follow-up

BDX recently asked 3 experts in the industry what builders should consider as they follow-up with home buyer leads. Thanks to Mike Lyon, Meredith Oliver and Mike Moore for your words of wisdom. If you’re not following these leaders and learning from their experience helping builders sell new homes, you’re missing out. Here is their advice:

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It’s Time To Start Marketing and Selling Like It’s 2013

From Mike Lyon — www.doyouconvert.com

In 2005, builders didn’t have to think about how to manage their online leads. Shoot, we had people camping out waiting for homes and paying crazy prices! In 2010, many builders were struggling to pay their bills, let alone pay attention to anything happening online. Now, we finally see light at the end of the tunnel. All of the builders I work with are saying something to the effect of “We just had one of our best months ever”.

Pay close attention, you have a small window of opportunity. I would say 9-12 months. If you haven’t figured out how to create 25% of your sales from online sources a year from now, it is really going to hurt. The fact is, your website is the new model home. How have you staffed it? Are the lights on but nobody’s home?

Countless surveys show us that about half of sales agents don’t even respond to their online leads. These sales agents and their builders don’t understand that a lead with an effective nurturing process will set an appointment 25% of the time. And here is where it get’s really interesting – they will write a contract 30% of the time. So go steal some prospects from your competition! Start marketing (and selling) like it’s 2013!

Learn more about Mike at www.doyouconvert.com or follow him on Twitter @mikelyon

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The Need For Speed

From Meredith Oliver —  www.CreatingWOW.com

Speed! If you don’t respond fast enough to homebuyer leads, your prospective buyers will be furious. How fast is fast enough? You can’t be too fast. You can only be too slow.

Your goal should be to catch the person while they are still browsing the web for homes before they move on to another task and become preoccupied. You want to pull the person into your sales funnel quickly and efficiently so your ongoing follow-up plan has a chance to convert them from an online shopper to an in-person buyer.

Connect with Meredith at www.CreatingWOW.com  or follow her on Twitter @CreatingWOW

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Contact, Speed and Urgency Are Keys For Success

Mike Moore at http://mooreleadership.blogspot.com

Although there are several keys to converting sales leads into customers the most important are CONTACT and SPEED. A recent study revealed that between 40% to 50% of inbound leads are never contacted. A sales lead is a request for information and the faster you respond the higher your conversion rate from lead to customer. A Harvard business study results showed that companies who followed up within the first hour were 7 times more likely to convert a lead to a customer. Even if the lead was contacted at 1 hour the conversion rate dropped significantly. Time matters most.

So, URGENCY becomes the key to following up and converting leads to customers. I’ve found too many new home salespeople, sales managers and homebuilder’s view leads as secondary to foot traffic in their models. In this new age of business as consumers shift their shopping habits, this is a grave mistake that costs homebuilder’s sales and damages their reputation because of the lack of urgency in their response.

Connect with Mike at http://www.mooreleadership.blogspot.com/ and www.makingcustomers.wordpress.com

 

 

Isn’t that what we want all consumers to do when they get to our websites? Builders like getting internet leads. With a good follow-up program, builders I have worked with tend to convert about 4% of leads into sales. Unfortunately, not all consumers fill out lead forms. This is a gross understatement. In fact, the number of online shoppers requesting information is well under 10%. So, how do you know if your online advertising on NewHomeSource.com, Google, or Yahoo! is working?

If you can’t measure leads alone to assess value, what should you measure to see if exposure to the other 90% of online shoppers were of any value to you?

Obviously, you have to measure something else. Let us help you out with some objective benchmarks. We completed a consumer survey of NewHomeSource.com users on October 31, 2009. 6,044 consumers participated in the survey. They were only asked to participate once they had bumped around the site a bit. So, these could be called “engaged home shoppers.” We pared this down to 4,245 that answered all our key questions. One of the things we asked is what actions consumers actually take:

NHS Consumer Survey 2009

23.5% of consumers took at least one of these actions. Keep in mind a consumer can take multiple actions. Here’s how they broke down:

NHS User Survey 2009 - User Actions

So, what does this really mean? Well, if 23.5% took at least one of these actions, then of all the consumers answering the survey 17.6% clicked over to the builder’s website, 5.6% printed off the driving directions, 5% called or are planning on calling you, and 7.6% filled out a lead form. How can you track this?

Tracking is always an issue. First, make sure you track through Google Analytics or whatever you are using, users coming to your website. You can even track their path and whether referred traffic converts into leads on your site. Next, you must modify your registration cards on site to capture the real source and ask the question in the right way.

23.5% of engaged shoppers are taking action we can measure on NewHomeSoruce.com. What about the other 76.5%? Come read about it in a week or two. In the meantime, let me know what you think by responding to this post or sending me a note.