If
I were to walk up to you and ask you to explain your cell phone plan to me,
that would be relatively easy, right?
You have three phones, two of which are smart phones so you pay an
upcharge of $XX, and you get 4GB of data each month (you usually use just over
2 GB except for those months when you have to take your car into the shop, and
they don’t have free WiFi
so you end up using a boatload of data playing Candy Crush and watching videos
on YouTube): all of this costs you $XXX/month.
Easy enough.
However,
if I asked you to explain how you arrived at that particular plan, there’s a
95% chance you’ll just shrug your shoulders and say, “I honestly can’t
remember. It’s all a blur now.” Why is that?
There are two parts to that answer.
The
first part is relatively simple to explain: it’s something you see every month
and doesn’t change –
you’ve become used to seeing it arrive in your mailbox or inbox, and unless
there’s a drastic change in the monthly price you’re accustomed to paying, you
don’t give it another look. Am I right? Now for the second part of the reason.
When
you originally walked into the store (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile,
etc.) to get your phones and their accompanying plan, you’re immediately
“greeted” by a plethora of shiny gadgets (phones that can slice, dice,
julienne, AND solve quadratic equations) and a man or woman wearing an
ill-fitting polo shirt who stares directly into your eyes so intently you’d
swear they can see your soul, and they won’t look away. You’re on sensory overload, and you’re not
sure where to look: all this beautiful technology all around you but this sales
person with the tractor-beam eyes.
Help! While you start salivating
over a particular phone (which Mr./Ms. Bad Polo IMMEDIATELY picks up on like a
shark sensing blood in the water), the sales person is showing you algorithms
and flow charts that only rocket scientists at JPL could have produced to
demonstrate each monthly phone plan.
Before your head explodes, you ask, “Just tell me: how much?”, and Polo
has you! Like a WWII fighter pilot who
paints a small version of the enemy’s flag on the fuselage of his plane for
each “kill”, these sales people, while they’re retrieving your phones from the
back, lift up their shirts and tattoo another stick figure on their backs to
represent another “sucker sold”. I
wouldn’t be surprised if they used their own blood as the ink for the tattoo –
these folks are ruthless!
With
that said, though, if you’ve ever had a real estate/mortgage experience similar
to the cell phone plan experience, I apologize on behalf of all the good people
in the industry. Yes, we’re in this to
make money and feed our families, without a doubt. However, our
job, first and foremost, is to educate and explain (without using complicated
algorithms and flow charts) so the client can make an informed decision –
the client should never feel pressured into a transaction, no matter how much
they want that shiny house. If we’ve
done our job correctly, the client can easily explain the reason they chose our
plan over someone else’s –
and it’s an added bonus if they can remember whether the shirt we were wearing
fit properly.
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