Posts Tagged ‘Sales’

Does my seller’s agent have access to the right buyers?

Let’s face it in Sydney you have a 2-5 week window to find the right buyer for your property. This blog post builds on my previous post: Social Media challenging the norm: a new business model of Real Estate

The traditional “STONE” way that Estate Agents engage is:

1. Agent builds a “ready” network of buyers through franchise relationships or the agents own personal network – “database”
2. Print advertising in publications like North Shore Times and Domain North
3. The Franchise network and listing on the agencies website
4. Listing on vertical aggregator websites like of Domain or Real estate

The notion of social media is to place your brand, experience, the WHY and leadership in the middle of your customers and prospects. Clearly social media isn’t the place to peddle products and services! It is about relationship and trust!

What then is the quickest way to access the right buyers? Who are they? What are they looking for? Where are they spending their time? Who do they trust? Who has the relationship with these current or prospective customers?

With my Social Media hat on I examined where the buyers/customers were:

Facebook

44% of the Australian population is on Facebook, over 340,000 new users since last month (July2010), 50+ age group grown by 9% and 35-49 age group grown by 5%. Clearly as the chart shows if we wanted access to these potential buyers we needed to be amongst them!

Click on Image to see larger view

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Supporting a channel partner in today’s world has become a lot more complex as end-users are far more demanding and educated.

To me a channel partner is a company that partners with a manufacturer or producer to market and sell the manufacturer’s products, services, or technologies. This is usually done through a co-branding relationship. Channel partners may be distributors, vendors, retailers, consultants, systems integrators (SI), technology deployment consultancies, and value-added resellers (VARs) and other such organizations.

A channel partner will never have the insights into the product or services as the manufacturer has. Thus providing a framework, process and system to allow for the sharing of why the product is relevant to a customer is key to the success of the manufacturer and channel partner alike!

As outlined in my blog post on The Emperor’s clothes – Selling through Social Media – Why should you care? Clearly manufacturers would need to support a channel partner in either:

1. Communicating value – where the product is unique
2. Creating Value – where the product is a commodity

To effectively support the channel partner; manufacturers need to support the WHY – the cause or intention underlying an action or situation, especially in the phrase ‘the whys and wherefores’.

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The Emperor’s clothes – Selling through Social Media – Why should you care?

There is a dichotomy occurring in sales where our customers are driving commoditization of our products and services and vendors trying to position themselves as unique.

Understanding this and leveraging the right Social Media tactics is truly a case of the Emperor’s clothes as customers have changed from 5yrs ago and we can’t employ the same tactics.

Customers do this through trying to decrease differentiation, introduction of new technologies, introducing competition, and being more demanding. The traditional approach to attack this by suppliers is to define new products/services, encompass value added services to the product/service, attempt to bundle offerings, and provisioning of customized options.

The arguments I have heard from many sales organizations are:

• Customers are getting tougher to deal with
• Treat you more like a commodity
• But they also demand more expertise and support than ever before
• They are using new purchasing techniques to force greater concessions from their suppliers Read the rest of this entry »