On Coaching, Trust and Rhetoric - Part 1 of 3.

There's a script most #realestate coaches hand out for the fee objection. A vendor asks for a discount, and the agent is trained to reply along these lines:

"Mr and Mrs Vendor, if I discount my fee to you, what likelihood would there be that I'd encourage you to accept a lower offer than the asking price? I battle hard to get you the best offer, and similarly with my fee."

It's a neat piece of logic. It's also answering the wrong question.

What the script assumes

The script treats the fee objection as a negotiation to be won with a better argument. Say the clever line, watch the vendor nod, close the listing. What it never asks is why the objection was raised in the first place.

A vendor who trusts their #estateagent doesn't ask this question. They don't need to, because the fee was never really about the fee — it was a proxy for whether this person is going to fight for them. Trust settles that before the number comes up. The vendor who does ask, then, isn't opening a negotiation. They're telling you, as plainly as they know how, that something in the pitch didn't land. The script skips straight past that and starts arguing.

What Heinrichs would say about that

Jay Heinrichs spends most of Thank You for Arguing on a distinction coaches routinely miss: argument only works on ground both people already share. Heinrichs calls it common ground, and it has to exist before the rhetoric starts — you can't argue your way into it after the fact. Character, what the Greeks called ethos, comes first. Once it's missing, no line of logic fixes it, because the audience is no longer evaluating the argument. They're evaluating you.

He also separates arguments about the past from arguments about the future. Defending your fee — explaining what you did to earn it, why it's fair, why you're worth it — is forensic argument, the kind used in a courtroom to defend a prior act. It's backward-looking. But the vendor's real question isn't about the past; it's about whether they can trust what happens next. Answering a forward-looking question about trust with a backward-looking defence of value is a mismatch dressed up as a comeback.

Heinrichs' more useful point is the one coaches never quote: the best persuaders know when arguing is the wrong move entirely, and disengage instead of pushing a clever line through a gap that clever lines can't close.

If the trust was there, the question wouldn't be.

What the honest answer sounds like

Not a script. A read. Something closer to: it's clear the pitch didn't convince you, and that's worth sitting with before we talk about the fee at all. If another agency has earned more of your confidence, that's the one to list with — a fee negotiated from a shortfall of trust isn't a win, it's a loss with better paperwork.

That's not a weaker position. It's the only position that treats the vendor's question as information instead of an obstacle.

Where the coaching industry gets this backwards

Tom Ferry, Tom Panos, Ricky Carruth — different accents, same product. Scripts that let an agent sound confident without having done the harder work of becoming someone a vendor trusts on sight. And beneath the three names sits a much larger tier of coaches who took the same lines, changed the branding, and sell them as original thinking. None of it is reasoning from first principles. It's inheritance dressed as insight.

The damage isn't that the scripts sometimes work — they do, often enough to keep selling. It's that they train agents to reach for a rebuttal instead of asking what the objection is actually telling them. An #realestateagent who can't explain why a line works is an agent who can't adapt when the vendor doesn't follow the script back. Clients are on the other end of that gap, and they deserve agents who can think, not #estateagents who can recite.

Which leaves the only question worth ending on. Doesn't it make more sense to build implicit trust with a stranger first, than to spend the conversation trying to convince and confuse them with scripts that are fast becoming a commodity?

The Brand Within — thebrandwithin.me