Have you figured out how to go beyond just staying in the game to really winning in these turbulent times?
Lasso’s upcoming complimentary webinar on September 21st – CRACK the code to +30% Close Ratios .. . Guaranteed! - will feature new home sales and marketing authorities, Myers Barnes and Mike Lyon.
We have asked Myers and Mike to present this one-time webinar where they will deliver a roadmap to success that is achieving 30% (and higher) close rates for homebuilders across North America.
They will demonstrate how to make the successful connection between online marketing to onsite sales with a proven formula that is not only pragmatic and 'doable', their combination of people, process and technology delivers proven results. Time after time!
Learning Outcomes:
- Successful integration between online & offline sales
- Role of the Online Sales Counsellor
- The transition to the Sales Team
- Define the lead follow-up process
- Master a paint-by-numbers sales process
- Double your conversion ratios
For more information and to register, click here.
Lasso holds educational webinars every 4-6 weeks. View our past webinars, featuring Mike Lyon, Jeff Shore, Jim Adams and Carol Flammer, here.
What do you do after you send a mass mail to your prospective home buyers or Realtors and brokers?
Chances are you put a lot of effort into the design of the email, then you spend time testing the email and then you send it. Right after you send the mass mail, you likely have a look at the quick stats to see how many people opened it, but what do you do next?
Often we see the regular blasting of a registrant list all with similar results over and over (in fact, sometimes with declining open rates). A 20% open rate is not bad, but we think you can probably do better with a few suggestions on what you can do after you send out the mass mail (or before you send out your next email!)
- Read and review the mass mail detail report in Lasso. You’ll see who opened the email, who clicked on a link, who unsubscribed, as well as who didn’t receive the email because of a failure.
- Learn what the delivery failures mean and update your registrants accordingly. If you see that an email address has bounced, pick up the phone and ask the prospect if they are still interested in receiving information. If they are, ask for a new email address. A great opportunity to touch base with potential home buyers!
- Make sure that the “From” email address in your mass mail is a valid address. Often when you send out email, you receive “out-of-office” responses and many times a registrant will reply with a query. It’s important that this email is monitored and someone is responsible for responding.
- Update invalid email addresses. These are the email addresses with a typo, such as “hotmial” instead of “hotmail”.
- Try resending your email. Yes, you heard me correctly. I’m suggesting that you send it out again. But this time, don’t send it to everyone, just send it to those who didn’t open it the first time. You may want to change the subject line to include “Update” or “Reminder” or “Last chance . . .”. We’ve had a number of clients use this approach (albeit, carefully – you don’t want to be sending email so often that you annoy people). They have seen a surprisingly good open rate the second time around.
- Have a follow-up email ready to go out. If you have a link in your first email about one-bedroom units and 75 people click on this link, have a follow-up email ready to go that provides further information and pricing incentives on one-bedroom units!
- Plan some human interaction. We get so caught up in email today; however, it’s important for a human touch. Use the mass mail reporting to follow-up with those registrants who haven’t opened an email in awhile, or maybe even those registrants who have unsubscribed. Some people just aren’t into email. It doesn’t mean they aren’t interested. Don’t ignore them!
Follow these ideas and you will find that your email subscribers are more engaged and your open rates are going in the right direction . . . up!! More appointments, offers and sales will follow.
The ability to calculate and determine the effect of marketing on sales is important. And the marketing team needs to be able to work closely with sales team with the common goal: Sell more homes. Closed loop marketing helps you accomplish this by uniting marketing and sales and allowing the team to put a process in place that combines key activities for both.
You won't have sales yelling "Where are my leads?" and marketing yelling "You've got 500 of them waiting to be followed up on!" Instead, it's understood what the process is, from when a lead first enters your ‘system' right through to the ultimate goal of becoming a purchaser.
Closed loop marketing enables you to track and manage your leads from start to finish. So you can analyze and determine your best lead sources (pay-per-click, search engines, websites, email, etc.) and track the leads from their source to conversion. Plus determine which lead sources get best results.
This is where your Real Estate CRM comes into play and is really important! Lasso's Real Estate Software will provide the information so sales and marketing can track their activities together. A CRM system is a key piece in the closed loop marketing process.
Standard sales and marketing processes can be setup to be automated and email can be tracked and monitored to see which leads are engaged and moving along through the buying process.
Using a CRM for your real estate project is important now more so then ever. There are a lot of options available to you with respect to CRM and here are a few considerations:
- Review your own work flow and your processes. How are you capturing leads today? How are they being followed up? What marketing campaigns do you have in place? What is working and what isn't. Do your due diligence to ensure that you don't need to reinvent your processes.
- Reporting - one of the key areas of importance with a CRM is the ability to report on the data. Using a CRM give you the ability to aggregate your data in one common database and simplifies getting the information you need for timely analysis and decision making.
- Tracking - by continuously tracking the response and effectiveness of a campaign, the marketing team can be far more effective in identifying the prospects' wants and needs and provide sales with a much better picture of not only the current purchasers, but the attributes that make up a purchaser of a new home.
Utilizing a Real Estate CRM such as Lasso, for standardizing common Sales Processes and Activities, prospect Ratings and Source Types, along with Email Marketing all integrated together, will help you in selling your new home developments faster and easier.
My role at Lasso is to provide useful topical information to new home marketing & sales professionals, so as I gather useful tips from webinars, blogs and articles, I will pass them along via our blog and hope you find them interesting and worthwhile.
Can you sell if you don't have an established process? Perhaps, but in today's competitive new home sales market there's more need than ever to manage, educate, follow-up, and nurture your leads to the goal of setting the appointment, then continuing to connect throughout the prospect's ‘buying process' to the eventual ultimate goal of the sale. Check out this short blog by industry consultant, Mike Lyon on setting an online sales process.
The 5-5-5 System is something that Jeff Shore prescribed in our March 25th Webinar: It's Likely Not a Traffic Problem. He also mentions this in one of his blogs for Builder Radio. He explains that it's easy to fall into the "email trap" where we rely on email as a sole communication medium. He suggests the 5-5-5 System of picking out 5 prospects, mailing them a hand written note or post card, and then following up with a call 5 days later - a nice personal touch. What do you think - is this a repeatable process you can implement?
Have you been thinking about how to use social media to your advantage in your online marketing program as part of your selling process? Carol Flammer of mRELEVANCE writes about the opportunities for increasing internet traffic and building relationships through taking advantage of social media outlets in her book Social Media for Home Builders. By the way, our next free webinar will be on May 20th and will feature Carol presenting the competitive advantages of blogging for new home builders and developers - Details to follow, so please save the date!
Check out our recorded webinars here.
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.
Once someone has registered on your new home project website, what do you? Is there a defined sales process (logical steps from interest list through to purchase)? Does your sales team get involved right away?
In most cases, the leads go into a CRM system, and then get assigned to sales reps. who are then alerted to new leads. One of the challenges that arises is that a significant number of the leads may not be "sales-ready" yet. It's a common fact that 4 out of 5 new home buyers are starting their research on the web and will register for more information but many are at the very early stages of the buying process. Therefore, keeping these prospects engaged and informed throughout their buying cycle is an important part of your real estate marketing strategy.
Let's first take a step back and define Lead Nurturing. Lead Nurturing or lead management is the process of following up with leads in a consistent manner, gradually moving them through their buying cycle along the path towards becoming a purchaser. The idea is to create a strategy to provide enough information to engage, provide interest and develop trust so that when they are ready to purchase, you have met their needs and they will buy from you (sounds simple!) Realistically, not everyone who signs up to get more information about your project is going to be a perfect match for your project but the concept of lead nurturing is to put these leads into an ongoing marketing program that will provide some triggers and indicators showing when and if they are getting ready to buy. Then the sales reps can get involved and convert these prospects into purchasers.
A key aspect of marketing includes keeping the prospects engaged. Most online registrants are looking for information right away, but may not be ready to purchase. A creative marketing strategy that keeps these prospects engaged and gaining confidence in your new project is important. The tendency is often to just keep sending mass mails and although this can be effective, always ensure that there is a clear call to action in the email and that there is value to the prospect - otherwise, you will lose their interest and when you do send a mass mail of importance, they may dismiss it as not relevant.
Use the technology you have available to help you! Often the old 80/20 rule comes into play - perhaps you're not using all the features available to you. For example, functionality just released in Lasso now provides you with the ability for you to track the behaviour of your prospects on your project website. Not only can you see what specific pages they are visiting but also track when they return to your site. This form of lead intelligence is powerful - especially when you tailor an email message or a phone message to a prospect and you make specific reference to something that they were viewing online!
Use Lasso's Self Serve Registrant Update (SSRU) to further qualify your leads and prospects. Nowadays, many home builders and developers are making it easier to complete registration forms by reducing the number of questions asked. The strategy is to make it really easy to register and then ask more qualifying questions throughout the sales cycle. If you've gone that route, Lasso provides you with the ability to use mass mail functionality to survey or ask additional questions via email. This allows you to engage your Registrants - if they responded that they enjoy skiing, then send them an email with pictures of your recreational development in the winter. If they select golf, customize one with pictures taken in summer.
To nurture something means to take care of it (to cultivate, cherish, develop) - that's exactly what needs to be done with leads; whether they are in the early home buying research stage or ready to buy now, the technology is available for you to achieve this.
"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.