If You Want It, Come And Get It.

Jul 7
If You Want It, Come and Get It ·
Part 1 of 5

The Knock at Dinner Time.
The entire prospecting machine of real estate is built on one move: arriving uninvited. Today, an honest look at what interruption actually costs, and who's been paying the bill.

Picture an ordinary Tuesday evening. A family is having dinner. The phone rings, and it's an agent they've never met, reading from a script about the equity in their home. They hang up, a little annoyed, and go back to the potatoes.

Nothing happened, right? No harm done. The agent logs it as a dial, the family forgets it by dessert, and the coaching industry calls it a numbers game.

Except something did happen, and I want to slow the film down so you can see it. In the four seconds between hello and the hang-up, that family made a small deposit into a large account. The account is labelled what real estate agents are like, and the deposit said: they arrive uninvited, they want something, and they don't much care whether I do. Multiply that deposit by every cold call, every door knock, every “just checking in” email, every letterbox drop and expired-listing ambush, made by over a million agents, every working day, for decades.

That account is now the water this entire industry swims in. And agents wonder why it tastes the way it does.

The interruption model, stated plainly
Strip the euphemisms off modern prospecting and here's the machine underneath: identify people who did not ask to hear from you, and make them hear from you. That's it. That's the model. We dress it in vocabulary like outreach and touch points and farming, which is a marvellous word, farming, as though the neighbourhood were crops and the agent were weather. But the mechanism is interruption, and interruption has a signature: it spends the other person's attention without asking, then requests their trust in the same breath.

Read that again, because it's the whole problem in one sentence. Interruption withdraws trust at the exact moment it's asking for trust. It is a salesman knocking on your door to sell you a security system, having let himself in first.
"Permission marketing is the privilege, not the right, of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages."   -   Seth Godin

Godin named all this a quarter of a century ago. Anticipated. Personal. Relevant. Now hold the average prospecting call up against those three words and watch it go zero for three. Not anticipated: they didn't ask. Not personal: you're reading a script written by a coach who has never met them either. Not relevant: you have no idea whether they're moving; that's literally what the call is trying to find out.

What low trust actually costs.
Here's where I'd normally cite the surveys that place estate agents down among the least trusted professions, keeping company with the professions people make jokes about. You've seen them. Every agent has seen them, winced, and carried on dialling. But rankings are abstract, so let me make the cost concrete instead, because low trust isn't a reputation problem. It's an operating expense, and it's charged to every single interaction you have.

Low trust is why the seller triple-checks your valuation against two portals and her brother-in-law. It's why the fee conversation starts hostile before you've said a word, because she's not negotiating with you, she's negotiating with every agent who ever interrupted her. It's why your genuinely useful market update goes unopened in a promotions folder, presumed guilty by association. Every agent operating today pays a tax on the behaviour of every agent who came before them, and then, with each cold call, raises the tax on everyone who comes after. It's the only pyramid scheme where all the participants lose.

Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.  -  Dutch proverb

And the deepest cost is paid by the agent, in private. Because you cannot spend your days doing something to people that you would resent having done to you without it corroding something. Most agents hate prospecting. This is treated as a discipline problem, a mindset problem, something to be coached out of them with accountability calls. May I offer another reading? Your reluctance to interrupt strangers at dinner might not be weakness. It might be your character, functioning correctly, and being overruled.

The question under the question.

The industry's defence is always the same: it works. Make enough calls and somebody eventually says yes. And that's true, in the way that fishing with dynamite works. Something floats to the surface. The question was never whether interruption can produce transactions. It's what it produces alongside them: a marketplace defended against you, a profession ranked beneath repair, and a version of yourself you have to talk into showing up every morning.

Hold this thought: a business model that requires the public to not want to hear from you, and requires you to not care, is not a business model. It's a siege. And sieges are expensive for both sides of the wall.

So what's the alternative?

"Ah, says the industry, we know this one: sit back and wait for business to fall from the sky."
That's the strawman, and next time I'm going to take it apart stick by stick, because attraction is not what the hustlers have told you it is. It might be the hardest work you've never been taught.

Chris Arnold · The Brand Within
Be worth knowing, not simply well known.
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https://thebrandwithin.aweb.page/trust-whisperer


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