The Right Sales Team for Working Leads
The project was called Westmount Grand. It was a 77-unit building in an area called Waterloo, Ontario. Waterloo is where they make the Blackberry smartphone, and it’s a growing city. All of the big tech companies are there and the universities are very well known. It’s a great place, but that market hadn’t seen a luxury condominium before Westmount Grand.
Westmount Grand Luxury Condo
An agent had pre-sold a portion of the building for the construction financing, but once the project was built the developer ignored sales. The company didn’t have an experienced salesperson or very many leads – only a few hundred people in their database.
What N5R did...
We started by building them a new website. Their marketing materials were all very stale and they needed a bit of a facelift.
The website went up and things were going well. We used HubSpot software, which allowed us to easily integrate Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest for search engine optimization purposes. The second thing we were able to do was to send out some very nice, professional emails to the existing leads and properly track the results. Not just who had registered, but also their activity on the website.
While in Hong Kong I explain the importance of tracking emails as a a sales team.
But we didn’t have an advertising budget and we knew that we were going to need a better sales team if we were going to make this work.The developer told us that they had tried using a lot of major real estate firms for their sales staff before, but nothing had worked. I was inclined to believe him because, typically, traditional real estate agents are the worst people to sell an apartment or condominium. The reason is that most of the time they’re not selling, they’re actually just showing. They use the strategy of showing a client so much that eventually they’re going to buy something.
Hiring a new sales team
N5R was trying to show customers one apartment and make a sale, so a traditional real estate agent was not what we were looking for. Instead we decided to find somebody who had never sold real estate. We ran an ad and hired two people. One thing I’ve learned when recruiting salespeople is that if you just recruit one person, they tend not to succeed. If you recruit a number of salespeople at the same time however, some natural competition kicks in and they tend to be more successful.
The first person didn’t last the week. It’s not that he wasn’t qualified; he just wasn’t willing to make a lot of phone calls. One of our major tasks was to call up all the old leads until we reached them. The second person had spent 10 years in telemarketing and many years in hospitality working at hotels. It was the perfect combination. One, he wasn’t afraid of the telephone, and two, he was very good at showing the units. He closed eight deals in 60 days by calling that small database of old leads. That was more units than they had sold throughout the entire previous year.
The point is that when you’re using old leads, it’s all about putting the work in. If you have a nice system, you call everybody, and you have to have a good script it’s easy to do.
Learn more from my book
The Million Dollar Minute – the secrets of how we sold 367 condos in 90 minutes, and how you can too!
