Industry Tips: The Building Sector

June 2010

It’s not easy being in the building sector right now.  Demand is weakening, the first home owner’s grant has fallen, interest rates are high, and finance is hard to get.

So how do you sell more property in a market like this?  Here are three tips we recommend, strongly...

Carve a difference in a shrinking pie

Your first task is to establish a point of difference so that the shrinking number of potential customers have a reason to favour you over others.

You’re facing a long and expensive road if the message you take to the market is average.  It won’t be competitive.  Better to face some up front investment and get that message as strong as it can be.

That message, taken to market wisely, will help you convert more numbers.  That stronger message makes all the marketing dollars that follow it work harder.

Trawl for meaningful leads

There are two parts to this, not one.  The first part is to trawl, the second is to make sure their meaningful.

Trawling for leads means going where the leads are plentiful, and that’s probably in more than one place.  For instance, if you’re not running a Google Adwords campaign and running it well, then you need to consider this immediately.  It’s fast replacing offline sources like the Yellow Pages and Google still accounts for the vast majority of online searches in Australia.

Other trawling media you can consider are advertising in your local or state newspaper, articles and press releases in the same, and participating in shows and exhibitions.

Less in volume but more in results can be processing old leads and processing old clients for referrals.

But along the way, concentrate on meaningful leads.  If you spend on advertising without educating your market about your points of difference, you can fail to sell and fail to qualify leads.  If you give away masses of brochures at events, you can again fail to sell and simple waste good printing.

Offering irrelevant give-aways can also be expensive, not because of what’s given away but because unless you qualify leads you waste time on leads that aren’t fruitful.

Boost and manage your selling process

Once you have a qualified lead, you need to treasure it.  You spent a lot to get it.  Now it needs to be progressed and managed.  If you run the company, you need to know what happened to every lead and what was done to progress it.  When times are easier, you might divest this to a trusted lieutenant.  But in bad times, the drive for accountability for lead conversion rests entirely at the top.

We’d advocate 5 factors to getting more from your sales efforts...

1. Put all leads into a centrally organised sales pipeline that tracks who owns the lead, what value it’s believed to represent and what actions are due to progress them
2. Equip your sales team with the training, dialogue, support materials, and clear selling points-of-difference they need to take your lead and convert it
3. Meet on sales leads weekly and seek progress reports; in these meetings, offer feedback to sales staff... both constructive and corrective
4. Ensure every sales-contact by your team has an agenda.  ‘Catching up’ or ‘Keeping in contact’ does not make an agenda.  Educating them or seeking information from them does make an agenda.
5. Reward and make heroes out of sales staff upon conversions

If you want assistance with any of these ideas, talk with us today.  Mentioned were:

USP Derivation

Google Adwords

Display Advertising

Sales Systems

Sales Training