Donna
Siegel

Sell More By Showing The Right Product On The First Try

If you have many different products to offer, the challenge is which one to present first. If you guess wrong, your prospect may walk away believing you're not a good fit for his or her needs. You will find that you can Sell More By Showing The Right Product On The First Try.

Whereas the larger Realtors in town can afford to advertise heavily, and thus secure many listings, Johnson has a very modest advertising budget. They have a fairly small volume of listings, so most of their revenues come from selling homes listed by other Realtors on the multi-list system. Since virtually all homes available for sale in the area are multi-listed, Johnson's agents have access to the same inventory as those from any other agency in town, whether large or small.

The Problem

As is common throughout the residential real estate industry, Johnson uses independent real estate agents. Many agents prefer big name agencies which generally provide them with more support. The agents who worked at Johnson preferred the family quality of a smaller agency, but only if they could make an adequate living there. Many of them found that they were having to show too many house to too many prospects for every deal they closed, and they blamed the Johnson agency for this. After a few defections of agents to larger firms, Johnson's management decided to bring in a sales training firm to diagnose the ways their agents sell and to offer improved methods.

In a focus group meeting to review the problem, the agents complained about the dishonesty of the customers: "No matter what they tell you they want, when you show it to them they always want something else." Several of the agents felt that customers were just wasting their time. Some even believed that customers would deliberately describe something different from what they wanted, when they really planned to buy from somebody else anyway. None of the agents could say why so many customers acted with such duplicity, but it seamed the only plausible reason why they so often did not like what they were shown, even when it perfectly matched what they said they wanted.

After the focus group, we met individually with the agents to ask them to review their selling process. The main question we asked was: "How do you determine what the buyer is looking for in a house?" The first answer for most of them was: "I ask them." After a bit more probing with each agent, we got down to more detail on how they asked. Among their standard questions were:

"How many bedrooms and baths do you want?"

"What is your price range?"

"Do you want a pool?"

Some of the agents were more artful than others in how they asked their questions, but fairly consistently, the questions they said they used were closed-ended: price, numbers of rooms, size in square feet, whether or not the customer wanted a certain feature and so on. When we asked why they used this sort of questions, the universal response was that this was the kind of information they needed to choose the houses they would show. At any one time, there were several hundred homes available in the market, all in a computer database which is continually updated from the multi-list system.

The computer screen would prompt the agent to enter in key facts - the same sort they had been asking - such as number of bedrooms, number of baths and price range. The system would then print out a list of homes that fit those parameters. This list formed the basis for what the agent would show to the buyer. The better agents would also read the listing carefully for items that the database program could not single out, but which were specifically cited as desirable or not by the buyer.

What Was Done To Address The Problem?

As we thought back to our own experience in buying homes, we realized that each of the 3 houses we had bought ended up being quite different from what we originally told the sales agents we wanted. We also realized that we had not knowingly given the agents false information; we were simply uneducated about what we wanted. For example, when we moved from Chicago to Boston, we looked for a tri-level brick house like the one we left behind. As it turned out, few houses of this style are built in Boston. Wood frame colonials are the norm.

On further reflection, we realized these facts about our own home buying experiences, which may apply to many other buyers:

• Whereas a real estate agent shows many houses every week, we purchased a new house at intervals of 5 - 7 years. By the time we went shopping for the next house, we had forgotten much of what we knew last time. And since we were buying in a different neighborhood or city, much of what we thought we knew was no longer valid.
• Although we spend every day living in our house, we are not trained to really think about the way we use a house. We didn't remember how many square feet our old house was, and not knowing all the possibilities, we were not sure how we would want the next house to be different.
• When we thought about our best home-buying experiences, we realized that the people from whom we had bought had used excellent consultative techniques to help us determine what we wanted, and to educate us on the realities of the marketplace.

Based upon our own experiences, and our knowledge of consultative selling, we suggested a new line of questioning for the agents. Instead of asking detailed feature questions, we suggested that they use questions like these:

"What would your ideal house look like?"

This was followed by a series of additional open-ended questions to solicit amplification about specifics. As a result, the agents learned what they needed about numbers of bedrooms and baths, but they got much more: this buyer always wanted a large country kitchen; another buyer loves to grow vegetables and wants a back yard with good sun exposure; and a third owns over 3,000 books and needs a room big enough to build a library for those books.

"Tell me about the kind of entertaining you do."

This turned out to be one of the most successful questions. Some people have huge extended families and need a space where they can set up a temporary holiday table for 30 people. Others may prefer intimate dinner parties of three couples. Inevitably, this question resulted in lengthy conversations about kitchen features, dining rooms, traffic flows, where a caterer could set up for a big party and so on. In many cases, bedrooms and baths were considered basic elements of the house, but the future owner was highly motivated by the role their new house would play in entertaining.

Once the agents got the idea, they came up with new questions: the buyer's favorite hobbies and what activities the family members enjoyed together. There were also questions about the children to help the agent determine needs for access to schools, recreation and worship; and questions about work to address commuting considerations.

All of the information the agents got from these questions helped them do two things better:

1. They could look beyond the basic questions in the computer system to select the list of homes to show. Increasingly, they would add to the list some house which fell outside some of the buyer's parameters, but which were a better fit with their lifestyle.
2. As they showed each house, they were able to discuss it intelligently in terms of the buyer's values and help buyers deal with their conflicting requirements: "This house will probably sell for about $30,000 more than your upper limit, but I thought you might want to look at it anyway, because it is one of the few that has the kind of garden space you were looking for."

The Results

As they began using the new approach to questioning, and began to serve their buyers as better consultants, the agents reported fewer fickle buyers. Customers tended to express more pleasure with the first round of homes they were shown; and if they didn't buy one of those, they were more likely to work exclusively with that agent until they did find what they wanted.

After six months of using the new method, sales for the group increase by an average of 32%. Nearly as valuable, many of the agents reported that they were able to work fewer hours. They were spending less time showing unsuitable homes, so they needed fewer average showings per close.

How You Can Apply What We Learned To Improve Your Sales

For almost any product, you know more about your industry and your products than even your best informed customers. This is particularly true if you sell a business or consumer product like a house which people buy infrequently. For this reason, many of your buyers are unable to tell you what they really want. They need you to help them through the process of clarifying their needs. To do this:

• Avoid asking closed-ended questions about features. The answers you get may not reflect their true needs.
• Ask open-ended questions about the prospect's environment that will have an impact on their product selection. For each answer, ask follow-up questions to learn their needs in as much depth as possible.
• Pick solutions to present which match as many of their needs as possible. This may include solutions which match some needs better than others.
• As you present each solution, explain how it addresses some or all of the prospect's stated needs. If it fits only some of their needs, make it clear you understand this.

SeaBird Associates Inc
3011 NE 7th Drive
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Phone: 561-750-9233
E-mail: Donna Siegel

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