Through all of my years in this industry and having listened to a lot of the top sales trainers from across the country, there’s a resonate theme about what brings prospective buyers back to your community after their initial visit. It’s either the product you have or it’s the processes you use. And the pundants will tell you, quite correctly, that processes bring back more people than great product ever will. Probably not something we builders want to admit (after all – we designed and built these homes, they must be spectacular!)

So…since most prospective buyers won’t know much about the builder’s processes until they close and experience everything from weekly communication to selections, closing and warranty, processes in this context must mean something else. And it does. The processes referred to here are our front line salespeople. At the end of the day, they make a tremendous difference. Always have, and speculation about people buying their home over the Internet notwithstanding, they always will.

So time for some good soul-searching. Are you providing a customer experience that is memorable…designed to keep your community in the buyer’s “keep pile”? In these times of much buyer fear about dipping their toes into the new purchase waters, are you successfully executing your role as a couselor/consultant to calm their fears, add value to their buying process and being the kind of person they want to deal with in this uncertain environment. Take hold of that concept – youwill bring more people back to your builder’s site than the builder’s fabulous model homes ever will. Own that concept and work to improve upon it every day, and you’ll find yourself start to inch your sales past all of your competitors who assumed it was the builder’s model homes, pools and clubhouses that were creating those “be-backs”.