Many authors refer to a metaphorical funnel when explaining what it takes to be successful in sales, but since we work with lots of property related service providers and skilled trade professionals, we’d like to try a house building metaphor.
Create the right foundation
Having a clearly defined, easy to understand offering creates a deep, strong foundation for your sales efforts.
Dig out the trenches, by creating a marketing plan that captures the attention of your target market and start pouring. Each blog post, social media ad, or email campaign represents cubic centimetres of concrete that will eventually set hard, despite so much of your efforts feeling like they are going underground, out of sight. But when the time is right for your client, they will not be out of mind, those little nuggets of value and brand awareness will be remembered.
Darren Hardy’s The Compound Effect teaches us that consistent efforts, no matter how small, lead to extraordinary outcomes. The walls of your house will not be erected in a day (unless you’ve purchased one of those highly engineered prefabricated constructions!). Success in this significant phase of your build is the result of small, deliberate actions that accumulate over time – methodically, carefully and consistently laying each brick to a line, and to the agreed plans.
Building the Walls
Picture your CRM as brick walls. You can’t dump all the bricks into a pile and call it a structure, and contact points, enquiries and new connections need to be kept orderly too, otherwise they create little value.
Once you have attention from neighbours, passers-by and your online community, the next step is to build relationships. This phase requires just as much patience. Like constructing walls, your leads need frequent, intentional effort to reach their full height. Email and telephone follow-ups, personalised messages, and valuable content are the mortar that bind the bricks together.
Nurturing your leads – even if it’s just responding to one or two sales-related emails each day – compounds into trust and loyalty, a roof for your fabulous property.
Completing the Structure
Share your vision with your leads, help them to understand how your house is going to feel and why it is valued at the price it is. Fit out your home with electrics, plumbing and furnishings to match the needs of your audience so that your product/service becomes their aspiration.
Guide your leads to a purchase decision, using marketing techniques and simple processes. Once again, consistency here is key, don’t let your guard down in this final phase, your success is a sum of all the steps taken before.
And finally, get baking bread! The onboarding experience will delight your customers so they become very vocal advocates….
We hope you’ve enjoyed our tenuous attempt at matching sales processes with constructing a house!
If you’re looking to grow your business, whether related to property or not, we’ve got plenty of experience, strategic tools, empathetic support and a fantastic network of collaborators. Whatever you need to compound your efforts and make your business successful on your terms, we’d love to hear from you.