I just got off the phone with the managing partner for one of our full-service real estate marketing and sales clients. This call was initiated to discuss the end of the term of our existing contract with this project, and just maybe the possibility of signing a new contract for the remainder of 2009. Currently, we handle their web, interactive, media buys, CRM, print pro, and we lead their on-site sales team.
These types of clients use all of our services, have large budgets and have to take a very hard look at the results of their spend with us. Traditionally, results for real estate are measured in sales. By no fault of ours, we have had NO sales in the first 6 months of this contract! Real Estate is not selling anywhere in the country, so it’s not a surprise most developers are not finding value in firms like ours. I called the managing partner expecting to have this discussion.
To my surprise the first thing this client said was, “I have no problem with your firm’s monthly retainer or the cost of the onsite sales team.” He went on to say he didn’t think he could have found any agency that would have worked as hard we have, or a team that cared as much. Specifically, he said our creative is better than any he has seen and is far better than any of his competitors. And he said his relationship with our director of sales could not be better.
This client has been in the real estate business for years, and he said he has never seen a company deliver so many qualified leads. He told me the weekly sales meetings prove we are doing everything we can to succeed, that our monthly reports give him visibility into exactly what his money is doing for him, and that if he would have had our firm in place when times were good he would have already sold his project out.
He finished by saying he would be crazy to consider changing anything, and that as the economy continues to recover he would not want to put this project in the hands of any other team.
So here is a case of a customer who hired us because they saw value in the number of real estate sales we projected, but has retained us because they now see the value in our entire team.
It’s hard to brag about a project where we’ve made exactly zero sales, but that just goes to show that it’s not always about the numbers. Sales and marketing are changing, and nowhere is that more apparent than in real estate.
Sometimes we get so caught up in the end result, we forget about the processes and the connections that it takes to get there. Obviously, success for both teams depends on making sales, but reaching our goals becomes a whole lot easier when both sides trust that the other is doing the best job they possibly can.
This isn’t bragging about the project, it’s bragging about the people we work with and the people we work for. They are the ones that make our work special.
Jeff Novak, CEO