Staying In Touch To Make the Sale

 Keeping In Touch to Make More Sales [18:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

With special guest, Jerry Constanzo, G. L. Costanzo & Associates, Inc. www.NewHomeResearch.com

Every new home salesperson learns early on that selling a home takes time.  Lots of time. Sometimes it’s many months or more between contact and close.  And when we’ve got a tall stack of leads to follow up on, the challenge is in determining who should get our valuable time and attention.  Jerry Costanzo has spent years selling new homes, and is a sales manager.  Now his company, G.L. Costanzo and Associates Incorporated, works with builders and sales organizations to increase their effectiveness.  Here, Jerry shares his simple, yet powerful, system of staying in touch with prospects.

It starts with the basis in which you can rate your customer in terms of the amount of time that you’re going to spend with them at this time.  And it really starts with getting answers to 3 very basic questions.  The first question is, ‘And how soon would you like to be in your new home?’  Now, that gets out the idea of timetable.  Once you know timetable, you can determine where your product can fit into that.

If somebody tells you a timetable ‘I need something as close to right away as possible,’ and you’re a builder that only builds pre-sold, then you might have a little bit of a job to work with that customer to get them to wait.  So, the first question that you get an answer to is timetable.  Those people that are truly hot prospects know their timetable.

The second criterion is to determine what they are truly looking for.  And that is couched under the questioning that asks, ‘What’s important to you in your new home?’  It’s amazing because just adding that word ‘important’ adds a dimension psychologically.  People filter out all the ‘wish list’ stuff, and now they focus in on what truly is important to them.  So, once you know what the key ingredients are – the things that are most important to the customer – then it’s your job to know whether or not your product is in the running.

So now if you’ve got somebody who’s hot based on the timetable question, and now you’ve got somebody who’s basically really interested in what you have to offer, then the last question is simply, ‘What budget or what price range do you have in mind?’  And that strikes at the idea of ability to move forward.

It’s really nice to know that if a customer walks through the door and they’re thinking $250,000, and you’re thinking $275,000 or $300,000, even though they may have the ability to go up to that $300,000 their mindset is still back at $250,000, and that’s really what you have to be able to deal with.  Well, what you have to do is translate that to the idea that it’s not a leap from zero to $300,000, it’s only a leap from $250,000 to $300,000, or an additional $50,000.  And most people who have the ability to buy a home at $250,000 often can stretch that to $300,000 if they really want what you have to offer.

So, now, if you have all 3 of those ingredients – you know how soon; you know what’s important to them; and you have it, and you’re in sync basically on the ability to buy – you now have a hot prospect.  That’s your ‘A’ prospect.  To have a ‘B’ prospect, which is just a little bit down on the scale, always you need to have that 1^st question, timetable, because that’s the real key. You may have the product that they’re most interested in.  Or, you may have that they have the ability to buy.  The beauty of this system is if you know that it’s product-oriented; where there is void, you focus on product.

If the issue that you have is their ability to move forward, you focus your attention on their ability to buy – whether that’s financing, programs or incentives, or whatever that might be.  And then everybody else falls into the category of ‘C ‘buyers.  And there’s nothing wrong with ‘C’ buyers.  And the reason why I love ‘C’ buyers is because I did a study, believe it or not for a couple years, at communities in New Jersey. I took the rating that was originally done by the on-site salesperson and I tracked that compared to their sales. What we found was almost 50% of their actual sales after about 6 months were from people that originally were rated as ‘C’ prospects.

The point here is that you must have a follow-up system that you are relentless in using, and I chose that word on purpose.  You have to relentlessly to stay in touch with people.  As a matter of fact, I don’t even use the term ‘follow-ups’ anymore because that sounds like work.  But I call it ’staying in touch.’

People don’t mind staying in touch.  I mean, you do that with your friends; you do that with acquaintances – you like to stay in touch.  So, now need to have a system of taking those ratings and staying in touch.  And there’s a whole sequence of events.  Take the ‘A’ prospects for example.  They walk in the door on Saturday.  You’re going to be on the phone with them the next day.  And if you did it right, you should’ve predisposed them to the follow-up phone call the next day.  And you’re going to make the call like you told them you would, because if they came in on Saturday, or even Sunday, they may have seen something that they like that is one of your competitors offerings, and you need to know that pretty pronto so that you can intervene early on before they get too engrossed in the other person’s product.

So, the first day after their visit is they get a phone call.   Three days later they get a 2^nd phone call.  Five days later, they get a phone call.  And all you’re trying to do in those phone calls is get them to come back.  And what’s often missed in terms of follow-up – especially phone calls – is that salespeople don’t ever ask the person to come back.  The conversation goes something like this:

“Well hello Jerry, this is Jerry from Happy Trails – we saw each other last Saturday when you were out looking for a new home.  I was just following up to see if you have any questions and…Oh you don’t have any questions?  Well you know Jerry, if you find that you have some questions, you’ve got my number and card.  Don’t hesitate – I’m here to help.  Thanks a bunch, hope you have a great day.”

Well, nowhere in there did we ever invite them to come back!  So you just change it around a little bit.  You say, “Hey Jerry, this is Jerry from Happy Trails.  You were out Saturday and we met while you were looking for a new home.  And I’m calling to invite you to come back out so we can continue to help you in your search for a new home.  When’s a good time to do that?”  Because if you don’t invite them back, only the hottest of hot are going to come and basically sell the home for you.  And that happens – and thank goodness it happens once in awhile – but I always say to my people, I said “You know, I’d like to know that people bought because of you, not in spite of you.”  And a lot of salespeople don’t catch onto that.  So those are the follow-up phone calls.

Then, if they came in on Saturday, that evening you write out your little invitation note.  “Dear Jerry, thank you for coming out.  I’d like you to come back.  I’ll give you a call to see when that’s convenient.”  So that 1^st card goes out, and I like postcards.  I’ve switched my thinking from a nice note card to a postcard, because with a post postcard typically one side of it can have a really nice picture or two of the interior of a home and on the other side is your message.  And, 50% of the time, theoretically, you’re message should be face up and they’re going to look at it.  They don’t have an envelope to mess with and open up, and most people are curious about what postcard did they get.  If it flips on the other side, then there’s this nice inviting couple of pictures, and people say, “Oh what’s this?”  So they turn it over and they look at it and read it anyway.

So, that’s the first contact.  And then I like to send out a follow-up note in about 14 days to the hot prospect.  And all the while you’re doing these phone calls, and all the while you’re following up, you’re trying to get them to come back.  You’re also trying to determine whether or not they really were an ‘A’ prospect, or whether they were really maybe a ‘B.’ Or, they might’ve found something that they just fell in love with somewhere else and you’re out of the running, and then boom – they’re no longer an ‘A’ for you, but they’re now a buyer for somebody else. We don’t like to have that happen, but it does happen.

So then at 30, 60, 90 days, unless they’ve actually purchased, you send them another little note.  Usually it’s kind of automated.  It might be a computer generated letter; it might be some flyers that you put some labels on.  But, whatever you do, you’re sending something out.  And then after 90 days you hold off until 180 days, because there seems to be sort of a magic point at 180 days where, if they’re serious, they will be back in the market.  Aand if they’re not too serious, then they’re really not there.

With ‘B’ prospects, you make that same phone call within a day.  Everybody gets their follow-up or their staying in touch note right away.  No matter who they are or what level of interest they may have exhibited, everybody gets that postcard or whatever within a day.  Or, gets written out within a day and put in the mail.  With the ‘B’ prospect, though, you go from that first phone call the next day to maybe a week to see how they’re doing, and then maybe 2 weeks, and then you follow into the same routine that you did for the ‘A’ prospect.  At 30 days you send them a note, at 60 and 90, and then 180 days.

Your ‘C’ prospects are an interesting group because, as I said, we found that about 50% of the sales actually came from people that were rated as ‘C’ prospects.  So, with those people it’s not nearly as intense, but it needs to be consistent.  I had a great salesperson that was working in a very difficult community, and Ted was an absolute believer in staying in touch.  I mean, he took the program that I had put together and added to it. He was phenomenal.  And he told me this story about one day he’s sitting in his office on a Saturday or Sunday and a guy walks in with a whole stack, literally, a stack of letters and flyers that Ted had sent out.  And he walked in Ted’s office and he threw them on his desk, and he said, “Stop it!  I’m ready to buy!”  And Ted sold him a home.  And that was somebody that, just fell into the groove of an automatic kind of a system.

If you have any kind of traffic, after awhile it can get to be a monumental task to keep track of all that, and that’s where some of the systems that are available for customer contact management are really an important ingredient in making it all come together.  I don’t endorse any one over the other, but there are a couple of pretty good ones that are out there.  Some smaller builders wind up using some programs that are really designed as general follow-up programs, such as Act or Goldmine or one of those, and you can modify those.

Now there’s another important ingredient, that part of that follow-up process where you’re also gathering of some critical information.  So, not only do you need to get a visitor card filled out so you have a way to contact people, but you also want to have some basic demographic information included.  And you want to be able to take demographic information and put it into a computer, and look at those people that purchased, and compare that to the demographic profile of the people walking through the door.  The reason why that’s so important is you may be getting some sales from one group, but you’re really attracting more from a different group.  If you don’t have a mechanism of comparing your buyers to the traffic walking through the door, you never really know whether your advertising expenses are being well spent, or if you’re just ‘lucking out.’

So it’s not really just tracking the customers, it’s tracking where the customers are coming from. It’s not follow-up, it’s staying in touch.  It all flows together.

______________________________

Public Relations Made Easy!

Join us as Jerry Rouleau shows you step by step how to plan, produce and implement a successful PR campaign – all on your own and without the expense of a high-priced PR firm!  Jerry has helped his clients realize over $50 Million in free press, and he shares his secrets for getting articles about your company published.

Did you know that an article written about your company and published in a local magazine has more than 10 times the value of advertising?  And that reprints of articles can be effectively used for 5 years or more?  Find out how to launch your own PR campaign.  Jerry will show you how!

Public Relations Made Easy – 1-hour live webinar event

Wednesday, December 2 at 2:00pm ET

Live recording available after December 4 to all registrants.

Register here.