Last night, I started reading a little book on door knocking.
Door knocking?
Yep, it’s a real skill. And a lucrative one.
The book was written by a real estate agent who built her entire career by going up to a stranger’s door, knocking on said door, and if somebody opened, asking if they wanted to sell their home.
Most of the time, the people inside said no. So the real estate agent would turn around, walk down to the next house, and do it all over again.
The author of the book gives a few good reasons why a sane person might want to live their life like this. Here’s a few that might resonate with you:
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You will earn more money than most doctors, lawyers, pilots, and professors. You will have more freedom to come and go than almost any other professional, and you will have a saleable product (your business) that will continue to support you after you exit the industry.
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I love this book so far, and in particular I love what the author says is the number one quality that leads to success as a door knocker, and by extension, to success in opening up any kind of sales conversation.
Can you guess what this quality is?
I’ll give you a hint. In fact I’ll give you a few hints, and tell you what it’s not:
* Persistence. A lot of people persist in spite of not getting any results or making any sales. (Such as, ahem, myself for large stretches of writing this newsletter.)
* Intelligence. Good God no.
* Extroversion. Now we’re getting a little warmer, but in the words of Eddie Murphy, that ain’t it…
* Likeability. Sure, being seen as likeable helps open conversations. But a lot of people, myself included, tend to default to thinking that you’re either likeable or not.
Of course, that’s not true.
We each morph from moment to moment, and from environment to environment. Our likability goes up and down, because it’s not really inherent to us. It’s in other people’s heads, and not something that we have control over. So likeability ain’t it either.
I’ve now given you some hints. I told you what this magic quality is not. As to what it is?
If you’d like to know that, I’ll tell you. Or rather, I’ll point you to it.
This quality makes up chapter one of one of the greatest sales books of all time, where it’s called the “highest paid quality on earth.”
If you’d like to know what this quality is and why it is so valuable and how to get it, read the book.
Plus, read the book because no less of an authority than Gary Bencivenga, the A-list copywriter who gets the most love an adulation from other top-level copywriters and marketers, credits his great success to this book.
And by the way, you can cheat. You can find out what this quality is without reading the book.
Somehow, I suspect this will do absolutely nothing for you. But you decide. Here’s the book, with all its sales wisdom: