You’ve done this a hundred times. The pitch is polished, the comparable sales are lined up, the fee structure makes sense, and yet the vendor goes with the other agent.
For Pancho Mehrotra, Chief Executive Officer of Frontier Performance, this scenario has a familiar root cause, and it’s rarely about your service or your numbers.
It’s about what happens – or doesn’t happen – in the first moments of connection.
“When vendors struggle to feel an emotional connection with an agent, which usually happens at the start of the meeting, the automatic default by the vendor is to focus on fees and comparing each agent on what they don’t offer rather than what they do offer,” he says.
The fee conversation is a symptom, not the problem
It’s tempting to treat a fee negotiation as a standalone issue, something to handle with better scripts or sharper objection-handling. Pancho suggests that’s treating the symptom while missing the disease.
He points to negativity bias as the underlying mechanic at play, something he describes as “hardwired in everyone and easily triggered, especially when the vendors feel very little connection.”
In other words, when a vendor doesn’t feel understood, their brain defaults to the most tangible, comparable thing on the table – your fee – because the intangible thing that would have won them over, trust, never got established.
Pancho is clear that this isn’t about charisma or charm, it’s about reading signals most agents are trained to ignore.
“These nuances are often missed by agents, such as the tone, the rate of speech and the words chosen, not to mention misread body language signals,” he writes.
Clients communicate more than they say
One of the more practical insights in Pancho’s argument is how much of a vendor’s decision-making happens below the surface of the conversation.
He argues that missing these signals doesn’t just cost rapport, it can cost you money directly.
“Clients often communicate more through body language, tone of voice, and subtle cues than through words alone,” he says.
“Missing these cues can result in missed opportunities and lead to incorrect assumptions such as discounting your fee, when you don’t need to.”
That’s a line worth sitting with for any agent who’s ever dropped a commission rate reflexively, assuming it was the only lever left to pull.
Pancho’s point is that the discount often wasn’t necessary at all – it was a response to a disconnection that had nothing to do with price.
Your own nerves are leaking into the room
Where the article goes further than the usual “build rapport” advice is in turning the lens back on the agent.
He argues that an agent’s own insecurities, specifically anxiety about losing the deal to a competitor, or a lack of self-belief, can shut down empathy before the meeting even starts.
“These behaviours manifest in the way the agent communicates to their clients, unaware that the vendor’s response reflects their own behaviours and insecurities,” he writes. “These are often projected onto the client.”
He describes the feeling underneath this pattern as one of helplessness, of feeling “weak and out of control in the process.” The agent, in his view, hasn’t come to terms with the fact that sales is not linear.
“Sales to a certain extent is not predictable,” he says. “It’s not a linear process. A+B does not always result in C.”
Nervousness, frustration or even excitement, he argues, can unconsciously leak through your speech and body language, leaving potential clients hesitant to trust you with their business.
The vendor isn’t rejecting your service, they’re responding to a current running underneath the pitch that you may not even be aware you’re transmitting.
Three practical shifts
Pancho outlines three ways agents can apply emotional intelligence in real listing presentations, rather than treating it as an abstract soft skill.
The first is self-awareness: acknowledging and understanding your own emotions, and recognising how they influence your behaviour and decision-making in the room. The second is ownership – resisting the urge to blame external factors for a lost listing, and instead treating your emotional reactions as something within your control to adapt.
The third, and the one Pancho spends the most time on, is empathetic listening.
“It is developing the ability to listen to someone else’s thoughts, feelings than in yours and because you listen well, you will observe more,” he writes. “Genuine curiosity in the other person is infectious.”
What this means for your next appraisal
None of this requires a new script or a different value proposition. It requires noticing what you’re bringing into the room before you open your folder.
His’s broader argument is that clients aren’t simply buying a service, they’re buying an experience of being understood. Build that experience first, and the fee conversation changes shape entirely.
“Your clients are not just buying a service or product; they’re buying an experience,” he says.
“By embracing emotional intelligence, you can provide that exceptional experience and create lasting impressions that drive repeat business and referrals.”
If you’ve felt a listing slip away despite doing everything right, Pancho’s framework offers a different diagnostic question to ask before the next appraisal: whether the vendor felt genuinely understood, rather than simply pitched to.
Take your Emotional Intelligence test now.
Read the original version of this story, as published in August 2023 here.