FAQ’s

Our Real Shops measure how often a salesperson is completing the steps of a selling presentation that management believes are most likely to result in the purchase of a home.  We interview five recent prospects who were in the market to purchase a new home and that spent time with the salesperson.  There are no actors or fake buying signals here, just feedback and impressions from real prospects.  The result is a Key Performance Indicator that is based on a weighted point system where higher points are assigned to the most critical presentation elements.  The point distributions can be customized to match your management’s expectations, sales training and selling strategies.

Instead of reporting what your salesperson did with one person who pretended they were in the market for a new home Real Shops provide a sample of your real traffic – a report about what your salesperson did with real prospects that were really in the market for a new home.

Instead of having your salesperson argue with you about the validity of their mystery shop, Real Shops build belief and trust in the observations of their own prospects.

Instead of taking an hour – or more – for you to review and understand the mystery shop tape, Real Shops can be analyzed and implemented in less than 10 minutes.

Instead of going through the tactical nightmare and frustration that goes with ordering and managing a mystery shop, like making sure the salesperson and shopper schedules are matched up, Real Shops are simple and easy to order, and you won’t need to manage the process.

The majority of salespeople feel that Real Shops are a more accurate reflection of what they do in their selling presentations than what’s observed during a Mystery Shop.  They appreciate knowing they didn’t waste their time with someone who was just pretending to be a new home buyer, and that the evaluation is by multiple prospects instead of just one imposter.

Not at all.  People who are really in the market to buy a home like to talk about their experiences, especially because they’re properly approached by our interviewers.

We won’t conduct an interview with a prospect who doesn’t remember touring the community and spending time with the salesperson.  We only interview people who were in the market to purchase a new home and recalled their tour.  The overwhelming majority of prospects who fill out a guest card and provide their phone number do remember their tour – and in great detail!

Definitely.  Salespeople who conduct more complete presentations, including taking prospects to a home or homesite, asking for the sale and following up by phone make more sales than those who aren’t consistent in their efforts.  We’ve proved this in a study for one of the nation’s leading developer of active adult communities.  Because all of the sales staff were selling the same homes in the same sales pavilion, we were able to identify the top performers and correlate their Real Shops scores against those of the worst performers in the same community.

Virtually “bulletproof:”

• There’s no shopper bias – Real Shops report the experiences of REAL prospects.
• There’s no bias in the shop because the salesperson can’t accidentally recognize the shopper.
• There aren’t any problems in completing the evaluation due to scheduling the shopper on the same days the salesperson works.
• There’s no problem that the shopper ends up spending time with the wrong salesperson.

Turnaround is in as little as one to two weeks

The report provides a Key Performance Indicator – one number that reveals how frequently your staff is performing the 20 steps of a selling presentation that are most likely to result in the purchase of a home.  This KPI is based on a weighted point system where higher points are assigned to the most critical presentation elements.  Using the KPI, you’ll be able to quickly identify which team members need the most training and coaching.

The report also provides the frequency with which each salesperson is performing each of the 20 steps, so your training efforts can target the weakest areas of their selling presentations.

And the report identifies sales staff who may not be performing according to company standards – situations where disciplinary actions may be required.

The reports will help you identify salespeople who are willing to be held accountable.

BUILDER:  When a large national company implemented the evaluations on a twice-annually basis, they consistently observed an increase in sales during the three-month tour dates time period upon which the sales staff will were evaluated.  This is why we encourage our clients to conduct evaluations on an on-going basis.

SALESPERSON:  When a new home salesperson was evaluated, she learned her prospects did not perceive her as asking for the sale.  She had a reputation for seeming to be aggressive, so she had minimized her closing presentation.  Once she learned that her prospects perceived her as caring and empathetic, her manager was able to help her create a closing with which she was comfortable.  She doubled her sales during the next 30 days.

Because we customize the point distribution for the evaluations, each report is tailored to your unique selling style, methodology, practices and beliefs.

While every builder is different, the three elements of the selling presentation that are most critical to a salesperson’s success are the same: Demonstrate the product, Ask for the Sale, Follow-up telephone call.  This has been scientifically proven through a statistical analysis of the Real Shops results completed for one of the country’s largest pavilion sales builders.  We analyzed the steps of the critical path sales presentation, and found a statistical significance between the completion of these three presentation steps and a salesperson’s position in either the top or bottom 10% of their sales team.

By providing actionable and quantifiable information based on your prospect’s feedback, your sales staff will be better equipped to convert more prospects to buyers, increasing your sales volume and home prices.

If you find yourself wondering how well your sales staff is consistently performing with your prospective buyers, then Real Shops can help you.

As a builder, you’re able to quantify every single element that goes into a home – except the number of prospects with which your sales staff is performing complete selling presentations.  Real Shops provides you with that number that’s very critical to a community’s sales rate and success.

To assure you are doing well because of the sales staff’s efforts, and not in spite of their efforts.

Perhaps you could be selling more homes at a higher price (and getting higher profits) if your staff was more effective selling homes.

Real Shops measure your sales staff’s effectiveness on site – how well they’re completing the sales presentations management expects them to make with prospects.  When sales take off, it’s easy for salespeople to take the focus off of making complete sales presentations.  That’s risky for two reasons:

First, buyer demand in a marketplace may be enough to get people to sign a contract, but it doesn’t mean they will be truly “sold” on the home.  That can make it harder to keep them happy from contract to close, and won’t result in as many referrals.  So your sales team needs to get out in the field with their prospects and avoid just selling from their sales office.

Second, it’s easy to get out of practice, and you don’t want to end up relearning sales skills when you need them, such as when sales rates return to “normal” or even slow down again.

It’s a lot easier to make complete selling presentations in a booming market instead of a slow market.  So sales staff should stay in the habit of making complete presentations to a minimum number of prospects each week, even it’s only three or four a week.  That way they won’t have to relearn a habit when they’ll need it most.

Please contact us for more information about pricing for individuals, divisions and company-wide implementations.

Real Shops is the innovative and industry changing service offered by The Intelligent Approach, a customer relations firm specializing in services and product offerings exclusively for America’s home building industry for over thirty-two years.

We deliver innovative solutions and strategies to address and overcome our clients’ sales and marketing challenges through engaging with our clients’ customers. By getting a true ‘finger on the pulse’ of what our clients’ prospects and clients are truly thinking and saying about their product, we produce tangible results that yield higher sales volume, more focused and effectual sales training, and more satisfied customers walking through our clients’ doors.