How many customers visit a community, intent on building rapport with your professional? In other words, is finding a rapport focused sales professional on the customers list of priorities? Customers could care less about building rapport when they don’t even know if they like what you are offering.
I hear from sales professionals all the time that their ‘Rapport’ skills have made them successful today. “I get invited over for dinner all the time”, they say. “I held their baby.” Great, but, isn’t that a given?

With so many builders to visit, and so many decisions to consider, buyers don’t have time to “bond” with each and every salesperson they meet. Rapport is not the purpose of a customer’s visit; it’s the furthest thing from their mind. As a matter of fact, customers have their own agenda. They are visiting to see if you’re worth the time it will take for further investigation. Customers visit to qualify YOU.

Customers don’t want and need rapport until they decide if they “like what you have” … and once they have put you on their “Investigate further” list. And until that happens, Comfort should be an associate’s objective.

Comfort is achieved using a non-business approach, anchoring techniques and verbal & visual signals.

Instead, sales professionals are quick to qualify and use their jedi rapport tricks, which worked in a good market, but that’s when there were more than enough customers for everyone. Times have changed. Customers don’t like to be qualified.

Questions are the source of the qualifying process and they almost always seem to be the same. Is this your first visit? What brought you out today? What’s important in a new home? What size home? What price range? Do you live in the area? How soon are you looking for a new home … and so on?
Look at it this way. In the chart below, consider who the question asked benefits, the sales professional or the buyer.

On one hand, sales professionals say that they need to “Sell Themselves” first … and on the other hand they signal that it’s “All about me”. They can’t have it both ways and that means they have to quit worrying so much about themselves, and start worrying more about their customer.

If the objective is to build rapport and qualify early in their customer’s visit … what signals are they sending? And whatever qualifying (opening) signals sales professionals are sending, definitely sets the stage for the rest of the building experience.

It’s all about The Builder and not the Customer.

With the significant expansion of our business activities which now includes product lines and services far beyond the traditional survey provider, this new brand represents many exciting and positive changes for our company.

We are a contemporary, comprehensive customer experience group with strength and diversification and we felt our name needed to reflect that. This transition is representative of our desire to be progressive in serving our customers and our plans to grow our customer base. Our hope is that wherever you see our new name and logo you will have a sense of assurance that CustomerInsight will create an experience for industry customers from prospective buyers, through purchases and referrals.

While the name has changed, the personal care our team provides has not. We appreciate your support of CustomerInsight and we’re honoured to serve you now and in the future.

Sincerely,

Christian Caswell
CustomerInsight

We asked Social Media expert, Linda Warren, how best to embrace the social media world. Linda is an experienced writer and educator, social media consultant specializing in the home building industry, as well as social media strategist for BIG Advertising Agency.

Linda instructs new clients to first understand that they are embarking on building relationships through two-way conversations. “The main difference between conventional marketing and social media, is that social media is not commercial it’s cultural. It’s important that the client realizes you can’t go in with hard sell one-way messages,” Linda explains. She also stresses the importance of investing in research and planning. “It is imperative that your social media consultants clearly understand your brand, the target demographic, and the influencers among this group, before they can recommend strategies and the most effective platforms” says Linda.

Linda recommends clients remember these five rules.
1. Transparency. Show your customers the real you. Social media thrives on honesty. Let them know you are real people and that you welcome their thoughts – it shows you have nothing to hide. Too often, businesses will panic over a negative tweet or comment. Instead, embrace the criticism and act on it. It shows your company cares, and you follow through on the commitment to your customers.

2. Immediacy. Social media is not a Mon-Fri 9-5 job. However, a quick response to questions directed to your company is expected. If it is not a direct question, you may find that customers will often override a negative comment by defending the company.

3. Quality not quantity. Pick one thing, and do a great job. You don’t need to be everywhere at once. Find out where your clients are and be there too. Spreading yourself too thin leaves little time for quality communication with your customers. Beware of social media people who want to blast your name out their with automated sales messages, it gets old very fast. Social media people are savvy customers and will see through this quickly.

4. Research. Don’t skip the planning and research. Know where your customer is, and be prepared to research their likes, how can you help them, invest in monitoring platforms and use the right tools to reach out to your potential customers.

5. Most importantly, patience. Success in social media takes time. Have reasonable expectations, your business wasn’t an overnight success, don’t expect people to flock to your sites, it’s about engagement – it takes time to build a community.

Social media isn’t just about Twitter and Facebook. It’s about engaging in conversation. Linda is quick to remind us that, “social media is not a spectator sport – it’s about listening, monitoring and conversing.”

Linda Warren
warrenpiece@cogeco.ca

It is with great pleasure we introduce Shari Pryce – Production Manager, as a new member of our growing team. Shari comes from a background in Marketing & Sales and brings knowledge of the building industry from working as the Office Manager with her husband’s custom home building company – Prycon Custom Building & Renovations.

Her most recent position as the Executive Director of the Learning Disabilities Association of Simcoe County drew on her expertise in strategic planning, project management, public relations, and policy development.
Shari’s primary responsibility with CustomerInsight is working directly with our clients’ customers to ensure their experience and voice is captured. Like other team members, she wears multiple hats and plays a vital role in maximizing the output of the various support services such as marketing and procurement.

We are delighted that Shari has joined our team as we continue to grow in the Canadian Homebuilding Industry.

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“Communication is the key to success! Truly listening and understanding your customers’ unique needs allows you the opportunity to provide strategic measures in improving customer loyalty.” Shari Pryce, Production Manager

If your customer isn’t the focus of multiple advertising messages, she’s juggling family or work issues. And if it isn’t that, she’s trying to decide who gets her time and attention and who doesn’t. All of this boils down to a simple definition.

If how you sell ends up matching how your customer’s decide, you’ll get the time and attention you deserve. If it doesn’t, you won’t.

It’s a sentence that might well be the most important “If” in our industry. And as much as you might not like to admit it, this “If” is responsible for how successful you can be. Selling has reinvented itself all because of a research study that began over thirty years ago.

High-Ticket Selling

In Neil Rackham’s book, SPIN Selling, what’s different from the more than 1000 sales books already published is two things:

1. It’s About The High-Ticket Sale: Almost all existing books (especially inside the homebuilding industry) have used models and methods that were developed in low-ticket, low-pressure, one-visit sales.

In the 1920’s E.K. Strong carried out pioneering research studies focused on small, or low-ticket selling. As a result of his studies, he introduced ideas new at that time to selling. Strong introduced features and benefits, closing techniques, objection handling and open and closed questions.

Now, for more than 90 years, these same concepts have been copied, adapted and refined with the assumption that they apply to all sales. Even the trainers that insist their training includes “high-ticket” strategies, base their ideas on Strong’s original methods. The fact is, these are all wonderful techniques if your selling low-ticket products.

Rackham’s SPIN research is the first study that separates the difference between High-Ticket and Low-Ticket selling skills. And the first to identify the skills most closely associated with success in high-ticket selling.

2. It’s Based On Research: The SPIN research is the first publication of results from the largest research project ever undertaken in the selling-skills area. Rackham’s Huthwaite Inc. team analyzed over 35,000 sales visits over a period of 12 years to provide the high-ticket selling strategies that literally every other industry now embraces.

Rackham points out that there are plenty of opinions on how to sell, but a real shortage of well-researched facts. Stating that a project “sold out” in a few months, or a testimonial from an associate that sold a few extra homes doesn’t constitute a study.

Rackham’s SPIN research was based on a behavior-analysis method that was able to produce the first-ever scientific, qualitative look at selling.

Some of the Results

It’s certainly nice to have a body of evidence to look toward for improvement, but you have to wonder, “How can it help me?” Let me introduce you to some of the differences between selling a high-ticket product compared to selling a low-ticket product and you can decide for yourself.

Look closely and I think you’ll be both amazed and fascinated. Here are just a few of the strategic differences his project discovered:

• Discovering your customer’s “needs” represents only about 25% of the information you need to uncover to be able to easily and efficiently close a high-ticket sale. In a low-ticket sale, discovering needs is all that is required.

• A traditional feature and benefit presentation, while super effective in a low-ticket sale, is the least effective method to build value in a high-ticket sale. Value building in a High-Ticket sale requires a very unique set of questioning skills.

• The more you present … the less value your customer perceives … and the less value they perceive … the more objections they’ll have. Not true for a low-ticket sale. Matter of fact, Rackham’s research presentations work well with low-ticket products.

What About Associates?

I’ve found that almost every associate responds differently as they’re exposed to High-Ticket selling techniques. The experienced and most successful seem to respond by saying, “Come to think of it, I knew that … that’s the way I sell. I just didn’t know how to express what I did.” Other high performers say it differently by stating, “Finally, it’s about time the industry started thinking this way.”

At the other side of the sales universe there’s the “newbies”. And they’re very matter-of-fact when they say, “Why wouldn’t we sell that way. It makes all the sense in the world.”

In the end, it’s your decision to keep doing what you’re currently doing, or to investigate a method that’s guaranteed to improve your results. The longest and largest research study (6 years and ongoing) inside the homebuilding industry shows that you can double your sales per hundred visitors at a minimum … and reduce your customer’s first visit to time of contract by 48%.

In the end, no matter which direction you choose, it’s important to never forget:

“Success in today’s market is based on the selling strategies most closely associated with success with high-ticket products.”

Through a number of initiatives, Geranium has proven that they are a leader in our industry in customer-centric decision-making and execution. Geranium gathers customer feedback through a robust survey program that begins at the prospective buyer stage, and they continue to maintain communication and a strong relationship with their homebuyers long after closing through a series of customer touch points, including surveys, events, and community gatherings.

Serving the move-up buyer market – these are discerning buyers who have been through the home buying process before. This market can often be one of the most challenging in terms of closing sales and achieving excellent customer satisfaction scores. Geranium has mastered the nuances of serving this clientele, and is at the forefront of new and innovative improvement strategies.

From our team at CustomerInsight, congratulations to the innovative and dedicated team at Geranium Homes for achieving Home Builder of the Year. Well deserved!