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“What we have here... is a failure to communicate.”

Pick up any textbook on selling skills. Read any article on customer service. Take a course on relationship building, on teaching, on being a better Dad, on what it takes to manage a little League team.
 

Or consider what it takes to stay married…happily (OK, OK, so that might be a bit of a stretch…).

In any of these activities, one word will pop up over and over again. It’s the cornerstone of success in any field, at any level, from novice to veteran. It’s the social lubricant that makes a buyer and seller move together, two companies work together, two people stay together.
 

It’s communication, son, communication. Everybody talks about it. We all think we know what it is when we see it, we can all discuss its importance ad nauseum, but very few of us really do it very well.

Let’s be more specific. Most new-home salespeople operate under the delusion that they are great communicators, that their strength is the manner in which they relate to their prospects, the way they communicate with their buyers. And, in part, they are correct.
 

Clearly, 87% of buyers are quite pleased with their sales person’s ability to answer questions, explain procedures, explain options, etc. When it comes to “Reactive Communication”, our sales people receive high marks. (The same goes for Loan Officers.) In fact, out of almost 80 builders that use our on-going homebuyer survey program, several of these builders score consistently in the high-90’s on these ‘reactive’ communications questions.
 

However, on the issue of pro-active communication, the scores drop off dramatically for both sales and lender personnel: Buyers’ satisfaction with lenders’ pro-active communication falls off by 7%, while sales people take an even bigger hit with a 10% decline from ‘reactive’ levels.

This means most of our salespeople are meeting buyers’ expectations when it comes to responding to questions and problems, but we are woefully inadequate when it comes to pushing the information to buyers before they feel it necessary to come looking for it.

 

The Impact of Pro-Active Communication

Here’s why this is important. Eliant conducts about 200,000 surveys of new-home buyers each year; we survey them three times during the first year of ownership. Since we always ask if the buyer would recommend their builder to a friend, we can determine the statistical relationship between each survey question and the buyer’s ‘willingness to recommend’.

 

Based on this analysis, we have repeatedly determined that the sales skill having the strongest impact on future referrals and buyer loyalty is the sales person’s ‘pro-active communication’ (PAC). In fact, this issue is almost three times as impactful as any of the other eight important issues being rated in the “Sales Personnel” category of the Eliant “Move-In” survey. Not surprisingly, we can usually predict a buyer’s ‘willingness to recommend’ by looking at his rating of the sales person’s PAC performance.

 

The Best Communicators

Each year, we use our buyer surveys to rate and rank over 1,200 new-home sales people by name. When taking a closer look at the most highly rated sales personnel, these people always score exceptionally well on the key PAC question: “My sales representative kept me informed of purchase/construction progress without my having to ask.”

 

Sales people scoring well on this question engage in a wide variety of pro-active activities which inevitably generate high buyer satisfaction ratings and strong buyer loyalty. Some examples of PAC activities during the purchase to close period:
 

• Weekly call to each buyer with some new information regarding the status of construction or loan;
• E-mailed picture of home being constructed, every two weeks;
• Phone or e-mailed reminders of cut-off dates, walk-through schedule, and documentation received, congratulations on entering next construction phase, and the ever popular “Hi, your new next-door-neighbors have children…who love to baby-sit!” (Nirvana);
• Status of move-in date, particularly if delays have occurred; by nature, salespeople do not like to transmit bad news, but if delays occur, it is always better to bite the bullet and pro-actively communicate the delay…as soon as possible. Don’t delay in bringing up the delay!;
• Pre-move phone call—if not home leave this message: “Hi, this is Sally. I know you are moving here in four weeks. Is there anything we can do to help make your move go smoothly?”

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