What a pleasure to have been invited to lead the Sales Rally at the 2018 South East Builders Conference with my friend and talented fellow Sales trainer Kimberly Mackey, at the lavish Gaylords Palms Resort in Orlando. We had a full house of eager New Home Salespeople, Realtors ®, Managers and Owners, from all over the South East.
One of the greater pleasures for me is to travel with my family. So, while I toiled away sharing transformational sales processes during the day, they were splashing away and relaxing by the pool. Tough life but someone has to live it!
Here are some of the major sales tips that I shared with the audience. We all learn differently, and many of us need to write things down to retain information. So, with that in mind, please feel free to email at:Roland@newhomesalescoach.com and we will send you the fill in the blank workbook, so that you can follow along and maximize your learning opportunity.
At the Sales Rally, my goal was to teach salespeople how to have create a “Purposeful Process”. This may sound strange, as we may already believe that the time we spend with clients has purpose. Let’s be candid and ask ourselves, how many times are we able to ask the correct discovery questions, listen actively, connect with all personality types, give a meaningful presentation that is tailored around your client’s specific needs, demonstrate our homes creating emotion, and involving constantly? Then how often do we narrow down to a one-of-a-kind home and home site, ask meaningful closing questions, sit down and recap, and close again? If this isn’t happening regularly, then we have a huge opportunity for personal growth and increasing sales on a consistent basis.
We began by sharing principles relating to connecting and caring, as opposed to being too pushy. Theodore Roosevelt famously said:
and as the late great writer Maya Angelou said:
When you meet prospective clients for the first time, we can make the conscious decision to help clients relax and enjoy the experience with us, as opposed to coming off as the stereo typical slick salesperson. When I went back to becoming a selling sales manager for a luxury home builder, after 10 years of being a national sales trainer, I learned a lot of valuable lessons. The main one was that I had to make sure I slowed it down and focused on caring and connecting first. Once I had built authentic trust, then taking clients through the buying process was much easier, and far more successful.
Part of this elevated experience is to have a service mentality, to put yourselves in your client’s shoes and to ensure that they are having a positively memorable experience.
We discussed the minute attention span that we human beings now have, and how research shows that goldfish, (yes, goldfish!) can currently focus longer than us digitally-damaged humans. With that in mind, we discussed techniques to ensure that your clients experience what you are sharing with them, such as the fact that we must experience new information between 3 to 7 times to fully absorb it. With this in mind we must:
We have all probably heard that “Features Tell and Benefits Sell”. With that in mind, we need to hear ourselves saying to our clients “So what this means to you is…”. The benefit is especially meaningful if it links back to something you learned about your clients in your earlier discovery. Then let’s make sure that we actively engage our clients by asking sincere involvement questions. As a coach I have found that Essential level salespeople share features, (which by the way is a perfectly good starting point), more Advanced salespeople share benefits, but the Mastery Level salespeople will then ask involvement questions. This quote sums this concept up well and is a combination of thoughts from two of my early Florida sales mentors and now friends, Walter Blackburn and Tom Daddario:
“Buying is Emotion backed by Logic.
Features are Logical,
Benefits are Emotional,
the Involvement questions, connect the client to the emotion.”
Then we discussed how to purposefully close throughoutthe sales process, as opposed to just at the end. When I first started selling homes, I would often wait until the end of the process to ask my big closing question. I was frequently nervous, vesting everything in my all or nothing big finish. With both experience and training, I realized the folly of my ways and learned to close consistently throughout the process. As I like to say:
“Let’s make deposits in our clients ‘Yes Bank’”.
[caption id="attachment_702" align="aligncenter" width="300"]
'Yes Bank' drawn by Shawn Irish, Copyright Roland Nairnsey New Home Sales Coach ©[/caption]
In other words, close out various elements of the home, such as:
The easiest and most effective closes in the world are simple Recap closes, when you reach back into your ‘Yes Bank’ and share all the agreements that you gained along the way, before asking for the sale.
I shared with the team that the two most distinctive studies into the subject of body language (Dr. Mehrabian and the Pennsylvania University Study), show that 93 percent of communication, or what people are perceiving when communicating with us, is body language, voice, and tone. Shockingly, as much as words are valuable, they are only a measly 7 percent of communication, when dealing face-to-face with a client.
I learned many years ago that when you have narrowed down to a home and home site with a client and are coming back into your office:
“Never Negotiate at Your Feet, Always Close at Your Seat.”
Roland Nairnsey
Look at the pictures below and see how you feel. If you are standing up, you are basically saying, “Thank you, off you go, nothing to see here”.However, if you sit your clients down like the delightful young lady below, then you are now saying what? “Let’s stay awhile, we can chat. I will listen and help you put this homebuying process together.“
I hope this light overview in Purposeful Selling was helpful. Please feel free to call or email me with any questions or to receive the pamphlet and the PowerPoint from the program.
Truly,
Coach Roland
Roland@newhomesalescoach.com