The Importance of Prospecting and Building a Healthy Sales Pipeline
Do you know where your sales are? The importance of prospecting and building a healthy Sales Pipeline
Many of us are still working through the deluge of prospects we hopefully had coming through our model during this year’s selling season. We sincerely hope you’ve had a great year so far!
Looking ahead though, this is the point in the year when many new home sales professionals start to get mired in managing their backlog of customers who have homes under construction, managing timelines, weather, mortgage financing and all the other fun surprises that come our way in this industry. This is the point where many new home sales professionals stop prospecting because they believe they are still selling customers that they’ve already sold. They believe they don’t have time to prospect.
While managing backlog in our industry is often the most challenging part of the entire process for us, let’s just face it: there are often times when we have to sell a customer two, three, even four times on the same home throughout the building process and even then there’s a chance we’ll lose the sale at the closing table. The biggest mistake we see both new and experienced sales professionals make at this critical juncture is they STOP PROSPECTING.
Let’s take a step back for a moment. Remember a time when your pipeline was dry? When you sat in the model for days without hearing the doorbell or phone ring? When even a full catered lunch couldn’t bring your realtor database out of holiday-mode to visit?
Remember when you made the promise to yourself to not let that happen again?
Consider this your friendly reminder.
All too often, we get so caught up in servicing the customers we have in backlog, we forget about the future customers who we need to sell to fill that backlog once our current customers close.
The sales funnel is an all-too-recognizable visual for our business:
At the top are our customers who visit the model and fill out a registration card. At the bottom is a set of keys being handed over to the customer. The meat of the prospecting process is in between. That’s where we determine who could viably close and who should be moved out of our funnel. Just because they’ve walked into the model and filled out a card, doesn’t mean they’re a prospect.
The problem with this model is that it’s one-dimensional. You move each prospect from step one to step two and so on. But what happens when they get stuck on step three? Or you never hear from them after your third appointment? Or you lose them during the build process due to a misunderstanding or unmet expectation that was created during an earlier step of the process?
Our business is unique in that the sale isn’t “closed” when the customer signs the contract. Our sale isn’t typically closed until several months afterward. Which means a lot can happen to bust that sale and leave you with a big goose egg for the month.
A realistic model looks something like this:
Not so pretty is it? Here we see the reality of new home sales. The good news is that we can sell a home to someone the first time they step into our model homes and not have to worry about getting them back out after visit one or twenty-one. The bad news is that there are escape points throughout the process, which allow the prospect to go Missing in Action (MIA) at any given time.
There are two ways to navigate the perpetual new home sales funnel:
- Tighten up your sales process to ensure you are communicating your value in a relevant and meaningful way to the prospect.
- Keep the funnel full!
By continuously prospecting and calling your cards (and we don’t care how old the cards are! Keep calling!), for every prospect that goes MIA on you, you can replace them with three more. And you know what starts happening then?
More sales!
The fact is, the more prospects you put into the funnel, the more will come out as a closed sale.
So do yourself a favor starting NOW: Get out your cards going back six months. If they’re not in your funnel now and haven’t been for the past sixty days, call them. Just call five per day. That’s 25 calls a week, 75 calls a month. Even if 90% of those prospects say no, you’ll STILL adding eight new prospects to your funnel which will get you at least one more sale this month.
And isn’t that what sales is all about? Just one more…
Happy prospecting!