Our industry spends heavily to drive traffic to their new home community websites and to their sales & discovery centers. But often, if a prospect is not an ”A” lead that is planning to buy in the next 30 days or so, this prospect gets buried in the database of names never to be contacted (except for the odd email blast) or nurtured systematically through their home buying process. So, while we're all concerned about driving more traffic to our communities, that strategy makes no sense if we are not maximizing our existing opportunities.
We are excited to host our next webinar Thursday March 25th featuring Jeff Shore, a popular homebuilding industry veteran and renowned expert who will discuss how and where to spot the “lead leak”.
Sales: It’s Likely Not a Traffic Problem
Maximizing Existing Leads and Prospects
Some of the Learning Outcomes:
- Why your sales report is nothing more than a history lesson.
- Why spending more to drive more traffic is not the best use of your $$$.
- Why lowering your price might be your biggest mistake.
- How successful companies make converting internet leads priority #1.
- How to find 'A+' leads (Hint: they are already in your system labeled 'B-')
Click here for more information on how you can join in this 30 minute discussion with Jeff Shore.
Lasso is presenting a free webinar series in 2010 that brings you acclaimed home building industry experts to discuss the business of marketing, sales and customer service in today’s evolving market. We hope you will join us.
Startling, but true! 64% of sales agents did not follow-up even though these were ‘motivated' prospects who visited the sales center. This, according to a blog post written by Mike Lyon that includes a whitepaper from a study by Qgenisys and Red Tree Resultants conducted in the Denver area in 2008.
This study was conducted at mostly US big production home builder sale center sites and may not be indicative of your company.
But interestingly, the results are similar to ad hoc tests Lasso conducts every few months in which we register on new home project websites ‘Register here' and Contact us' pages in cities across North America. Often, upon registration, there is an email confirmation (not always) stating ‘you will be contacted' by the sales team. Too often, there is never another follow up, by phone or by email.
The findings are troubling because builders spend $1000's in marketing and advertising to attract the interest of potential buyers. And companies like ours exist to help builder marketing & sales teams:
- Capture every lead, then;
- Nurture prospects from interest to occupancy, and;
- Deliver ‘prospect intelligence' so the marketing or sales person can differentiate themselves (and their company) from the competition.
First let me state that CRM software for home builders should never attempt to replace good people or processes. But it can and should be the plumbing, the infrastructure to at the very least:
- Deliver a high quality thank you email.
- Support a step-by-step sales activity process to nurture the prospect from interest toward close.
- Provide key information about website visits (and repeat visits) and page popularity (think of it as online digital body language).
- Inform about who opened your emails (and who did not) from your latest campaign.
- Report on whom and what was the last contact date and activity.
- Provide a history of every prospect communication.
Changing tradition and old habits in marketing and sales can be challenging. But recurring studies like the one above reiterate that change is a needed recipe for sales success. The recipe includes some leadership, some discipline and a little time. It costs a little too, but literally a fraction of what is spent on advertising and promotion to attract potential buyers in the first place.
"If you build it, he will come." - Famous words from a well-known movie. For most new home residential communities and projects, thousands of dollars go into marketing to generate leads and prospects; then even more is spent in the sales process to turn prospects into home buyers. In past markets, the lead traffic was high and sales efforts "just seemed to work". Nowadays, depending on your location and project, the volume of new prospects signing up on websites, calling in, or visiting sales centers may not be as high. How you handle these new prospects and manage each prospective buyer through the sales cycle is more important than ever.
What is a Sales Process?
A sales process is defined as an approach to gaining new sales using predefined steps. Virtually all new homes sales involve the following steps by the sales reps:
- Prospecting - capturing and engaging with people; every lead is a prospective home buyer
- Initial Contact - qualification process
- Sales Center Visit/Appointment - assessing the buying indicators
- Handling Objections, Customizations, Incentives, etc. - proposing
- Offers - closing the sale
- Customer Care - service after the sale
What differs constantly is the amount of time required for each step as well as what's involved. Some prospects know exactly what they are looking for - they've done their homework and are ready to buy when they walk through the Sales Center (your dream customer), others may visit several times and take months to make a decision. One of the biggest challenges for sales reps is identifying where a prospect is in the sales cycle and moving them along the buying process.
Within Lasso, a Sales Process allows you to define an automated set of activities that are generated for your sales team as a prospect progresses through the sales cycle. You can create triggers that will allow for a set of activities to be created for a prospect. By creating the activity for the prospect versus the sales rep, the prospect/lead never gets lost in the sales cycle due to staff turnover or changes within your organization and mapping a process provides a starting point to move the prospect along the sales cycle.
How do you go about setting up a Sales Process?
A sales process you create may be a triggered activity for the assigned sales rep to follow-up or an action that needs to be performed. Setting these processes accomplishes at least two things - it provides a reminder to the sales rep to follow-up and it keeps the prospect moving along the sales cycle.
Lasso Sales Processes can be setup for each step of the sales process. Here are examples of some great ways to use the Sales Process functionality in Lasso:
- A reminder to make a phone call within 24 hours of a prospect signing up on the website.
- A reminder to make a seven day follow-up call referencing a couple of the prospects buying interests.
- An alert to send a thank you card after they visit the sales center.
- Send flowers to a new purchaser.
The key to any sales process is to keep it simple so that you're not bombarding your reps with a multitude of administrative tasks. You want them to be creating that customer relationship and do what they do best, and that is to sell your new homes. Make it easy for your reps to follow through . . . if you want them to send a thank you card to a prospect that visited the sales center, have the cards readily available; or, if they are to send updated floor plans to a prospect, make sure the corresponding email template has the correct information.
Many will say that this is all just common sense and a good sales rep will do all these things intuitively - and yes, that may be true; but why leave anything to chance? To maintain consistency, promote your brand, ensure exceptional customer service and ultimately have your prospects convert to purchasers, a little structure and direction for the sales reps never hurt. The majority of sales people are more successful when they follow a specific sales process and are provided the tools to use for each step.
By setting up Sales Processes, you will be well on your way to having your Sales Team working effectively in creating that deeper customer relationship, closing more deals, and using the science of technology as their ally in the art of selling. By developing a solid sales process work flow, perhaps we can modify that famous quote - "If you build it, he will buy."
For more information on how to setup a sales process in Lasso, please contact Lasso Client Support (support@mylasso.com) or refer to Lasso University in the Client Administration Center of Lasso.
Back when George Carlin created his infamous "seven dirty words," he couldn't have realized that if you scroll through basic cable, you can hear most of them somewhere along the dial before 11 p.m. on any given night. And he probably never for a second considered including the word "accountability."
Yet the word can send shivers down the spines of sales teams and executives alike. Salespeople hear "accountability" and immediately assume that their strategies aren't working up to snuff, or that they'll have to meet new quotas to pass muster. Most executives don't want to be the villain, so to them, "accountability" means having to follow their team's every move down to each individual phone call and e-mail.
For those willing to embrace the concept of accountability as more than just a dirty word, there are numerous advantages to developing a close relationship between salespeople and sales managers across the life of a development's sales cycle. Managers benefit from an enhanced awareness of activity in the sales center, and salespeople benefit from the advice of experienced professionals, who can offer guidance on how to address objections, mitigate expectations, and close deals.
Here are a few best practices for implementing an ongoing accountability strategy for your sales team.
1. Encourage the fundamentals. All too often, it seems easier to blame a failure in completing home sales on anything that's handy-a failure in marketing, the position of the planet Venus related to Saturn's second moon-in other words, anything but the mundane truth. Sales succeed and fail based solely on the fundamentals of good communication, strategic pricing, and a quality product. Incorporating accountability into a sales strategy isn't about finding a magic formula that will enable your team to make more sales with little to no work. It's about using hard data to examine the fundamentals of new home sales.
When a new lead enters the system, is the assigned salesperson executing follow-up in a timely fashion? What methods of communication work best for each particular lead-does one prospect respond better to e-mails than phone calls? How many leads were driven by marketing's last direct mail campaign, and what did sales deliver on those leads? These are simple, basic questions that should have simple, basic answers.
2. Utilize a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. By its very nature, accountability for a sales team requires aggressive and active tracking of each sales lead, along with all contact between the sales team and each lead. There is no better way to track and manage leads than through a robust customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Without a CRM solution, your sales team will be forever left in the limbo of disorganized spreadsheets and other ad-hoc "tracking" systems, and no true accountability can ever take place with the incomplete information these imperfect methods provide.
3. Accountability reaches across the organization. A robust CRM solution will enable stronger strategies not just for the sales team but for departments across the organization. Marketing will be able to more effectively determine which campaigns brought in the most leads and which haven't had a strong impact. Customer service reps can note each contact they have with a buyer and build a relationship that extends far beyond just the final contract signing.
According to The Yankee Group, a consumer trends research organization, up to 80% of sales leads go stale, are lost, or are simply never followed up on. That means as many as eight out of ten inbound leads for a new home community-whether delivered via the project's website or through traffic into the sales center-do not receive the attention they need to convert them into home purchases and realized revenue.
Taking these steps will insure that "accountability" is no longer a dirty word, and that the gap between properly executed leads and fumbled leads should continue to shrink down to nothing.