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The Real Reason Why Commercial Real Estate Clients Will Want to Work With You

By Jim Gillespie | June 3, 2009

I have a confession to make…I’m a big fan of the old Hawaii Five-0 TV show. You know, the show where detective Steve McGarrett became famous for saying, “Book ’em Danno, Murder One!”

About ten years ago I got ecstatic when individual videos of the show’s episodes were put on sale to the public on a monthly membership basis. You’d get two episodes on every video, and one video would be sent to you every month.

And before these videos became available I had never understood why people ever got excited over collecting things–things like beanie babies and little statues of lighthouses. But when this show became available on video, I then began to understand…

Every month the package would arrive and I’d open it, reading all about the two episodes that were on the video and the actors who were playing the roles. And then I’d be finished watching the two episodes sometime within the next several days. And then after that I’d spend the rest of the month looking forward to the next package that would be coming, and wondering what episodes might be awaiting me inside of it.

So about nine months or so into my membership, I realized that there was a big problem looming ahead—I was receiving one video a month with two episodes on it, the videos were bulky and took up a fair amount of storage space, and there were 278 episodes made of Hawaii Five-0 throughout its entire 12-year run.

But fortunately the problem resolved itself, and after receiving my 12th video the company told me they weren’t releasing anymore episodes of the program, and therefore they wouldn’t be sending me anymore videos. And there I was left longing for more episodes, trying to catch glimpses of them on cable TV, until they finally began releasing them sequentially season-by-season on DVD beginning in 2007. (And the good news is that now 24 episodes come in a package that’s smaller than just one of the videos I received years ago, and all 24 episodes cost about the same as just one of those videos did!)

The reason why I love Hawaii Five-0 so much is because of the writing, the scenery, and the actors. Jack Lord, playing the character of Steve McGarrett, is just so incredibly congruent as a character to me. He’s on a mission to do what’s right to protect the people of his State, and nothing is going to stand in his way. He has great men around him who he trusts and constantly delegates to, he’s completely loaded with integrity, and he treats everyone except the bad guys with respect. And to me, television today is crying out so incredibly loudly for another character just like him, and they’re definitely not very easy to find. And this why I really can’t watch the newer programs that are on television today.

The truth of the matter is, your clients and prospects want you to be Steve McGarrett. They want you to be on a mission to protect them at all times, to get them the best deal possible, and they want to feel that you earning a commission is secondary to accomplishing these objectives. So when you project total congruency and integrity around these objectives at all times, more people will want to work with you, and they’ll refer their friends and business associates to work with you also.

Putting your clients and prospects first at all times will always make you more money, because everyone wants to work with a salesperson who stands for this. And we all know from the salespeople we’ve interacted with during our lifetimes, that there are very few of them who’ve compelled us to feel that we absolutely must work with them again in the future.

So in getting back to Steve McGarrett, two years ago my family and I visited Hawaii, and we went to the place where there’s a statue of Jack Lord being honored by the people of that State, for all that he’s done for them. You see, not only was he a great man in the character that he portrayed, but he and his wife Marie left their entire estate of $40,000.000.00 to different Hawaiian charities when they passed on.

With this in mind, I think if you’re an actor playing a character who’s loaded with integrity, it probably helps if you’re already a person who owns this integrity yourself, too.

Click here to see a photo of me and my daughter Jamie visiting the statue of Jack Lord in Hawaii.

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If you’re looking to improve your prospecting and you want to know what the best words are to say to the receptionist, to the decision maker, and how to leave voicemail messages that compel people to want to call you back, click here.


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