Graduates of our Integrity Selling course learn a very important principle in the world of sales: You always get paid what you think you are worth. It’s how the great sales people in real estate always earn the top dollars – because they believe they are worth them and won’t settle for a second-rate pay for the first-rate service they provide to their clients. The principle of “getting what you believe you are worth” is usually applied to commissions, but lately, with our clients, we’ve been taking this to a whole new level:

Are you achieving the success you believe you deserve?

This question is much more than an academic exercise. Our belief systems determine not only how we perceive the world, but how we interact with it. And especially what rewards we get from it. We know – from training thousands of agents and coaching hundreds of brokers – that the single most important “change” people make is not their skills or habits – but their internal belief systems. No matter how many times you practice an activity, if you don’t believe it deep down inside, it won’t amount to a hill of beans. (Do beans still come in hills?)

Even in a “down market” our beliefs matter. If we think the market is slowly undermining our business, we’ll probably act in ways that reflect that belief - and our businesses will fail. If we think that our success is “beyond our control” – that it’s the government or banks who have to “save us” from further decline – we’ll probably think that anything we do is bound to fail – and either not do it at all, or at least do it so poorly that it will fail.

Extend this principle to the key decisions we make as sales organizations: Choosing our customers. Most agents still believe they have to (beg?) persuade customers to choose them. And certainly, in a competitive industry, we do have to compete for consumer’s attention and loyalty. Yet an honest observation of today’s market forces us to admit that many of us have “accepted” customers we “know” aren’t good for our business. We sit across from a table from a seller who insists his house is worth more; we know it isn’t and we try to explain how the market works; but he insists and we produce the contract and we still sign it. We take him on – knowing that we’re once again setting ourselves us for a long, hard fight – not only to sell his property, but with the seller who is going to be disappointed in “our” results from day one. Don’t we believe we can find a better client to work with? Apparently not.

Likewise, we work with buyers who refuse to make offers – insisting they’re going to chase the market to the bottom and get a “deal,” even though they are sacrificing their time, family life or cash paying rent rather than creating equity while they wait on the sidelines. We spend hours showing these buyers homes, going through the numbers and matching their amenities and desires – only to have them thwart the process because they aren’t really ready or serious about buying. In fact, they never were, but we felt we had to work with them – to serve them – because someone out might if we didn’t do it. Don’t we believe we deserve better results from our hard work? It doesn’t seem that we do.

Partly, our error comes from another belief we have – that we deserve to serve our clients, but we don’t deserve to be justly paid for our service. For proof, look at our irrational fear that “someone else” might work with the consumers if we don’t do it. If we truly believed we only deserved success, why would we do such a thing? Because we don’t believe we deserve our success – only a commission- since so often we accept payment while we’ve only achieved an operational loss.

The reason we end up with consumers “worse” than we might like is really an outcome of what we believe we deserve. If we believe we deserved only success, only to work with reasonable consumers, only to work in ways that help us earn a living, would we willingly accept untenable assignments with clients who will only lead us to another loss? If we believed our mortgage deserved payment more than we believed our sellers deserve being “serviced” would we take overpriced listings and go weeks – months – without the ability to close on them?

Our beliefs guide our actions into reality. If we believe the economy is a disaster, we will create that self-fulfilling prophecy. If we believe we can’t find good sellers or profitable buyers, we’ll make that happen, too, by accepting anyone who’s lucky enough to “choose” us as their REALTOR.

And it’s not only agent’s who believe they can’t get better consumers. Many brokers don’t believe they deserve to work with better agents. They often find themselves surrounded by non-performing agents not because the agents “randomly turned out” to be duds – but because they don’t fully believe they deserved to be surrounded by successful agents. Why else would we tolerate non-performance amongst those we choose to help build our companies?

Is your success simply a matter of luck cherry-picking customers or market timing or mortgaegs markets or buried statues in the yard?

Take the question to the extreme: Do you believe you deserve to be successful? If so, how does that belief affect the clients you select or the agents you recruit?

I’d really like to know!

- Matthew

PS: Need a little inspiration? Here’s one of my favorite movie moments. It should inspire you to seek what you deserve.