Control Selling: The Complete Nine C’s

Who Is Andrew Audette: The Introduction and the Ryan Serhant Bit

Tom Ferry brings Andrew Audette to the stage directly out of his own setup about sales presentation skills and a book the two of them are writing together: “He and I are in the middle of writing a book. I can’t wait to share it with you. My partner, my book partner, ladies and gentlemen, Andrew Audette. Andrew! Thank you!” An unidentified crowd voice shouts “All right! All.” as he takes the stage.

Andrew opens by naming his own motive plainly:

“Now I come to these things, for typically one reason: I’m trying to make money. Does everybody want to make more money? Yes? Okay. Well, I know this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Okay, There is no question that the number one skill you need to learn in order to make more money is understanding sales at the mechanical level.”

He immediately frames real estate’s obsession with presentations and scripts as a distraction from that mechanical understanding: “we’re so obsessed with presentations… An open house and scripts and scripts. If I hear another script, That stuff doesn’t land as well as it could when you don’t fully comprehend sales at a mechanical level.” He defines “mechanical” himself: “I mean, you break it down into very simple parts that all connect and you understand how the world works in sales.” He claims the executives and top performers already understand this — naming, per the transcript, “the Andy Cs making twenty million a year, the Tim Smiths, the Jill Biggs, The Steph Youngers” as people who “understand this stuff because they understand this is how you make money in this business.”

Before diving into the framework itself, he sets up a bit he says happens to him constantly — being mistaken for Ryan Serhant:

“Before I dive into this… I have to make a prediction. We’ve got about five thousand people in the room, And I know, at least ten percent of you have already said this to your neighbor or thought in your head this very thing… Every week, without fail, when I am not doing my thing in Baltimore, I am from Baltimore… And when I am at a real estate conference, it happens to me three to four times an hour. You guys don’t want to know what it is? People are thinking this guy looks like Ryan Serhant everywhere I go.”

He riffs on it at length: “People thought I was Serhant yesterday. That’s Troy Vincent saying, ‘What’s up?’ He knows. That lady thought I was Serhant, huh? But Ryan is my buddy. Okay, I collaborate a lot with him. He’s a good sales guy. I’ve always found the best salespeople and I take what I can from them and put it into my own brand.” He shows a photo of the two of them together and jokes about it being real (“This not AI… This real life stuff… we’ve been finishing each other’s sentences”), plugs his own Instagram handle, and reads out the mean comments he gets: “‘Look at this wannabe Ryan Serhant.’ ‘Look at this Teemu version discount.’” and a suggested nickname: “You should call this guy ‘Try and Sir.’” He shrugs it off: “I love it. Okay, so anyway, enough of that. This actually me.”

From there he gives his own bio and credibility numbers, verbatim:

• “I run a real estate team in Baltimore. Been doing this essentially my whole life. I started in new home sales, Taught a sales training and worked for a sales consulting firm.”
• “We got about twenty seven agents now, do about two hundred million in sales, five hundred transactions. We do that with three staff; very profitable; love it.”
• “Also have a mortgage company; got two partners there… do one hundred seventy five million a year in loans; good business.”
• “We do property management, right? That’s another little way to make money. This is a money talk, okay?”
• “And then I have my personal brand… personal brand AU. I do some stuff with that.” He describes his logo: “That’s my little logo AU is actually bold on the periodic table of elements” — a reference (as transcribed, somewhat garbled) to the chemical symbol for gold.

He then pivots to what he calls the thing he’s actually proudest of — not the business numbers: “I’d be remiss if I was sharing with a room of this size. This what I’m most proud of. This my family, and this my why. Why am I so obsessed with this? It’s not about money that much anymore. I’ve done well, but I want to make my family proud of me. I want my parents to be proud of me. I want my wife to be proud of me. Have awesome siblings; I want them to be proud of me, and I certainly want my kids to be.” He ties this to a Zig Ziglar reference: “if you don’t have that, you rely on motivation, and as Zig Ziglar would say, motivation is like bathing; it wears off. That’s why we recommend it daily. But if you have inspiration, it’s white hot.”

He is candid, almost self-deprecating, about his own limits as a leader and manager: “It’s not because I’m a great leader that I was able to accomplish these things. I’m working on it… I’m not like the best leader; I’m okay, and working on it.” On management specifically: “Not the best management It’s the bane of my existence; I don’t like doing one-on-ones, and i don’t like being held accountable myself, and i don’t like holding other people accountable. Not a great manager; i am working on it.” On marketing: “I am okay. I have done some videos with Sergei… Not nearly consistent enough. I don’t have a good YouTube channel. I am working on that, right?” He gives a shout-out to his operations lead: “Before I hired, the most brilliant COO who’s over there, shout out to Riley Kratzer give her a hand real quick.” His conclusion from all of this: “here is the thing i am good at this [sales], and that’s all i need to be. Because, you are not going to be a good leader if you are not a good salesperson… You are not going to be that good at managing people and getting people to understand your ideas and move them powerfully if you are not a good salesperson. I’d argue, you can’t even be that good at marketing, because what are you even marketing? In our business, we’re trying to market our ability to sell.”

The Origin Story: How Control Selling and the Book Came Together With Tom Ferry

Andrew tells the story of how the partnership with Tom Ferry began, in his own words, as a chance call in January:

“Tom and I we’re both kindred spirits on this. I got a call from Tom. Which is kind of a cool thing. I am not super involved in the ecosystem. He called me in January. He said, ‘Hey, I’d like to hop on a Zoom with you.’ Ruby’s going to schedule it. That’s nice. I like that Tom wants to talk to me. Woo! I’ve been watching him for fifteen years. And he said, ‘Andrew, I’ve watched some of your sales stuff. I really like it.’ It was a fifteen-minute call — fifteen minutes — it was busy guy — and we ended up talking for two hours.”

What made the call run long, per Andrew, was a shared intellectual lineage in sales training: “what we learned is we are both kind of obsessed with this stuff going all the way back from Napoleon Hill to Earl Nightingale to. Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn, Floyd Wakeman. We were just in it. It’s like we were in rapport. We were having this great conversation.” (Note: the transcript renders this name as “Floyd Wakeman”; the real sales trainer this almost certainly refers to is commonly known as Floyd Wickman, but the transcript itself says “Wakeman,” and that is preserved here rather than silently corrected.)

Tom then set homework for the next meeting: “She goes, ‘We need to do this again. The next time we meet, I want you to present to me what you think the future of sales training is.’” Andrew mentions, in passing, having “a couple of buyer presentations go viral” and that he and a colleague (“Steph”) “did a listing one last week that got one hundred thousand views on YouTube.”

He describes his own sales-training background as long-running and not real-estate-specific: “So I’ve been working on it my whole life. My whole adult life, I was lucky; I got a ton [of] Sales training from the time I was twenty. Not real estate stuff, sales stuff. And I understood that if I could really figure this out and understand sales at a mechanical level, I could print money.”

The framework’s construction, as he describes presenting it to Tom:

“So, I presented Tom this framework. And i told him, i said, look, we got to took this from this guy and that guy and Tom’s adding to it, we’re playing with it. And essentially what we did was. We took all the best stuff since 1930, kept the good stuff, ditched the stuff that’s bad or doesn’t work anymore, added all the new stuff because the world’s changed, right? The world’s changed. There hasn’t been a new sales framework since 1980. Because if you’re going to have a mechanical process, you have to have a framework that identifies what these things actually are. There hasn’t been one.”

He explicitly names the prior industry-standard framework he says has gone unchanged since 1980: “AIDA: Attention, do I have your attention? Interest, are you interested? Decision, Action. That’s a framework for sales. There hasn’t been a new one.” He also references Glengarry Glen Ross in passing — “You guys seen Glen Gary Glen Ross? I can recite that line for line. And it’s very profane. So we’re not going to do it” — as a cultural touchstone for old-school sales pressure, without further elaboration.

Tom’s reaction to the framework, per Andrew: “After I presented to Tom and we riffed on it for a while, he goes, ‘Time out. You need to be my executive team. We’re partnering on this. This needed.’ And I was like, ‘Well this just what I’ve been doing my whole life.’ But I didn’t think anyone cared or anything like that.” He names the resulting framework directly: “So that’s what Control Selling is It’s the new framework, I’ve been working on my whole life, and I’d argue Tom has as well.”

Andrew also surfaces a piece of Tom Ferry organizational history that he says most people in the room don’t know, tying Tom’s family lineage directly back to the same sales-training tradition: “guess who guess who Mike Ferry worked for. So you guys don’t even know this. This history. If you are in the sales, you should know this. I’ve been coming to summit for twelve years… He’s never talked about this because he doesn’t want to brag about it, but it’s fascinating. His dad worked for Earl Nightingale. Do me a favor; just write this down, if you get nothing else. You listen, this from like the nineteen eighties Listen: Google ‘Earl Nightingale The Strangest Secret.’ One of the best soliloquies on sales.” He connects this to Napoleon Hill as well: “You guys were like, you know, direct ties to Napoleon Hill.”

He frames the whole intellectual project of Control Selling this way: “We’ve taken everything every sales framework since nineteen thirty. And we’ve analyzed and we’re using AI, and we’re talking to a lot of smart people. Captured all the best stuff. Ditch the stuff that doesn’t work, added all the new psychology and neuroscience to create controlled selling. I’m going to walk you through it step by step.”

Why Real Estate Has No Real Sales Training

Before laying out the nine C’s, Andrew makes an extended argument — carried over into the next part of the transcript — that real estate is uniquely undertrained in sales compared to other industries:

“Some of these industries, I’ve consulted with some of these other industries. They focus on sales training. Oh, they focus on sales as a mechanical process. Pharmaceutical, telecom, SaaS, insurance, medical device B2B. They won’t even let you try to sell your product unless they know you’re good. We don’t do that here. Real estate doesn’t do that at all. We just say, hey, get your license, and we’ll call you a salesperson, and we wonder why most people are failing.”

He mocks the disconnect between the licensing curriculum and actual sales skill: “when you got your license, right? When you did all that amazing work to get your license, You studied your state stuff, and you know about riparian rights and meets and bounds… Meanwhile, you don’t know anything about sales.” His analogy: “We’re the National Association of Engineers, but no one took math.” He cites specific statistics on industry failure:

• “eighty two percent of people enter this industry oftentimes with a second career… I am going to have no formal sales training.”
• “The old eighty seven percent fail after five years — that’s been pretty true for like ever.”
• “half these licensees don’t sell anything.”

His explanation for why agents can survive despite this is that the product itself is easy to want: “we’ve never had to preemptively inoculate ourselves to sales resistance in this industry… the reason we haven’t had to deal with sales resistance is because the consumer already wants the product, guys. They want to buy a house… It’s all countries based on property rights.” He draws the line between surviving and excelling: “If you just go to the process, you can get by by not being a good salesperson. You can do your two deals a month, which is good. But if you want to achieve the highest level of success this business offers, you want to sell homes to everybody.”

“You Are the Product”: Andrew’s Framing of the Salesperson’s Job

Andrew introduces a framing quote attributed, per the transcript, to a book he calls “Robin” by an author he compares to Jim Rohn — the attribution here is garbled in the transcript and could not be resolved to a specific real title or author, so it is preserved as spoken:

“If you don’t listen or read the book ‘Robin,’ one of those brilliant business minds of all time, it’s like a philosopher; he’s like the modern name Jim Rohn from them. He says, ‘This you are doing sales because you failed at marketing, and you are doing marketing because you failed at product.’ That just means if your product is so good, barely even need to market it. Your product is so. Your marketing is so good, you barely have to sell it.”

He anticipates the audience’s objection — “But Andrew, I thought this was a sales talk” — and answers it by redefining what the “product” is in real estate: “Sales is like the least important thing on that list, right? Here’s the thing: in our industry, you are the product. You’re the product. It’s not the houses. We don’t have products; we have a service. You’re selling a service, an agency relationship — you are the product!”

From that he defines the actual job of an agent:

“This is what your job actually is. Your job is to influence the outcome of a transaction, okay?… How do you do that by effectively managing the entire real estate ecosystem on your behalf? I got to sell everybody every deal: buyer, buyer’s agent, seller, seller’s agent, home inspector, mortgage loan officer, Title company. I am going to effectively manage everything for you. That’s sales. That’s what your job is. It’s not my buyer presentation is good, that’s this, that’s a piece of the mechanical process, it ain’t everything.”

Andrew Audette’s Stated Definition of Sales

Andrew gives what he presents as the deliberately-worked-out, jointly-developed definition of sales itself — he explicitly notes that he and Tom Ferry “pulled this apart” because “there is a million definitions” and “you have to properly name things”:

“Sales is the art and science of getting somebody intellectually engaged on a future result that’s good for them. And then helping them emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. That’s what sales is.”

He repeats and reinforces this definition multiple times across the talk, treating it as the throughline for every one of the nine C’s. He also ties status to sales skill directly: “Do you know what they call the best salesperson in any company?… They call the best salesperson in any company the CEO. That’s a fact. So if you want to rise in your life and in your career, you better be good at this. It’s not an option.” He offers his own definition of intelligence in the same breath: “That’s my definition of intelligence: people who get what they want, they’re smart to me. I don’t care how quickly you can do calculus or how fast you can read; I want to know if you’re getting what you want, then you’re smart, okay?” He uses Tom Ferry himself as an illustration of a non-obvious kind of salesperson: “Tom Ferry is a great salesperson… He has to sell something. We’re selling Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food, shelter, water… Tom has to sell vision. Executives have to learn how to sell vision — a belief, A strategic execution plan — getting all these different people on the same page takes a master salesperson.”

The Nine C’s: Three Triads of Three

Andrew introduces the framework’s structure directly, with visible enthusiasm and a promise of giving it away for free:

“You really want it? Because we should be charging for this shit. I ain’t making any money on this thing here today. I’m here to give. I have nothing to sell you. I literally have nothing to sell you, unfortunately for me. I just want to give it to you, but we’re going to give it to you This is it Okay. Seems simple, it’s not simple.”

He describes the overall architecture:

“Let me break this down. This is three triads, three sets of three, okay? Easy to remember: nine Cs, nine Cs, three sets of three. Three triads — the trinity — woo!”

He names the three triads by function before naming the individual C’s:

• Triad One — the foundation: “This is universal skills. See, we don’t talk about this in real estate much… If we don’t get the foundation right, doesn’t matter. I can give you the best listing presentation of all time, I do it like three times a day, doesn’t matter if you’re not able to perform.” (Comfort, Care, Connection.)
• Triad Two — the structure: “Then there’s going to be a structure. You need that structure in these sales situations.” (Control, Clarify, Crystallize.)
• Triad Three — the resolution: “And then finally you have to resolve and close and present out.” (Consult, Close, Confirm.)

C No. 1 — Comfort

Comfort is the first C and, per Andrew, the precondition for everything else. He frames the traditional sales-training obsession with client comfort as backwards — the salesperson’s own comfort has to come first: “Most of the sales training that has existed, it’s all about making your client comfortable. So, it’s what it’s all about: bond their floor. And there is all this good stuff that’s important. I want to make people comfortable, excuse me. You are never going to make someone else comfortable unless you are comfortable with yourself. Period full stop end of story.”

He illustrates the cost of discomfort with an image: “We’ve all seen the guy at the cocktail party; They’re so uncomfortable, you are like ‘ish.’ You can’t wait to get away from them. It’s repellent.” He then makes the point that comfort is situational, not a fixed trait, giving several concrete examples: “Maybe you’re comfortable working with a referral who’s just like you, But you’re less comfortable meeting a stranger or an online lead who wants to meet at the house for the first time… Or maybe you’re comfortable in this neighborhood, but as soon as I get out of that neighborhood, I’m a little uncomfortable. Or at this price point. As soon as it’s over 2 million, I get a little nervous. Why? You got nothing to lose. You’re on a free roll. You’re not spending any money; they’re about to make a giant financial decision, but you’re uncomfortable all the time.”

His prescription is a mindset shift around control of perception:

“You need to be aware of this stuff, and you have to realize you get to pick how you’re perceived when you show up. It’s not up to them; it’s up to you. Don’t give your power away. I pick how I’m perceived. I wore this because I want to look like money. You pick your presence, and some people are hearing this for the first time. You got to be aware of this stuff. If you’re not good, nothing else matters. That’s why it’s the first step.”

He ties this back to identity, state, preparation, and presence with an image: “How many times have you said, ‘How do you feel on the inside’ for your answer to those on the outside? You’re like a lemon or an orange; you squeeze what comes out?” And he grounds the whole concept in his own coaching of his 30-person sales team: “trust me, I have thirty salespeople. I know when they’re comfortable and not comfortable, and I know what they need to work on. But, they want to talk about this cool line. I say, when I walk up to the front door… they’re not comfortable. We can’t move past that.” He closes Comfort with a line from his wrestling coach: “It’s, like my wrestling coach, said: ‘I could show you the moves. But you are too tired. It’s not going to matter. You are going to lose anyway.’”

C No. 2 — Care

Care follows directly from Comfort in his shorthand framing: “That’s this: Am I good? Next is care.” He defines it as making the felt experience of caring, not just the fact of caring, the agent’s responsibility: “That’s hey, I want them to feel that I care about them. Most of you guys are good human beings, I’d imagine you do care about them, you do want to do a good job. Your job is to make them feel that care. You ever thought about that?”

He lists specific, small behavioral markers of demonstrated care:

• “How you show up… shows care.”
• “Are you on time? That shows care.”
• “Are you friendly?”
• “Are you genuinely curious?”
• “Do you actually listen to them?”

He summarizes the compact three-word framing he uses to teach Comfort/Care/Connection as a checklist: “I am good and then I want to make sure you are good and I want you to know it.”

C No. 3 — Connection

Connection completes the foundation triad and gets the third slot of his three-question shorthand: “I want to say, ‘Hey, comfort is “am I good?” care is “are you good?” connection is “are we good?”’” He is explicit that Connection is where most sales training historically starts — and that starting there is a mistake without the first two C’s in place: “This is where most of the sales training starts that has existed in the past. It starts with connection, and there’s all that great science. But, you’re never going to connect with someone if you’re not comfortable and they don’t think you care. Fair?”

The single largest piece of cited research in the entire talk appears here — a communication-breakdown statistic, rendered in the transcript as “the Marabia rules” (almost certainly a garbled reference to the well-known Mehrabian communication-model statistic):

“Then you get into all the signs of like the Marabia rules: fifty-five percent of body language; fifty-five percent of communication is body language. Thirty-eight percent tonality, greatest speech. Only seven percent is the words you use. But we’re obsessed with the words. We have like a fetish for scripts in this industry, and they don’t work because if they did, everyone would be selling a lot more homes. But they’re not.”

(Note the transcript itself double-states “fifty-five percent” — once generically and once specifically tied to “body language” — which reads as a stumble/restart in the live delivery rather than two separate claims; it is preserved verbatim.) He closes the foundation triad by naming its scope and its limits: “This that human element, okay? That’s the foundation. We need to work on that. That’s a framework; that’s infinite amount of training can go into that, But this the framework and I can only go so deep in this.”

C No. 4 — Control

Before naming Control, Andrew narrates the moment in his conversation with Tom Ferry when this second triad clicked for both of them, including a joke about Tom’s love of owning web domains: “when I was explaining this to Tom, he was picking up when I was putting down; he was ‘oh,’ because control is the most important part. He goes, ‘I am a domain control seller.’ If you want to know why it’s hard to pull him back, it’s the most important step: you have a domain talker. It’s like a billion domains, shipreader dot com, banana real estate dot com. He’s got kind of long.”

He defines Control as a binary condition every meeting is already in, whether the agent realizes it or not:

“Here is the deal: You are either going to be part of your plan or someone else’s plan. Whose plan do you want to be a part of? People don’t know how to buy the service that we’re selling, but we let them drive the ship. Someone’s driving the ship every time you meet somebody; they have an agenda, spoken or unspoken, and you have an agenda, spoken or unspoken.”

His prescription for establishing Control has three explicit parts: “Your job when you’re meeting with somebody in a sales situation is to understand their agenda, and then you want them to know your agenda, And you have to discuss what the outcome looks like before you ever get started. That’s control.” He gives a full verbatim script for how this sounds with a buyer:

“So when I’m meeting with the buyer, I’d say, ‘Hey Joe, when we meet tomorrow to take a look at that house, What types of things would you like to go over in order to make the best use of your time?’ … I have to ask you some things just based around if there’s any critical dependencies on timing, on budget, what you’re looking for. Is it cool if we go over that stuff while we’re together? No one ever says no to that. Say, ‘Awesome.’ Hey, At the end of the meeting. Just to make sure we’re clear, let’s spend the last five minutes figuring out where we’re going to go at the end of the meeting. So we can move into a PowerPoint. That sound good? That’s control.”

He then reveals the psychological trick underneath the script: whoever asks questions is actually the one steering, even though the other party feels like they are in charge: “Now who thinks they’re in control in that situation when I say, hey, what types of things would you like to go over in order to make best use of your time? They’re telling me what they want. Who thinks they’re in control? They do. They do. Perfect. Who’s in control? You are. Whoever asks the questions, guys, this how real salespeople, real G’s do this shit. When you’re selling big stuff, like I was working with guys selling fifty machines, you know, five hundred million dollars of machines to the Pentagon and the complex here, this what they work on.” He explicitly de-emphasizes the industry’s obsession with closing in favor of opening: “People are obsessed with closing; we’ll talk about closing. You want to be a good closer, but if you’re a real student of this, you realize you want to be a great opener. I want to be a great opener. Opening is more powerful than closing.” And he stakes a personal claim on its financial value: “Not winging it. This has made me more money than any particular step in this thing, because I do it every single time, every time I meet a buyer, every time I meet a seller, Every time I am trying to recruit an agent when I am talking to a lender.”

C No. 5 — Clarify

Clarify is introduced through a mentor quote, attributed (per the transcript, with the name possibly garbled) to “Alan Ball, the owner of realtor dot com”: “Clarify, my one of my great mentors, a master salesperson Alan Ball, the owner of realtor dot com. I used to speak with him all over the place at Berkshire. Shout out to Gino for even letting us do it because we were crazy people. We went crazy. He’d always say, ‘You can only access people through their concerns.’”

His definition: “your job is to clarify and remove any opacity. You want this crystal clear. What is this person’s deal? What is this person’s deal? That’s your job as a salesperson. Every great sales framework is a question-based methodology, so you have to ask good questions.” This is where he introduces the four P’s as the compressed version of the questions worth asking (detailed in their own section below).

C No. 6 — Crystallize

Crystallize is presented as the step almost nobody actually does, even among agents who ask good clarifying questions: “here is what no one does. Here is what no one does. I am not one of this ones. You got to crystallize it once, you know, and you get that information, you repeat it back to them in their exact words in their exact.” The technique is to mirror the client’s own language back to them, and he ties this to physical rapport cues: “at that point, if you are in rapport and the connection is good, when you lean forward, they lean forward. When you laugh, they laugh. You nod your head; they nod your head. That’s a structure of a good conversation in sales.” He again reaches for high-stakes B2B selling as validation: “Not many people know this stuff, but you know who does know this stuff? The executives. You start doing this with someone high up; you are trying to sell one client from fifty deals — they love it. So, I’ve taken down National Builders and stuff. Same structure every single time. Conversation’s different because how could you possibly move to this next step?” This is the point in the talk where the room’s screen visibly moves to the third triad, and Andrew reads it off live: “What’s it say on the screen? Consult. What’s it say on the screen? Consult.”

The Four P’s (Used Inside Clarify/Crystallize): Picture, Pain, Price, Process

Andrew introduces the four P’s explicitly as a compression device for the question set inside Clarify: “for brevity, you have to understand the four P’s in here. You have to understand what they want.”

• Picture — what the client is actually trying to achieve. “Our business is easy: they want to move, they want to buy a house, they want to sell their house, they want to unlock their equity. What are we going for? That’s the picture. Can you just explain to me a little bit about what you’re going after here?”
• Pain — the cost of inaction, distinct from the goal itself. “There’s always a pain point. They’re moving towards something, they’re also moving away from something. What’s the cost of inaction? What happens if you don’t get that? Well, I hate these schools, my other kid cannot go to this school, and we got to move by there. That’s the pain. It’s always the pain — your job to uncover it.” He gives a deeper diagnostic version of the pain questions: “I want to know how bad is the situation and how long has it been a problem? And what have you tried to deal with it? And why is it such a problem? What happens if it continues? That’s sales stuff. That’s not product presentation.”
• Price (framed around budget/pricing dependencies) — attributed to a colleague named, per the transcript, “Janelle Garren”: “Janelle Garren said, ‘You love this line.’ Do we discuss if there’s any critical dependencies on pricing or budget? It’s just a dumb way to say it… Say it however you want. You have to uncover their budget. Can they even afford to do what we’re trying to do here?”
• Process — logistics and stakeholders. “Clarify within the process — when do they want it, how are they thinking about the process, who’s involved in the process?”

He closes the four P’s with the payoff of gathering all of it: “Can you imagine if every person you met, every client you met, you knew all that stuff? I know exactly what they want. I know what their pain points are. I know who’s involved in the process and I know the timeframe and I know all about the financial situation. Would you be better able to serve them if you knew that?” And he diagnoses the industry’s usual failure to do this: “We don’t know how people got most of your leads, your CRM, most of the appointments you go on. You come back, you don’t know anything about this. And, maybe it’s because you weren’t comfortable and they didn’t think you cared, and there was no connection.”

C No. 7 — Consult

Consult opens the third triad — “the resolution” — and Andrew spends real time arguing against the very idea of a canned, one-size-fits-all presentation before defining the C itself: “How could you ever have a canned buyer presentation or a canned listing presentation unless every buyer is the same, right? Everyone you deal with is the same; they have the same pain, same picture, same process. They’re not the same. We treat them the same because I get my presentation, I get my twenty-two point argument plan; it’s garbage; doesn’t work; it’s weak. I had to beat that weakness out of me and other people, not physically but intellectually.”

He introduces “confidence” as an adjacent, necessary quality that he deliberately did not make one of the nine C’s: “You do have to be confidence, not one of the C’s, but confidence. Everyone has confidence; it’s almost too sophomoric and benign to call a ‘C.’” He grounds it in a certainty principle: “when you’re presenting, You have to realize whoever is more certain in any interaction will influence the other person. Whoever is more certain [in] any interaction influences the other person, and if you can accept that, and that’s true, there is a ton of psychology on it, neuroscience on it… you’ll realize oh it’s so freeing. They don’t even have to believe what I am saying; they have to believe I believe what I am saying. That’s gangsters.”

The Consult technique itself is to draw out the process live and assign dates and ownership to each step, tied back to his sales definition:

“Based on what I know, I’ve crystallized it. I know exactly your problem. Here is what I am going to consult you. I present the exact process and steps that they need to take in order to achieve what they want. I am getting them intellectually engaged on a future result that’s good for them, And then I am going to help them emotionally commit to take action and achieve that result. You draw it out… Assign a date to it today. When you leave here, I am going to hook you up with the lender. Every step, you describe what you are going to do, when you are going to do it, how you are going to do it, and what unique value you bring to the relationship in that.”

He gives a concrete illustration around mortgage guidance: “I am going to introduce you [to] their lenders, so they wrap your head around the numbers. And, one of the things I like to do is help people get the exact best mortgage product, help them get the lowest interest rate and help them competitive. I know sometimes we can pick up some money or some grants available.” And on offers specifically, he lists the components an agent needs to walk a buyer through: “You have to really understand offers — just five things: purchase price, closing cost[,] deposit and settlement date[,] contingencies.”

He offers a memorable metaphor from a past sales trainer: “One of my old sales trainers used to say, ‘Sales is a Broadway play put on by a psychologist.’ I believe it.” And he explains why the step-by-step drawing-out approach works psychologically: “what’s great about that is people will defend what they helped build. They’ll argue with you all day, but they will defend what they helped build. So you’re co-building. This is a dance.” He closes Consult by tying skill here directly to lead-generation appetite: “if you really get this stuff… you’ll spend whatever to get as many leads as you possibly can ‘cause you actually know what to do with them… I know when I get these opportunities we’re gonna close ‘em.”

C No. 8 — Close

Close is presented as almost anticlimactic by design — the argument is that a properly executed Control step upstream removes most of the pressure from closing. Andrew attributes the framing quote to Mike Ferry, and notes Tom Ferry has said the same thing: “Mike Ferry says it the best, And Tom’s been saying it forever too: ‘Closing is the natural progression of a great conversation.’ It’s natural. You don’t have to worry about closing. And by the way, our framework — you kind of closed when you took control. So you don’t need to worry about it now.”

He is careful not to let this become an excuse for passivity: “You do have to ask for the business. You can’t totally get uncomfortable and wimp out on everything all the time. It’s not saying that — you do have to close; that’s why it’s a step — but realize if you did your job right…” He illustrates with an unnamed colleague’s experience: “smooth sales. She closes everybody on her listings, and we were riffing on it. She was, ‘Yeah, I don’t get many objections. I don’t really have to close if you do this right; they’re begging to work with you. Where do I sign?’ They close themselves.” He frames this as a deliberate contrarian positioning against competitors: “I want to do what other people — i want to be the opposite. My competition is doing one thing; I want to be the opposite. I never push. It’s like a lateral move for us — use their momentum. They close them. It’s a natural progression of a great presentation.”

He also describes the transition moment out of Consult and into Close, including handling last-minute additions from the client: “when you are done that consultation stuff, you are discussing your media pathway. After you showcased all the screen values, you say, ‘Hey, is there anything I missed that you’d like to add?’ And then if they have something else — we’re still consulting. I am glad you brought that up. Shame on me; I must have missed that while I was clarifying and crystallizing stuff. Shame on me. Right? You close — here is what it looks like to get started.”

C No. 9 — Confirm

Confirm is the final C, and it is presented as a hard rule about never leaving a meeting without a locked-in next step. Andrew names it with a callback nickname and a specific audience shout-out: “You just immediately start confirming the next steps, confirm the next steps. Call that ‘bam bam.’ You guys ever heard of ‘bam bam’? Where is Peter Hernandez? Sharon actually pointed him out. ‘Bam bam,’ open meeting from a meeting.” His rule, stated flatly: “You never leave the sales appointment unless you know what the next step is. Nothing drives me more crazy than that. Could it be as simple as, ‘I am going to connect you with the lender tomorrow’? Yes, these nine C’s.”

Bringing the Nine C’s Together

Andrew closes the framework portion with a summary that ties every C back to his original definition of sales and explicitly claims universality across every type of client and every type of relationship an agent has to manage:

“This everything. Every time you meet someone, you are not selling them a house that day. You are trying to move the process forward in a logical, Powerful fashion by getting somebody intellectually engaged on a future result, that’s good for them and then helping them along the way emotionally commit. That’s sales. Did you guys find that helpful at all? Okay, by the way, this like baby scratching the surface. Let’s just understand what sales is at the mechanical level.”

He lists, rapid-fire, the range of relationships he says the same nine-step structure applies to without modification to the underlying mechanics — only the content changes:

• “How I do it with the first-time home buyer.”
• “How I do it with the downsizer.”
• “How I do it with a luxury seller.”
• “How I do it when I am recruiting an agent.”
• “How I do it when I am working with a mortgage company, mortgage lenders.”
• “How you do it when I am trying to attract a team.”
• “When i am trying to work with an agent to sell me referral business.”

His closing line before handing back to Tom Ferry ties the whole talk back to money, deliberately steering away from a self-help framing: “Sales is not about getting your emotional needs back. It’s about going to the bank. That’s how you go the bank. Did you guys love it? Say yes!”

The Book, the QR Code, and the Waitlist

Partway through unveiling the nine C’s, Andrew pauses to describe how the material will eventually be released as a book, with a QR code and a waitlist offered live in the room: “There is going to be a QR code. I’ll give you all the slides and you can get on the waitlist for the book and all that kind of stuff. Give everything away to everyone in this room all the time. So, you’ll be able to get it all for free, okay? And, you can get the pre-orders and all the bonuses and fun stuff we’re going to do.” Earlier, discussing the book’s production status, he says it is being written but deliberately not rushed: “we’re not going to rush it. Probably end of the year, maybe by O E V I L” — this final phrase is rendered exactly as transcribed and does not resolve to a clear date or word; it is preserved rather than guessed at. He also mentions the production team behind it: “we have it documented. Copywriters got it. They’re doing all kinds of stuff to it. Wanted to have it ready.”

Tom Ferry’s Reaction and the Handoff

Immediately after Andrew finishes, the transcript captures a brief, warm exchange as he leaves the stage: “Hey, hey, right on time. Good job. Thank you. Good job. Tom was nervous because you don’t mess this up. I don’t really know how to do that one next day. You gonna be okay? I said, tell me something else. No, First of all, he’s comfortable and he cares. So wasn’t this morning now. It is big.” Tom Ferry then opens his own transition, confirming to the room that Control Selling is destined to become more than a single talk: “Room I make a difference. Okay, I got it. So let’s get. Let’s get the real deal feedback. All my all my clients in the room. If I told you, we’re writing this book. But what we really want to do is a bunch of trainings and courses around this stuff, so you can really master the craft — who would be up for that.”

A Note on Transcript Ambiguities

In keeping with sourcing only from the raw transcript and not inventing clarity that isn’t there, the following specific points in this segment are genuinely ambiguous, garbled, or unresolved in the source material and are called out explicitly rather than silently corrected or omitted:

• The shared-influences list names “Floyd Wakeman” — likely a garbled rendering of sales trainer Floyd Wickman, but the transcript says “Wakeman.”
• The quote about sales/marketing/product failure is attributed to “the book ‘Robin’” and a philosopher compared to Jim Rohn; neither a clear book title nor author could be resolved from the transcript.
• The passage immediately after “you can do your two deals a month” — “you swing that ass, act — you want it to cut! Not flinch! Remember that — Tom remember that — make an ass action!” — is not coherent as transcribed and its intended meaning is unrecoverable from the text alone.
• The Clarify mentor is named “Alan Ball, the owner of realtor dot com” — this name/title combination could not be independently confirmed against the transcript alone.
• The colleague credited with the pricing-question line is named “Janelle Garren” — spelling and identity unconfirmed.
• The book’s target timing is given as “Probably end of the year, maybe by O E V I L” — this phrase does not resolve to a recognizable date, quarter, or event name.
• The description of his personal-brand logo — “AU is actually bold on the periodic table of elements” — is preserved as spoken; the likely intent (a reference to gold’s chemical symbol, Au) is inferred but not stated cleanly in the transcript.
• One mid-segment interjection from an unidentified crowd voice — “Take this and drop it into a.” — is an incomplete sentence with no resolvable content or clear addressee.
• The Mehrabian-style communication statistic is rendered as “the Marabia rules” and restates “fifty-five percent” twice in a way that reads as a live stumble rather than two distinct claims.
• A name mentioned in passing as someone who “loves this stuff” and would be at the summit “tomorrow” could not be confirmed against any real-world figure from the transcript text alone.