Supporting effective compromise
What you’ll learn
- How to help your clients prioritise their needs.
- Tools for talking through difficult decisions.
- How to lead compromises that feel comfortable.
Facilitating the art of compromise is essential to every good sale. While not all clients will need to compromise to accommodate sustainable choices, those with a smaller budget will need help prioritising their decisions. Learning effective compromise as a sales consultant will let you explore your client’s different priorities and help them decide what’s most important to them.
Of course, people will ultimately make whatever choice they feel is in their best interest. But more than just helping them weigh up the pros and cons effectively, your role is to look for opportunities to create win-win situations; a win for your client, a win for the environment and a win for you. This guide will help you do just that by building on what you’ve learnt about your client so far.
Leverage your hard work
By now you will have built a strong rapport with your client by learning what they want from a sustainable home, broadening their horizons, and guiding them to make choices that will improve the liveability of their home post build. Now you can take all of that context and use it to help them prioritise their wants and needs so that their trade offs don’t feel like losses.
While you’ll need to give your client time to digest their decisions, narrowing down their field of choices can simplify the process for them. Your scope of influence here is still bound to helping them make decisions that prioritise what matters most to them. By helping them check their expectations and understand the outcomes of their compromises, you can gently start to influence their decisions for the better.
Good compromise in practise
Your goal is to help your clients realise their own best interests. In most situations they won’t get everything they want, but your role is to help them achieve what they want most.
| Your goal | What to say |
|---|---|
| Clarify your client’s desired result. | Ask questions that inspire a sense-check: “When you say you want lots of natural light, can you tell me more about which areas that's most important in?” or “You mentioned the importance of the home feeling spacious throughout — is that mostly about the living spaces, or do you want the bedrooms to feel big as well?” |
| Communicate the compromise they’ll be making if they opt out of a sustainable feature. | Ask questions that humanise the benefits they’ll be passing up on: “Would you prefer to downgrade to an economy build and let go of these comfort features, or would you rather stick with the standard?” |
| Help them trade-off between two things they want. | “Is it more important to you to have high ceilings throughout the house, or is it more important to have the build package with sustainability features?” |
| Provide acceptable alternatives and options. | Use statements that help your customer find a comfortable compromise: “If you want to afford sustainability features by shrinking the floorplan, you can actually keep the same square meterage on your open kitchen and living space that you love so much. Instead we can trim that space off of the bedrooms or storage space if those aren’t big priorities for you.” |
Where to from here
Now that you’ve clarified what sustainability means in the home, what your clients want from it, and how to position the value, it's time to build your knowledge of the details. When you know the design principles that underpin a sustainable home, from insulation to orientation, you can confidently explain their value to your clients.