Being a Brisbane boy I remember there was election that occurred in 1991 for the Mayor of Brisbane. At that point in time, Sallyanne Atkinson was the incumbent. She was hugely popular with the people and it came as a shock when she was voted out. So many years on, I am still fascinated that I haven’t met anyone who will admit to voting against Sallyanne – everyone claims they voted for her, yet she was beaten. Someone out there didn’t vote for her – the majority of people, in fact.
In many ways I feel the same about sliding commission. Everyone claims they don’t discount their commission, yet we continue to see rates declining. Someone out there is cutting commission. As with everything, there is a large percentage of the industry who want to take a shortcut. There is so much rhetoric given out as tools to ensure commission is held, yet commission by and large declines across the country. Have you ever wondered why?
In an earlier post I talked about trust being our industry’s core product. Every vendor would like to make decisions based on trust. Many owners don’t believe that the trust is out there, so they call in multiple agents. Trust is lacking, therefore owners have to strike out top-level decision making and drop down to the next level; fees and/or method.
Are you contributing to the climb of commission rates, or are you one of the people that said you voted for Sallyanne?
McLeod and clear 
Good read Macca. Well said thanks for keeping it real
Without established relationships, trust is a myth.
Hi Mark
In the absence of value, people default to price- you taught me this. It is so true. Without a clearly defined value proposition a potential vendor sees only a swill of “sameness” in our service offering, so wants to pay a minimum fee.
In my business, we have held our fee to 3.1% as an average across our group. The truth is, our recidivist fee discounters are often fear-driven, at the potential loss of a sale- due to lack of skills, lack of self-belief or complacency.
It bewilders me how we provide as much as we can to up-skill, coach and help as best we can yet there is always a “good reason” the same people fee discount. Last year, to help one sales person, I enforced my contract with him- if he discounted, he paid. Guess what- full fee charged every time!!.
I believe that we are worth our fee. I will help you to hold it if you work in my team- as an industry, we have created a fee-war that stuffs it up for those who can deliver on value.
Stop making excuses- create & communicate your USP- if they see that and they trust you, they will engage you.
If they don’t, look in the mirror- something is missing & you have the opportunity to fix it.
Reduce the Sallyanne syndrome for our industry!.