Understanding the buyers journey, and making your marketing reflect where they are and guide them through their journey to purchase.
This is the role of your marketing – to firstly attract them to your business and then its job in today’s world is to educate them, to nurture and move them along the journey.
Your marketing starts by showing them the benefits and then overcoming their objections. And you leave the best to last which is the standards guide that shows you as the expert and a term I like to use is to accelerate the discontentment with your competitors.
Most people view marketing as a single process (a tactic), like running an ad in the paper or Google but really marketing it about having a strategy and a series of tactics to move people onto and along the buyers journey.
By understanding your marketplace, knowing their wants, needs and desires and being able to relate to them, puts you ahead of your competition simply through being able to “see” what your customer needs to solve their problem from their perspective.
With this understanding comes major advantages – you can easily convey the benefits of the solution you are offering, relate directly to them and position your business above your competition.
Once you master this, you will know who your target market is and what it is that they want, need and desire that you can provide.
Many builders believe they aren’t a sales person so they can’t sell.
We often hear “I’m a builder not a sales person”, but this simply isn’t true!
Most people think that sales people are born but I have to break the illusion. Sales is simply another business process and skill that can easily be learned.
The Four Fundamentals to selling are:
Once you understand the fundamentals it’s about sitting in front of the right people.
Not everyone is ready to buy when they first make contact, but most builders make the mistake of rushing out to do free quotes without qualifying what this prospective customer wants and when they are looking at proceeding.
By qualifying you are not discarding any leads, you are simply focusing doing estimates for those who are wanting
what you offer and are looking to purchase soon or in the near future.
The other leads you keep “warm” and interested by providing them the information they need right now and following them up at a later date closer to when they indicated they were looking at proceeding with their project.
You may be the best of the best for your chosen area of building, but does your potential customer know?
Competition is fierce and your prospects are more educated than ever before so you must be able to let them know why you are different from the others they are calling.
They are interested in how you are going to help them and if you nail this you are positioning yourself as the expert in your area.
As with the building process to create stunning homes, you need some tools to help you convert leads and enquiries into sales and make the transition smoother and easier regardless of who is handling the enquiry.
The essential tools you need are:
Sales process beats mindset every time – without a process you are vulnerable to each individual salesperson putting their own “spin” on how you want things done or worse still things getting missed, deadlines slipping for appointments or quotes going out steps being forgotten that would have given you critical information about your customer’s needs.
With a process laid out, every customer receives the same high level of attention as if you personally attended to every whim regardless of how many you have in your team.