When It Comes To Building Relationships, Make Them Feel Important

Imagine this scenario for a moment. You wake up early to prep for a job interview, arrive at the location with plenty of time to spare, and wait in the lobby for your interviewer. The hands on your watch slowly tick by as your nervously tap your hands on your knee. Nerves build up as the interviewer is five minutes late, then ten, and then twenty.

When they finally come meet you and lead you to their office, they’re texting someone from their phone, barely looking at you as you attempt to make conversation. You brush this off and decide that they’re probably just having a busy morning, but then it gets worse. The interviewer barely looks up at you from their computer, interrupts you over and over again, and takes a phone call halfway through the interview.

How do you feel as an interviewee? Would you want to work for that person? Of course not.

If we want to build lasting relationships, we have to make sure we make them feel important, and that they make us feel important too. I would never be able to trust someone who made me feel unimportant. If I were that interviewee in that office, I would never take a job working for someone who made me feel so insignificant. The people I trust the most are the people who make me feel significant when I’m with them, especially during times of uncertainty.

Whatever emotion you’re after, whatever goals you chase—building a business, getting married, raising a family, traveling the world—Tony Robbins devised six basic, universal needs that make us drive all human behavior. Derived from Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they are the force behind everything we do. We all have the same six needs, but everyone has their own needs profile. How you address those needs – and ultimately embody them for your customers – determines every sale.

The six core human needs are certainty, variety, significance, connection, growth, and contribution. The reason someone is just looking is because their current home isn’t fulfilling their needs. Whatever reason they tell you, their current home is not fulfilling one or many of their six human needs as it did when they first bought it. When you first meet them, you have to know right out of the gate that there’s something lacking. Your job is to uncover and find out how their current product or service not fulfilling their needs, and how what you have fulfill that need.

We need to feel like we matter. We need to feel like we’re important to the people in our life. That’s why significance is so important. It’s the need to be wanted, to have meaning and to have a sense of importance in life. Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics once said, “Pretend that every single person you encounter has a sign around their neck that says, ‘make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life”.

As a homebuilder, you will encounter tons of customers who need to feel significance in order for you to make a sale. You need to validate that their thoughts, ideas, fears, and feelings are important to you. Buying a home is one of the biggest decisions you can make, and you need to give them the gift of significance or they’ll walk right out your door.

So, how can you provide your customer with the significance they need?

1. Collaborate
We defend what we create. Your prospect’s will feel so much more significant in the buying process, and so much more certainty around their buying decision, if you let them work with you. If builder representatives challenge and force compromise without including collaboration, they may end up with the result they want, but the prospect won’t feel confident about it because they didn’t feel significant in the buying process. The only thing worse than someone unwilling to lead, is someone who dictates. Your role as an adviser is to be a collaborator, because collaboration builds loyalty and makes prospects feel proud of their decisions.

2. Validate the objections.
You will hear endless amounts of objections and worries from your customers. They want to feel 100% certain that they will be happy with the home they buy, so you need to validate their fears and objections. If they don’t like something, don’t try to talk them into liking it. This will cause them to feel pressured and will break any trust you’ve built. Instead, give them significance by providing facts that will soothe any anxieties they have. Your customers are a real people with real concerns, allow them to feel significant in the buying process by validating and resolving any concerns they have.

3. Follow up.
Have you ever been on an amazing date with someone, and they don’t call you back after? The Twittersphere has labeled this act as “ghosting”. Don’t ghost your customers. If they need time and space to decide, don’t just ignore them until they come back to you. Follow up, ask them how they are doing with the process. Show them that they are more to you than just a dollar sign, and I guarantee they will feel the significance they need which will lead to the sale.

Be someone who makes your customer feel excited to update you on their life. Be someone who your customer can lean on when they feel uncertainty. Be someone who your customer trust in when they make these big decisions. Be a leader for your prospects and give them the significance they need.

Read more: Don’t Miss Out On Business Opportunities By Being Indecisive