The Experience is The Product
I love to travel.
And every hotel where the staff was kind and welcoming, I remember. I actually keep a list on my phone of great hotels I’d go back to or recommend without hesitation.
The hospitality industry understands something really well: the experience is part of the purchase.
I’m not sure why more people in sales don’t think this way. I was out with buyers recently who were only looking at a few buildings in Manhattan. So every time we went out, it was one of the same three buildings. In one of those buildings, there’s a team that controls many of the listings. We kept running into them, and my buyers weren’t enjoying it. Every question they asked… “I don’t know.” Full stop. It was constant and surprising.
In the other two buildings, we met different brokers each time, with varying levels of experience, but all of them were more helpful and engaged. At one point, my buyers said, “We want to buy in that building, but we don’t want to work with those brokers. The ‘I don’t know’ ones.”
That says everything.
This would never fly in hospitality.
They understand that the experience is the product. In sales, we sometimes forget that. The apartment might be perfect. The location might be right. But how someone feels during the process matters just as much.
It’s not about having all the answers. It’s about being willing to find them. It’s about building trust rather than shutting things down, because people remember that.
In the long run, it impacts your reputation just as much as any deal. You’re not just part of the transaction. You are the experience.
