Are 100 Listing Appointments Better than 10 Listing Appointments?

I was listening to some ho-hum non-real estate-specific sales training seminar a few weeks ago – don’t know why I was listening to it, considering it was as ho-hum as they come; maybe I was subconsciously looking for material to blog about!

And voila! I found something!

During the seminar, the speaker was spouting traditional numbers game fluff. Basically, the same old “The more people you touch with your sales pitch, the more you’ll sell of whatever it is you’re pitching.”

One of the examples he used was actually from the world of real estate. He was talking about real estate agents procuring listings and made the statement that: “If you could go on 10 listing appointments this month, that would be good, wouldn’t it? But what if you could go on 100 listing appointments, wouldn’t that be even better?”

Hmmmmmmmm.

Really? 100 listing appointments this month?

Oh, I get his point and since he’s not a real estate agent, perhaps he doesn’t realize that going on 100 listing appointments in one month would be nearly impossible for a normal human being. But he seemed to know enough about the real estate industry to understand what a listing appointment entails and the reason for doing them, so I’m going to assume that, practical considerations aside, he believes that MORE is always BETTER when it comes to prospecting for business.

I disagree.

Here’s the thing. Regardless of the number of appointments you shoot for, if your primary goal is one of QUANTITY over QUALITY, I personally think you’re wasting an awful lot of time and energy. I mean, think about it. Let’s say that it’s possible to do 50 listing appointments a month – that’s about 2.5 appointments every week day. Now, I’m assuming that if you’re going on 2.5 appointments a day, you’re doing very little preparation for each appointment and basically going in with your well-rehearsed presentation followed by an expedient pitch for signature.

Hold that thought.

The speaker who was espousing the quantity over quality approach proclaimed that one of the great things about his approach was that when (not if) you get turned down, you won’t really care that much because you have plenty more fish in the kettle – that is – another listing appointment or two later that day, and 2.5 more tomorrow.

Hmmmmmmmm.

That sounds exhausting.

But how about the other approach – the one the speaker implied was “just okay?” Where you “only” have ten listing appointments a month; therefore every one of those appointments is going to be far more important to you and much more disappointing to you if you don’t get the listing?

BINGO!!!

D’ya see where I’m going with this?