by Donald Davidoff | Nov 7, 2014 12:00:00 AM
Selling for multifamily operators used to be a pretty simple task. First get a great (or good) location. Make sure the units are appropriate for the market. Promote the property, buy balloons for the entrance and get a guy to spin a sign down the street.
That created the foot traffic needed, and from there you just needed to train your leasing agents/consultants/associates (salespeople) to answer questions about the property and to serve as a tour guide. Demand took care of the rest.
Oh, how times have changed. Now you’ve got to manage apartment listing services, Craigslist, SEO, PPC and ApartmentRatings reviews. Prospects have more power than ever before and research from the likes of Forrester Research indicate the customer has often completed as much as 90% of their buying process before they step foot on your property!
Prospects already know what floor plans you offer, the prices for various units and what the property down the street is offering as well. This “Zero-Moment-of-Truth” (ZMOT) has not only changed how your customers shop, it’s changed how your salespeople need to sell. If you don’t adjust, the ability to sustain NOI growth will be stunted.
Yesterday your salespeople needed to be prepared to answer simple questions and provide a compelling tour. The tour path was basically the same for everyone because all of your prospects lacked the same information.
Today, your salespeople need to be curators of information and access. Their jobs have become far more complicated and far less predictable. Selling organizations have been dealing with this challenge for more than a decade, but it’s only become truly acute in the multifamily industry in the last few years.
We’ve shared in earlier posts how your salespeople need to move more to an inquiry approach, and when things are clear and desires are fully articulated they then move to an advocacy phase.
Customers entering through your front door are motivated by a number of factors and can literally be anywhere along the path of their “buying journey.” Your leasing team now must be able to assess where the prospect is in their journey, what is motivating them, what they know, what they don’t know and how they go about making decisions. They must be able to do this quickly, with a prospect that probably thinks they already know everything.
When you view the sales process through this prism it should be no surprise that conversion rates are down as are the vast majority of salesperson productivity numbers in the multifamily industry.
We’re trying to address an exponential increase in complexity with the same, simplified process-centered leasing approaches we’ve used in the past. While we’ve adopted disciplined systems approaches to areas like operations, revenue management and marketing, we’re still trying to solve our sales problems with behavioral solutions.
The problem is that there is simply too much to keep track of, manage and assess in a sales situation to expect our sales team to be able to do so effectively without taking the same type of systems approach we’ve adopted in the other facets of our business.
Think about it for a moment. While we have a tendency to treat every sales encounter like it’s unique, the reality is that 80% of it is the same. For example:
- We know who our residents are for each property, and by extension we know what’s going to motivate the vast majority of prospects who will move into our community in the future
- We know what prospects value, and how they relate to neighborhood, community and unit
- Further we know how they buy
- And we know what their journey is and the emotions they’re feeling at each stage
Yet, very few multifamily organizations have built all of this knowledge into a system that frees salespeople up from figuring out the things we already know, so they can focus on humanizing the experience and truly connecting with the prospect.
By “building the genius into the system,” rather than relying on the behavioral genius of each salesperson we can increase productivity, delight prospects and make the process of hiring and onboarding our leasing team far more predictable, efficient and productive.