It is 7 PM, Do You Know Where Your Customers Are?

By Kimberly D. Mackey, MCSP, CMP, Realtor®

I have long since suspected that this is the case, but now have solid proof. The bulk of your traffic is visiting your communities between 5:30 PM and 7:00 PM. Are you there?

Sometimes, we sales managers and upper level managers are, (I hate to say it) "sold" by the very group we hired to do the selling for us. Please don’t feel badly about this. It is this very skill that let’s us know that we made a good hire. However, occasionally we need to take a step back from what we are being told and do some investigation on our own to determine what might be best for the company.

Any sales manager or division president who has been in the business for more than 5 minutes has experienced the phenomenon that I like to call "TRAFFIC MAGNETICS". Traffic Magnetics occurs any time management visits the sales center: THE TRAFFIC PICKS UP! Amazingly, this happens every time management stops by, and the sales agent remarks, "Wow, I am really glad you are here. I haven’t seen this much traffic in a whole week!" Then, you think to yourself, "Boy, I should try to be here more often." The point being, sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know unless you are there to see it for yourself.

Ok, back to the point. My partner team has been executing our "Primary Residence Inventory Reduction Program," and in the process we have found that each community requires its own plan based on its traffic patterns. We have been studying these traffic patterns by (a) physically being in the community at varying times; (b) by not always positioning ourselves in the model centers; (c) by setting up an individualized marketing and tracking plan on all inventory homes; and (d) most important, evaluating our efforts on a week-by-week basis so we can adjust rapidly, as needed.

We have learned much, now that we have this process rolled out to several builders. The most important of which is that your traffic is not necessarily inclined to visit your sales center in person during your set hours. As much as we liked to think in ‘04 and ’05 that these homes sell themselves, they don’t. Several builders have made an effort to reach buyers by putting brochures in a "Take One" box, in the hope that buyers will call after having collected all the information they think they wanted, without ever having met with a sales agent. Obviously, this is not the solution.

Others have put lockboxes on some of their inventory so that Realtors® could bring out clients after hours. A step in the right direction, if you are using digital lock boxes so you know who accessed the home while you weren’t there, and you have an on-site agent who is following-up real time. However, do you really want to rely wholly on a General Real Estate Agent to sell your homes? Will that agent understand and be able to communicate effectively your Unique Selling Propositions? Will he or she be able to convince the client that buying your home over your competitors’ home is a good idea, especially when your competitor is offering a higher Realtor® incentive bonus? This is not the best solution, either.

So, what is the best solution? The best solution is to have a highly trained and motivated sales force that knows how to sell your homes, AND to put that sales force out there at the most opportune times to meet customers face-to-face. This may require changing your sales center hours. It may require making sure that you always have at least 2 agents responsible for a given community (and yes, enough traffic exists for them to succeed). Perhaps you might even consider staggering the hours of the agents so that one closes and one opens on a rotation basis. Like it or not, we are in a retail situation, and since having customers purchase and enjoy our homes IS our business, doesn’t it make sense to be more accommodating to the needs of those customers?

*Kimberly Mackey, MCSP, CMP, Realtor® is the founder of Creative Sales Solutions. A company dedicated to providing the Sales and Leadership Solutions You Need Right Now. For contact information and for a free subscription to SOLUTIONS E-newsletter, please visit www.creativesalesnow.com.

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Champions Produce Champions

By Zig Ziglar

Every football fan in America knows the name and many accomplishments of Lou Holtz, former Head Football Coach at Notre Dame University. Lou was at Notre Dame for ten years. He produced one national championship team and came within a whisper of repeating on several other occasions. During his tenure, at least eight of his assistant coaches went on to head coaching jobs at other universities. Many people probably think that Lou had "given up his best and brightest" coaches. They must wonder how he continued to turn out such marvelous teams, despite losing his best coaches.

Read the Full Story at:

http://www.ziglar.com/news/9-23-2008.html#article1

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You can always find resources and articles you can use by visiting our new "Positive Press" page on our website: http://www.creativesalesnow.com/positive-press.php

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