Commission Sales Agents: Be Sure To Learn Your Lessons

Good, sharp selling skills are a business imperative for real estate agents, especially today. But there is something much more to learn than skills. It took me years for this to sink in.

My undertanding changed one day after years in the business when I sat down at my home-office desk, got out a yellow pad, and starting remembering the lessons I had learned through the years, who taught them to me, and under what circumstances they were learned.

I learned to laugh at myself, the night my coat  caught on fire  in front of the CEO of large lender and 450 of his closest friends came over, learned what happed and started laughing so hard they started crying.  I learned that ‘we all have room for improvement’ from my daughter’s fifth grade teacher, and other ‘unintentional mentors”.

I learned what ‘hurt’ feels like in the ninth grade,when I made the baseball team as a pitcher and the team’s senior catcher asked me to throw my fast ball to him. I was excited. This was big deal. The senior catcher wanted to catch with ME.  With his buddies watching, he caught me barehanded.   I learned that day to never try to make a fool out of someone else, especially when they are giving it a hundred percent.

Mr. Chet Vanscoy, now deceased, taught me that ‘lessons’ are more important than skills.

He was an experienced sales manager. I was his manager, with no real sales experience. I asked him one question: If you had one piece of advice to give me to be successful in real estate, what would it be? Without hesitation, he said :”Patience.” Learn to be patient. What? He then said this and I never forgot it.

“I can teach a high school student how to sell. Learning skills is the easy part of selling. But if you don’t learn patience, you will not need the skills because you will be out of business. If you cannot handle the broken appointments, cancellations, late closings, in additon to the rejection that in inherent in sales, you will not make it in real estate.”

I came up with 14 lessons I learned along the way, and only two from trainers. I will be sharing some of them in the days ahead. What lessons have you learned? Feel free to share here. And if you have never done what I did with a yellow pad, try it. It will help you appreciate a lot of people that helped you along the way, and they never knew it.