Doing it Right

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	Sales.com
		Assessing...

by Diane Sanchez, Stephen E. Heiman, and Tad Tuleja

There is a right way and a wrong way to assess customers' needs. As an example of the right way to assess your customers' needs, we'll point to Bob Mayes, vice president of the Sante Fe area real estate development firm Las Campanas. In a business whose professional etiquette is often as manipulative and high-pressure as that in the used-car business, Las Campanas follows simple principles to nurture what Bob calls "respectful partnerships between buyers and our representatives."

In an interview with Sally Glover, who writes feature articles for our company newsletter, Best Few, Bob made it clear that, at Las Campanas, there's no jumping the gun to convergence, no product pushing, and no fretful, whizbang overcoming of objections. There doesn't have to be, because the entire point of a Las Campanas sales interview is to "co-create a communication process that helps someone decide." "Most buyers," says Bob, "have been through so much of the 'Come on in and commit ninety minutes, pay your dues and then find out if the development is for you.' We allow them to come in and tell us what they want to achieve, and then we honor their request. They're stunned. They know right off the bat that something is different here."

What's different is that that this Miller Heiman-trained sales force focuses on "what they want to achieve", and avoids "inundating the buyer with product." What's different is the value placed on questioning: "We're switching the percentage from what we talk about to letting the client talk 80 percent of the time." What's different, finally, is that the company's method, and its goal, is to let prospects follow the natural order of their thinking. As Bob explained it to Sally:

We help them process information, show them alternatives and provide them with a better way to verbalize what they're seeking but may have only been internalizing. If it turns out that it's not Las Campanas, then we've still helped them determine what they want. It's really a personal real estate decision, and the sales representative acts as the facilitator of that decision -- whatever that decision may be.

One immediate effect of this approach is to take the pressure off. Off the buyer, to be sure: "I have had zero complaints," Bob says, "about hard-selling salespeople." But off the seller too. Bob's field people are unanimous in their appreciation of that benefit. One of them expressed his delight in not needing to have all the answers: "Miller Heiman's Conceptual Selling helped me to improve my credibility, create trust, and make the sales interview a conversation rather than a hard sales pitch." Another one reflected on the relief she felt at "not being in a contest with the customer_I was not putting pressure on myself to sell, sell, sell at any cost! This helped me understand that if a customer walked away, we both still won."

The best news, though, is that customers don't walk away. Rarely do customers who are encouraged to walk through their natural decision-making process balk at the end and take their business elsewhere. The proof of that is in the close-rate figures. Through a combination of highly selective marketing and a dedication to "co-exploring the best solution," Bob and his team have kept their numbers unbelievably high.

In the real estate development business nationwide, for lots priced at $100,000, the close-to-prospect ratio is 8 percent. The Sante Fe sales force has achieved a marginally healthier ratio of 10 percent -- for lots whose average price was three times that. By "facilitating" the decision-making process, Las Campanas salespeople are closing 30-40 percent of their prospects, on parcels priced 30 percent higher than the local competition's. In the last few years they have realized over $100 million in sales revenues. As for creating satisfied customers: an astonishing one-quarter of their new business comes from referrals.