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LeBlanc
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Issue 8 Summer 1999
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The Front Porch Like many of you over this year's Memorial Day weekend, I attempted to relax and have some fun in the sun. I also listened to the "oldies but goodies" on the radio. Not trying to date myself, but two of my favorite songs were played and both came to mind when thinking about this edition's article for The Front Porch. One favorite is the Stones "Time Is On My Side." The other was by Chicago, "Does Anyone Know What Time It Is." (This may not be the correct title, but for those of you in my music era, you know what song I mean). Time Time
is on my side Time
Is My Friend Time
Is Limited Let's forget the excuses. We must all commit to become top performers and take time to: 1. Offer a friendly greeting and warm welcome to our prospective buyers. Make visitors to our sales centers feel at home. Don't forget to smile! 2. Get to know to whom we are selling. Let's discover if they are married. Do they have a family? Children? Their ages? What is their lifestyle? 3. Create excitement and enthusiasm about the homes and community in which we are selling. This includes letting the buyer know who your builder is. What makes our homes a good value in terms of quality? How our builder stands behind its homes (warranty, customer service, etc.) 4. Obtain our prospective buyers involvement in our homes and communities. How will the buyer live in the home? (Important rooms, furniture, important features, etc.). Top of page 5. Answer, to the best of our ability, all questions posed by the prospective buyer with meaningful answers. This includes objections. 6. Offer a high level of personal service. Don't just pass your visitors onto the models and defer to brochures or other written material when information is requested. 7. Create the right situation to ask for the sale. Earn their trust. 8.
Learn new selling strategies. Commit to an ongoing program of 9. Practice and reinforce proven selling strategies. 10. Incorporate a "can do" attitude as it applies to sales and our personal lives. Don't place yourself in a position of saying "Why didn't I take the time?" When it comes to staying on top of your selling game, the time is now. Learn from the top performers.
Who's Minding The Store? A recent area of concern is how the buyer is being treated by a builder's many vendors. Once the difficulty of the sale is overcome, the challenge of buyer selections begins. So now you send them off to the design center people, the landscape company, the lighting fixture company, etc. How sure are you that this process doesn't undermine your sale? Are the vendor associates treating your buyers with courtesy, professionalism and a high level of personal service? Are they knowledgeable? Do they help to hold the sale together? Several of our accounts call on LeBlanc & Associates to verify this half of the sales process. We will design an appropriate report to meet the unique criteria for this type of assignment. Don't let others undermine your sale. Give us a call! Perception Is Everything Although two competing candy shops had the same prices, neighborhood kids preferred one store over the other. When asked why, the kids said, "Because the 'good' store always gives more candy. The girl in the other store takes candy away." True? Not really. In the "good" store, the owner would make sure to put a small amount of candy on the scale, then kept adding to it. In the "bad" store, the owner would pile a heaping amount of candy on the scale, and then take it off until it hit the right weight. The same amount of candy was sold, but perception is everything. How
do prospective buyers perceive your homes? Are they the "good"
homes or the "bad" homes? LeBlanc & Associates
can conduct Exit Surveys at your communities to determine how
prospective buyers perceive your homes. Give us a call! What is a picture worth? Many companies have been requesting a series of video shops for their sales teams. LeBlanc & Associates now provides this valuable service. Through a full video presentation, we take the denial aspect out of the evaluation process. Give us a call! 3-D Selling With new tools, we can arrange to have our sales offices and models "open" for customers all day, every day. Virtual reality tours are becoming more common. (See an interesting article in Builder magazine, page 76 of the February, 1999 edition regarding the Shumway Condominiums.) It's becoming possible to "see" homes, models, merchandising, and options - even views that do not (yet) exist. Sales masters will use these as additional tools - not as substitutes for their own skills. Top of page Previously, too many colleagues in our sales offices would point the way to their model homes, then offer to answer any questions (e.g. Can I buy one?) when the prospect returns. This is disrespectful to our customers, and a waste of our model complexes, their merchandising, their cost etc. The OTHER 3-D approach to selling is "Demonstrate, Don't Dispatch." Use our models. Not only to show the benefits, our quality, even some of our lifestyles. But also to do more qualifying, learn more about our customer, her motivations, his timetable, her site preferences, their design plan requirements, names of the kids, etc. Top of page How often do we become offended when "our" buyer comes back with the eleventh-hour agent? Obviously, this was NOT our buyer. We provided little or no value to their visit. We created no bond, fostered no trust, showed no respect. But we want THEM to respect US with THEIR loyalty and THEIR business. (Cynics call this SAC - Stealth Agent Complex. The Stealth Agent is invisible. Never appears on radar. Works in the dark of night. Has an unerring ability to seek and find the target with apparently no effort. Creates extensive, even collateral damage that will be apparent the next morning.) Top of page Top
sales professionals will use every tool available to give service
to all buyers. Virtual reality tours? Ask about them! A visit
to the community must mean our web site is working. We should
be, too. A follow up from a virtual tour is a buying signal. Take
advantage of it. The prospect has self-qualified to a community,
a location, a price range, a floor plan or two, a price range.
AND has qualified as to timing: now. We
will be most successful when prospects feel, touch, hear and smell
our products. Seeing may be believing, but it is not buying. And
pointing is not selling. Let's be with our customers when we can
help them feel, touch, hear AND smell, and buy, their new home. by
David Harding, Exchequer Consulting Corporation The Most Important 5 Seconds of a Sales Tranaction In a recent issue of The Home Front, Mary posed the question, "Where are all the cheerleaders?" - suggesting that salespeople in today's market are less than enthusiastic when it comes to greeting the customers in an appropriate manner. In the same issue, Bob Schultz suggested that the strength of the current market could be breeding complacency in today's sales force. I can tell you first hand - having lived through the great boom and bust of the California real estate market in the 1980's as a sales representative - staying sharp when the market is strong can be a tough assignment for a new home salesperson. There is so much in the market that says, "Relax - take it easy. The deals will come to you." There are two significant dangers to that attitude: 1) Salespeople fail to maximize on today's sales opportunities, and; 2) Salespeople are ill-equipped to handle the decline in the market when it does hit. The one element of the sales process that is most often neglected in a strong market is the salesperson's mental approach to the initial greeting. Consequently, the relationship starts off flat, dull, and uninspiring. We'll eventually want to ask these customers to trust us with a six- or seven-figure financial decision; but we give them little reason to do so right off the bat. Why is this happening? Because salespeople in a strong market often ignore the most important five seconds of the sales transaction - the five seconds before the customer walks through the door. Think about that for a moment. When a salesperson takes those critical five seconds to mentally prepare for the start of the relationship, when the sales professional makes a conscious decision to offer their very best, the chance of a successful transaction goes up by 1000%. Conversely, when a salesperson waits for the customer to lead the way - when they insist that the homebuyer prove to them that they are "for real" - the sales transaction is doomed. The latter approach might work (barely) in a good market, but woe to the salesperson that takes this approach when the market goes south. The rule is simple: "If you want to finish strong you must start strong." That rule will never be more important than it is today. Jeff Shore, of The Jeff Shore Company, is an expert in sales strategy and training to the home building industry. As a former National Sales Director for one of the nation's largest home builders, Jeff has taught thousands of sales managers and sales counselors on the art of sales. Based in Auburn, CA, Jeff can be reached at 530/269-1045; Fax: 530/269-1846 Email: jeffshore@aol.com Innovative Staffing Solutions As the new millenium approaches, home builders are finding new ways to run lean, cost-efficient operations. Reducing the costs of building and maintaining a productive, professional new home sales team is a key business strategy for preserving the bottom line. Since 1990, Real Estate Temps has been the leading pioneer in the development of innovative staffing solutions to meet the builder's sales and marketing needs. By providing out-source services in sales agent recruiting, training and temporary staffing, the company has been instrumental in helping its clients achieve sales and marketing flexibility by reducing the costs of recruiting and hiring. Real Estate Temps understands that achieving aggressive sales and closings, demands a team of exceptional sales professionals proficient in the leading-edge tools and techniques of real estate sales. Nevertheless, fielding and paying for such a team as an internal cost component is costly for the builder due to a number of variables. Among them: sales personnel turnover, and fluctuating new home staffing demands during strong markets, phase releases, special events and project closeouts. Add in personnel issues such as vacation, sick and maternity leave, as well as continuing education and training of agents, and the complexities of maintaining a strong, cost-effective sales force become clear. With a network of seven regional locations in California, Nevada and Arizona, Real Estate Temps provides its clients temporary sales staffing solutions, sales and computer software training of it agents, and temporary escrow personnel support. "We recognize that the builder's first objective is to staff their sales and information centers with professionally licensed agents with superior knowledge of sales techniques and technologies," says JoAnne Williams, National Director of Real Estate Temps. "We've earned our clients' trust by recruiting, training and placing experienced, skilled sales agents in their on-site sales centers without the burdensome costs of direct employment." Aside from temporary staffing services, Real Estate Temps is blazing new trails in the development of value-added benefits and services to its clients. The company developed the certification training program for the widely used residential sales software application, Computers For Tracts, and regularly conducts training courses in this leading application for its sales professionals. Through its Alliance with Norwest Mortgage and other regional lenders, the company provides on-going educational seminars in the area of finance for its employees. "Productivity and knowledge are essential in new home sales," says Williams. "We must give our agents and our clients the very best tools available in order to achieve success in the sales arena." Real Estate Temps has its national headquarters at 300 South El Camino Real, Suite 204, San Clemente, CA 92672. Telephone: 888 RE-TEMPS Fax: 949/366-1279. The Sign of a Good Sales Person A man walks into a country store and sees five shelves filled with bags of salt. "Wow! You must sell a lot of salt," the man said to the store owner. "Nope," replied the owner. "I can't sell hardly any salt at all. But the fellow who sells me salt - he can sell salt." This site designed and hosted by Expedionet,
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