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Training and Evaluating Sales Teams Bring Sales Success
 While many companies are cutting their training and evaluation budgets, smart builders are finding ways to continue training and testing ― and seeing solid results.
We at Melinda Brody and Company, which trains home builders to sell, have seen these kinds of results ourselves among our clients.
Two of our clients, different-sized builders in Lakeland, Fla. and Charlotte, N.C., have both experienced rising sales after increasing their training and evaluation processes. In fact, one of them went from 14 net sales in January to 54 net sales one month later, and this was with the same amount of traffic.
Intrigued, I asked representatives of each company to share their “secrets” of how they train and how they utilize evaluations to eliminate the non-producers.
One of them, Highland Homes in Lakeland, pointed to its in-house testing-training-testing process, and its video shopping or “shops.”
“In January, we had only 14 net sales,” said Kathie McDaniel, director of marketing and advertising for Highland Homes. “We ended February with 63 gross and 54 net sales and the conversion rate has doubled.”
“I attribute this to our agents watching their video shops and getting into the game of sales,” McDaniel said. “They were astounded at the buying signals they were missing.”
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The Highland Homes sales team | Highland Homes is a small builder with a small sales staff and training budget. She used video shopping evaluations of her sales team to identify specific training items that they needed to address.
“After watching the tapes, I realized that the agents were not using tie-downs or closing,” McDaniel said. “They were continually asking management to lower the price so they could get sales.”
“They had a real wake-up call watching themselves on the video, and were appalled at how many buying signals they were missing,” she said.
So McDaniel instituted a regular training program with three-hour sessions every other week. Each session focused on a different topic and used role playing to demonstrate good and bad techniques. The sessions also included discussions and brainstorming solutions.
McDaniel also used industry-specific training DVDs, saving her some time by providing a ready-made lesson pla upon which she could build.
McDaniel also said she requires all her agents to become Certified New Homes Sales Professionals (CSPs) within two years of joining the company, “and they must pay half of the investment,” she said. “This has more buy-in for them.”
“They also must submit a personal marketing plan on how to generate traffic each week,” McDaniel added. “Our company has invested in ads in the newspaper, Internet, New Homes Guide, etc. to drive the traffic, but we want to see the agent’s proactive role in traffic generation, too”
The training program involves creating proactive roles for the entire sales team, not just the agents.
Highland Homes began hiring only licensed assistants after seeing unmotivated sales assistants on the company’s video shops. Highland Homes also began to include the assistants in sales training and give them more opportunities to take part in the sales process.
By changing the company’s approach to assistants, Highland Homes now has a “feeder line” for bringing on new, well-trained sales representatives.
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Doug Bevington |
| “We have committed to a continual shopping and training program because we can see solid results from this process, and we hold our team totally accountable,” said McDaniel.
Doug Bevington, director of sales and marketing for Pasquinelli and Portrait Homes in Charlotte, also found great success in the testing-training-testing process. But with 28 agents and two area managers, it made more sense for the builder to bring a national trainer, Myers Barnes, to Charlotte.
Training also included an in-house performance coach to help implement group and field training, video shop reviews and a three-week internal “boot camp” for agents.
“We started with Myers Barnes coming in for a three-day workshop,” said Bevington. “We adopted his scripts and trained our agents to use them. We used the video shops as our ‘field test’ and then re-trained where necessary and shopped again.”
Some agents, including an eight-year veteran, underwent extensive training for 40 hours a week for three weeks.
As a result, Charlotte is now the national company’s top-producing division.
In today’s market, sales representatives actually have to sell.
Statistics show that companies that are dedicated to training and evaluating their sales teams, whether through an outside source or by themselves, are clearly the front runners in selling new homes.
Melinda Brody, MIRM, is president of Melinda Brody and Company, which helps builders sell more homes with video shopping, seminars and training products. For more information, visit the company’s Web site www.melindabrody.com, or e-mail sell@melindabrody.com.
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