Your Success Depends On It
It’s been said that your success in life depends on how well you “sell” yourself and your ideas to others.
This statement becomes particularly meaningful when we realize that everyone is already a salesperson, whether a successful one or not. We are all selling something, whether products or services, our technical and academic competency, our time, energy, political opinions or just ideas.
In fact, we all started selling from the moment we were born. We were hungry, we cried, someone put a bottle in our mouth, and we closed our first sale.
As we made our way through life and our sales career, we quickly learned that crying wasn’t always effective, so we had to try something new. As we grew and matured, we began to learn something about ourselves and other people. We soon learned that our success greatly depended on our sales-ability, and our sales-ability depended on our communication skills.
Whatever you sell, the message is clear. Our success depends not so much on what we know, but rather it’s on what we do with what we know that really counts. To put it another way, knowledge is neither wisdom nor power…until it’s been organized, directed, and applied by someone who knows how to communicate, motivate, convince, persuade, and influence others to think and act favorably with them.
Question? Do those who are more expert in ‘real estate knowledge’ sell more than those who are less knowledgable or new to the business?
Dr. Clifton Williams of Baylor University tested the essence of this premise by conducting an extensive research project using Baylor University graduates. The purpose of the project was to determine the correlation, if any, between one’s level of academic achievement, and one’s subsequent success in one’s personal and business life.
The results of this study revealed that the A and B students succeeded in class, but still managed to fail in their careers and personal lives, while as many students who were less successful academically went on to lead highly successful lives.
The conclusion is rather clear, it is not technical or academic knowledge so much as it is people knowledge and self-knowledge that makes the real difference in the real world.
Throughout my years as a brokerage company owner, coach, and trainer, I developed a set of RULES of the game. One of them is …”The most important subject to master in real estate is YOU!”
Sounds simple, however, in my experience, it is often the last place people want to look. I would go so far as to say that the answers to all questions should start with looking at YOU.
Ask yourself: how can your experience, attitude, values, or skill-set be tweaked to solve a given problem? It is a great starting point and one that needs to be approached without judgement. Just the willingness to begin by looking at oneself is in itself a sign of strength and confidence.
Summary: As a minimum, one needs real estate knowledge to succeed, but to succeed greatly, you need to understand yourself and others, including the principles of motivation and the dynamics occurring in our interpersonal relationships. in short, the more you know about what makes people tick, the better you will communicate and, commensurately, the more you will sell, because your success in life depends on it.
PS: It’s been said that the payoff we get for our time and energy in sales, is the price we deeply believe we deserve, or are willing to accept.
PPS: “Some people see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ while others dream of things as they can be and ask, ‘Why not?’”