Can Your Staff Really Use Your Marketing Resources
It is an interesting question to ask the sales team. Can they really sell your real estate business and your services? The answer is sometimes quite scary and of great concern. Try them out at the next team meeting if you doubt my observations.
More often than not most salespeople in our industry are fairly average when it comes to using the available marketing materials and can overlook the use of them entirely. Given that most brokerages and agencies are spending lot of time and money in creating exceptional marketing tools, the most important part of the equation is at the front end of the business; the brokers and agents that have to use them.
Test Them Out
You need to know how your agents and brokers use those resources. Don’t assume that they will use the resources to any great level of skill or to help with any listing conversion. So, let’s check things. Start the process of role playing a listing presentation within the team to check the capability of individuals when it comes to marketing resources and common market conditions from the listing process.
At your next sales staff meeting take in a selection of your marketing resources and put them on the table in full few of the team. Ask the team to show you exactly how they would use those resources given current market challenges and listing situations. Create a real situation from the property market and use some of your existing listings as part of the process.
Explore the skills of your team with their use of your marketing resources in a listing pitch. In a recent workshop for a CBD brokerage I did exactly that. The results were very concerning. The business itself had some world class resources that were printed on high quality paper stock and presented in professionally prepared booklets; that was very positive, but things went ‘downhill’ from there. It was obvious that the sales team had never discussed the methods of presentation using those quality resources.
Here are some tips for presenting and pitching:
- A good resource tool to use when it comes to a listing presentation or sales pitch will be a graph or an illustration. Numbers, colours, and illustrations attract the attention of the reader. Wordy brochures do not convert new business very easily. Take a serious look at your brochures on that basis. See if you can add some visual aspects of market activity, enquiry, prices and rentals, and marketing strategy.
- With most property types and with most clients, there are a standard set of rejection or discussion factors that will always come up. Usually they centre on price, marketing, fees, inspections, and negotiations. All of your marketing material should offer various levels of support to help your team through those client discussions and listing conversions.
- Seek to understand the client and the property at an advanced level before you push your ideas and recommendations.
So the message here is quite clear. Revisit your marketing materials as they exist today. Test the members of your agency to see how they can use those materials given the various sets of circumstances arising from the marketplace and your clients.