The instinct when a seller asks what you charge on a cold call is to defer it — you have not seen the house, you do not know the job yet, you will talk about it when you meet. The coach on this role-play call stops the agent mid-hedge and gives him one sentence instead, plus the line for the seller who immediately says they are not paying it.
The session is a live role-play. An agent runs an expired listing call, gets to the door-opening question, and the seller comes straight back with the one everybody dreads: if you bring me a buyer, what's your fee?
The agent starts to hedge — he does not know what the job is yet, he has to see the home first — and gets stopped there. What is wanted is direct and confident. He is also explicit that this is a hypothetical conversation and not rate-setting: “I'm not telling you to charge 3%, everybody.”
The answer is one sentence, and he repeats it twice and tells the room to write it down: “My fee is 3% to represent the buyer if you accept the offer.”
Then he plays the predictable comeback, where the seller says they are not paying 3%, and he does not negotiate on the phone: “No worries. When I bring you an offer, if I need to give up money in order to make the deal work, I will because I'm a dealmaker”.
The opening lines from the same session are built with the same care. On a for-sale-by-owner call: “I noticed your home was for sale. Just curious if I had an offer on your home, would you want me to bring you the offer?” He points out that he never uses the word buyer and never claims to have one. The question is conditional on purpose.
“My fee is 3% to represent the buyer if you accept the offer.”
Hedging on the number does the opposite of what agents think. It signals that the fee depends on what can be got away with, and it leaves the seller holding the only question they did not get answered, which is what the rest of the conversation is then about.
State it, then decline to defend it. The concession moves to the place it belongs — a real offer, with real money in front of both of you — instead of being handed to a stranger on a call where nothing has been agreed. Your percentage is yours to set; what transfers here is the shape: the number, what it buys, and the condition attached.