Online Sales Counselors, Sinking Ships, Mindset, Mindshift, Energy, and the Customer Experience
Did that catch your attention? I’m going to tell you a story here. Right now, there is a lot of scarcity mindset going around.
I hear OSCs concerned about not getting enough leads, or not setting enough appointments, and for some of them they equate this with not making enough money or even being fearful of losing their jobs. This, in turn stresses them out because they can’t pay their bills, which is understandable, but only adds fuel to the fires of scarcity. We can bind ourselves in a downward spiral of stress and anxiety over where the next lead, appointment, sale, and bonus is coming from, and THIS creates a lower energetic vibration.
People can feel this. People can feel when you are stressed, when you are frenetic, when you are low energy. But even when people can’t, the universe can, and if you are vibrating at a lower energy, you will get lower results.
We need to find a way to break out of that death spiral and create a more positive vibration. The higher your energy, the higher your vibration the greater the things you attract into your life. The feeling of abundance occurs at a higher vibrational level. And we CAN do that even with less leads.
It’s About Recalibrating Your Attention and Focusing on What This Job Really is
The job of an online sales counselor, while heavily dependent on setting appointments is about creating a great customer experience, it’s about converting as much traffic as you possibly can for your builder. When we can start a new prospective home buyer off on a great journey by building rapport, discovering their needs, wants, and desires in their new home as well as their pain points in their current home, we can set strong appointments that the sales agents can carry over to sales. All the while providing a great experience for the buyer.
This means slowing down and taking your time with each person you can get on the phone. Other phones ringing and emails dinging cannot become a distraction from the person you have on the phone. I know we have said over and over, year over year, decade over decade that an OSC needs to provide a fast, personal, response. But that doesn’t mean sacrificing the rapport building with the person you have on the phone.
We need to take care of the customer right in front of us first. Distractions can be heard over the phone. If we concentrate on each buyer giving them our full attention, we will naturally create strong relationships and strong appointments. This will benefit the client, the builder, and our agents, which all means it will benefit the OSCs.
This Reminds Me of a Story from My Sailing Days
When I was first starting out on wooden schooners as a deckhand, I was not used to living in close quarters with others, working with others as a team, and quite frankly I wasn’t used to worrying about others. Up to this point in my travels I was a solo backpacker and dive instructor.
The only boats I’d worked on before was a liveaboard dive boat where we took care of passengers, but it was a different kind of care. And honestly it was a bit of a toxic environment because everyone was all about the tips.
But when I started working on wooden schooners, it was a whole different mentality. There was a lot of work to maintain a wooden boat, and it meant keeping it in good condition, so it didn’t rot (sink) or catch fire!
No one wants a sinking ship or a fire aboard while 100 miles off-shore!
So my first true captain/mentor in the wooden boat business, this grisly, barrel chested guy with a long beard and mustache said to me, “Leah, it’s not about you. If you take care of the boat first, your shipmates second, and yourself third… you will be so busy doing the first two things you aren’t going to even have to think of yourself.”
Not only was this a lesson in selflessness, but it really was also a lesson in abundance. If you are thinking about all your shipmates, and they are all thinking about you along with the rest, you will naturally win.
When we remove the first thought that this job is about appointment setting, and instead focus on the customer experience, and doing the very best we can for the buyer, we will naturally do the best we can for our builder. When we do the best, we can for our builder, we naturally do great things for our sales agents. And when we provide our sales agents with strong appointments, detailed notes, and let them know why we are jazzed about that upcoming appointment, then it will naturally roll over and benefit us as OSCs!