Lose the “Dumb” Phone
Are you looking like Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell. Time to lose the “dumb” phone and upgrade your primary communication tool.
I even wrote this whole post using the Wordpress app on my iPhone. Grabed a screenshot of the Zack pic, tweeted out the link, sent to facebook and posted on linkedin. A true miracle of modern technology.
Leave your comments below. What do you love most about your smartphone?
(on a side note, I use my iPhone so much my wife has threatened to flush it down the toilet multiple times. Guess that is the side effect of a connected world. Does anyone else experience this?)
Is Follow Up a Lost Art? Survey says…
Is follow-up a lost art? Can you guarantee your agents are responding and following up with your prospects, the ones you paid $1,000’s to get to walk into the door? In this short video I review a study conducted on this topic (details below) You be the judge. If you are wondering what is going on with your internet leads, it’s time to secret shop your agents. Submit a lead from your website and listing services, not once but several times. Track the response time, quality of the message and how many times they follow up. You will be surprised.
Take a look at this at this whitepaper released by Red Tree Resultants and Qgenisys. They conducted actual on-site evaluations acting as motivated prospects to learn if there would be adequate follow up on the visit to try to persuade the prospect to become a purchaser and what builders and developers can do to improve their market share. What they found out:
- Despite spending millions of dollars to attract them…In only 36% of the visits did an agent bother to follow up with the prospect who visited the community and expressed immediate purchase interest.
- In only 14% of the cases did agents follow up with personalized information about the community that reflected anything they discussed with the prospect.
- Builder agents from the higher-priced homes/communities actually followed the prospect more aggressively than did the lower-priced homes/communities.
- Of all homes visited during our research, unless a prospect followed up with the builder, nearly 60% of all prospective sales would have been lost due to lack of follow up by the builder or the builder’s representative
- We estimate that up to 75% of builders’ emails, both from sales reps and marketing teams were caught by our researchers’ spam filters.
Their findings clearly show that after spending all those marketing dollars to get potential buyers into their homes, motivated buyers were largely ignored and received almost no relevant follow up from the builder’s site agent. On-site builder agents allowed prospects to walk out the door, but also allowed them to slip through their fingers with little relevant follow up…or in many cases ANY follow up after the visit.
The Conclusion – Builders who implement the changes we have recommended here will be better positioned than those that do not to take advantage of the inevitable turn around that will eventually come in the housing market.
Thanks to Brendan and his team for the timely and powerful info.
Contact:
Red Tree Marketing Resultants
Weekly Hotlinks
Photo by joshbousel
I hope to see many of you at IBS this year and you need to mark your calendar for our seminar: Attracting Today’s Buyers Online: Building Success With Connected Customers
Be sure to let me know you are coming – it is a great topic.
Here are some of great reads from this past week:
- The Brand You is Dead. Long Live The Brand You Build. Talks about the importance of creating value in your personal brand – not just having one for self promotion. Good stuff!
- Wondering about Twitter – check out this prediction – Why Twitter Will Go Mainstream In 2009 with 10 reasons to support it.
- This article is from 2002: As the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Go Online Yes, that is from 2002 – message translates to today…gotta love business cycles.
- On the predictions train: Seven Predictions for 2009 Internet is still the victor.
Here’s to a successful and prosperous new year. Look forward to your comments on these articles. What do you think about Twitter?
Encounters are the new “Visits”
Myers Barnes has a great post over on his blog – Visits are Out. Encounters are In—And Encounters Can Occur On-site or Online.
He comments:
In the old economy, prospects shopped by the process of elimination. They would drive around, build their short list and eventually settle on their new neighborhood and home. In today’s economy, new homebuyers shop by the process of exclusion on the Internet. They build their short list and then visit only the neighborhoods they are seriously considering. In building a list of places of interest, they will have many encounters. Each time they log on to your website, it’s an encounter. So they could easily have had 10 encounters with your new homes/homesites before you ever get the first opportunity to meet and greet them.
I can’t agree more. A good percentage of our prospects will spend more time on our website than we will! When researching one of the largest investments a person will make, the website and other listing sites become a “power tool” for the prospect putting them in driver seat.
Don’t give them a reason to eliminate you. Keep your site fresh, up to date and full of useful information they are looking for.
Email Hacks for the New Home Sales Executive
I stumbled upon a neat little hack by accident and I’m pretty excited. Most cell phone companies have a free option of email to SMS. This is the ability to send an email which converts to a text message on a mobile phone.
Big deal right, I get email on my iPhone already. Well, like most people, I disabled the email notification/buzz/alarm on my phone, so I actually have to check for new emails. This helps me stay focused and not distracted by emails all day (3rd step from my Crackberry Anonymous meetings). If not, I would probably be locked in a room pasting up newspaper articles like Russell Crow in "A Beautiful Mind".
Anyway, so here’s the trick. Again, I don’t want a text message for every email I get… but I would like to receive a text message when someone submits a lead from our website, because these are usually the hottest and most qualified requiring the absolute highest priority. To accomplish this, you need to program in your standard email on the web contact form and copy your new mobile SMS email address and voila, you’ve got an instant text notification when you have a hot lead! If this is Greek to you, have your web design firm help you out. (note: you need to have text messaging set up on your phone or they charge you a pretty penny per text)
As you can see, it doesn’t take much to excite me. But, in a challenging market – response time matters right? Like Ricky Bobby says, "If you ain’t first, you’re last."
Also, a little side note. Check out Jott – it’s a FREE service that transcribes voicemails to emails automatically. I use it to take voice notes and leave reminders that funnel directly to my email – which helps me stay organized. A true lifesaver.
Below are the email addresses of the most popular carriers.
T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
ATT: phonenumber@txt.att.net
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com
phonenumber = your 10 digit phone number
