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Negotiating by text. Or not.

Negotiating by text. Or not.

Date:

By Darrin Friedman

For many agents, text messaging has become the single most important communication method. After all, it’s so easy! And phone conversations are so laborious, aren’t they? So, we text one another, and I mean we text everything. We discuss our clients' desires and needs, and yes, we even negotiate with the other side using texts.

But is that effective, and is it in the best interest of our clients?

If you were to answer honestly, you would probably tell yourself no. It’s not.

Look at it this way: most of us, when we first meet our clients, tell them what wonderful negotiators we are. But how can we possibly be that fantastic if we don’t even bother to pick up the phone and have real conversations with the other agent?

Inflection, tone, and building rapport are all a part of negotiating, and I would argue that those things are incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to convey via text. 

So the next time you pick up your device to communicate a long list of demands using your thumbs, ask yourself: is this in my clients' best interest?

The answer is no.

Go ahead, make the phone call instead. You just might be amazed by the response from the human being on the other end of the line.