Homebuilders.com

There are all kinds of metrics in selling new home communities, but two always jump out at me as critical to marketing ROI and maximizing sales (velocity and close ratio):

• Cost per new lead ranges from $250-$500 (feedback from multiple builders)
• 80% of sales are made between the 5th-12th contact (National Sales Executives Association)

A CRM system will pay for itself many, many times over in just a few months if you use it just to track:

1. Where are my leads coming from? (to pin-point best sources and allocate marketing spend accordingly,) and
2. What happens after their initial interest? (Is follow up responsive? Is it consistent? Are we getting the lead into the model home or presentation center? Are leads coming back to my website for more information? How many contacts completed in first 30 days?)

Let’s take a simplistic example.

Let’s say you are getting 50 new leads a month and you want to have every new lead followed up at least 5 times in the first 30 days (phone, email, invite, etc.). Plus there are 6 sales people on the sales team with each having 100 existing prospects that should be followed up at least a couple of times in the month (this does not include those others that you want to nurture monthly with an automated email campaign). That means there should at least 1,450 activities completed by the sales team in the month —-250 activities for new leads (50×5=250) and 1,200 activities on existing prospects (6X100X2=1,200).

Pretty tough for managers or owners to manage, track, report and analyze this level of activity with a manual or spreadsheet system. Perhaps even more important is the importance of a CRM system for the sales agent – an effective CRM system can be setup to automatically guide the activity and follow up process and it eliminates the manual redundant reporting that sales are often expected to do.