Maximum reach, minimum splash, utmost integrity
Recently, I was chatting with a developer who was keen to know how we use social media in our sales process. After all, it is an integral part of our strategy to guarantee sales for developers with whom we partner. It’s also a strategy that forms the backbone of our off-plan sales success.
In this article, I explain how we have developed our Property Launch Formula over the last two decades, and why it works so well.
What do the best salespeople do every day?
Figuring out how to use social media as a sales tool isn’t rocket science, but it does need you to understand what your best people do naturally every day. When we analysed what our best salespeople did so well, we were able to condense their incredible talents into six specific areas:
- Positioning of company, product, and opportunity
- Prospecting, and building rapport with new connections
- Presenting opportunities, and ensuring that those opportunities were relevant to the prospect
- Following up, ensuring constant contact and maximising the good work done to date
- Closing a deal, and ensuring the sale runs smoothly
- Maintaining contact and encouraging repeat purchases
Why social media is so important in the off-plan sales process
As social media apps started to take off, we realised that in the future people would use apps like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Quora as sources to make buying decisions. We also understood that each different social media app has a different audience and different use.
Our Property Launch Formula is designed to maximise the reach of each different social media app, targeting different types of investors and answering different investor needs. Some investors want information. Others want specific solutions. Swathes of investors want to be kept in touch with industry developments and investment opportunities. We mix and match our messages through social media to satisfy these and other needs.
Social media gives us the ability to replicate all six of the sales talents that we identified, but on a scale that human salespeople could never hope to achieve. We have used social media to build a sales funnel that takes investors through a journey from initial contact to purchase. It allows us to start this process with tens of thousands of prospects, before funnelling through to a list of hot, registered prospects.
This scale of contacts would require hundreds of salespeople to perform. Social media has enabled us to act more effectively and target your development at those investors who are most likely to buy at earlier stages of development.
We use 16 social media platforms in our Property Launch Formula, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Quora.
Here are a few of the ways in which our social media strategies replicate and enhance what the best salespeople do:
Prospecting
Social media is an exceptional tool for prospecting when it is used correctly. We target keywords and search phrases to attract investors who are considering investment in the UK property market. They are already looking, and social media helps us to leapfrog the cold call phase of prospecting.
We offer these prospects. Why not reach out to them and offer your support and expertise? Establishing yourself as a useful resource is a strong step in the right direction. You can also use Twitter’s search function to search for keywords associated with pains some people have that might bring them to the solution you’re selling.
Familiarisation and building rapport
Through social media, we can begin to familiarise investors with our offering – driving them to our private investor’s arm, Gladfish, where they can access what is probably the largest property investment resource on the web today. This includes videos, podcasts, blogs, books and webinars all designed to introduce investors to new build property. Check it out at www.gladfish.com/academy.
In addition, our social media reach allows us to directly answer investor questions, and post information that serves to get investors familiar with an area before our off-market efforts begin in earnest.
Engagement and relationship building
We have an excellent record of building relationships, breeding investor loyalty, and encouraging repeat investment. Social media is integral to this process. Several social media channels are ideal for sharing content and adding value to a broad spectrum of investment needs. This is soft relationship building at its best.
Relationships are critical in any sales process. We found that social media accounts such as LinkedIn and Facebook are exceptional tools for maintaining these relationships.
Following up with interested investors
With all the preparation work done, we can launch to only those investors who are most interested in your development. This increases our chances of making sales. And allows our salespeople to concentrate on the end game in the sales process. We’ll share useful resources with these investors through our social media accounts, ensuring that our relationship, message, and your development are at the forefront of their investment plans.
Launching your development into the market
Our Property Launch Formula and social media reach is key to maintaining relationships with more than 50,000 active investors on our database. We’re able to segment these investors for specific marketing – for example if we wish to launch to specific countries.
But there is no need to worry about us making a big splash and disrupting price integrity. When we launch, it’s off-market all the way. The only public footprint will be the name of your development. Investors must log in to see everything else. Cash flow projections are only made available to registered investors who speak directly with the team. The only pricing information that will be posted online is the one that says, ‘Prices from’.
Our Property Launch Formula means you get the widest and deepest reach, without making ripples in the market.
Of course, this is only part of how we work with developers to maximise sales. To learn how we can customise our approach for your specific development and sales goals, call the team on 0207 923 5680. Our partnership will get your new build and off-plan development sales to where you need them to be.
Live with passion
Brett Alegre-Wood