Once,
many years ago, a very wise person shared with me a small but very powerful
insight that has helped me in practically every aspect of my life –
it’s easy to remember, too: Seek first to understand, then to be
understood. Whenever I rush headlong
into any situation with the goal to be understood first, I hit resistance or
find my argument to have more holes in it than I had thought possible. Just the opposite: whenever I pause to ask
questions and digest the answers, I find it so much easier to reach my goal(s)
because I’ve either found a way to build a bridge without the need to take a
leap or that my original goal needed to be adjusted because it had holes in
it. There’s a great line from the novel
(and movie) To
Kill a Mockingbird that
sums it up: “You
never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view
. . . until you
climb in his skin and walk around in it.” (I chose not to open this week’s article with
that line for fear you might have thought I was going in a different direction
with a different movie about lambs and how quite they can be.)
Recently,
I was meeting with two real estate agents who handle a lot of higher-priced
properties, and I wanted to steer the conversation to a topic that I thought
was perfect for who I thought was their ideal clientele. Just as I was about to launch into my
presentation, I stopped myself and asked this question: What’s the makeup,
demographically, of most of your cash buyers?
Of course, I KNEW the answer to this question –
older folks who were close to retirement or who were already retired and wanted
to downsize –
but I asked the question because I’m big-hearted and noble that way. Their response, though, absolutely shocked
me: Millennials. What?!!! They explained that most of their cash buyers
were folks in their early 30s who have been saving for quite some time and have
amassed enough capital to purchase a small home without a mortgage. This not only pulled the rug out from under
me as to what I wanted to discuss, it went against practically everything I had
believed and read about Millennials.
The
focus of this week’s article isn’t really Millennials and the unexpected
saving/spending habits of some of them (because my gut still tells me that
Millennials buying houses with cash isn’t THAT big of a group in the grand
scheme); it’s about being open to the unexpected and learning from new
revelations. Because I asked the
question and waited to digest the answer, I was able to make a completely
different pitch on the fly that gave these two agents something that they could
use to market AND take to their existing cash buyers that they’ll find very
attractive (and should increase more selling/buying options for those
agents). This exchange was a two-way
street: I now possess a piece of information that I can add to my repertoire
and trot out with other agents when the moment is right. Not bad for asking just one question, right?
Comments
Post a Comment