Typically, overlays promote a product or a service, but they’re also being used to make consumers aware of a cause.  Others ask for feedback from the visitor, perhaps a short poll.  The content of the overlay is generally framed around whatever action you, the marketer, want internet visitors to take. It’s a way of communicating an important message that we don’t want the visitor to miss.  For example:

• Do you want to offer the visitor a ‘live chat’ salesperson when they first arrive on your site?
• Do you want to engage them in a charitable cause with which your company is involved?
• Do you want to tell them about an item on sale today only?

Perhaps you’d simply like to build upon your outbound marketing efforts and capture their email address, so you craft your overlay to get them to register as a preferred customer with a special offer.  (This is why marketing is so exciting! Just think of the possibilities!)

How many overlays are too many? Well, consider that they tend to be like mosquitos at a barbecue.  You can deal with one annoying little pest, but they tend to quickly become irritating and ruin the party.  Too many and the guest will leave your site and party elsewhere.

What’s the best strategy? This is all fairly new. We’re evaluating this and making up ‘the rules’ as we go along.  Overlays are a dynamic new way to tell your customer about the ONE thing you want them to know today.  Let’s use some common sense and not ruin it for ourselves the way many of us did previously when we over-saturated the customer with ‘pop-ups’ and emails.  Too many overlays and the web visitor is going to leave and look elsewhere.

The methods of marketing are changing daily.  Keep up.

Chick.Fil.A serves quality food at a fair price in a hurry, wrapping it in extraordinary customer service.

Just now I was reminded again of what masters they are at customer service. It’s not everyday that a fast food company, or any company for that matter, thanks me for my business and tells me that it is a pleasure to serve me.

Too often companies try to be all things to all people. Perhaps more of us need to tear a page out of the Chick.Fil.A play book: Do one thing well and then wow the customer with value and extraordinary service.

When the customer gets what the marketing department promised, that’s just good business. Marketing can only sustain a company’s efforts so far … eventually you have to deliver the goods, and clearly Chick.Fil.A does.

Can you handle the truth? If you can’t, skip this post. I’m probably going to step on a few toes here . . . 

Great residential marketing, after the product has been developed, designed and built, is the continuation of finding the answers to the who, what, where and why.

If you’ve read more than one of my blogs, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that whenever I talk about marketing I always preface the word ‘market’ with target.  Everything to me is ‘target marketing’, as it should be to any great marketer worth his/her shekels.  Here’s why: no one has scads of time or money to waste marketing to broad segments of the market, so everything that the sales and marketing department does must be highly targeted to drive the right traffic to build sales.

The optimum time to determine the target market is prior to the start of the development and production of the product, and not make it up as you go along. But even after product launch, changing market conditions can change your target audience, so the key is to stay on top of who your market is by collecting good data, asking questions, and pulling it all together so that the new market information is something with which the entire team can work with and use.

I often run across companies who are marketing broadly with little success, or they are having some success while spending more money than is probably necessary to generate that success. As an industry, for whatever reason, marketing is frequently looked at as a necessary evil, handed off to the office manager who ‘needs something more to do’, and, quite frankly, sometimes the people calling the sales and marketing shots don’t really know who their target market is; they simply don’t know how to do it . . . how to figure it out, how to get the answers they need, or what to do with those answers once they get them.

Generally, the ‘target market’ is incorrectly based on assumptions, not on research and fact, or it’s been assumed that the target market is a certain demographic because the company  thinks that their product will appeal to most. When sales are weak, the target audience may have been derived from a few buyers that did buy; what happens next is that generally that small pool of buyers becomes the focus of the selling strategies.

Sometimes the sale is lost on the sales floor.

I’ll ask the salesperson who their target market is, and whatever the last three buyers looked like, that’s the market.

When this happens, I’ve noticed that the tendency is for the salesperson to ‘push’ the things that they think the customer wants, needs, or desires, thus totally losing sales to other audiences by highlighting the wrong features of the product.  In essence, this goes back to the fundamentals of salesmanship and asking each prospect the ‘right’ discovery questions to get the answers that the salesperson needs in order to build the correct presentation for each prospect.

Great residential marketing, after the product has been developed, designed and built, is finding the answers to the who, what, where and why today, and then adjusting both the selling and marketing strategies to those findings. Not coincidentally, we ask the very same questions before developing and building the product, which helps us get the target market and the product correct right out of the starting gate.

Even when running the marketing for Centex Homes, I consistently focused on finding and building sales incrementally, community by community, product by product, by asking myself who does this product/community appeal to and why, and you should be doing the same. What is it that these buyers are looking for, and will they find it when they get here? Then adjust, track, seek confirmation, and  continuously refine your sales and marketing strategies to keep things moving forward.

We’re aiming at moving targets, and so each of us must constantly be looking at what we’re doing and whom we’re attracting to make certain that not only can we draw a bead on the bulls-eye and hit our target, but that we’ll have precisely what they want and need when they get here.

Deborah Fisher has been in the professional new home sales and marketing arena since 1985. A past speaker with the National Association of Homebuilders and the Southeast Building Conference, Fisher now makes her primary home in North Texas, and provides sales and marketing consulting services and sales training to companies nationwide and throughout the Caribbean. To discover more, click here: About Deborah Fisher 

Although the peril of pricing traps applies to virtually every industry, let’s use homebuilders as an example. If you’re not in homebuilding, just take a moment to think about your industry’s strategies with regard to pricing and market positioning.

All things being similar, i.e., size, location and, to a degree, features, which are the differentials that separate one home from another, Homebuilders have three pricing strategies. The homebuilder can position their company, and homes, to be:

1. The lowest priced in the market
2. Priced somewhere in the the middle of the competition
3. Or demand a higher price than those of the competitors.

The Pyramid of Pricing

Most of us are familiar with the Pyramid of Pricing, shown above, which illustrates that as price goes up, the number of buyers able to purchase goes down.  Simple economics and the affordability index: the more things cost, the fewer the people that can afford them.

Because the market share of buyers are greater at the bottom of the pyramid, obviously more people can afford the $130k home than the $330k home, so homebuilders can make a good case for developing a strategy of building homes that are targeted to the majority of buyers.  Flip open your laptop and browse through one of the on-line real estate networks, and you’ll clearly see the pyramid of pricing by noticing that there are a great many more new homes being offered at the lower end of the price spectrum for a given market than the mid-to-higher priced homes.

However, if the homes are similar in size, location and features, competing in the marketplace as the “lower priced” builder may not be the best strategy.

There is Nothing Unique About Pricing

The difficulty with positioning your company, or your product based solely on price is that it doesn’t give you much of a selling position from which to operate, for there is nothing unique about pricing.  You are either the lowest priced product or not, and every day someone can, and will, ’beat you up’ on pricing.  If it isn’t the prospect looking for a “deal”, and trying to beat you down on your pricing, it’s your competitor beating up their suppliers and vendors to get their prices lower than yours.

In the case of homebuilding, it’s your competitors getting the subcontractors to do it for 5 cents, $5, or $50 less as well as employing other cost cutting measures to get their prices down below yours.  The larger, national builders with their national purchasing abilities can strike a lower priced deal with their vendors and suppliers better than the small to mid-sized homebuilders.

Homebuilders know exactly what I’m talking about. If you build 100 homes a year, you aren’t going to get the same price as the company building 500 homes a year, nor will he get the same deal as the firm selling 5,000 homes a year.

If your strategy is to be the low-priced homebuilder in the market, the struggle to remain the low priced builder will take more time and energy as you fight to remain the lowest priced.  You think you’re going to make it up on volume, but in essence, the energy and brain damage you give yourself to produce volume will actually produce an overall lower return on your assets (think people as well as other resources) and investment than other more reliable, dedicated marketing strategies and business practices.

When I think about low-priced business model companies that have been pushed out of the market by someone who did it better, I think of:

• Kmart, once a retail giant, who virtually self-destructed.  Taken over, Kmart has now emerged from bankruptcy, but is third to Wal-Mart and Target
• Woolworth, which despite being the largest chain in the US  went out of business and was replaced by companies with a better business model, such as Wal-Mart, who added a grocery line.
•  Close-out specialist Pic N Save, a staple in the industry, was replaced by Big Lots.

I can also think of a few builders that have come and gone or been taken over, and I’m sure that you can too.  

Be the Price Leader Operating from a Different Position

If your market strategy is that you are going to be the low-priced builder, give yourself another position from which to operate.  Be the builder with the highest integrity and commitment to your customers and employees.  Provide amazing customer service to both your internal and external customers.

Explain your business model thoroughly to your employees so that they will champion your cause to be the market price-leader. Empower them to make the right decision for both the customer and the company.  Better employees, the ones you want to retain, become frustrated when not given the opportunity to perform at their peak and do the right thing. Companywide, the price to be paid when employees don’t fully understand the low-price business model is the perception that the organization is being cheap with both the customers and ultimately, with the employees.  Poor moral is not a winning situation for you.

Explain your business to employees. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because they aren’t in the executive suite they don’t have great ideas or a passion for your business and industry.  Build a team by involving them and rewarding them appropriately. Guard that you do what you say you will, especially with employee compensation packages. Set the goals high, but make them achievable, and don’t penalize the employees by renegotiating with them when they do hit the marks you set.

Please, don’t ever tell an employee that they are making too much money.  If you’ve set your compensation plan up correctly, and your team is making a lot of money, well that means you are too!  Don’t begrudge them the prize.

We are taught that good sales and marketing starts with you defining your unique selling proposition: so start there.

What do you have to offer better than your competitors, other than price? Generally, as the price leader, it’s going to be value, both through your product and your people, so start there.

For homebuilders, start by building a team of people who are fired up with enthusiasm for making homes more affordable than anyone else in your marketplace so that more people in your area can enjoy the benefits of home ownership. Remember to pay them well and treat them as though they are your most valuable resource, because they are.

Get everyone in your company working on developing a product that will deliver a lot of “WOW!” to the customer.  Maybe you have fewer bells and whistles but excellent craftsmanship.

Build in a few special touches that cost less than the perceived value. For example, take an ordinary entry area from the garage and include a built in bench with open storage underneath so that kids (and grown ups) can dump book bags, sports gear, backpacks and such upon entering the house. Perhaps it’s just a simple wall closet in the kitchen turned into a really cool catch-all for the family.  The cost of a few hooks, the lumber and paint will far outweigh the return of delight from your prospects, and the perceived feature value will be high.

Hire an outsider, like Lew and I,  to come in on a limited basis and review your plans, walk your homes, your communities and brainstorm ideas that will make you the talk of the town and generate momentum and sales.  Three days with Lew and I will generate enough ideas, activities and change to keep you busy for months.

If you want to be the low priced leader in your market, go for it.  But don’t forget that with that strategy you must work hard and fight hard to remain there.

    To learn more about Deborah Fisher and why she tugs on Superman’s cape, Click Here!

Copyright 2011, Fisher & Company, P.A., Deborah Fisher, DeborahFisherMarketing.com  All rights protected.

Price and Value are not the same thing. The seller gets price, the buyer gets value.

There are three different categories of buyers:

• Price Driven
• Value Driven
• Design Driven

With those three categories lie a few sub-categories, such as the Price-Value Driven or the Design-Value Driven buyer, the combination of which represent buyers who balance Price with Value or Design with Value.

many of us sell price as though it were value

Three out of the five possibilities revolve around value, yet many of us center our marketing around price. In fact, we often sell price as though it were value. As a result, are we attracting the wrong segment of buyers? The buyers who are shopping strictly based on price, who most likely won’t buy from us because we are not and can not be the lowest priced builder in the market. How many times have you stood there, dumbfounded as your salesperson or sales manager states that the prospect you inquired about bought from another builder because the price was marginally less, and you have said: “What? We build a far superior home to them!”

Frustrating, isn’t it?

Price and value are not the same thing, yet we often mistakenly treat them as such: the seller gets price, the buyer gets value.

A sale will occur when price and value are balanced in the mind of the buyer.

When the buyer gets more value for less price than he/she was expecting, in their minds they got a great deal, a bargain, a steal . . . depending on how much lower they paid than what they determined the true value to be.

Price oriented buyers have always, and will always, complain to the builder/seller that he/she is over-priced, yet often, when they are a seller of an existing home, they complain bitterly about their buyers who, just like themselves, are only concerned with one thing: price. Just ask any Realtor who has had to deal with one on both ends of the sale.

The price oriented buyer does not grasp the value of . . . well, value!

In marketing, we strive to create and build value for out products and price things competitively, yet stay mindful of what a ready, willing and able buyer is willing or prepared to pay.  In other words, we may want a margin of 21% ROA but may have to live with 16% because that is all the market will bear.

Value, to the majority of buyers, far exceeds price alone. So as a sales strategy, shift from the focus of selling price alone, broaden your target market and start building value for your homes. Get everyone in your company involved in improving your value.

Get your marketing department to research why you’ve lost sales.  Don’t base why you’ve lost sales on what your competition is doing. Ask the people with the answers: the customers that got away.  If your marketing department doesn’t have the skill and experience to pull this off, hire someone who does to temporarily help you out.

Put your purchasing department to work figuring out how to incorporate some of the features price-value buyers would enjoy in a home, and finally, train and drill, drill, drill your sales teams on the fundamentals of selling so that they become unconsciously competent and will deliver a planned presentation – the presentation which you help them design – every time without forgetting something they needed to cover that speaks to value in your homes.

There’s a lot that goes into the sale and marketing of homes, and it definitely requires the ability to stay on top of all of these things, but the fun is in the challenge, and the reward is in converting traffic into sales.

So now that you have an idea of which direction to steer the ship, go have fun with it!

To learn more about this radical thinker, click here: About Deborah Fisher

Copyright 2011, Fisher & Company, P.A., Deborah Fisher, DeborahFisherMarketing.com  All rights protected.

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