Click Here to download the BUYER BINGO card
In focusing on telephone selling techniques, it feels that Hollywood has a vision of telemarketing that may be out of sync with the real world….
In David Mamet’s Glengarry, Glen Ross, salesmen swear and drink heavily, relying on ancient tricks and tactics to sneak into a prospect’s good graces in hopes of a sales check.
Steve Conrad’s The Pursuit of Happyness tells a different story, based on the true-to-life growth of a seller who overcame adversity and poverty through sheer determination and cold-calling.
Cinema’s history is littered with these: Boiler Room, Wall Street, Death of a Salesman, and more. We are led to believe that dialing prospective buyers is rough work, to be avoided, hated, and even the best sales trainers say “like it or lump it,” or “how many no’s will it take to get to yes?”
This holiday season, download my Buyer Bingo sheet, print it out and compete. Cross off the number of attempts it takes you to get to success, and make one more sale this season so you can offer something extra to the charity of your choice. Have a great December and a Happy New Year!
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Making the transition from a decade of work as a mortgage broker to a fresh start working for a banking direct lender could have been a real challenge. Instead, it was an opportunity to grow market share.
After working for mortgage brokers from Chicago to New York, I recently started a new contract for an entity I had never worked for directly as a loan officer before: a bank.
While in most arenas, being promoted to Euro Mortgage Bankers was a step up for me— lower pricing, faster closings, direct access to underwriting and lenders— in another way, I was unsure. How could I go to loyal clients and Realtors who had known my dedication to my previous mortgage brokerage?
The answer came in a way I couldn’t have expected: working for the bank meant I could sell loans not just t o my end consumers buying homes, refinancing their property, and not just through Realtors who could recommend me, but also sell our loan products to my competition!
The very mortgage brokers I had competed with for so many years, and many homes, could now purchase directly from me at a discount and I could be rewarded for setting up the relationships! This was a true win, and more than a third of my initial success stories have been in this manner.
To think, I could have continued only direct selling and not even noticed!
When competitive challenges mount, the best leverage in many small companies is innovation and the ability to implement change more quickly and with better results than in large organizations.
What would you do if you were faced with the challenge of creating new and effective ways to sell homes in a competitive real estate market?
When I was considering ways to double ClickAnnArbor.com, my small team of Realtors in sales and in size of the workforce, many fleeting ideas seemed solid. What can a small firm offer that bigger competitors can’t?
Change and technology.
Since the mid-1980s, real estate sales firms have been using technology that puts panoramic views of homes online in what is now called a “virtual tour.” Most Realtors provide this as part of a package in home selling services.
My firm, ClickAnnArbor.com, pioneered the use of low-cost, high-quality digital video technology to replace the “computer nerdy” feel of virtual tours with a newsy YouTube video. This innovation allowed us to become the fastest-growing real estate company in the nation’s slowest-selling state!
Today, real estate agents from Maine to California use YouTube for a much more robust view of property.
When faced with a budget crisis beyond proportion and mounting promotion and industry trade show demands, one company stood up to adversity and made a new name for itself by spending smarter.
While working for Virtual Systems, a Point-of-Sale (POS) software client, I learned that one of the annual budget items was $275,000 spent on a single trade show for the POS industry. The sales and marketing teams always put a lot of planning, money and thought into the show, and almost always came home hungry, with little to show for it.
The reason: The show was almost sold out with competing POS companies, all working to out-do each other’s booths, presentations, giveaways— all the traditional trade show avenues. It was time to put an end to this cycle.
By recommending that the client send the sales team to the show on the floor, but not invest in a booth in the “Me Too” contest this industry expo had turned into, we freed up over $225,000 that was then invested into three other trade shows attended by the company’s key clients: One in gift shops, one in bookstores, and one in pharmaceutical retail. In each convention, they were now the only POS company on the floor. The result: Sales growth of more than $ 3 million in new orders.
