Sales Process: Balancing the Art & Science of New Home Selling
"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.