Why You Don't Want a Sales Culture

In talking with operators about their approach to selling in the multifamily industry, I regularly hear the desire “to build a sales culture with leasing associates.” While I’m certainly glad to hear the increased emphasis on selling, I challenge them on the desire.

I get that the term “sales culture” sounds good. Especially if you feel like your leasing team has become increasingly reactive in their efforts and have fallen into an order-taking mode. The idea of a team of sales-oriented, hard chargers is appealing.

In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey cautions people to remember that when you pick up one end of a stick, you’re stuck with the other end as well. Many times the attractiveness of an idea is negated by the consequences (known & unknown) of the idea.

Creating a sales culture could very well be one of those ideas. I’ve learned that there are basically two types of cultures that exist. One is what I call an operations/services culture, while the other is a sales culture.

Anyone who has been involved in culture development knows that you can only have one culture. So the first problem with the idea of creating a leasing team with a sales culture is that you’re trying to introduce a second culture into your organization, creating a potentially harmful conflict.

What’s more, even if you could introduce such a culture, I don’t believe it’s the right step to take. Stop for a moment and think about what having a sales culture really means. Salespeople are aggressive (some in a good way, some not). They like to break things and they thrive on variance.

Additionally, good salespeople who would fill such a culture are expensive – more expensive than the multifamily industry can afford or needs. If you’re looking to hire (and keep) good salespeople, you’ll be competing with pharma, technology, enterprise services and even auto sales where good salespeople regularly make a solid six figures.

The Reality of Sales In The Multifamily Industry

Selling in multifamily is a relatively high volume, low variance process. There are not a lot of moving parts in the process and demand is structural, not discretionary.

This means that the organization has more ability to control and influence the experience between the customer and seller. This is a powerful opportunity that very few operators are taking advantage of.

The workforce that we typically can recruit is also not aligned with building a sales culture. While there are certainly outliers who make low six figures, the bulk of leasing associates make low 40s to maybe mid 60s. As a point of emphasis, given the economics and requirements of the job, that’s not a bad thing.

It does however put us in the world where we are recruiting a services culture population; and as the old saying goes, if you put a pilot behind the controls of a submarine, he’s not going to be able to make it fly.

Addressing The Real Problem

The point of this post is that culture is not the reason for ineffective sales processes in the multifamily industry. The culture is fine. The problem is:

• We don’t talk about the sales process like we talk about other operational areas.
• We rarely have someone in charge of managing, measuring and evolving our sales process.
• Too often (and please, please, don’t take this out of context) we treat sales as just a training issue.
• We don’t have and are not managing the right metrics to accurately assess and manage our sales process.

Sales is a complex ecosystem. It’s manageable, but it’s complex. For years the multifamily industry has gotten away without paying attention to it. Apartment managers have focused on pricing strategies, improving efficiencies and most recently leveraging marketing opportunities like ILS. It’s now time for us to pay attention to sales—but let’s make sure we pay attention to the elements of sales that will really drive results for our particular business needs.

Instead of trying to change your culture, take a deep look at your approach and how you’re managing and supporting the sales process. You’ll find that not only is that a solution you’ll have more control over, it’ll also give you better, longer-lasting results.