Mastering Traffic Generation: The 6 Rs for Sales Success | 5 Minute Sales Training
Hey, welcome back, everyone, to our special limited series of 5 Minutes
Sales Training. Over the next three weeks,
we're giving you a free peek at the work we did with over 650 leaders in Nashville
at the Sales and Marketing Summit. Just a small little segment.
And one of my absolute favorite presentations came from our own
Michelle Bendien. Her speech was called The 6 Rs. Arrrs. If you know, you know,
the 6 Rs of Self-Generated Traffic for Salespeople,
I know you're going to love it.
Let's start with the question. And look, there's no right or wrong
answer here. And depending on where you're from,
you may answer differently than the person sitting next to you. But raise your hand if you have plenty of potential buyers
walking through your door right now. I mean, like you're good. Raise your hand. Plenty of potential buyers
walking through your door. All right. Some of you like like look at you,
you sassy, sassy things. You. All right, good, good. I'm glad. All right, Now raise your hand
if you could actually benefit from some more buyers, qualified buyers
walking through your doors and at least some,
if not all of your communities. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Right. But let's call it like it is, right? I mean, let's call out the elephant
in the room. Most of us haven't had to really worry
about generating traffic to our communities or driving traffic to our communities
for quite some time, right? I mean,
everything is going great until it isn’t.
Collapsing banks, interest rate hikes. Kanye West does something stupid. Yeah. Yeah. Shocker. Right. All right. More importantly,
did you hear that Pat Sajak is retiring? I mean, some sad news, I love Pat. But stock market instability,
the war in Ukraine, election year. Kim Kardashian. Oh, Kim she finds a new love. Right? We love Kim. Seasonality. A world health crisis. Jeff’s hockey team wins
the championship and mass hysteria ensues
and the government defaults. You get the idea. The truth is, any number of things
can can affect the housing market. In fact, in reality,
the housing market is constantly changing. We just don't tend to recognize it
or worry about it until the change is significant enough. And markets tend to rescind locally
before they change globally.
So depending on your geographic location,
you may not feel it for a while, but it starts with a slow in our traffic. And you know,
we don't think anything of it. We just kind of brush it off. Next week comes along
and traffic is still down and we go, Huh? Oh, that's interesting. But we think it's a fluke. And then then week three comes along and it's. Yeah. Crickets. Crickets. About now, we begin to panic
because it is happening, and. And we're reactive. It's all hands on deck. And by the time we realize
there's a shift in our traffic and plan to do something about it,
well, it's too late. We've actually lost sales,
and now we're playing catch up. So here is the big idea. Here's the big idea. Traffic
generation is everyone's responsibility. It is a skill that needs to be practiced and a habit that needs to be established.
So give a thumbs up
if you agree that the burden of traffic generation does not lie solely
with your marketing team. Okay. All right. All the marketing people are like,
Yeah, yeah. Not all on us. No, no, no, no, no. Of course,
Because it's a big deal, after all. No buyers, no sales. But question for you. Does your sales team know that? Because, listen, in full transparency in the early 2000s early in my career,
look, I had an abundance of sales. I had an abundance of traffic, and traffic
generation was not high on my radar. I, too, had the mindset that traffic
generation now, that wasn't my job. That was the marketing team's job. My job was to sell homes. But then fast forward to 2007,
and all of a sudden I started to see a shift in my traffic. And then for the next four years,
I did everything in my power to generate traffic to my communities. And I have to tell you, for a real long
time it was uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable because I didn't know how to generate leads. Skillset issue.
I feared rejection, mindset issue. I didn't want to be that pushy, icky,
yucky salesperson, mindset issue. And my sales manager, bless his heart,
he didn't know he should and could teach me how to generate leads. Skillset issue. And quite frankly,
he didn't always hold me accountable to do what I needed to do
consistently to be successful. Honestly,
I think that was uncomfortable for him.
Skillset and mindset issue. So now I added to the long list of discomforts for salespeople and sales
managers. We're going to add lead
generation to that. And when things become uncomfortable for us, well,
we become a good story tellers. I don't know if you knew that, right. We become good storytellers. We tell ourselves the story. See if you can relate
to any of these stories that salespeople may tell themselves. Well, I would ask for the referral, but,
you know, they probably don't know
anyone who's looking for a home. Yeah. What do you think? Do you think that salespeople
could tell themselves that story? Yeah. Okay. All right. How about this one? Well, I would follow up
with my prospective buyer, but, you know, he's at work. He's probably busy. Wouldn't be able to take my call anyway. Story that your salespeople
could tell themselves? Yeah. Okay, how about this one? Well, you know, I would
plan a broker event, but you know what? Nobody goes to those things anyway,
so why even bother? Story salespeople tell themselves.
Now, look what? It's fair game. How about stories? Is that we as sales leaders
often tell ourselves. Now, just do a little mental
self-assessment here. You don't have to answer out
loud or acknowledge it. You might as well tell the truth
because quite frankly, no one can see what's going on up there
anyway, Right? So. So just answer yourself
honestly here and see if this is a story that maybe you've told yourself
over the course of your career. Well, I would do my lead conversion calls
or my planned encounters. But you know what? My salesperson
is probably busy helping a customer. Okay. All right. Or, you know, I would train my sales team, but,
you know, their results are solid. They're all veterans. They already know everything anyway. What? That's not me. That's in your head. Okay. All right. Or how about this? I don't need to inspect what I expect, because everyone's doing what I ask
consistently. Right? Right. So here is the deal. Our beliefs drive our behaviors. So we need the right beliefs
and behaviors to establish good health, good skills and habits.
And that leads to mastery. So I want to lay out in three easy steps. I want you to do three things
when you get back home. Right out of the gate. First thing I want you to do is
I want you to set or possibly reset expectations
with your sales team that everyone needs to assist
in traffic generation. Right? Now for some of you, this is going to be
an uncomfortable conversation because their results are strong. Traffic is coming in is strong,
but we need to sell them on the why, why it's important to take a proactive
approach versus a reactive approach. And quite frankly, there's a great quote
in your workbook that I think that can help you with this,
and that's proper prospecting prevents poverty. Okay. And I think a lot of them
can relate to that. All right. Second thing that I want you to do
when you get back is I want you to establish
manageable goals for them.
So let me give you an an example of that. So let's say
you want your minimum performance standard at your community
to be ten units of traffic. Okay. And let's say your community isn't hitting
those ten units of traffic. Well, then it would be your sales
person has a responsibility to make up the difference
with their personal prospecting efforts. Now that traffic can come from a variety
of sources, but for simplicity's sake, we're going to have your team
focus on the six Rs. Okay. All right. So realtors, referrals, renters return, visitors, repeat sales,
and then rehabilitating old leads. Now, please,
please don't assume that your team is going to know how to do this,
because I'm going to tell you right now, they're not going to
you're going to have to train them.
But I want you to keep it easy. Easy for you. Easy for them. And so you can think in terms of micros
skills. Okay. Just focus on one hour at a time. All right. Third thing, just like your team is blocking time
on their calendar for a follow up. Okay. Now they need to block time
on their calendars for prospecting, which means you need to block time on your calendar
to inspect what you expect. Now, look, you can do this
a variety of different ways. Certainly,
you could show up when they're planned, planning to do their prospecting. You can spot check the CRM easier still. You can add this to your lead conversion
calls for some of you in the group. You know what I'm talking about. There. And you can also and perhaps the easiest way of all, why not incorporate this as part of your weekly traffic and sales
reports? Easy, right? Your team just reports in what traffic
they were responsible for driving for the week,
and then classify it among the six Rs.
Well, there you have it. Michelle absolutely crushed it.
I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, then please
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to more salespeople. And don't forget, if you want to be in the loop on the 2024
Sales and Marketing Summit next summer, there's a link in the description
of this video to join the interest list. Until next time,
my good friends, learn more to earn more..
