Set Yourself Apart From The Competition – Create an Engaging Customer Experience -B&D Mag
Recently I was in Texas with a little down time so I decided to visit a new home community. I walked into the sales office and was greeted by a very nice woman whom I will refer to as Wendy. Wendy gave me a quick rundown of her community highlights. After handing me a price sheet, we walked to the first model home. She allowed me to enter first. Once in the entryway, Wendy shut the door and told me to look at the light switches. She exclaimed, “What makes us different than our competition is that we include rocker switches!” (Rocker switches, are considered a higher quality light switch when compared to your standard light switch.)
I looked at Wendy with a blank stare, mostly because I couldn’t believe the light switch was that big of a deal. Wendy looked at me and said, “Let me tell you why rocker switches are more superior.” Well, as you could have guessed, Wendy went on and on about rocker switches for roughly five minutes. #YIKES.
Although the feature dump technique is common, customers don’t want to be feature dumped on anymore. You know what they do want? They want an experience. Customers want to be a part of the process, not have it happen to them.
That being the case, here are three keys to engage your customer with experiential selling.
1. The “Demonstration” of a home is not about the home. It’s about the customer.
We can all agree that feature dumping is not great technique although it happens more often than we would like to admit. The question is why does feature dumping happen outside of the fact that we were trained to do it? There is only one reason; we don’t really know our customer. Think about it. If you had a best friend or close relative come to your community, would you feature dump all over him or her? Of course you wouldn’t. Instead, you would engage in a conversation about their life and how it would be lived in the home you were showing them.
During the front end of your conversation with customers, seek to understand why they are in your office in the first place. A U.S. Census survey of 36 million people that moved showed that nearly 50 percent of people moved due to “Housing-related issues” while a solid 50 percent of people moved because of personal issues not related to the home they were living in. Find out why people are moving and you will have no choice but to focus on how your customers’ lives will improve via future experiences instead of trying to sell them a bunch of features.
2. Help customers to create “Future Experiences”
Picture this…you are in a model home with clients and they are loving you and the home you are showing them. It is feeling right and you have connected with them on a personal and emotional level. Then with one cheesy sales question, you transform from a human being who cares into a slimy sales person. What is the question? “Can you see you and your family having Thanksgiving dinner here?”
Obviously you can tell I have a high disdain for this question. Here’s why. Although you may get a “yes” answer to the question, you don’t actually engage customers in actually seeing what life would be like in the home.
Instead, ask customers to project specific life scenes and tell you about those scenes. For example, in the kitchen instead of asking, “Can you see yourself cooking dinner here?” Ask, “If this was your kitchen, who would be where and what would they be doing?” Automatically customers will begin to have a “Future Experience” in that home. This is far more effective and more engaging for your customer than simply saying, “Ya. I could see it.”
3. Take down the “velvet ropes”
Have you ever gone through your models at the end of the day and, while karate chopping your pillows back into shape thought, “I can’t believe people messed up my model!” I know I have. What I didn’t realize was that I was wrong. My pillows should be messed up at the end of the day!
If you want to engage in experiential selling, we have got to stop seeing our models as a showroom model and more as a test-drive model. It is time to take down the velvet ropes when showing customers rooms and actually let them try the house on for size.
In Las Vegas, I have a coaching client that actually had a customer pick out his spot on the couch in the TV room, put his feet up on the table and watch YouTube clips (via Apple TV) of his favorite football team. Talk about trying it on for size!
Remember that customers expect an experience. The question is, are you going to provide one for them or are you going to try and sell your version of “rocker switches”. For my sake, and millions of other customers, I hope you choose to create great experiences on purpose.
