The Order of Operations in Home Sales
A recorded conversation (YouTube) between Jim Johnson and another speaker about using AI (RealVoice) to analyze in-home sales presentations. They report analysis of ~500,000 sales conversations and identify repeatable behaviors of top performers: they speak ~20% less, maintain roughly a 50/50 talk ratio with homeowners, ask more and sustained open-ended questions throughout the visit, remain continually in discovery, and handle objections by asking clarifying questions (e.g., “What do you mean?”).
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So let's switch gears a little bit here. We've been talking a lot about AI and its impact and a lot of scary stuff, a lot of cool stuff. Let's talk about real of voice specifically. I'm going to remind everybody what it does. It records your in home sales presentation, which there isn't anything out there that does it like what RealVoice does. Yeah, it takes that information, transcribes it, but it also says, hey, this is the piece or the thing that this guy's saying, who's being successful here? It is. You should try that. Right. Like, it parses out those things that are being successful. What are you finding that tends to be uniform across all the companies out there? We won't have to like, pick one specifically, because I don't think that's fair.
But.
But what are you finding that's uniform? That's like maybe eye opening or, hey, I kind of thought that. And we proved it.
So we analyzed 500,000 sales conversations with our AI. Right. That's all. Just 500,000? Yeah. We're going to tell our team to do more. Just, you know, they made Jim disappointed. We're going to do more. So we analyze 500,000 sales conversations with AI and we kind of. We looked at what the top performers across the country, across different industries. What is it that they're doing differently in that home with those homeowners? What is it that they're saying specifically, and how is it that they're saying it so that they can close more deals? And we're talking people that are bringing in more than $3 million in revenue to their businesses every single year. Right. So we're talking about absolute top, you know, 1% of performers across the country. What is it that that makes them special scientifically? Right. You know, that's one of the things. Like, not, yes, there's personality and yes, there's an art, but there's also a science to sales. Right. And so we kind of ran the numbers and we found some pretty interesting things. Right. One of the first things that we found that was common across industries, especially when it's in home sales. It's like talk ratio. One of the things we measure is how long is the salesperson talking versus the customer. And you probably didn't need AI to figure this out, but now we have the numbers. The numbers are in, ladies and gentlemen, and the numbers are in. And they say that the top performers talk 20% less than the average performers. The average rep spends 75% of the time talking in the home versus the homeowner. And average performers, consistently they're between 45 and 65% of the time they spend. It's basically like 50, 50 with the top performers and the homeowners, they elicit open ended questions, which I can talk about in a little bit. The elicit more open ended questions. They're able to get the homeowner talking for just, you know, a longer amount of time than the average reps and not, you know, 20%. If you just talk less, you, you increase your chances of selling by a lot. So that's one of the things we.
Thought that's first off, that's pretty incredible. And you're right, it proves what we thought.
Right.
Like you got two ears to listen with one mouth to speak that all the time. Open ended questions to gather information. But in sales, the training that exists out there in most places doesn't talk about that very much. They talk about order and format, they talk about how to beat objections. They talk about those kinds of things.
Yeah.
But they don't talk about the investigative side of it. And really what we are, if you, if you really want to get down to brass tacks, we as salespeople are detectives trying to solve a case. That's what, that's what we're doing. And so the more information we have and we can compile together, we can put it together and go, oh, down the path and there's the actual. We solve the case for you. Mr. And Mrs. Homeowner.
Yes.
Pretty cool to see that that is proven to be accurate. Yes, that's cool. What else have you found?
So one of the things we found like talking about like all these things of how to talk is that when the top performers. Right. So talking about open ended questions, the top performers, if you look at the, at the rate of open ended questions, they ask more open ended questions than usual. They're usually averaging like 5 to 10, whereas average performers are asking 1 to 5. Right. And so it's like almost twice. But then what you also see is that the rate at which top performers and again these are averages. Right. So there's conversations where there's more, more, there's conversations where there's less. But you know, one of the things we saw is that the rate at which top performers ask open ended questions during the conversation with a homeowner, it basically stays static. It's not that they ask all the like average reps are asking open ended questions and it's mostly like if you were to see it in a graph, it'd Be like the average reps would be like this many open ended questions at the beginning and then it kind of dies throughout the rest of the conversation. The top performers, they ask a lot of open end questions at the beginning, but it kind of, they keep doing it towards the end of the conversation. So it's a graph that's not like skewed to the right. It's a gray graph that's like kind of pretty consistent. Right.
And so that's really get more, more in depth and maybe even almost more aggressive because there's comfort now and trust between the two parties. And so you can ask more, you can ask a question later in the conversation that you couldn't ask earlier in the conversation. Are you finding any of that?
Well, what we think, and it just goes with another thing that we found is that typically it's that the top reps are always in discovery mode. They're always in discovery mode. So they do their discovery, their qualification at the beginning. Maybe you're doing an inspection and you're trying to figure out if this homeowner has any experience with a contractor before. You're trying to figure out how long they've been living in this home. Right? This is the standard questions that you're asking. Tell me a little bit about you. You called us here, right? But then when they get into the, you know, let's say you get the company story into the product demo, they, they see that the homeowner, you know, the homeowner's not, you know, reacting well to their presentation or to their demo. They stop and say, hey, I'm sorry, I must be doing something wrong. What about what I'm doing is not resident. There's something that's not resonating here. What, what's, what's going on? They stop, they literally stop and they see that it's not resonating and they literally say what's going on? And there's an open ended question, what's going on? Or if they see that it's really resonating, it's like, oh my God, this person. Hey, it sounds like you really like, you really like this part. Like what, what about this just resonated. Yeah.
What is it specifically that you like about it?
Yeah, yes, that's. And then when they deal with objections, this is another thing that I'm going to into. They tend to, they tend to answer objections with questions. So even at the end when they're, you know, dealing like price is $15,000 to do this roof. Oh my God. Jesus. I don't got $15,000 in the bank. That's. That's just not something we can. That price is too high. And then instead of saying, so the.
Answer to that is, what do you mean?
What do you mean? What do you mean exactly? What do you mean?
And so a lot of times we don't know as salespeople what they mean by that $50,000 is too high. Does it. Does it mean that they don't have the money? Does they. Does it mean that they don't know how they're gonna pay for it, but they think it's worth it? Does it mean that they're waiting on some money to come in later so they can actually do it? Like, we've got to get that clarity.
Yes.
Because we make assumptions, and they all know what. We all know what they say about that.
Right.
It makes the ass out of you and me to make assume that they're just saying it's too much. When they're not saying it's too much.
They'Re saying, you don't know what they're.
She's too much right this second.
That's just like the thing that they're saying, but you don't know what it is that they're actually thinking and what they actually mean by that. So it's like, what do you mean the price is too high? Help me understand. What do you mean by that?
Yeah, I bet you you don't answer that question ever, do you? Right. What. What do you mean this is too high?
I say, I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean?
That's super funny. So we've talked about.
We.
