How Can I Improve My Real Estate Sales Skills?

So, would you like to improve your real estate sales skills?

I hear you, and I think sales is one of the most important skills you can learn in any industry and as an entrepreneur. Some considered it to be even a million-dollar skill.

But how can you improve your real estate sales skills?

According to the statistics, you do this by becoming a better communicator over the phone or face to face, qualifying early, asking the right questions to learn about the customer’s needs, communicating the value you provide, pitching less, not forgetting to close, and practicing sales role-play.

The line is blurry between marketing and sales in general.

And since many real estate agents may feel that they need to improve their sales skills, I will tackle this question in more detail in the rest of this article.

You will learn 15 inspiring sales statistics, how to increase your odds for better real estate sales, and more details about improving your real estate sales skills.

If you are a big fan of robocalls and sales scripts without wanting to listen to a potential customer, this article might not be for you. If not, please read on.

15 Inspiring Sales Statistics

You can already get a feel and clues for the areas that need to be attacked to improve your real estate sales skills when we look at some interesting general sales statistics I found during my research for this article.

So, let’s have a look first. I will distill the most relevant stats for the sales areas that need to be attacked afterward and bold them in the bullet points below.

1) After potential buyers have researched their options and created a shortlist, 60% want to connect with sales during this phase (source).

2) If a sales representative would call back at a scheduled and specific time, a little less than half (42%) of people would be motivated to make a purchase (source).

3) One major difference between top and non-top performers is that 47% of the first group asks for referrals versus only 26% of the second group (source).
Additionally, those who ask for referrals earn 4 to 5 times more than those who don’t.

4) The large majority (92%) of customer interactions happen over the phone (source).

Also, according to Sales Insights Lab 2021 (source), 41.2% of sales representatives consider their phones the most effective sales tool.

5) A sales representative or vendor that responds first gets 30 to 50% of the sales (source).

Additionally, you want to be aware that when you wait longer than 5 minutes to respond, there is a 10x drop in lead qualification and even a 400% decrease when you respond within 10 minutes in contrast to 5 minutes (source).

6) For a clear majority of sales (80%), you will need 5 follow-up calls after a meeting. And in my article about follow-ups, I already mentioned that 44% give up after just one follow-up.

7) Something important to keep in mind for later – only a tiny number (13%) of customers think that a salesperson understands their needs (source).

This goes together with the stat that you will have better sales success when you ask potential customers questions about their pain points and goals (source).

8) Your calls will be most successful if you focus on the value you can provide (96%), then work together with your customers (93%), give them perspective through market insights and other information (92%), and again assist them in understanding their needs (92%) (Hubspot, 2020).

9) More than half (55%) of the people working in sales lack the skills to be successful (source).

This is additionally supported by the fact that 85% of prospects are unsatisfied with their phone experience (source).

10) Only 5% of presentation attendees remember statistics, but 63% remember stories (source).

11) For sales, qualified leads are closed by 30% of the best companies and, on average, by 20% (source).

In the same context, it is important to note that at least half (50%) of prospects are not a good fit for the product or service sold (source).

12) Not qualifying a potential client the right way is responsible for 67% of lost sales (source).

13) In almost half (48%) of sales calls, no attempt is made to close a sale. So, it makes sense that the overall closing rate is 27% (source).

14) Non-top sales performers do a lot more pitching (19%) or “premature sales presentation” compared to 7% of top sales performers (source).

15) Comparing top performers with non-top performers regarding sales-related activities, 81.6% of the first group spends 4 hours or more on these activities compared to 60.8% of the second group (source).

Before I bore you with more statistics, let’s see what we can make out of them regarding what sales areas need to be attacked to improve your real estate sales skills.

How Can You Increase Your Odds of Better Real Estate Sales?

From the sales statistics mentioned above, we can conclude several things that can move the odds in your favor regarding real estate sales success.

So, what can be concluded?

The phone or, for a better word, direct ear-to-ear or, even better, face-to-face (e.g., FaceTime, Zoom, Skype, etc.) conversations seem to be essential to have good customer interactions.

For sales skills improvements, this means you want to be a good communicator via these mediums.

I will come to what being a good communicator means later.

While it’s not directly related to real estate sales skills, it may improve your numbers if you want to respond as fast as you can to inquiries or calls you get.

You want to better understand your potential customers’ needs by asking them the right questions.

This comes back to being a good communicator.

When it comes to objections, you may want to focus on communicating the value you can provide aligned with the needs you discovered beforehand by again asking the right questions.

In contrast to stats, most people remembering stories gives us a clue about the importance of emotions.

Why?

Because stories usually convey emotions.

This means, in turn, that if you manage to sell by triggering some emotions in your potential customer, more of what you have to offer will be retained.

This is not limited to stories.

There are many other ways you can trigger emotions in a sales call, such as, for example, exacerbating pain points further.

The next clue from the statistics is that you likely need to improve in qualifying potential customers or prospects.

You can waste a lot of time when you first give a large presentation, the prospect picks your brain to get a free consultation, and then start to qualify or rather disqualify her way too late at the end of the call to find out that she needs to think about it, wait until the next full moon, or light a candle in the church first, and doesn’t have the budget.

The opportunity costs are huge.

The time you wasted with this type of unqualified or late-qualified client could have been spent talking to several more that may have resulted in a sale.

We can also learn from the stats that you might also need to improve your closing skills.

Remember that almost half of the salespersons don’t make an attempt to close a sale.

This can often happen when you may have prepared a nice presentation for a sales call.

And since you put so many hours into the preparation, you may focus on giving the presentation quickly and miss the buying signal from your potential customer.

What happens?

Instead of skipping the presentation and going into the close, you go through the presentation, and the potential customer goes from very interested (“shut up and take my money”) to less interested (“maybe I should reconsider”).

The statistics mentioned above further confirm that this problem seems to be a reality: the high performers do less pitching than the lower ones.

And lastly, another element to improve your real estate sales skills seems to be to increase the hours put into sales activities.

It’s kind of common sense, but the more you practice this skill by doing it, the better you will get.

How to Improve Your Real Estate Sales Skills

Most of the points I mentioned in the section before to increase your odds are part of what I know as the G.U.T.S sales system from Claude Diamond.

You will need to become a better communicator, and rather than using and getting attached to sales scripts, you want to have a sales system in place or better ingrained in your mind that you have already practiced several times via so-called role-plays, where your role-play partner gives you a hard time.

The problem when you use a script is that many things I mentioned to increase your odds for better real estate sales will fall under the table.

Why?

Because first, it will be more difficult to listen to the prospect when you focus on the script.

This means you will lose out on getting to know your potential customer’s needs, pains, and greed.

You also can’t be prepared with a script for every eventuality that may come up in a conversation.

If you do, you will have such a complex script at the end that you will lose the whole picture quickly.

In this context, I would like to mention a nice article from indeed.com I found during my research.

It mentions what is considered the 10 top communication skills:

Active listening
Using the right communication method (when you sell things like real estate where amounts are usually above $1000, you want to use face-to-face communication, for example; in e-commerce, this would be another story)

Friendliness
Confidence
Providing and accepting feedback

Volume and clarity
Empathy (e.g., “I am so sorry to hear that you need to sell your lovely house. It must be tough to leave this place”, etc.)
Respect (not only from you to the customer but also from the potential customer towards you)

Being able to pick up nonverbal cues
Responsiveness

So, you may already know the answer of how good of a communicator you would be if you are using scripts or rather are too attached to a script.

But the same is true if you don’t get the role-play practice if you have the theoretical knowledge of a good sales system such as the one from Claude Diamond.

It will be like learning to drive.

First, you will have to focus way too much on your conscious head-eye-foot coordination but won’t be able to react spontaneously to suddenly occurring situations on the street.

But once you have put the hours in, it starts to work automatically, and you become a better driver because you can adapt flexibly to most situations.

You might even start texting and driving (which you shouldn’t do, of course 😉 ).

You can read many different books on sales, persuasion, and communication, but it won’t make much of a difference if you don’t practice what you read or learn.

It needs to be mastered so that it enters your subconscious.

Now, when you look again at the conclusions from the section before, you will find that most conclusions from the statistics tie in with what makes a good communicator.

In the past, I’ve also read many books on sales and persuasions and also watched several videos from so-called sales gurus.

But up to now, only one guy stood out to me who, although he possibly could call himself a millionaire real estate guru, came across as modest, approachable, and trustworthy.

I will mention him one last time in this article.

It’s Claude Diamond, and when I compare his sales system to what the stats in this article say, the conclusions I drew, and what is considered good communication, it basically covers all of that.

His system is based on asking good questions, qualifying early, not giving early presentations, mutual respect, and different persuasion moves during a sales call. And, of course, not using any scripts and role-plays.

He offers several different coaching packages and info products where, depending on what you choose, group role-playing is also included.

You can take a look at his website here, and his YouTube channel, especially the role-play playlist here.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.