Kevin Ward argues real estate agents waste energy trying to seem different when they should focus on results instead. His script: tell sellers you'll get their house sold, not that you're unique. Stop chasing novelty.
Chapters
Hey, guys, it's Kevin Ward here. And it's actually Saturday and I'm here at the office and I'm actually recording the audio version of the book of. Yes, I've been really. It's been really exciting over the last four months. Since the book was published in the end of January, it has been on the Amazon number one best seller list almost the whole time for the last four months. So we're just now getting around. I'm just now getting around to recording the audio version to make the audiobook of it. So I'm sitting here with my YETI microphone and my. I don't know if you can see that. So I'm doing that. And then I've got here the actual. The actual book. And one of the things I'm recording right now is an objection handler for real estate agents. Whenever a seller asks, so, what are you going to do different than the others? How are you different than all the other real estate agents out there? And I just think about that because it really is something that disturbs me. And I see a lot of this. It's almost like a popular, a pop fad thing and that is trying to be different. And I think it became popular. I don't know at what point, but in the last. I've been in real estate now 18 years. So at some point in that time, this whole concept of having a unique selling proposition or a unique value proposition came really became really popular. And so everybody was trying to figure out, how do I be unique, how do I be different? And I really think it's probably more than 18 years old, because whenever I first got in real estate, I remember being the hat lady. And I always just. I thought, how corny is that? The hat lady? And that's how she marketed herself. And that was. I mean, it's like, okay, you're definitely unique, but I don't know if there's any value there. So I want to just. I just had to share this thought, and that is, if you're in a business where you're wanting to establish yourself in your niche, in your ground, and you want to establish a uniqueness about who you are, what you do, I want to just say this. Stop trying to be different. The goal is not to be unique. The goal is not to be different. The goal is to add value to people. And whatever it is your business is, whatever it is you're doing, your goal is to add more value to people. To be. Not to be different, but to be better and focus. If you're Going to focus on a unique value proposition. Focus on the value part of it rather than the unique part. It's okay to be different, but don't try to be different just for different sake. So I'm just going to share this because I think it's very powerful because I remember this was years ago. I'd been in the real estate industry for real estate business for a couple of years, and I'd always been afraid to prospect to call expired listings homeowners that were in the luxury market. Because I grew up in a mobile home, I just didn't feel worthy of it. And so I was afraid. And I can remember one day I finally decided, you know what I'm going to start calling the luxury homes. I'm going to call the houses over a million dollars in South Lake. I was in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex and South Lake and Colleyville was that luxury market home that I was intimidated by. And I can remember calling an expired listing a house that the property had been on the market and then the listing had expired and I called that house and it was over a million dollars in South Lake. And I can remember her asking this question. She said, just tell me this one thing. What are you going to do different than all the other agents? And I want you to send me an email with what you're going to do different. And we're going to take all those emails and we're going to pick the one that we ones that we like the best and then we're going to interview them. And I can remember sitting there being totally stumped, like, oh, what am I going to do different? And it dawned on me and it took me, I don't know, it took me years to figure this out. It finally dawned on me that they aren't really. They don't really care about different. What they care about is we're trying to figure out who's actually going to get us the better result, who's going to get our house sold. And so once I figured that out, it was like, I know the answer to the question if ever a seller asked me, what are you going to do different than any other agent? So here's my script. Here is, what are you going to do different than everybody else? I'm going to go, well, I'm going to get your house sold because that is what you want, right? See, I'm not going to go off into how I'm different because they don't really. They're not looking for me to be different. They're looking for me to be better than their last experience. They were. Their list house had been with. They had hired an agent to sell their house. The agent had failed. And so obviously they don't want to repeat that experience. So they're saying, how do we know you're not going to suck like the last agent did? So the way they ask the question is, what are you going to do different? They're not caring about whether you're different or not. What they're caring about is, are you going to deliver us a better result? So don't focus on being different. Focus on what your clients really want, which is the value, which is the result. When you focus on that, not only will you win, but you can always expect. Yes.
