I once interviewed a coaching client who had managerial responsibilities for the major commercial real estate brokerage firm he was working for at the time, and he told me about the time he had asked a veteran agent to make a presentation to the entire office on prospecting. The agent showed on the big screen his notes for one specific prospect from within the agent’s contact management software, and over the years whenever he’d called that prospect, there were entries in his notes like, “He hung up on me”, “He was rude to me”, and “He told me to never call him back again”.
So for many agents in this situation, they would stop calling the prospect after getting a series of responses from them like this, but this didn’t apply to the one agent who was making this presentation. In his final entry in the notes section for this one prospect, it then said, “Listed his building for sale today”.
The truth of the matter is, there are plenty of people in this world who are constantly walking around being rude and grumpy, but almost every single property is going to need to be sold and/or leased at some time. It may not happen until after the grumpy owner has passed on, but their kids may then want to sell everything to divide the estate.
This then means that when the mean and grumpy person suddenly needs to talk to an agent about selling or leasing their property, you definitely want to be that agent. But if you had given up on calling that person because of how rude and mean they’d been to you over the years, you’re going to miss out on this opportunity.
So let your competitors be the ones who fall by the wayside and stop making their prospecting calls to that owner, and you put on your suit of armor, hang in there, and keep making your prospecting calls to that owner anyway. Because in the end, you may be the one broker who capitalizes on the opportunity to list that property and earn and get paid a commission, long after your competitors have already disappeared.