The Voice They Read and the Person They Meet

By the time most sellers sit down with you, they have already read something you wrote. A profile, a few posts, a market update, perhaps an email somebody forwarded them. They formed an impression of you from it, and they brought that impression to the appointment.

The appointment is therefore not the first meeting. It is the second one, and the first half hour of it is spent, quietly, checking whether the person in the room is the person they read.

The comparison happens whether you intend it or not

Nobody announces that they are making this comparison. It shows up instead as a small hesitation, a question asked twice, or a seller who seemed warm on the telephone and is noticeably more careful in person.

When the two versions match, none of this happens and the appointment simply starts. When they do not match, the client spends part of the hour working out which version to trust, and that attention is not available for anything you are presenting.

Which version a client believes

They believe the room. The person in front of them is current, specific and answering unrehearsed questions, and the writing is not. So a confident, plain spoken agent whose marketing sounds stiff and corporate usually recovers inside ten minutes.

The reverse is the expensive one. Marketing that promises more certainty, more polish or more expertise than you comfortably carry in conversation sets a standard you then have to meet in real time, in front of somebody who has been looking forward to it. That is a hard place to be, and it is self inflicted.

It is worth being precise about what sets the expectation, because it is rarely a claim you made. It is tone. Writing that is formal, polished and a little distant suggests one kind of adviser, and a seller who came expecting that adviser spends the opening minutes adjusting to somebody warmer and less careful. Nothing has gone wrong at that point and the appointment is not lost, but you are starting from behind rather than from level, and you are doing it for no reason that serves you.

Rehearsed language is its own mismatch

There is a second version of the same problem, and it happens entirely inside the appointment. An agent speaks normally for twenty minutes, reaches a part of the presentation they have practised, and shifts register. The vocabulary changes, the pace changes, and the client hears a different person arrive at the table.

Practised answers are not the problem. Practised answers that sound practised are. The test is whether a sentence you have used two hundred times still sounds like something you are saying rather than something you are reciting.

Where to find your own mismatches

You cannot hear this in your own voice from memory, so it has to be looked at from outside. Record yourself answering three questions you are asked at nearly every appointment, then read your three most recent pieces of marketing immediately afterwards. The two will either sound related or they will not, and in a few minutes you will know which.

If they do not, the question is which one you want to keep. Many agents assume the marketing is the version that should win, because it was written carefully. It is usually the other way round. The spoken version is the one clients have already decided they like.

A question to sit with this week

Think about the last appointment where something felt slightly off at the start and you could not name why. If the client had read your marketing before arriving, what would they have been expecting, and did they get it?

Taking this further

If you would like to look at the gap between how you write and how you sell, you can book a discovery call and we will work through it together.