Buyer Psychology, Confidence, and Protecting Margin: A Conversation with Jeff Shore-187

Most builders are responding to a slower market with more incentives. Jeff Shore says that might be making things worse. In this episode, Anya Chrisanthon sits down with the founder of Shore Consulting and one of the most respected voices in new home sales training for a straight-talking conversation about buyer psychology, sales confidence, and what actually separates teams that will come out of this market stronger from the ones that won't.

What's covered: Uncertainty - not rates or pricing - is what's slowing buyer decisions right now, and Jeff explains exactly why. He shares the two-word response every salesperson should have when a buyer asks about incentives, how to reverse-engineer the sales presentation so "I'm just looking" never comes up, why dissatisfaction is the single greatest predictor of urgency, and how to normalize a first-visit decision before you ever show the home.

For sales leaders: Jeff's two non-negotiables are a daily lead conversion hour and weekly one-on-one skill development coaching for every rep. And for the teams that will win - confidence is the product of belief and mastery, and it's contagious.

Sales & Marketing Leadership Summit - San Diego, July 15-17 Anewgo is a proud sponsor. Use code ANEWGO to buy one ticket and get one free: whova.com/portal/registration/4MA1nFzvsqp4sg4JwSu1

Free ticket giveaway - apply here (admission only, travel not included, winner announced Friday): Apply Now

About Anewgo Anewgo is an all-in-one new home sales and marketing platform providing builders with AI-ready homebuilder websites, interactive design tools, floorplans, sitemaps, AI Sales Assistants, and data analytics. Learn more at anewgo.com or find every episode at anewgo.com/podcast.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/anewgo-of-new-home-sales/id1602564768

Transcript

Anya Chrisanthon 0:00

Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for a new episode of Anewgo of New Home Sales. I'm your host, Anya Chrisanthon, and today I have a guest who genuinely needs no introduction in this industry. But I'm going to give him one anyway because he deserves it. Jeff Shore is the founder of Shore Consulting, a best-selling author, a keynote speaker, and one of the most respected voices in new home training. His work has shaped thousands of sales professionals across the country, including myself, Jeff is also a founder of the Sales and Marketing Leadership Summit, and I want to mention right up front that Anewgo is a proud sponsor of this year's summit, which is happening July 15th through 17th in sunny San Diego at the brand-new Gaylord Pacific Resort. So we're going to talk more about that at the end of this episode, and we have something special for our listeners, so stay tuned for that. But first, Jeff, welcome to the show. Really glad to have you here today.

Jeff Shore 1:08

Well, it's good to spend time with you, my friend, any time that we have that opportunity. And yes, we'll be together in San Diego. It's gonna be great. Have you seen the Gaylord Pacific down in San Diego yet?

Anya Chrisanthon 1:18

I have not. I've been to one in, DC- Right and, in, Kissimmee, I think. So I mean- Mm-hmm. Yeah it's always such a great property, so yeah, everything-

Jeff Shore 1:26

It, it's spectacular, right on the water, and there are worse places to hang out in the middle of the summer than San Diego, California, so yeah, most people are gonna come down and spend a weekend there. It's really great.

Anya Chrisanthon 1:37

Yes, absolutely. So we're gonna give our listeners a little preview of what they can expect during the summit. Sure. So we're gonna jump in. I have some hot questions for you today. Uh- Go for it. Now, Jeff, you mentioned that in today's market that the biggest shift isn't pricing or rates, but it's actually buyer psychology. So what's changed, and how buyers are actually making decisions right now?

Jeff Shore 2:03

Everywhere we go, we see a similar story that's being told. There are buyers out there. There's no question about it, and then there are buyers who really want to buy. But there's also a tremendous amount of uncertainty, and, uh, one of the interesting things about human psychology, not just buyer psychology, but with human psychology, is that when we are uncertain, it tends to slow down our decision-making cycle. Okay, so y- you could just think of, you know, somebody who's thinking about getting married, but are not quite sure, and what happens? It just slows down the decision. A really simple example, if you're looking at a menu and you don't know what you want to order, the uncertainty cause, "I'm sorry, can you give me two more minutes?" to the food server, right? It's just human nature. When uncertainty rises, the buying cycle slows down. And I think the reason that that happens is that there's a specific correlation between uncertainty and my level of perceived risk. If I'm not certain about something, it feels riskier to me. If I feel certain, it feels safe. So that's, I think, where the buyer's head is at right now, and why they're struggling so much.

Anya Chrisanthon 3:05

Yeah, builders now are responding to this slower pace by throwing in incentives. Yeah. Like, we hear about incentives everywhere we go, and you've been very vocal about that it can actually make things worse- Yeah as opposed to help their cause. So why is that?

Jeff Shore 3:23

Well, you just look at it from your perspective at Anewgo. You are there to add value and not subtract value wherever you can. We have to look at it the same way. How do I add value in the incentive conversation? And when a customer is, asking about incentives right away, and we get dragged into that conversation, or worse, when salespeople bring it up unprompted, which happens a lot, about a third of the time salespeople introduce incentives, first, we get dragged into this discussion about how much you can give away, but there's no value associated with it. It's actually quite confusing to our buyers. They, they don't know how to assess the value of the incentive, because they don't have any assessment in the value of the home. It would be like you coming along and saying, "Hey, we've got a discount on all of our Anewgo products. Are you interested?" Well, I don't know. What are your Anewgo products first? That's where we have to start. So when we get that discussion in front of, the discussion on, what the buyer is really looking for and how this home fits their needs, it's going to actually devalue, the perception in the customer's mind, and that's gonna get us nowhere at all.

Anya Chrisanthon 4:28

Yeah, so can you help us frame the conversation? If I am a sales rep and the phone rings, and I answer the phone and they say, "Hey, what are your incentives?"

Jeff Shore 4:38

Yeah. So every time we hear the question, what are your incentives, the first two words out of our mouths should be the same, and the words are, "It depends." A- and now I can follow that up, because when I can look and say, "It depends on the home you buy, on what you need, on the timing, a lot of different factors, so let me ask you a couple of questions so we can figure out what you're looking for, and then in a few minutes, I'll be happy to share with you what the terms are on that home." The words it depends, It's not a t- it's not some tactic, it's true. The incentive should depend on who that buyer is and what they're looking for, and how we can help them out. So part of the problem here is when a salesperson, in particular in the front line, looks at it and says, "Well, we've got this 3.99% financing," and you know, I'll just blurt it out there 'cause it's so valuable. Not to me. I haven't had a mortgage on a house in I don't remember when. So if I walk through the door and you immediately start talking about a 3.99% financing, it's irrelevant to me. 35% of home buyers are paying all cash. So you have now just a- alienated a third of your buyers right out of the gate, and unprompted, your incentive means nothing at that point. Let's figure out what the buyer needs and start there and build on that.

Anya Chrisanthon 5:53

So sounds like the order of the conversation really matters-

Jeff Shore 5:57

Yeah

Anya Chrisanthon 5:58

and to determine the sales outcome. Mm-hmm. So besides the incentives, are there any other mistakes that you commonly see that salespeople make with the order of the things?

Jeff Shore 6:08

A lot of salespeople get frustrated when a customer says, "I'm just looking." Mm-hmm. And I understand why that can be frustrating. But when we dissect that a little bit, we see a couple of interesting things. So I will ask you, Anya, have you ever said, "I'm just looking," to a salesperson in any sales environment, when actually you were thinking you might buy something? Yeah. Have, have you ever done that?

Anya Chrisanthon 6:30

For sure. Maybe I just wasn't quite ready to have a conversation with the salesperson. Right. So it's like, okay, yeah, I just wanna check things out on my own first.

Jeff Shore 6:37

Absolutely. Absolutely. So that, those words, "I'm just looking," it's part of the human vernacular. It's what we say, it's an auto-response. So, so the first thing we have to understand is that there's a big difference... If you hear somebody say, "I'm just looking," and you take that just to say they're not motivated to buy, you've made a huge mistake. You've listened to what they have said, and you've made a much, much bigger statement out of it. That, that, that's a massive mistake. The other thing we have to do is, and I encourage salespeople to be self-evaluative about this, when we hear a buyer say, "I'm just looking," my advice is I want you to immediately go back and ask, "What's the last thing that I said to that buyer, or the last thing that I asked of that buyer where they said, 'I'm just looking'"? Because if I say, "Oh, what brought you out today?" There's a pretty good chance they're gonna say, "I'm just looking." Well, if I don't wanna hear, "I'm just looking," then I probably shouldn't ask, "What brought you out today?" So we can sort of reverse engineer our sales presentation by asking ourselves, "What am I doing that might be leading to that I'm just looking comment?" And then just change that behavior first. The best way to deal with I'm just looking is for it not to come up in the first place. And so we have to challenge what it is that we're doing that might be bringing that up.

Anya Chrisanthon 7:55

For sure. It's kind of similar to I'm getting decorating ideas, right? Yeah. Like, how many people come through, and then some of my sales turned from those people. It's like, "Oh, you're looking for decorating ideas. Maybe it's just time to upgrade your whole new home, right?" Like- Right why just decorate, right? Redecorate. Uh-

Jeff Shore 8:14

Absolutely. Well, not, not to mention the fact that sometimes people might think that they're just getting decorator ideas, then they see the home and they fall in love. I mean, come on. W- which of us has not made a big-ticket impulse purchase at some point just because we just had an emotional reaction to it?

Anya Chrisanthon 8:32

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. My, cars that I bought, two, two cars before, I had completely different idea for what kind of car I wanted to get, you know? It was gonna be a small, sedan, ended up with a giant Tahoe because- Yeah you know, I saw it, and the guy said, "Well, why don't you go sit in it?" Yeah. And I said, "Okay." And you know, next thing you know I'm feeling like a gangster and-

Jeff Shore 8:53

Yeah

Anya Chrisanthon 8:53

drove off with a Tahoe, so yeah.

Jeff Shore 8:55

Right. Right. Well, listen, we're human beings. We purchase out of our emotional core. That car speaks to you in a way that you did not expect, but it's sort of calling your name, along those lines. And so when we think about that buyer who's... W- well, even to your point, the buyer who says, "I'm just looking for decorator ideas," well, what can I assume right from the very beginning? Whatever is the situation of the home they live in right now, i- it's lacking. They wouldn't be looking for decorator ideas to the future if they weren't dissatisfied in the way that their home is decorated now. So even there it's the hint that there's something that's not right in the home that I'm living in. I can leverage that. I can build off of that and to help them to find the home that's gonna work best for them.

Anya Chrisanthon 9:39

Yeah. There is that word dissatisfied- Yeah as you remembered from your books- Yeah the dissatisfaction, right? So, and it is the greatest predictor of urgency, as you say. So how should salespeople be uncovering that without feeling like forced or scripted?

Jeff Shore 9:57

Right. Yeah. Well, it is the greatest predictor of urgency. The, the greatest predictor of urgency is not interest rates or the threat of a price increase or the right h- home site availability. All of those things are aspects of urgency, but the greatest predictor of urgency is dissatisfaction. It is the problem that needs to be solved. And I think if we, if we approach this as a trusted advisor with the thought that I can serve you best when I know you best. And so the question that I encourage salespeople to ask is to s- simply say, "Can I ask you just a few quick questions, just so I can make sure I'm pointing you in the right direction?" And that technique is an inroads into gaining their permission, so I'm not jamming anything down their throat, to ask them some really, really important questions. And of course, I'll start with the motivation question, "Why are you thinking about moving in the first place?" When I do this, it, it's not intrusive. It's something that a buyer is going to respect because I'm taking a genuine interest in who you are and a genuine interest in your life. So for example, you, you mentioned cars, Anya. I, I would look at it, say, if I was selling cars, the very first question I would be asking is, "Tell me what's not working in the car that you have right now. That'll help me to decide what's the best way to show you over here." When I learn what you're coming from, then I learn what you're moving to. If I don't know what you're coming from, it's really difficult for me to apply the right solution because I don't understand the problem in the first place.

Anya Chrisanthon 11:27

Mm-hmm. And, when we help to uncover that reason behind the why, I clearly remember this conversation with my sales manager at the time, and we were following your, book. And I said, "This, this buyer's looking to move because they, are renting and they no longer want to rent." And she said, "No, that's not the reason. What is the w- why, why do they... they obviously rented in the past and it worked for them. Like, why do they not want to rent anymore?" So it's kind of like thinking about that reason. What they're giving as a reason, you may have to dig a few more to get to the real reason behind that.

Jeff Shore 12:01

That's a really important point, because when you take something like, "Well, we're renting right now," that's not a reason. That's a, that's a housing status. Right. But just think about all of the different reasons why people who are renting don't want to rent anymore. They're tired of throwing their money away. They need a tax advantage. The neighbors next to them are really, really loud. They're in a bad area. They're the last of their friends to have purchased a home, and they're feeling, self-conscious about it. There's a lot of different reasons why somebody who is currently renting doesn't want to rent anymore, and you're right, that's the dig deep. That's where we have to get in order to figure out who these people really are.

Anya Chrisanthon 12:35

Yeah. Now, Jeff, in your opinion, is it still realistic to close someone on day one? They're a brand-new prospect, they come into your model home, you take them through the whole sales process.

Jeff Shore 12:46

Yeah.

Anya Chrisanthon 12:47

Is it, is it still the expectation today?

Jeff Shore 12:50

Yes. Statistically, one in five sales are made on visit one to a new home community. That doesn't surprise me at all. I- what surprises me it is not higher than that. When you look at the online tools that are available today, and the amount of shopping that customers can do before they visit a sales office, of course this is what you do. You see this every day. You make it easy for a customer to speed up the decision-making cycle, because you provide them with the type of information that otherwise they would have to stand there for a long time talking to a salesperson to get. So the buyer is so incredibly educated before they walk through the door for the first time, that we can't look at it and assume that this is a brand-new exposure to my community. They already know who we are. But the other part of that that I find, uh, very, very interesting is that I will acknowledge that there are customers who don't walk through the door thinking, "Gee, I hope I find something in the next 90 minutes that I can fall in love with and buy today." I, I don't think that that's the typical buyer mentality, which means it's up to the salesperson to normalize the idea that it's okay to purchase on visit one. So if I got to know this customer and we had a good rapport and I was excited to work with them, I could say to them, before I show them the home, "Let's go take a look at the home, and if you love it as much as I think you're gonna love it, there's no way w- no reason why we can't make it yours today. But let's go take a look first and see what you think." I've not asked for a commitment right there. I've just planted the seed that said it's okay to purchase today. So then by the time I invite them to purchase at the end of the conversation, it's not weird. It, it's something that they would already have expected to, to some degree. So we can, we have more power than I think we, we realize to normalize the very idea it's okay to buy on visit one. As I say, one in five sales are already being made. It should be significantly higher than that.

Anya Chrisanthon 14:41

Yeah, you're right. It's all about setting those right expectations- Yeah and kind of closing along the way, right? Mm-hmm. So you're not at the end of it, and it's the first time you bring up the idea of purchasing a home today then, yeah. Yeah. And if you didn't feel like you uncovered everything, that's probably why you don't feel confident enough to ask for that sale.

Jeff Shore 14:59

That's right. That is correct, yeah, yeah.

Anya Chrisanthon 15:02

Now, Jeff, you work with a lot of sales leaders, as well as salespeople. Yeah. So what do you see most commonly in today's market that maybe sales leaders are not doing justice when they're coaching, their salespeople? Maybe some mistakes that they're making that you commonly hear from them?

Jeff Shore 15:20

Well, I, I think it begins with the idea that, that- Sales leaders first have to be in a situation where they're allowed the time to coach. Coaching takes time. And I think, it's a fundamental flaw in our industry that sales leaders are caught on so many different responsibilities between the meetings and the paperwork and the problem-solving and the emails and everything else, that they don't have the time to coach in the first place, and that's something that's gotta be fixed structurally inside of an organization. But when we do have that coaching opportunity, now the question is, how am I gonna spend that time? Because walking into a sales office and asking a salesperson, "What do you have working t- this week?" That's not coaching. That's just an advanced peek at the sales report. Coaching is about rolling up your sleeves. Coaching is about digging deep and figuring out, how do I take this lead right now that's rated as a B and move it forward, with my expertise and my ability to come shoulder to shoulder with my salesperson? So it begins with the sales manager's understanding that these are our leads. The leads belong to the company, or more specifically, to a sales leader. These are my leads, and I wanna be ferocious about the way that I protect that. A sales leader, a sales manager, a vice president, whatever it is, they should be able to look at the sales report at the end of the week and see their fingerprints all over those deals. "Yep, I helped with that one. I helped with that one. I coached my salesperson over there." But there's an intensity to that to lean into that. In my mastermind group that I lead every year with sales leaders from around the country, the one thing that we talk about over and over again is the principle of lead conversion. This is the number one task of a sales leader above everything else. It gets priority in your day. Lead conversion. What are you doing today to convert more leads?

Anya Chrisanthon 17:12

Hmm. So I imagine that that is gonna be one of the answers for you, but if you were leading a team of sales professionals today, what would be, like, a couple of non-negotiables on your calendar that you'd be doing immediately every single day or every- Yeah single week to really drive results for that

Jeff Shore 17:30

team? Yeah. So There are two things that I would say there. One is every day I would have what I call my lead conversion hour. This is one hour on the phone where I'm doing nothing but talking to salespeople about their leads and trying to figure out how to advance them along. One hour every day calling my salespeople, looking at my CRM, how do I take that prospect and move them to the next level? That's the first thing. The second thing that I would do is that every salesperson would get skill development coaching every week, and this is one-on-one, face-to-face, where we say, "We're working with this micro-skill right here, this 15-second skill, and we're gonna work it over and over again." But every salesperson gets skill development coaching every single week. If you show me a sales leader who is working on lead conversion every day and skill development coaching every day, I'm going to show you one of the strongest sales teams that you'll see in the country.

Anya Chrisanthon 18:22

So it shouldn't be doing a bunch of reports and sitting behind their

Jeff Shore 18:26

desk. You gotta get out of the meetings. You, you, you gotta get out of the paperwork. You, you've, you gotta protect your territory. Sales leaders have to be able to look at their division president or company owner or their boss, whoever it is, and say, "Listen, I can sit in these meetings or I can get you sales. I can handle this paperwork or I can raise revenue. You make the call." Uh, but we have to be protective about what it is that we do that is most important to the organization.

Anya Chrisanthon 18:52

That's a great, great point. A sales leader should be in the field, right, with their, with their people, training- That's where the sales are being made and visible.

Jeff Shore 19:00

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Anya Chrisanthon 19:01

Exactly. Uh, Jeff, in your opinion, what really separates the teams that are going to come out of this market on top versus the ones that are maybe suffering right now? Are they doing something different? Maybe not from the sales coaching perspective, not the sales leadership, but the team itself.

Jeff Shore 19:20

Yeah, one of the more important attributes of great salespeople is that- They are confident. And it's important, not arrogant, but confident. And that's really important because confidence is adopted. We gravitate towards confidence. We respond to confidence. Our buyers want to see confidence. Well, that begs the question, well, what is confidence? And I always teach that confidence is the sum of two things, belief and mastery. If I believe very strongly in what it is that I'm doing and I've mastered the way in which I do it, the end result is confidence, transferable confidence, contagious confidence. So then we look at it and we say, what, what do the best teams look like? They're teams who believe very strongly in who they are, what they do in their company, in their value proposition. They know their market so well, that their belief is very strong that they have got something that is, highly desirable to a customer. Plus the belief in themselves, that they themselves are gonna bring that. And then they have mastered the way in what they, in which they do it. They're constantly working on their sales presentation. They know their market, they know their product. They're smart, intelligent, and they can answer any question a customer would ask. When the belief is high and the mastery is high, the end result of that is confidence, and that's what separates great sales teams from everybody else.

Anya Chrisanthon 20:39

For sure. Uh, confidence is contagious, like you said. And, uh, the minute that you start saying, "Oh, you know, the market is not that great right now," that starts to creep into you, and then essentially you do transfer it onto your customer, and it would be almost impossible to make that same-day sale for you, right, if you don't personally believe that it's possible.

Jeff Shore 20:59

Yeah. It's a really wise observation, Anya. It's very difficult to sell against your own value set.

Anya Chrisanthon 21:06

Yeah.

Jeff Shore 21:06

If, if I believe this, but I'm told to say that, it, it doesn't work. It doesn't work, and your customer will smell it from a mile away. So that sense of belief in yourself and your company and your value proposition is a critical aspect of confidence.

Anya Chrisanthon 21:22

Is there a way to build that up? Because I think that is... A- as an ex-salesperson myself, I do recognize that I wasn't as good in sales because maybe I lacked some of those beliefs, right? If you're, if you feel like, "Okay, I need to sell X amount of homes, and maybe it requires me to do something that I don't feel necessarily comfortable with," or, a lot of it is in, in, is in our head, right? So I don't know. Is there a book? Is there exercise? What would you say to a salesperson who's, maybe not as confident in their ability, and, and how do you build up that confidence over time?

Jeff Shore 22:03

Well, you used a really interesting word in that question that I think is telling and powerful if we can harness that word and, and use it, for our own self-development, and the word was discomfort or being uncomfortable. And our natural reaction when we are uncomfortable is to shy away. This is just human nature. Our brain tends to experience discomfort and translate it as threat. And w- because my brain's number one job is to keep me alive, when I sense that there is a threat, my first thought is, "I wanna run away. I wanna get away from that." If we can train our brain to recognize that those moments of discomfort are moments of opportunity, if I am uncomfortable, it means that I am not yet confident in whatever that moment is, so I can run away from it or I can lean into it. And when I lean into it, when I embrace that discomfort and say, "Great, now what am I going to do? H- how do I lean into this discomfort and perfect my mindset and my technique so that it's no longer uncomfortable?" Now what happens? I'm a better salesperson by the time I'm done. So pick your discomfort. Asking a closing question, follow-up, prospecting, overcoming objections, dealing with difficult realtors. Whatever it is, pick one and lean into it, and say, "Now what can I do to prepare myself the next time that moment of discomfort..." Every moment of discomfort comes as a moment of opportunity, but we're gonna have to make that decision. Am I gonna back away, or am I gonna lean into it? I say embrace those discomforts, because on the other side of this discomfort is a profound way to be able to learn and to grow.

Anya Chrisanthon 23:51

That's a great, great position. It- it's interesting, because I've been able to take that, mindset in most of the things that I do in my life, but I guess sales, I just, I don't know, maybe I didn't stay long enough in it to, to really fully embrace that, with the sales, but yeah,

Jeff Shore 24:07

uh- Well, look, we all have these little comfort addictions in our life and, you can see this over and over again. It's not the question of whether you're gonna be comfortable, it's the question is what are you gonna do when you're uncomfortable? Like, I have on my agenda today, I'm going to work out. Now, there's a good chance when, uh, the time, it's time to work out, I'm like, "Oh, I'm not feeling it. It feels uncomfortable." The question is not whether it's uncomfortable, the question is what do you do when you are uncomfortable, right? So, and it's different for everybody, it's different for everybody. But, I've been on this journey for years to try and dismantle my own comfort addictions, and I feel like I'm living my best life because when I notice something that's uncomfortable, if I lean into it, I just feel better about myself by the time I conquer that discomfort

Anya Chrisanthon 24:48

Yeah, absolutely. Now, Jeff, if we have a salesperson listening to this and maybe they're starting on their journey or maybe they've been in this for a while and they're not as lucky as having a sales coach, on their team. Maybe, their sales manager does not subscribe to this philosophy and they're not getting consistent coaching.

Jeff Shore 25:07

Yeah.

Anya Chrisanthon 25:08

What would you recommend? Would you, suggest them team up with s- another sales rep, I don't know, practicing on customers? What's the best- Yeah solution here?

Jeff Shore 25:17

Yeah, I think the most important thing that you can do is to become a student of sales yourself. And the natural human tendency when we are learning something new, we see the learning curve go like this. The natural human tendency is that the learning curve, curve plateaus. Mm-hmm. This is where we look and we go, "I know everything I basically need to know in order to do this job, and so it'll be easier if I just kind of coast." And the s- strongest professionals are constantly pushing that learning curve. So they become a s- a student of the sale. They become a student of their buyer. They don't just simply take what's being handed to them. They challenge it and they turn it on its head and they look at it different. They read a lot. They follow really great sales thinkers like Jeb Blount over at Sales Gravy. There are people out there that can help, but you have to be a student. When you look at it from that perspective, I think about,, football teams. The amount of time that they spend studying first and then practicing what they studied versus the amount of time that they actually spend playing the game, it's ridiculously lopsided. They spend this much time in preparation, study, and practice, and this much time in actual playing. We are completely the other way around. We spend all of our time playing and we don't spend any time studying or practicing. So lean into it. Become a student. It's such a fascinating field. You think about the world of sales that has to do with the human emotion and decision making theory and all of these, uh... We- trust me, you're not gonna run out of material if you lean into this and you really wanna understand the way that a buyer makes a decision.

Anya Chrisanthon 26:57

Yeah, you guys, you can hear the enthusiasm and the passion in Jeff's voice here, right? Like, this is the guy you wanna learn from. So if you're in a position where, you don't have the support on your team, you don't have the sales coach, or your manager is not spending the time with you, consider coming to the Sales and Marketing Leadership Summit in July because that's where it's at. If you enjoyed this conversation, it's gonna be fire. It's gonna be more of this, a full day and a half of this exact energy. So it's, again, July 15th through 17th this year at the Gaylord Pacific Resort in San Diego. Jeff and Shore Consultancy will be there, along with a really strong lineup of speakers focused specifically on protecting margins and driving results in this market. There's also Builder Tech Expo. We'll have Zonda Innovation Stage, and we're kicking things off with Tiki Island Luau Party. Ow, ow. So that sounds like a really great start to the conference. And the tickets are on sale right now, and Anewgo has a BOGO code for our listeners. Buy one ticket, get one free. The code is Anewgo, and I'll put the description in the show notes, along with registration link where you can grab it right there. And we have one more thing. Anewgo is giving away one free ticket to the summit, so if you want to be considered, we're going to drop a link in the show notes as well, where you can submit and tell us why you should be picked. Just know that it covers the ticket, so you will still need to pay for your own travel and lodging. And we'll pick the winner by Friday, so don't wait on this one. And Jeff, before I let you go, I know we covered a lot of territory today, but was there anything that we didn't talk about that you think is really important for our listeners to understand?

Jeff Shore 29:01

Well, the last thing that I would say, and we're gonna get into this deeply at the summit, buyers buy when they have a sense of value purity. Value purity happens when I believe that the price is fair and that the price is final. We have confused the heck out of our buyers. They don't know where the price is. They don't know what fair is, and if they don't know what fair is, how can they make a final decision? I don't think we've done our customers any favors. So we'll lean into that at the summit to really look at it and say, how do we increase margins by coming to our buyer with a value proposition that is much more clear and much more reassuring to them?" The incentive wars have got to stop. We're not doing our customer any favors at all. This is something we can control, and we look forward to diving into that conversation.

Anya Chrisanthon 29:49

I love that. Easy is right, like, that's one of your sayings, and- Yeah you know, you're consistent with that message, and I think it makes sense. It makes sense in marketing. It makes sen- sense in sales. If you make it easy for your customer, don't make it confusing, right? And they will buy. Absolutely. So thank you, Jeff, so much for being on today's show. I really, really appreciate your time today, and thank you all for listening to Anewgo of New Home Sales podcast. If this episode was useful, please share it with someone on your sales team, and leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts, 'cause it genuinely helps us a lot. Links for everything that we talked about today, including the summit, the BOGO sale, as well as that free ticket giveaway, all gonna be linked in the show notes, and we'll see you guys next week. Thanks for being here with us. Bye for now.