Great Questions Are The Key To Winning Negotiation…



Some negotiations go beyond the deal itself. Learning to effectively navigate them can positively impact your productivity and growth, writes broker Nick Schlekeway.

Check out parts 1 and 2 of this three-part series on negotiations.

I want to wrap up this series with one of the most important communication topics that we could ever discuss: Questions. If you want to be a great communicator and a great salesperson, you need to learn to ask great questions.

Asking great questions — and then remaining silent so that your question can do the work it was crafted to do — will open up an entirely new world to you. If you put these habits into practice, you will never look at negotiations or relationships the same way again. 

Great negotiators ask great questions. Then, even more importantly, they shut up and wait for their counterpart to answer the questions. Open-ended questions that keep your counterpart talking will reveal much about their motivations and what it is going to take to get a deal done. 

When it comes to real estate negotiations, everyone immediately thinks about the negotiation that takes place between buyers and sellers through their respective agents. Although this is a critical negotiation, there are much more important and frequently overlooked negotiations that take place every day — negotiations that we must win or at least win more often than we lose.

The negotiations that take place to convert a lead to a client, for example, will be much more predictive of your success in real estate than your ability to convince a listing agent that their seller should include the fridge in the deal.

Although this is about “real estate” negotiations, I would be remiss…