Leads and sales go together.
It should be a no-brainer, right?
- Developer pays for marketing
- Leads get generated.
- Sales people contact the leads and within a heartbeat, they’re all over your project like a rash.
Everyone thinks being a developer is having a license to print money.
That ship has long sailed.
And when the Financial Review advised that 16% of all investment properties across Australia are being sold at a loss, those enquiries you’re paying for will become more expensive, let alone finding a buyer with appetite.
So, what are the best doing?
How is it that stars always make money?
I’ll let you in on a secret.
Stay with me here.
Promise not to get annoyed because I could be touching a few sore nerves…
Star developers make money because they integrate themselves into the sales process and they treat selling like a science.
The best developers understand that delegation and trusting your team is important, but having full control and visibility is better.
Have you watched Moneyball?
Basically, the General Manager of Oakland Athletics is given a tiny budget to recruit C-Grade baseball players to try and win against A-Grade teams.
He doesn’t pick the fastest, the one with the best arm nor the one with the most home runs.
He approaches a Yale economics graduate and gets nerdy with numbers.
Using sabermetrics, he understands that he needs to hire players who can get to first base above all else.
Why?
Getting to first base meant you might have a chance to get to second base.
Then third base.
Then fourth base to score.
Problem is, that most sales people want to hit home runs ALL the time on their first swing.
Then the conversations around pricing start, leads are bad, the economy is tanking and you need more REA budget.
Life is not that good.
So, what is a first base in sales?
An appointment!
This is not Million Dollar Listing where Russian billionaires buy properties sight unseen.
I was speaking with a high profile developer last week and they’ve doubled their sales in the last quarter by doing ONE thing.
They no longer farm out the leads (which they pay for so ethically, this belongs to them) to independent sales people.
They apply Moneyball strategies to sell.
They need appointments, not excuses.
All enquiries now come through a centralised booking system and all this department does is build rapport and set appointments.
Once the appointment is set, they don’t ask what time the sales people are available.
If you have a prior obligation, no hard feelings, the appointment will be handed to the next available sales person and you miss out.
There is no begging, no shuffling, no fear because the customer truly comes first, and this developer now controls the leads and the conversations from the beginning.
Powerful lessons here.
Everyone needs and deserves a life outside of work, but developers also need to sell projects.
And buyers need to be treated with the highest priority.
If you tell a buyer to visit your showroom between 9 am – 11 am on a Saturday because this is your ONLY available time, then your time is near.
Do you really think your buyer will go out of their way to accommodate you so they can hand you a half a million dollars?
Uber, Deliveroo, AirBnB and Netflix have disrupted industries which are not new while their competitors are crying over spit milk, and why?
Because they understand that customers come first.
If you are a developer with multiple projects and big goals for 2020, this is where I’d start.
