Managing Uncertainty with Sales: Homebuyers Don’t Know You or Your Product!

The next Housing 2.0 webinar offers 10 strategies for translating value before, during and after the sale.

According to research, the average person will own three homes in their lifetime . And new homes account for only 10 percent of the U.S. housing market. Thus, consumers are almost completely detached from home building companies because they are rarely in the market to purchase a new home. Until then, any builder messaging will be lost on them because it is not relevant to their daily lives.

Thus, it’s critical home builders understand that they are constantly at bottom step of the brand development staircase shown in the figure below, having to identify prospective buyers interested in new housing and get them to know you exist.

Figure: Staircase for growing a successful brand

Once awareness is created, there is a long way to go to become a company with a successful brand. During pre-sale, you still need to educate buyers to understand what makes you unique or special and then establish an interest to buy from you.

One real estate website suggests homebuyers on average will only view 8 to 10 houses before making an offer (a.k.a. exhaust themselves). The goal of effective pre-sale messaging is to convince buyers they should consider you in the ten homes they will view.

Once they decide to visit your office or model homes, now comes the critical challenge of getting them to purchase your home rather than others visited. Thus, during the sales process it is critical to offer benefits that are personal and relevant to each buyer and lead to sales.

The final step in the brand staircase is the most difficult, earning loyalty. You want to ensure after the sale that buyers have an optimized user experience and refer you to others.

Unfortunately, this is also the step most neglected by builders. This can be attributed to a lowest first cost business model that continues to dominate the industry as an epic affordability crisis only gets worse. As a result, many builders remain on the sidelines optimizing user experiences that are not readily visible.

If you follow Housing 2.0, you’ll know the program lays out a comprehensive framework for consistently achieving $10,000s of cost advantage (e.g., savings plus extra value). This includes over 160 best practices for optimizing the homeowner user experience. However, the rubber meets the road once you go to sale.

Now you have to translate all of this extra value. As the famous sales axiom says: “Once value is understood, price becomes much less important.” These are powerful words to live by but often a missed opportunity.

I have read dozens of books and over a hundred articles related to effective selling. However, while mystery shopping hundreds of housing developments during my tenure running ENERGY STAR Certified Home, it was remarkable how the sales process relied almost exclusively on the model home experience, letting customers walk through homes expertly staged with extensive upgrades and interior furnishings that make the visible benefits of new construction highly emotional.

The invisible benefits associated with optimized design, performance and quality were much less effectively conveyed.

This has led me to curate all of my research and experiences into 10 strategies for translating value before, during and after the sale. These are science-based solutions for changing consumer behavior to recognize and pay for hidden value.

Please join me for my next Green Builder media seminar on managing uncertainty on November 6 at noon where we’ll take a deep dive into each of these strategies. The housing market is not getting any easier and those that follow me know I’ve been predicting a tough road ahead. Make sure you’re prepared knowing how to “make price much less important.”