Most sales and marketing departments of the top 50 home builders in North America—at their core—are built on a faulty premise. It erodes margin, increases the length of the sales cycle, reduces customer satisfaction, and ushers them further down the road of commoditization from a brand standpoint. Foundational ideas are often the hardest to review with complete objective honesty. I want to make a case for change before the market shifts more dramatically and good companies are caught off guard.
Years ago, I was having a discussion with the national vice president of sales and marketing for a top 5 builder. She was insatiably curious about why her online sales metrics were below the industry average despite having infinitely more resources than the average builder. As I was reviewing her numbers in more detail and trying to gain an understanding of her company’s online sales efforts, I said something before my internal filter could prevent the words from leaving my mouth. “It seems as though your program is built on the idea that you’ll never be able to connect with everyone who is interested in buying a home from you,” I said, with a hint of sarcasm to let her know of course I didn’t really think that was true.
To my surprise, she didn’t hesitate a moment. “Of course we can’t connect with everyone,” she said. “Do you know how many leads we get each day?” I was stunned by her reply as my brain was racing to rewire everything I knew to be a best practice so I could try to view things from her perspective.
“Is that why you use lead scoring based upon a lead’s behaviors with emails or the website, because you can only hope to personally connect with the best ones?” I asked.
“Correct, we can only hope to reach the top 15% to 20% of our leads,” she said with a hint of a smile. “It’s the best we can do at the moment.”
Perhaps you find yourself nodding in agreement as you read that last paragraph. The past two years caused a surge of buyer interest at the exact moment that staff was already stretched thin and inventory levels plummeted. I empathize with why you found yourself affirming her viewpoint—but stop it. We aren’t selling sneakers.
I understand why Nike can’t have a knowledgeable sales associate available to interact with me on demand. The company sells an estimated 1,500 pairs of shoes each minute of every day, according to my online research. Can you guess how many people consider buying a pair of shoes each minute? I crunched the available data—roughly 50,000 people.
Meanwhile, Toll Brothers closed 9,986 homes in 2021, according to the latest Builder 100 list. Some quick math allows me to estimate that the firm, the 11th largest home builder in the U.S. based on closings, had between 200,000 and 250,000 qualified leads over the year, or about one lead every two minutes. It’s also worth noting that this is likely the peak of lead volume for some time to come, meaning the challenge of connecting with every lead will become easier for companies to solve, not harder.
Our product is an expensive and highly researched purchase, and, when you add starting price point, geographic radius, and timing to the equation, you absolutely can develop a system to connect with each customer via their preferred method of communication. To design an approach that will connect with only a minority of those who express intent to purchase with your brand is not playing to win and will be detrimental in normal market conditions (and perhaps fatal in treacherous markets).
The builder in my earlier story began to slowly rebuild its approach to online sales from the ground up. Over several years it hired four times the front-line staff and reviewed its tools and systems to make sure they fit a “no lead left behind” core approach instead of scraping the cream off the top. The results speak for themselves—so strongly, in fact, that the builder will never be tempted to revert to its prior foundational flaw. Now that the builder is properly staffed, I believe it should move toward a system of increased automation. The goal of the automation isn’t to provide a bare-essential experience for customers, but instead to automate the prompting of opportunities to create an unforgettable one.
Automation Is a Tool, Not a Solution
The current result of most marketing and sales automation creates a flood of messaging to my inbox and my voicemail that feels scattered and unaware. Almost none of it feels like it is meant for me, but instead is a warped marketer’s view of a large overall category they’ve placed me in (i.e., new lead or old lead).
“Are You Looking for a Home?” begins one such email from a top 25 home building company after requesting more information. “Introducing the MERV 13 Air Filter” is delivered two days later. It crescendos over the next two weeks and four additional emails to “Your Monday Just Got Brighter.” Truly, this is adding more noise for the customer than helpful information.
I believe that once a company is appropriately staffed, automation should instead nudge an online or on-site sales professional, highlight what it believes is relevant background information on the customer, and then help them determine the next relevant action they want to take. Listening must be amplified using technology for our industry to reach the next level. What is the difference between listening to the customer’s digital and real-world actions and lead scoring? The foundational core belief that either every lead is a human looking to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars with you and deserves an outstanding service experience, or leads are merely prospect IDs that must prove themselves worthy of human interaction.
Automation in sales and marketing is another tool, not a final solution. The goal is to amplify humanity because this is the part of the customer journey where revenue is created and where perceived value (and therefore margin you can sell for) are most impacted. Automation in administrative tasks, reporting, and research has a different end goal—the dramatic reduction in the number of hours humans are necessary to get a complex yet straightforward task done. Dive back in and take a second look at the foundational ideas on which your approach to sales and marketing are built, and don’t be afraid to cause a ruckus. Your customers, and your company’s revenue, will thank you for it.
