Dialogues for Results

VALUE ENGINEERING THE SALES PROCESS

DON'T BE AN ACCIDENTAL TOURIST IN SALES LAND!

Today's challenges are not the result of high interest rates, high unemployment, recession (yet), or global events. They are the result of an unsustainable cycle during which the emotion was drained out of home ownership and all the players, including buyers, operated out of greed. Homes were reduced to widgets, and the sales process to an assembly line.

To meet the challenges head on, homebuilding companies are value engineering their homes, designing new product, retooling their processes and organizations, and restructuring debt and capital. However, all of this will be for naught if an equal or greater amount of time and resources isn’t spent on strategic, targeted marketing and the training and re-training of salespeople. Today’s cycle is like no other. It requires that we move forward to new fundamentals, not back to basics...

It is a period of Darwinian natural selection for our industry. Those companies and people who are willing to change will evolve, while the rest will become extinct like dinosaurs. And it is not just people, but our sales processes and sales management strategies, that must change. Salespeople need to be empowered with a level of expertise comprehensive enough to overcome customers' fears and confusion. They need to be supported emotionally, while held accountable to the highest standards possible. They need to be empowered with sales techniques and planned dialogues powerful enough to stimulate desire and alter customers' perceptions of 'sameness' and low value. Without expertise, management support, and an effective sales system, salespeople will be 'Accidental Tourists in Sales Land'.

The sales process itself needs to be value engineered. I do not mean eliminating features and architectural details to offer more for less, as with homes. Quite the opposite. I mean injecting value back into the process itself for the salesperson, and for the customer. And, then, placing the emphasis of the process on value, specifically, value of emotional relevance for each individual customer. All the knowledge and closing techniques in the world will not secure the sales needed if the process itself is not based on the integration of expertise and in depth discovery into emotionally relevant differential demonstrations.

The traditional Critical Path has disintegrated into a series of stand alone steps, occuring sequentially. If it is executed at all, salespeople 'attack' it like a laundry list of items to be ticked off. It has become linear and one dimensional. Only a sales system incorporating the fundamentals of critical path selling, retooled for today's reality and today's customers, will be powerful enough to deliver the desired results. Only a sales system value engineered into a 3 dimensional, circular series of planned dialogues with emotional relevance for the customer will be compelling enough to lead customers into the Urgency Zone.

The loss of even one prospective homebuyer today is one loss too many. If a builder is to survive, and, dare I say it, thrive, they must focus their energies and resources on the engine that drives this train...sales and marketing. If a salesperson is to thrive, they must focus on elevating their performance, by internalizing and executing an effective sales process, and by self marketing to increase their three key measures of success. Above all else, salespeople need to "own" their process and their store...to assume full responsibility for their results by seizing control of all they can control and investing in their own success.



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