Counting Down the Days Until NAA

We’re just a couple of weeks away from the NAA Education Conference when 10,000 of our “closest friends” in the industry will descend up on the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco; and this year, the Multi-family Technology Entrepreneur Conference (MTEC), running Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday morning, will precede the main show. Altogether, it will be a whirlwind 3+ days of panels, presentations, trade show and networking. Oh…and also a good bit of partying.

This year, I have the pleasure of participating in three sessions, each with its own very unique topic:

As part of MTEC, I’ll be on a panel Marketing Automation and Direct Sales Wednesday at 11:15 AM. Joined by Jennifer Anderson of RentPath and moderated by Jacob Silber of Tenizen, we’ll be talking about how marketing automation platforms work; covering topics like inbound marketing strategies, lead nurturing/lead management and account-based marketing. This session has a decidedly B2B bent, but its' lessons will be valid to any marketer.

On Thursday at 9 AM, I’ll moderate a panel called How the Zero Moment of Truth Requires Us to Change Sales. This is really the highlight of the week for me. Panelists Jason Whittington, VP Business Solutions at The Gene G. Glick Company and Joanne Chapman-Reps, owner of Effective Leadership Solutions, will discuss why Glick decided it needed to revolutionize its sales model and everything related to sales behavior. Jason will describe how he came to the conclusion that their organization required a change in kind, not just degree. He’ll take the audience through what they implemented and share some very compelling results. Joanne will talk about the shopper’s journey and how a sales system can be modeled to connect better with prospects to match their needs. She’ll bring her 20 years of experience in real-world change management to disclose the latest in best practices for adult learning.

Lastly, on Friday at 12:45 PM, Richard Hughes from RealPage and Annie Laurie McCulloh from Rainmaker LRO will conduct a 1-hour reprise of our very successful deep math discussion at last year’s Maximize conference. In-depth Analytics of Pricing Discovery will delve into deep issues including unstructured data, measuring pricing performance and using a “days on market” base market response model to assess the efficacy of unit amenity pricing.

The Thursday session is so important to me because it represents another key step in helping the industry have a conversation about sales. I’ve been talking about this for a while now, so hopefully you’re not too tired of this subject. If you’ve ever doubted the importance of this, take a look at the graph below. These are real-world results from Glick’s April-May 2015 rollout of our InSite^TM Sales Performance Improvement System. Jason is going to share how Glick’s occupancy growth versus the general market pivoted right when they rolled out the program. But I’m giving you a sneak preview now.

Come hear from him how they achieved this!

If you’re at NAA, whether or not you make it to the Thursday morning session, please make sure to say hello. Better yet, let me know you’re going and let’s set up a time to meet. I truly treasure the relationships I’ve built over the now 17+ years I’ve been in multifamily and look forward to renewing many of them in San Francisco!