Counting Your Touchpoints.

1% of people commit on the first sales office visit.

Expecting people to buy a condo on their first visit to a sales office is like proposing marriage on a first date and expecting the person to say yes. Only one percent of people who walk into a sales office will make that big purchase commitment in the first visit, which means that 99% of the time, your potential buyers is slipping away. They come in, hear a pitch and then leave. But the sales process shouldn’t end there.

Even when the market is great, you need seven touchpoints.

In the peak real estate year of the United States, 2005, it took seven TPs from the first time a prospect saw your marketing materials to when he actually signed a contract. Those seven TPs could be anything that got their attention and reminded them of your company and what you were selling. It could be an ad or direct mail. It could be a phone call. It could be a site visit or a YouTube video. But the important thing was that, in a hot, steady market, you needed about seven TPs (seven reminders) to make a sale.

In 2012, you needed more than twice as many TPs.

 Then, in 2012, we rechecked those statistics and it was taking not seven but 17 touch points to take people from prospects to buyers. Seventeen TPs , more than double what people needed in the peak year. So, as I’m sure you can appreciate, generating touchpoints is a critically important part of closing a sale; and you need a lot of them. But you certainly wouldn’t know that from talking with most developers out there.

Write a touchpoint plan.

If you go to work for a sales team or developer, ask them to write out their touchpoint plan. Ask them to show you their sales process that breaks down the many, varied ways they’re going to reach out to prospective buyers. First off, I bet that 95 percent of those people wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, and the five percent that do know, still don’t have a plan. They might come up with four points or maybe five. But even the National Real estate Board will tell you that nothing gets sold until at least six have been met.

To Create Your Own Unique Touchpoint Plan.