Developing Multi-Cultural Etiquette

By George Smith & David Compton

With the influx of foreign investors in today's market, it is important that you properly prepare to effectively interact with them. To pursue these investors, we suggest that you go to www.google.com and type in “Consular Offices, California,” (or whichever state you are in) to advise them about the wonderful investment opportunities in American properties. We also suggest that you search under the category “Foreign Trade Offices” in your state.

Let's talk specifically about developing “multi-cultural” manners. When interacting with a person of another culture or ethnicity, it is important to apply the “Platinum Rule” as opposed to the “Golden Rule.” The “Platinum Rule” says that you should treat the other person as THEY (not you) want to be treated. This means respecting the traits and traditions that have been infused into their behavior by their culture. While one can always apply the phrase “When In Rome...”, the real estate profession and the N.A.R. have recognized the need to go the extra mile to create that zone of comfort essential for effective interaction.

The following “Norms” are, for the most part, universal in their application.

• Learn at least a few phrases of their language if different from your own.
• Show appreciation for the other's customs, music, and art; do not criticize them.
• Be sensitive and non-judgmental on politics and religion; avoid discussing these if possible.
• Build on the other's cultural heritage to enhance communication, rather than trying to impose your own.
• Show good intentions and consideration and follow-up on promises.
• Extend respect to those who the customer cares about - for instance, the elderly, children, family, religious affiliations, and whatever groups the customer identifies with.
• Use common sense and credit the other person for having it as well.
• Acknowledge mistakes and apologize when appropriate.
• Minimize talk about the United States.
• In general, try to listen more and talk less.
• Do not tell the other what to do; you do not know what is appropriate.
• Do not talk about family unless they are present or the other person mentions them.
• Help the other see the “Big Picture” by sharing information.
• Seek to share the other person's ceremonies and celebrations.
• Recognize that you will need to be more formal and take more time in doing business than is your normal practice.
• Be punctual, even if it does not seem to be customary for the culture you are dealing with; many cultures regard tardiness as a character flaw, and they know that in American culture we would be insulted if another person was late for a meeting.
• Get names and contact information correct.
• Take the blame for language barriers and difficulties.
• Do not tell jokes; they have a very high probability of being misunderstood.
• Show deference and respect to the elderly; stand when they enter, wait for them to speak or when they extend their hands in greeting.
• Treat members of the opposite gender with respect. Always err on the side of formality.
• Be patient and forgiving if a member of the opposite gender has trouble determining how to treat you; remember that other cultures differ on the roles of men and women in business relationships and may have difficulty adjusting to the expectations in the United States.
• Skip the efforts to try to create an “instant friendship”.
• Respect the concept of “face” as in “saving face” - never do anything to embarrass another person, either in that person's eyes, in the eyes of others, or in your own eyes. In the same way, do not sacrifice your own “face” in front of others as well.
• Try to fit in and be comfortable without making a fool of yourself.
• While these are important behaviors to embrace, there are other behaviors that you will want to avoid. Just to be on the safe side, and until you learn better from your customer, avoid the following behaviors:
• Standing with your hands in your pockets
• Using first names
• Asking personal questions
• Asking about their family
• Crossing your legs
• Showing the soles of your shoes
• Fleeing or invading the other's personal space
• Seeking direct eye contact
• Initiating any physical contact
• Showing impatience

Putting positive attitudes, communication skills and multicultural manners into action with the varieties of people in your marketplace is certainly necessary on a personal level each and every day. Be aware that you may also need to make some changes in the way you and your office deal with specific business situations that involve multiple cultures.

Probability of Sale

by Chris Matcek,M.B.A./Masters of Engineering Candidate

Is there a way to tell ahead of time how likely a listing is to sell? In The Probability of Sale for Residential Real Estate (Journal of Housing Research) Ken H. Johnson, Justin D. Benefield, and Jonathan A. Wiley examine a set of 2,249 sold and unsold properties from a medium sized East Coast MLS. Their findings show that the commonly known positive relationship between property price and selling time has some inconsistencies and may require other variables to better understand the probability of a home selling. The probability of a home selling is most affected by factors like marketing time, seller motivation, certain property attributes, and location. The researchers compiled these variables to determine which ones most affected the probability of sale. The results of this research should not be applied blindly, but with serious thought as to how they might be relevant in your particular market.

1. "There is a third metric [other than property price and property marketing time] that has at least as much impact on sellers and real estate brokers. Specifically, the probability of successfully selling the property is of considerable importance to both parties."
THINK: Costs begin to rack up on both sides of the transaction if a house is not sold. The seller has the costs involved with keeping a house on the market and possible financial strain, while the broker will go uncompensated for their time. The probability of a home selling is an important metric to monitor.

2. "If sellers attempt to maximize their selling price by exploiting the positive relationship between property price and marketing time, as suggested by the majority of the modern pricing and time-on-market literature, there is a real cost to be borne: a reduced probability of selling the property."
THINK: The commonly known fact that as the price of the property increases the time on the market increases may be incorrect according to recent studies. If you try to find a maximized value for property price, it may not sell if the other factors, discussed below, are not properly considered.

3. "A higher degree of property overpricing (DOP), indicating a lower seller motivation, also reduces the probability of a successful marketing effort."
THINK: If the seller makes it appear that they have low motivation to sell by pricing the property over its market value, even if they change the price later, this may reduce the probability of selling within the listing time.

4. "Turning to the specified proxies for quality, the results generally behave as expected, with SSHOWER, DOVEN, and NC all significantly increasing the likelihood of selling a property."
THINK: The probability of selling a home greatly increases with features like a separate shower, double oven, and a newly constructed home. By knowing these qualities, the agent and the seller can agree on a degree of overpricing and time on the market that maximizes the likelihood of selling.

5. "The results for property size and age are less intuitive. The model results indicate that larger properties have a lower probability of sale, while older properties actually enjoy a higher probability of sale."
THINK: While this may just be a pattern in this sampled market, or the current market conditions, pay attention to which homes are selling since the results may not necessarily be intuitive.

6. "Both parties need to be cognizant that overpricing and extending marketing time, perhaps by rejecting a viable offer, are costly strategies that can contribute to marketing failure."
THINK: When the seller sets a price or receives an offer, careful thought needs to be placed in whether the probability of sale is greatly affected.

The Effects of Friendship on Business Relationships

by Bryan Gregory, M.B.A. Candidate December 2008

How do you manage friendship in your business? If the answer is "I don't," then this study may change how you do business. The effects of friendship on business and how best to manage it are studied in detail by Kent Grayson in Friendship Versus Business in Marketing Relationships (Journal of Marketing, 2007). Grayson analyzed survey data from 685 direct-selling agents, and discovered some surprising results regarding role conflict and friendship in the work place. Please note, the industry studied here was not real estate, though the core findings will still be relevant to your field. The results of this research should not be applied blindly, but with serious thought as to how they might be relevant in your particular market. Specific types of marketing media, measures of time, and percentages should be altered to fit your industry.

1. "Friendships...have a positive effect on business outcomes, but only for friendships with relatively low instrumentality."
THINK: Are your friendships at work genuine? This study continues to support the theory that friendship has positive effects on the business environment, however it emphasizes that this effect only occurs in friendships which exist for the sake of friendship and not for the sake of making use of another. Therefore if you wish to make your business more successful, you should seek out honest and true friendships with your clients. It also needs to be clearly communicated to them that you value the friendship for reasons other than the commissions or referrals that they can bring.

2. "The conflict between friendship and instrumentality is more influential for relationships that began as friendships than for those that began as business relationships."
THINK: Relationships which began as friendships first are "more sensitive to conflict." In the real estate industry, where friends and family networks often generate business leads, this is particularly relevant. One should closely monitor and take extra care with those relationships which were friendships first in order to avoid potential conflict which could result in the loss of both a friend and a client.

3. "Incentivizing customers to refer their friends may attract new business but may also dampen future customer commitment and negatively affect customers' relationships with members of their social network."
THINK: Offering incentives to clients for referrals is common practice in the real estate industry, however this is the first time its potentially negative effects have been identified. While this practice may have short-term benefits for your business by increasing leads, it may create conflict over the long term. By offering incentives for referrals, you are introducing instrumentality into that clients' relationships with the friends they refer to you, creating potential for conflict between them and a lack of commitment to you. Care should be taken when offering incentives for referral of friends, and creating non-monetary incentives may be a way to avoid these negative consequences.

4. "The role of friendship appears to be more complex than merely helping or hurting business. Depending on how it is managed, it may simultaneously facilitate and hinder exchange."
THINK: Do you currently manage friendship in your business? Careful management is key in harnessing the power of friendship for your business. There are two effective friendship management tactics. The first is explicitly separating business and friendship by "fostering some, but not all, of the relational attributes that define friendship." The second is "drawing attention away from the extrinsic benefits that exchange partners are getting" by "reframing instrumental activities as being primarily intrinsically motivated." For example, "[Companies] frequently reframe selling as ‘sharing' good products and ideas with friends."

5. "Ultimately, whether friendship and business conflict in a relationship depends in great part on how the individual exchange partners decide to define the terms of exchange."
THINK: The way in which you communicate is also key. Care must be taken to word certain aspects of the business relationships in such a way as to reduce the emphasis on instrumentality. For example, asking for leads from a friend or family member can be communicated as the desire to help and offer a solution to their problem. Removing the "what do I get out of it" from the communication process is crucial in avoiding conflict between friendship and business.

Stress: It is Your Business!

by Chris Pullig, Ph.D.

Are you stressed? Are the people you work with stressed? Undoubtedly, we all feel somewhat stressed these days. However, stress is not universally bad. In some cases it pushes us to achieve, but there are sources of stress that are counterproductive. One source of stress that isn't positive is stress that arises from the conflict between work and family roles. A question that arises and has not before been clearly answered is how this type of stress impacts your business. More specifically, when customers interact with your company's service providers and they encounter stress, does this have a negative effect on your business? In a series of studies, some published in a recent Journal of Marketing article and others still not yet published, my colleagues and I addressed this basic question.

We All Suffer from Stress
Stress is a part of our everyday lives. We feel stress with our investments, our businesses, the demands of our work, and balancing this with our responsibilities at home. In recent years, with an increase in the number of dual-career couples, family roles have changed. This has given rise to even higher levels of stress related to balancing work and family responsibilities. This conflict between work roles and family roles is even more pronounced in industries such as residential real estate sales where much of the work involves evening and weekend hours, hours when family-time is most demanded. We need to work at times when our children are busy with important activities. We need to simply be at home when our spouses have time off from their own busy schedules.

Not surprisingly, studies show that work-family conflict is a significant source of stress in many Americans' lives. For many of us, this conflict creates excessive levels of stress which can be harmful to our health, both physically and mentally. Conceptually, it is thought that stress operates as a type of resource drain. Stress makes it difficult to concentrate on our work or our family limiting our capacity to perform either task to the best of our abilities. Stress drains our emotional and physical energy, and as a result the enthusiasm we display as we do our job, attend our child's concert or soccer game, or simply take care of important family issues. The impact of stress may have serious implications in both our personal and professional lives.

But, Does this Conflict Really Impact Your Business?
Our research is the first to look at the impact of stress in a customer-relationship setting. In a series of studies, my colleagues and I examined the impact of stress due to work-family conflict on individual job performance, customer satisfaction, and customer's intention to patronize the service provider in the future. We conducted our studies across multiple industries with a focus on examining these effects for personnel in a sales or customer-interfacing role.

We first measured each individual's level of work and family role conflict and their felt stress. We then separately asked supervisors to rate each individual's job performance on three dimensions – 1) how the individual performed their prescribed roles in their interaction with the customer, 2) with others in the organization, and 3) how they performed in terms of extra efforts to provide customer service. Since stress from work-family conflict is conceptualized as a "resource drain" we expected that it should have a negative impact on performance of these work-related roles, especially the extra effort put into satisfying customers. Customer-level data was then used to determine the extent to which individual stress impacted not only job performance but also customer-level outcomes – satisfaction with the service provided and intention to patronize the company again in the future.

Using these measures we estimated a nested hierarchical linear model (HLM). This statistical method allows us to estimate regression paths for variables that exist at differing levels (i.e., individual personnel, supervisor, and customer level). Given that we are using measures from three independent sources enhances our ability to show causal relationships between our variables.

Our Results
As expected, individuals who reported higher levels of work-family conflict felt higher levels of stress. In turn, individuals with higher levels of stress were rated as lower in their job performance with the greatest impact on extra efforts to provide customer service. More importantly, customers served by higher stressed and lower performing personnel reported lower levels of satisfaction and intent to use the service again. In an interesting and somewhat unexpected effect, individual stress had a significant direct effect on customer impressions. It seems that customers can sense stress when interacting with service providers and that this has a significant direct impact on customer satisfaction and future intentions.

What Does this Mean for Your Business?
Our results have several implications. First, it is important to know that stress is not only harmful to the individuals who work at your agency, including yourself, but stress also has negative effects that can hurt your customer service personnel's performance and, in turn, customer satisfaction. In knowing these effects are likely to exist, you are in a position to do something about this type of stress. Second, if you sense that work-family conflict is a significant source of stress for your organization, then you have options to address this stress.

The following is a four-step process to use in addressing stress and, in particular, work-family conflict stress:

Step One: Educate Everyone on How Stress Can Impact Your Business
Educate everyone in your organization, employees and supervisors, about the detrimental effects of stress and especially the effects of work-family conflict in generating stress. In knowing and understanding more about the importance of this issue, you and all your personnel can begin to address ways to minimize its impact on your business.

Step Two: Assess How Stress Occurs Within Your Organization
Ask your personnel, and take time yourself to reflect on how work - family and other types of stress occur for your organization. Identify sources of stress for your personnel, especially those who interact with your customers the most. In knowing how work-family conflict and stress arises, then you can begin to address specific sources of stress. It is important that you identify sources of stress within your organization so that you can address specifically these issues.

Step Three: Create a Stress-Sensitive Culture
In creating a culture where everyone knows that stress is something that is taken seriously and its impact understood, you have a better chance of finding ways to alleviate the negative effects. A culture that appreciates work-family conflict will be one in which conflict can be effectively reduced and coped with more readily. Empathy and a supportive climate will allow you to institute programs and methods that will encourage active and meaningful participation in work-life programs and other steps you might take as an organization to address stress.

Step Four: Develop a Program to Address Sources of Stress and Coping with Stress
A good program will address stress in two ways. First, the program will attempt to reduce the sources of stress. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways and should be examined within the context of what creates stress for the organization (Step Two above). One method addressing the source of stress created by work-family conflict is to create a work-life program for your organization. The second manner of addressing stress is to assist personnel with methods to deal with stress.

• Work-life programs are commonly used options in addressing work-family conflict by lowering the barrier between work and family roles. The specifics of these programs should be designed to address your personnel's needs. Each organization will have unique needs. Be creative. Some work-life programs, in addition to serving to reduce work-family conflict, operate as perks generating additional HR advantages. Common examples from industry include on-site daycare, flextime, and telecommuting. But, more creative solutions might include concierge services (i.e., dry cleaning pickup and delivery) to deal with life's minor details that take so much time during critical times of the day. The idea is to create solutions that address your people's needs that also are cost effective for your organization.

• Work-family conflict and related stress will occur, so it is important to teach personnel how to reduce and cope with stress. Stress reduction techniques can be taught and encouraged. Nearly one-half of large companies in the United States provide some type of stress management training. Stress management programs teach personnel about the nature and sources of stress, the effects of stress on health, and encourage personal skills to reduce stress. For example, time management or relaxation exercises can be taught. Also, one of the best methods known to reduce stress is regular exercise. Exercise can be integrated into a culture at work. Exercise also can be encouraged through on-site facilities or in financial support for off-site facilities. Exercise can be a part of the social interaction within an organization.

In general, stress is a given in our lives. It is not always bad. Certain sources of stress can have negative effects on our personal and professional lives. The conflict we feel between family and work roles is one such area. This type of negative stress can have significant effects on your organization's ability to provide the kind of customer service you seek to deliver. While it may not be possible to eliminate stress, it is something we can address through a reduction in its sources and by facilitating individual coping and reduction strategies.

Lead Conversion: Adaptation, Influence, and Customer Value

by Christopher P. Blocker, Ph.D., Laura Indergard, M.B.A., Jacqueline Simpson, M.B.A. Candidate, Chris Matcek M.B.A./Masters of Engineering Candidate

Summary of Key Findings
A national study was conducted to explore the approaches that real estate agents use to influence their clients in face-to-face meetings. Findings revealed the following insights:

1. Agents use a variety of selling approaches. However, the study revealed two approaches that have widespread effectiveness for positively influencing clients:

1. Inspiring clients through appealing to their emotions and values and,

2. Providing clear recommendations that show potential benefits for clients.

2. Beyond these approaches, results demonstrate how important it can be for agents to adapt their selling efforts to an individual client's communication style. Specifically, results illustrate how approaches such as: (a) presenting information, (b) rapport building, (c) promising incentives, and (d) offering tactful warnings can prove to be effective, inconsequential, or detrimental depending on a client's communication style.

3. Being "customer-oriented" contributes significantly to client influence across all situations. This means demonstrating a high-concern for satisfying clients, creating value for them, and taking time to uncover their specific desires, both big and small.

4. Overall, findings suggest that salespeople who rely on standardized scripts and influence approaches should consider altering their presentations and selling styles to increase their levels of adaptation. Results indicate that doing so will enhance the influence agents have with clients, which in turn, helps them convert more listing appointments and attain higher personal performance (measured by gross commission income).

Acquiring New Clients Can Be More Art than Science
The first appointment with a potential client is critical. Clients are forming key impressions and, in a real estate context, are relying on their conversations and other clues to decide whether to "hire" the agent. Seasoned agents often expect to win new clients once they have gained this critical first appointment. Yet, in a crowded marketplace, rejection is common and sometimes the reasons for losing to a competitor remain a mystery.

Selling Formulas
In this uncertain environment, many salespeople consider their selling efforts a "numbers game" and memorize standardized scripts, approaches, and presentations to influence clients. This largely represents their personal "selling formula" – and just like science – it is held to be universally effective across most situations. This is no surprise; selling formulas can often build a track record of success and be quite useful.

The downfall is that, unlike the science lab where the factors at play can be observed and are relatively stable over time, potential clients are richly complex individuals who are motivated by unseen goals and desires, which are shaped by their unique personalities, life histories, and dynamic circumstances. Beyond this, the overall landscape of the way salespeople and clients interact is constantly shifting as consumers in large mass have become more connected, sophisticated, and demanding over time. The net effect is that salespeople can encounter a colorful spectrum of individuals who may respond quite differently to uniform sales approaches and techniques.

So, although selling formulas can be effective, the gap between having a good lead conversion rate and a best-in-class conversion rate may be the art of effectively adapting the selling approach to each individual and their perceptions of value. Since the livelihoods of salespeople sink or swim based on the success of their client interactions, it thus, behooves them to continually improve their ability to engage in the art of client adaptation.

The Art of Adaptation
Adaptive salespeople are constantly learning. Early in a sales call, they attempt to recognize a client's signals and reactions to better understand how the sales message can be customized for the unfolding sales interaction. At a more basic level, adaptive salespeople also assess client personalities, personal values, and styles of communicating. Exploring these areas can help uncover a client's psychological needs and how they prefer to socially interact with salespeople as they progress toward their decision. Understanding clients at this deeper level can help salespeople manage the overall client experience.

From a sales perspective, the goal of these adaptations is having greater influence with clients and ultimately earning their business. The trick, however, is that adaptive selling can only prove useful for influencing clients if salespeople can determine just how they should adapt. Unfortunately, there is not much evidence from research conducted in a real estate context about the effectiveness of various approaches across different types of clients. Without robust insights in this area, real estate agents are left to trial-and-error and anecdotal evidence about how they should adapt.

This gap in industry knowledge motivated the current study to explore questions like:
What sales approaches are effective for influencing various types of real estate clients?
Are there any sales approaches that appear universally effective in real estate selling?
Are there any sales approaches that appear consistently detrimental in real estate selling?

Having Influence with Clients
In some ways the idea of "influencing" clients can appear to be a negative term associated with manipulation or unethical persuasion. In contrast, this study simply examines (within a real estate context) some basic influence strategies people use when communicating with each other that are applicable in a variety of contexts such as influence in interpersonal leadership. In other words, each of the influence strategies explored in this study can be utilized within the framework of an ethical selling philosophy that seeks to both satisfy customers as well as strive for superior sales performance.

Six Influence Strategies
To examine the research questions at hand, this study draws insight from recent research examining adaptive selling and six influence strategies that salespeople use frequently. These general influence strategies are described below:

1. Information exchange: informing clients with statistics, presenting materials, and using other information without making specific recommendations.

2. Recommendations: making clear suggestions or summary statements that advise clients to take a specific course of action that may prove beneficial for them.

3. Warnings: tactfully cautioning a client about potential negative outcomes, such as letting them know they may fail to get the best results in the selling process if they delay making a decision, go elsewhere, or discount the suggestions given.

4. Promises: offering the client a benefit of any type (special attention, discounting, small incentives, additional resources) to induce clients to go along with suggestions.

5. Inspirational appeals: appeals to the client's emotions, values, and/or ideals, by attempting to communicate (in content and style) with enthusiasm and conviction.

6. Rapport building: any non-selling personal talk to build rapport, such as discussing shared interests, complimenting the client, or just generally trying to make them feel good about themselves.

Although these influence strategies are widely used with clients, recent studies show that these six influence strategies may impact different types of clients in a varied manner.

Client Orientations
As previously mentioned, individual clients bring their unique personalities into selling interactions; however, research helps classify clients using three buyer styles, which have also been called "orientations." These client orientations include:

1. Task-oriented: goal-oriented and purposeful clients that really want to accomplish the task at hand as efficiently as possible, and as such, can often place little value on any activity that deviates from the current task.

2. Socially-oriented: clients who believe that socializing is an important aspect of the interaction and are interested in fostering interpersonal relationships more so than getting immediately involved in the specific content of the task at hand.

3. Self-oriented: clients who tend to be preoccupied with themselves and their own welfare during their interactions and generally exhibit lower levels of task or social orientations.

Other Factors Measured in the Study
In addition to exploring influence approaches and buyer orientations, this study captured an agent's overall customer-orientation and situational factors like the population the agent works in, average home prices the agent sells, and years of experience as an agent. As agents reflected upon their use of various influence strategies, they also assessed their overall level of perceived influence with specific clients. Average conversion rates for client appointments and gross commission income (GCI) were then used to assess whether higher levels of influence impacted performance.

Results
Wide use of all six influence strategies. As shown below, results revealed that agents make moderate to extensive use of all six influence strategies. Specifically, use of information, recommendations, and inspirational appeals were used most extensively, averaging 5.6-5.7 on a scale ranging from very little use (1) to a great deal of use (7).

Influence strategy effectiveness.
Beyond their widespread use, strategies demonstrated significantly different effects within those sales interactions. The charts below report results from the analysis of a series of statistical models. These models estimate the relationship between each influence strategy and the overall client influence across a sample of over 1,000 agents. Colored bars represent the positive (greater than zero) or negative (less than zero) effect for each strategy to facilitate influence with clients and lead conversion. Bars marked "not significant" represent scores for strategies that can be regarded as showing "no apparent effects" at all on overall client influence.

So, for example, the combined sample for all clients shows that inspirational appeals (inspire), recommendations, and information exchange (inform) demonstrate a strong, positive impact on overall influence, and indicates that promises have a negative impact on influence. Warnings and rapport building demonstrated no significant impact.

Influence strategy effectiveness by customer type.
A key purpose of this study was to examine the need to adapt influence strategies. So, the six charts below illustrate the effects of different strategies when examining high and low levels of each client orientation type.

Inspirational appeals.
These models reveal several tentative insights. First, inspirational appeals to emotions and ideals demonstrated the strongest effect in all cases, with exception of a highly social client, where it obtained the second highest effect. Agents making greater use of inspirational appeals also held higher lead conversation rates (79% versus 72%). These results coincide with other research which indicates that customers frequently experience emotions when they interact with salespeople. For example, during the process of selling their home, clients might encounter a range of emotions such as worry, frustration, excitement, and pleasure. Salespeople who have the ability to arouse positive emotions in customers may improve a client's overall experience, and, in turn, those clients may tend to be more satisfied and loyal to their agents.

It is important to note here that, although inspirational appeals were a uniformly effective strategy, appealing to a specific client's emotions will look different based on customers' orientations and unique personalities. Human emotion stems from an individual's in-the-moment reactions to how they see their desires and goals being fulfilled or thwarted. In a real estate context, a socially-oriented client may be emotionally charged by a desire to work with an agent they believe cares about them as a person. Task-oriented clients, on the other hand, might experience emotions predominantly based upon whether they see opportunities to advance their personal task at hand.

Recommendations.
The only other influence strategy that obtained high effects in all cases was recommendations, and it showed the greatest impact with clients who have high social orientations. This influence strategy likely corresponds to a core characteristic that clients are looking for in real estate agents: trusted expertise.

Information exchange.
Interestingly, use of information, which appears to be a strong strategy in the overall sample, only showed a positive effect with high-task clients and clients with a low self-orientation. It actually had a negative impact with low task-oriented clients. A potential insight here is the possibility that agents can weaken their influence by relying too much on information exchange with prospects who may not desire a lot of it.

Negative effect of promises.
Use of promises, such as offering incentives of any type, demonstrated a consistent negative impact on overall influence in all situations. One possibility for this relatively surprising result is that agents by and large only offered incentives in cases where losing the client seemed likely without it. However, analyses showed that the promise approach was utilized with similar frequency across agents reporting wins versus losses. Further analysis confirmed a negative impact of promises on, not just influence, but also on overall lead conversion rates. That is, agents making greater use of promises in their interactions also held lower overall lead conversion rates (74% versus 77%) than agents who used promises less frequently. This difference was only a few percentage points; however, it was statistically significant across the large sample, meaning this result is unlikely to have occurred by chance.

Insignificance of warnings and rapport building.
With two exceptions that showed negative effects for warnings with high self-oriented clients and rapport building for low social-oriented clients, these approaches showed insignificant effects. Similar to other "non-significant" findings, these results do not necessarily mean that these strategies are of no use. Rather, they did not demonstrate enough of a difference amongst other strategies being captured in this study. We could also speculate that some minimal level of rapport is necessary in all selling situations or that rapport might even indirectly enhance other strategies like inspirational appeals and recommendations. Indeed, there is evidence that people tend to be influenced by those they like, which suggests that rapport supports other strategies. The main point here is that neither rapport building nor warnings demonstrated enough of an effect (outside the two exceptions mentioned above) to provide evidence that agents should emphasize or avoid these approaches in their interactions.

Customer orientation and customer value.
One significant result, which was tested in addition to the effects shown in the charts above, was the consistent, strong impact of an agent's "customer orientation" on their ability to positively influence clients. The average effect size was similar to the effects of recommendations across all the models. Higher levels of customer orientation also corresponded to higher lead conversion rates (76%) versus conversion rates for agents with lower levels of customer orientation (72%). Customer orientation captures an agent's ongoing emphasis on assessing what creates value for their clients and placing client satisfaction as a high priority.

Influence strategies and performance.
Other factors surely come into play when trying to convert leads into clients. However, the influence strategies measured in this study demonstrated statistically significant effects on agent influence with clients, lead conversion rates (.20 on a scale from 0 to 1), as well as personal performance (.14 on a scale from 0 to 1 and measured by GCI). So, the evidence in this study supports the idea that appropriate use of these influence strategies and customer orientation can enhance an agent's lead conversion rate and thus overall sales performance.

About the study and its caveats
The survey and analysis.
This study surveyed 1,146 real estate agents and asked them to reflect upon a recent client interaction related to a potential listing. Questions demonstrated strong validity. Analyses were conducted using structural equation modeling. The models demonstrated close fit with the data and the effects obtained statistically significant parameters. This study is limited by the use of self-reported measures using agents to report on their perceived levels of influence with clients. Future studies should attempt to gather data from agents and clients as well as capture objective measures. Further information on the data and analysis is available upon request.

Caveats to remember.
The results contained in this study should be tentatively considered within the context of your own business, your personal selling experience, the types of clients you deal with, and local market conditions. As with any study, there are likely specific characteristics of your selling interactions that are not captured here, which may affect the value of applying these insights for a given agent.

We hope you find the insights presented here to be helpful in continuously improving your selling skills and performance.