.
9. Stop building rapport on the house. Build it on the situation.
Nobody cares about the bedroom count or the square footage in the first call, not really, and asking about it just delays the conversation you actually need to have. What you really need to understand is what's going on in their life that made them pick up the phone in the first place, what their timeline looks like, and what kind of pressure they're under. When you ask about the situation instead of the property, you find out pretty quickly whether you can actually help them or not. And the seller starts to feel like they're talking to someone who's interested in them as a person, which a lot of times is the first time anyone in this process has made them feel that way.
10. The angry seller isn't the problem. Your opener is.
We used to get screamed at all the time on intake calls. Sellers were hanging up on us, the team was getting beat up by the end of the day, and we just assumed those were bad leads or bad people. Once we changed how we opened the call, most of that went away on its own. The "I want a price, I want a price" sellers basically stopped showing up because we weren't triggering them anymore with the way we were talking. If your team is constantly getting hostile sellers, the leads probably aren't the issue, and you should look hard at how you're starting those conversations before you blame anything else.
11. Reset the tone by resetting yours.
If the seller gets heated or starts pushing back hard, the worst thing you can do is match their energy. Slow your pace down even more than it already was, drop your voice a little, and get calmer instead of louder. People naturally match the tone of whoever sounds more in control of the conversation, and that needs to be you every single time. This one move has saved more calls for me than just about anything else I do, because once you bring the temperature down they almost always follow. It works so consistently that I almost don't believe it myself.
12. Patience is the skill nobody trains for.
Most salespeople quit a new process after a couple of weeks because they don't see fast results and they bail back to whatever they were doing before. Six months is what it took me to get comfortable with this, and during that time I had to keep running the script, keep listening back to my own calls, and keep trusting that all the reps were going to pay off eventually. They did pay off, but only because I didn't quit when it was hard. If you can't be patient with your own development as a salesperson, you're never going to actually get good at this, and every top performer I know has gone through some version of the same awkward six months I did.
Look, none of this is complicated, but it's not easy either. Most of what changed our results came down to slowing down, listening better, and trusting the process long enough to actually let it work. The script matters, but the way you deliver it matters more. The questions matter, but whether you actually hear the answers matters more than that. And the willingness to sit through six months of awkward calls while you rewire how you sell is what separates the people who get good at this from the people who keep blaming their leads.
If you take one thing from this article, take this: stop trying to close on the call and start trying to help the person on the other end of the line. The contracts will follow. They always do.
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