To sell homes in today’s competitive market, you must develop a well-planned, persuasive presentation, and you must practice it and then deliver it every time you meet a prospect for the first time. Allowing a prospect to tour a model home alone is a sure recipe for failure. Demonstrations build value When you demonstrate a home, you… - Build credibility through your display of product knowledge - Sell your builder’s reputation for quality - Ask discovery and qualification questions - Lead prospects to minor decisions with tie-down questions - Persuade them to visit their homesite - Build trust—people believe what they see A more efficient way to sell People like a show. They want to see things moving and happening. Thus, salespeople must find drama in their homes and build their demonstrations around it. Demonstrating this way makes presentations more convincing. That, in turn, makes selling more efficient and effective. Salespeople can show more in five minutes than they can tell in one hour. Three requirements of an effective demonstration: Demonstrate what prospects care about. Prospects visit model homes with specific decision-making conditions in mind. If you fail to discover what those conditions are, you may be demonstrating features and benefits that have no importance to your prospects. Far better to first know the prospect is interested in lower utility bills before you demonstrate energy saving features. Organize your demonstration. Timing is everything. How you sequence what you demonstrate can make all the difference. Early in my career, I hired a sales person who understood this. Throughout the model home, he planted sales aids to demonstrate his points. They were samples of product that customers could pick up and inspect for themselves. For example, he placed blown insulation into a bag and explained how insulation works. He helped his customers understand R Factors and enhanced their understanding by allowing them to see and touch the same kind of insulation that the home builder placed in the attic. Look for opportunities in your model home where you can demonstrate product benefits. Don’t worry about becoming flustered or embarrassed. That’s where practice comes in. When salespeople make the effort, practice their demonstrations and routinely deliver them to every prospect, they differentiate themselves from the competition and vastly improve their close ratio. Develop an effective delivery. In many respects, you are a performer. The salesperson with a forceful, dramatic presentation style rivets a prospect’s attention and sets up a sale far more effectively than a monotone presenter. Salespeople must be particularly mindful of their psychology, voice tones and word choices. The goal is to encourage the prospect to match a salesperson’s enthusiasm. Ask yourself, “Would I rather deliver an Oscar-winning performance or a B-movie performance?” Of course, you want to reach for the stars, don’t you? Make the right choice, and sales and income will follow. Create an Oscar award-winning performance Merely mentioning a home’s features will not cut the mustard in today’s market. It will not convince a prospect to buy. Listing a home’s benefits is better than dwelling on features, but this, too, is not sufficient. Only a performance can turn a prospect into a customer. A salesperson must study all the features a home includes, and then translate them into benefits a potential buyer can understand. Then he or she must go one step further—demonstrate the benefits that are meaningful and important to the prospect, particularly those that the competition cannot match. Construction knowledge One sure way to outperform the competition is to demonstrate the quality that is built into your homes. However, it is not enough to simply claim high-quality construction; you must know what makes it superior, and you should be prepared to demonstrate exactly how it is superior. Before you can do that, you will need to develop a basic understanding of general construction principles. Many of your customers will have some knowledge in this area; some will compare your construction quality with the competition’s. Obviously, it is imperative that you know as much as possible about how your homes are built because quality construction is one of the selling points you will have to prove. A confident, knowledgeable presentation says more than you realize about you and your product. You certainly would not purchase a luxury automobile from a salesperson that could not open the hood of the car and point out the finer points of the engine and how it works. Why would it be any different for a house? Take time to meet with your builder to discuss your company’s building practices. Take notes and be available to work alongside your builder on your days off so you can experience new-home construction first hand. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. The construction knowledge you gather will serve as your foundation when you and your customers do walk-throughs of homes under construction. Demonstrating can be one of the most rewarding and enjoyable aspects of new home selling. (When else do you get to give an Oscar-winning performance?) But like any communication skill, it must be polished and sharpened before its true potential can be realized, so practice, practice, practice!
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