The brands and people that move any market are customer-obsessed. They put the customer at the centre of everything they do. The future of our industry is to realign our purpose rapidly.
The sales pitch has driven our business models. Our purpose has been to maximise the saleable value of the asset at the point of sale. But what would happen if we set a bold new purpose – to maintain asset value and maximise it at the point of sale? It seems simple, but it shifts the mindset from a one-off transaction to recurring revenue built on property services.
Firms of the future are embracing the jobs to be done concept, building new recurring revenue from property services. We’re seeing property maintenance, finance, insurance, property management and sales as service lines that fulfil customer needs.
You don’t have to be big to be good. Strike relationships with external providers, until you hit the scale point where it makes sense to bring it in house. How much would that change how we work with past and future clients? How much closer would we get to the customer during their life of ownership?
Here are the game changes for 2020:
Amplify what works.
Review every listing and every management you’ve won in the last 12 months, and ask the question, how did we meet the seller or the landlord? Think the following categories:
Sales:
Personal network
Buyer enquiry
Past clients
Social proof
Landlords
Community
Property management:
Personal network
Sales team referral
Existing landlords
Landlords who enquired on fee
Tenants
Acquisition
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The database is not a lead source; it’s where you put the leads. When you know what works, you can cut the wastage. There is too much time and money lost in industry dogma. The smart money is defining where your customers hang out before they need you, then building a platform for customer success. One customer served well leads you to your next customer.
To drive performance get clear on a simple set of numbers, so you can set a strategy, measure it and adjust to keep on course. For sales, it’s month to date, listings, sales and income, actual versus target. Then every week measuring your appointment numbers – buyer appointments, market appraisals and listing appointments. Momentum happens at ten appointments per week and market share domination happens at 15 per week. The more customers you meet with, the faster your business moves.
Learn the power of routine. A meeting rhythm ensuring consistency over time and reduces risk. Here are 5 basic meetings to deploy:
The daily directions meeting – 5 minutes at the start of each day to review the diary, align activity and set the priority.
The 3 pm loop back meeting. A quick check-in at 3 pm, to see what’s ahead, what’s been done and if there’s anything critical prior to the close of business.
The Seller pipeline review meeting. Focusing on problem, timeline and destination, so you nail the next steps for client progress.
The buyer pipeline review meeting. This aligns the best buyers in the market with existing and forthcoming stock.
And finally, the stock review meeting, where you review each piece of stock based on the indicators of interest, enquiries, inspection, second appointments, contract requests and offers.
Intention combined with organisation clarity, and technical competence is the secret sauce to serving more customers more often. No one came here to play it small. The secret is not to compete with your competitors, but to compete for the attention and praise of your customers. The biggest opportunity that exists is realising we have far more existing customers than we do new. Too many focus on attracting new rather than serving those existing customers in new and better ways.
Here’s a great example in Property Management.
How many landlords do you have?
How many live locally?
How many of those landlords have met the property manager who manages that property face to face?
How many of those landlords have had an equity check on their existing home?
How many have an appetite to purchase?
Then we move on to past clients.
How many past clients do you have?
How many receive an annual checkup call?
How many book in for an annual checkup?
And how many of those progress to the market?
Have you ever thought, how many of the listings you go for are someone else’s past clients that are just completely underserved?
The opportunity is so great; it’s worth the pain of change. Shift to a recurring revenue approach, the recurring customer, and it will change the way you do real estate forever.
This article first appeared on Elite Agent: https://bit.ly/2U3xxNr