John Martinez, founder of Midwest Revenue Group, LLC (www.midwestrev.com) is a sales development expert and a highly sought after consultant who brings humor, insight and real-world advice to his audiences. His practical, street-smart approach to selling has helped hundreds of investors, sales organizations, call centers, business owners, and independent professionals increase their revenue with more control, greater confidence and less effort.
Today I wanted to talk about how to handle negotiations with sellers so that we get the price we want and they feel good about the whole process.
This is an aspect of buying directly from motivated sellers that keeps a lot of people on the sidelines.
John shares with us today several tips for working with motivated sellers so that they feel good about the process and everyone gets what they want.
John’s first tip involves empathy. You’ve got to have empathy for each and every seller and what they are going through. Period.
Don’t hide what you’re feeling and how you feel about their situation. Let them know that what they are going through is not easy and that you know it must be hard.
John’s second tip is to make use of price anchoring. You’ve got to reset whatever initial price the seller is expecting to get so that your offer doesn’t hit them like a huge punch to the gut. One way to do this is to share recent comps for nearby houses that have sold for low amounts.
As you negotiate price, continuously lower the increment that you come up in your offer. This will signal to the seller that you are nearing your max. He also advises that you end with an odd number as your final as it appears to be your highest calculated offer. Great tip!
If your max offer doesn’t do the trick, make non-financial concessions. Offer to allow them to leave stuff they don’t want behind.
I asked John about common objections from sellers and how to handle them. I absolutely love the approach he offered.
He doesn’t feel like there is ever any canned objection/counter that will work. It’s always more of a situation by situation ordeal. His approach is to find out the real reason for why they are selling and have them hash out what objections or problems they have with doing so.
Then, understand that you can never overcome sellers’ objections. They must overcome their own objections. You can aid this by asking them questions that plays their objection against what they are trying to accomplish. In this way, they will see that accomplishing the sale of the house and resolving the situation is much bigger than the smaller problem of the objection.
