When it comes to real estate, a sales manager is responsible for most of the revenue-generating activities within the business. A sales manager who can develop and maintain a healthy and productive sales process is in a better position to win a more significant market share.
But, being a real estate sales
manager isn’t just about having an extrovert personality. You need to combine
sales skills, people management skills, available technologies. This will bring
about the best results for the organization.
The right sales manager keeps the revenue registrar ticking throughout the year. The best sales managers can maintain the company revenue growth through thick and thin; during bullish market period or through a recession.
For the customer, their primary point of contact will be their sales team.
Ability to create a working strategic plan
Sales manager needs to always keep his
team motivated to close deals and maintain high performance. For this, the
sales head or manager should lay-out a strategic plan.
This begins with creating a sales strategy that just works on a consistent basis. For this, you need a strategy that’ll be most appeasing to their future customers.
All these begin with understanding customer requirement and creating a sales pitch tailored to customer requirement.
For this, the sales manager and team should
answer these simple questions.
1. What is the purpose of the product
or service? Who is being targeted and why? What are you going to tell them? and
why? And so on…
2. How can the company help to
satisfy the customer’s needs?
2. Measuring the sales performance
will show where you stand currently. With the help of tools, visualize the
performance of the sales team.
3. Listen and then speak! By
following this, the salesperson will be better able to catering to the
customer’s needs.
4. Have an effective on-board training session once every few months. This will help you deliver increased efficiency and higher performance standards.
If you can answer these questions, you are likely to figure-out the right strategy that satisfactorily provides the right answer to your customer. Later, you’ll be able to proactively scale this pitch achieve more closures across the board.
Getting quality leads keep your sales team buzzing
A good sales manager should be able to consistently generate quality leads.
If you want a happy and
high-performing sales team, you need to start getting them high quality leads that
will likely convert into closed deals. If there’s enough leads, your sales team
will be busy converting them into closed deals and cashing-in on incentives.
In turn, a sales team that is busy,
happy and productive. They will be looking to churn-out more profit for the
company and incentives for themselves.
In time, a sales team should be also
able to build relationships with their qualified leads. They should discover
their core customers, find their needs, make sure their needs are met and feel
satisfied by the service. By connecting with customers on a personal level, the
customers will feel valued.
For this, a sales manager should
train their employees to build relationships with their prospects. This goes
beyond just cold calling their prospects.
Creating sales scripts for cold Calling
Cold calling has always been one of
the favourite ways to generate effective revenue. In recent years, there has
been much talk about the efficacy of the cold calling process.
Even if cold calling is not efficient
to get in touch with potential customers, it can help you build a direct
connection with your customers.
This includes collecting phone
database, calling customers and using better phone numbers.
Sales people speaking to potential clients may give them confidence and experience in the process. Sales Managers and team leaders must have access to a team of effective and like-minded people.
However, it takes much more to maintain a long lasting relationship with existing and future customers. We will discuss about that during another section.
Managing a performance-based sales team
Usually, the sales people and sales manager are held accountable when their respective sales targets aren’t fulfilled.
For this reason, sales managers need to start running a performance-oriented team. This means careful evaluation of each activity. This can include number of calls made, number of responses garnered, number of email responses and number of collective conversations.
In the end, an integrated live chat service dashboard combine, organize and streamline your sales team activities through a single dashboard. This could help you organize and streamline all your performance-based campaign performances.
Manage and Track market trends
Sales team can bring-in revenue from the marketplace. To succeed in the marketplace, a sales manager should take the time to understand it in first-hand.
If the organization cannot understand
and adapt to changing market, they are vulnerable to losing their market share that
result in catastrophic loss in revenue. As real estate is a revenue driven organization,
this can make a significant difference to the organization.
1. Economy- When there is a recession; it causes a drop in sales. No amount of effort can bring up the sales of the organization. In such cases, organizations have to run operation under loss or change their prices or come up with a strategy to keep the organization live. 2. Forecasting Demands- When companies launch a new product in the market; it might have not been accepted in the marketed as the forecast. This is a failure to the sales team.
2. Forecasting Demands- When companies launch a new product in the market; it might have not been accepted in the marketed as the forecast. This is a failure to the sales team.
Managing leads through sales funnel
A working sales funnel looks something like this below. The leads could occupy various stages of prospective conversion such as awareness, showing-interest, Decision-making stage and finally actually making the purchase. You can learn more about sales funnel here.
There are numerous ways how people could land on your website. They could be sent your way by a Google search or paid ad or Facebook recommendations.
All these different traffic have
different chance of getting converted into a customer.
Depending on the quality of traffic
to the website, these leads can be effectively evaluated for being converted
into a buying customer. Rather than having your visitors leave your website,
having qualified visitors is going to bring some returns when they become
customers of your website.
1. Determine what actually brought
them to your website. Customers do not buy your product or service at the first
glance. Ads and popups should be shown until they visit the website again.
2. Learn their interest by viewing their interaction in the website. This will help to know the purpose of their visit. It’s always important to keep track of visitors. For example, you can track whether it’s the first time or they have been on the website more than once. Having a website live chat could be helpful for this purpose.
The website should have all the
answers to questions a customer might have, this is like a situation where a
customer walks into a store to buy a plasma TV and a sales person assists him
in answering all the questions the customer has.
3. A lead might show positive sign of
interest in your product or service. At this point, the customer is engaged by
a salesperson, which assists the customer in taking transaction forward by
giving an opportunity to buy the product or service.
4.Now, the lead is a paying customer
of your business. Sometimes, customer visit your website multiple times before
taking a final decision, these customers need to be engaged at the right time
and be converted into customers of your business.
Managing daily process through a well-Integrated and Optimized Sales CRM
Many old school sales people still try to get-by with their computer excel or plan diary. But there is a serious problem lurking below the surface.
An excel sheet or diary. won’t contain the complexity of a present-day sales process.
Today, most sales process is complicated and needs multiple touch points of interactions. This can include multiple phone calls, emails, chat or other communications.
In all these cases, a normal sales
process has become a series of many micro decisions. It’s hard to be on top of
this process with a simple diary or excel sheet.
For this, a more comprehensive sales CRM system to track and manage all the different sales activities. Instead, you can start using a cloud-based CRM to manage your sales process. You could also benefit through a lead management system for real estate.
Having a CRM in place will reduce the burden on sales team by at least 15% with unnecessary data filling tasks. They will be able to utilize this time at business development.
A Customer relationship management
helps in
- Continuous interaction
with the customers,
- Streamline process and
improves profitability. CRM,
- Develop and build individual
relationships with important leads and customers.
- Track and manage suppliers
or employees.
It is predicted that by 2021, CRM
will be the single largest revenue area of spending in the entire enterprise
software. A CRM helps to get a view of their overall interactions on social
media and other internet platforms.
With a CRM, the sales manager can also keep an overview of the entire sales process without actively interrupting the salesperson to know the status information. This includes analyzing data, and displays the target achieved percentage, lost opportunities, average deals done, revenue generated and many more…
Conclusion:-
To be a successful sales manager, you need to have a wide range of skills and natural talent. The best sales managers will continually develop and improve their skills on these arenas.
More importantly, you need to have a way to generate consistent inbound leads for your business. Above all other methods, you need to engage your visitors live on the website. Live chat services is best equipped to engage visitors on the website. A trained live chat agent can provide instant answers to customer queries, which will give them priority over other players.
Mr. Prassanna Kumar is Industry veteran with in-depth experience in managing 24×7 chat agents and different marketing activities. He has experience at growing brands in different industry verticals. You can connect with him at his linkedin profile