Last week my wife, my son & I were in a certain house developers sales office enquiring about new houses and the development in general. I won’t mention which developer it was but here’s the situation we found ourselves in…
This house builder had already finished a couple of phases on the development and we were enquiring about houses that fit a certain criteria, we wanted to know when they’d be starting/completing them and what kind of layouts they’d be. We had already seen a few of the house options on the development whilst browsing online and had seen there was a couple of these left to sell.
When we arrived though it was a different story! There were actually none of the houses we had spotted on the web site available and whilst I thought this may be a way of leading you into the sales office to take your details for any future houses as they finish them, it was not – when we mentioned about the website being out of date the reply from the salesperson was that the company wasn’t very good and they couldn’t keep up! Ok, so we asked could they keep us up-to-date on the state of the houses and when a suitable one becomes available they can contact us, NO – it would be best if we called up as much as every week to check as they’re very busy and struggling to keep up. Sometimes the salesperson has to take work home to finish!
There are a few more points within the conversation that I’m sure a more senior manager would’ve been shocked to hear, and I can’t believe for a second that a company of this size hasn’t implemented even a basic CRM system to keep leads warm and ready to buy as and when houses become available – but apparently not, and we walked away and won’t be visiting that housebuilder again.
So… the messages to take away from this are:
Make sure ALL staff are aware of how to deal with customers, how to record leads and contact data so, even if you can’t make a sale there and then – you can make a sale further down the line.
Be sure to update external information on your business – nothing gets customers annoyed like having completely incorrect information available to them and most of all, don’t let your staff sabotage your business.
