Selling the Promise -"The Best" is not always tangible"

By Richard Rawlings, Estate Agency Trainer.

In our quest to secure market share, every instruction counts twice. Not only as one more property our books, but also one less on our competitor’s. (So, if you’re keeping score, each instruction puts you two points ahead).

In order to secure an instruction, we need first to Attract, then Engage and finally Convert. Attraction effectively equals Marketing. And your Marketing is effectively a promise of what the consumer can expect to receive should they engage you. Your marketing, no matter how it is delivered, is usually a showcase for what you do, sprinkled with a few social proofs (eg the type of property in which you specialise). If the marketing (your promise) does not handshake with reality, then you are effectively selling a lie, and you won’t get the business.

For example, imagine an up-market client’s disappointment, if, as a result of your marketing, they thought you specialised in the sale of high-level homes; but on the market appraisal, the agent reveals that most of your recent sales have been one-bedroom flats! That engagement is unlikely to convert.

In the same way, there is a temptation in our marketing to front-end our strengths and successes, in the hope that future clients will be impressed by our figures. Yet even agents with impressive speed-of-sale, asking-price-v-sale-price, or low-fall-through metrics don’t necessarily attract the greatest market share, even though, in theory, they should. They are, after all, “the best”!

But “the best” is not always as tangible as we might expect. Both experience and research suggests that the agent who wins the business on a market appraisal is usually the individual agent whom the seller simply prefers. The one they respect; the one they trust. So why doesn’t our marketing better reflect this? What if your marketing was aligned less with what you do, and more about who you are, and how you are? Yes, even putting personality over performance. (After all, that’s how most human relationships begin). Not only would your marketing become instantly more magnetic, but you’d also find there would be a predisposition towards trust earlier in the journey.

As Toby Martin of Unchained said in a recent article, “People choose the agent that feels safest, most competent, and most familiar. The one that reduces anxiety and aligns with their emotional expectations in that moment”.

When seeking the right estate agent, consumers are increasingly turning to agent comparison sites such as Swoople. These sites are excellent at presenting the metrics of an agent’s past successes, but only those agents who choose to enhance their default profile with the “personality and character” that Tony refers to, are likely to communicate a better synergy between the marketing promise and its expected delivery.