How To Get Attention and Sell More Homes
By David Finney
If you’re staring at empty spaces or empty homes, you have a problem to solve. Where are your buyers?
Before you start putting up lender banners, blindly boosting Facebook marketplace posts, sending mailers to existing residents, hosting fish fries, or any other promotional endeavor, you need to ask yourself “Why?”.
Why don’t I have interest in that shiny new multi-section home? Why can’t we sell more affordable homes in a housing affordability crisis?
If you’re a business owner, manufactured housing or otherwise, there are three reasons that buyers in your market are not purchasing your product:
- Buyers don’t know you exist
- Buyer’s don’t want what you’re selling, and/or
- Buyer’s don’t trust you
It may be one of these, any mix of them, or a little of each. Let’s look at each possibility, and examine some solutions.
Buyers Don’t Know You Exist
If no one knows you’re there, you’ve got a marketing problem. Marketing is how businesses get attention — it is how they become known.
All businesses have to market. Some use word of mouth, some advertise on various media platforms, while others employ guerrilla marketing tactics.
Do your buyers know you exist?
This is the key question in determining whether your marketing is working, or not. The first step is to define what buyer you’re asking about.
For most community operators and retailers, your buyers are in the lower to lower-middle income brackets, and between the ages of 25 and 44. For most markets, this is the $40 to $70k per-year household income brackets.
Do most of those in your market area in that category know you exist? If the answer is yes, your marketing is working. If the answer is no, you need to turn up the volume.
Buyers Don’t Want Your Product
There is an important distinction I need to make here… when I say buyers don’t want your product, I don’t mean that they don’t need it. Your sales and marketing will create the want, and in our industry’s case, market conditions create the need. It’s no secret that every community in the United States needs more housing.
The problem is that there’s not enough want. How do we make a prospective homebuyer want to purchase a manufactured home? Good marketing piques a buyer’s interest, and a good sales strategy turns that interest into want.
To see if you’re creating the “want”’ from your market, look at your conversion rate for all leads (phone, web, walk ups). How many prospects that expressed interest in purchasing a home bought one? There is no ideal conversion rate. All industries, sectors, and sales organizations differ.
However, I can tell you that 0.1 percent is way too low and 100 percent is too high. The problem with a low conversion rate is clear. And too high of a conversion rate usually means that your marketing is ineffective and only those that are very eager to buy are inquiring.
Take a look at pricing and understand that if slim margins are associated, the sales process will prove to be unsustainable. If it’s too low, you need to look at your sales system.
Is the sales team working to earn that appointment (8-10 touchpoints per lead)? Do they know the ins and outs of the home and the community so that they can feature-benefit both? Are they asking the right questions during the sale to learn what problem a new home in your community can solve for your prospective buyer?
Our industry is in a place now where there is plenty of need, but there’s not a whole lot of want. Marketing and sales systems must both work to create the desire to purchase and live in a manufactured home.
Buyers Don’t Trust You
Conversation creates rapport, rapport builds relationships, relationships build trust, and trust closes deals. If you’re in sales, you’ve likely heard some sort of variation of that mantra. It’s what every new salesperson learns in their 101 sales training class. Your salespeople aren’t just in the manufactured housing business, they’re in the relationship business.
The more trust they build, the more homes they will sell. To create more trust in your sales process, you need to take an honest look at that process and determine what you can change to make the process more transparent and of more benefit to the customer.
Buyers trust things that are transparent and things that clearly benefit them.
Here are some examples of changes that we’ve helped retailers and community operators make to improve their transparency:
Clear Pricing
If a customer visits your website, sales center, or office, can they easily determine prices? In today’s e-commerce, and the abundance of information, buyers do not trust sellers who are unclear on pricing. It makes them feel as if the seller is hiding something, and if buyers think a seller is hiding something, they are not going to trust them.
Consistent Pricing
Does your pricing vary from customer to customer? A cash price and a financed price? There are circumstances under which pricing changes, if it’s connected to an associated valued service or expansion of the offering. But today’s buyer has come to expect a consistent price for a product.
Clear Agreements
As a document becomes longer, more complex, and full of “legalese”, the less a customer will trust the business asking for their signature. Yes, there are certain elements of an agreement that must be present, but there also are elements that you can remove. Perhaps you had one bad apple that caused your attorney to go overboard and add lengthy language to an agreement to cover a situation that will likely never happen again? Try and read your agreements from the perspective of a buyer – do they create trust, or dispel it?
Next Steps
As we all know, the manufactured housing industry is in a tremendously advantageous position for growth. The nation’s growing affordability housing crisis shows no signs of slowing, and we have the perfect solution. But to do that, we need to change and grow. We need to create more awareness and more trust. We need to show the millions of prospective home buyers the value, and durability of our product.
David Finney founded Bild Media in 2019 to help independent dealers and manufacturers tell their market about the incredible quality and value that a manufactured home offers. He has over a decade of industry experience in marketing and business development at 21st Mortgage Corp. Finney has owned multiple local businesses, and is very aware of the struggles of owning a business, and what it takes to market and advertise in a community.
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