Every listing script you have been handed asks the seller some version of how motivated they are, and every seller gives back an answer that costs them nothing. This coach asks the opposite question — whether waiting would be perfectly fine — and the reason they cannot wait falls out of them in one breath.
This is a live role-play on a coaching call. The coach is playing the agent, and someone else is playing Maria, an expired seller who wanted to downsize, possibly to a mobile home. She has already reached for the door: "but if it's not gonna happen sooner rather than later then we're just gonna hold off".
He does not push back on that. He has already told her, "I'm here to help I'm not here to talk you into doing anything". Then he builds the frame — "let's say that we knew that through no fault of your own or mine if you made a decision to wait which is perfectly okay" — and asks the question: "like a year maybe two like would that be okay with you could you make that work or that's not ideal".
She answers instantly, and it is not about the market. "no no this is a two story and my knees cannot handle that those stairs". That is the call turning. Every line he uses for the rest of the role-play points back at the stairs.
In the debrief he says out loud what the question was for: "if you waited you'd have to wait like I don't know 12 18 months before you could sell it again is that something you would be you were like oh no so now I know you're motivated right". His summary of the whole method is four words long: "it's just discovering what people's problems are".
“like a year maybe two like would that be okay with you could you make that work or that's not ideal”
Asking a stranger how motivated they are is asking them to hand a commissioned salesperson their leverage, so of course you get a hedge. Then you build the rest of the call on the hedge, book nothing, and put them in a follow-up campaign as a maybe. You are not failing at closing. You are failing at finding out anything true in the first four minutes.
Two things make the reversal work, and both are copyable. It is framed as permission — waiting is perfectly okay, nobody is at fault — so there is nothing to resist. And it makes them picture the wait, which is where the real reason lives. What you get back is not a rating out of ten, it is language: the stairs, the knees, the school year, the second mortgage. Use their exact words for the rest of the call. One caveat worth keeping in mind: the seller here is a training partner, not a real prospect, so the response is a demonstration rather than evidence.