Walk-ins. Your face to face, bricks and mortar, traditional sales practice, and for our sales agents, the greatest part of their job! The topic of conversation on a Monday morning across the property industry is around enquiry, deposits and walk-ins. In simple terms: We want numbers.
Coming off the back of the stop-start COVID-19 environment of 2020 and 2021, there’s no question that walk-in traffic has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels. For the time being, gone are the days of overnight campouts for a Saturday morning release of ‘15 new lots’ – today, we have online ballots and ticketed systems, where transactions continue to be made and paid via an online portal.
How do developers then land home buyers at the front door of showrooms and display rooms, where sales agents can further enhance the purchaser’s experience through a well-curated customer journey, swindling preference from competing projects? Or is it just not as important in 2022? Everything is online, right?
While it’s proving harder to get people off their sofas now, marketers need to facilitate creativity. Just look to the new world of retail and dining emerging off the back of the pandemic, with multisensory and technologically innovative experiences cutting through that industry, like Sublimotion, Dubai or The Mayflower restaurant in Sydney leading to this theme.
Will property be next to jump on board? With other industries exploring the use of tech in customer sales experience elements, there becomes the expectation from our customers to meet them this way in the property sales journey– particularly as this is a purchase of someone’s greatest and highest value asset.
Curating the in-person sales journey is something the team at DisplaySweet is all too familiar with, as a nationally prominent supplier in prop-tech, they play a major influence in the sales suite customer experience. With innovative tailor-made presentation apps that can sync to a CRM while facilitating a visual presentation, this technology is becoming widely prevalent and more important than ever before for master planned communities.
Speaking with Lachlan Hudson, VIC & SA Account Manager at DisplaySweet, Lachlan mentions the importance of understanding and treating each project differently “there’s no one size fits all”. One of the key benefits of their app is that it allows for a sales presentation to be personalised to “what actually matters to each selected customer segment”.
Aside from this, the data capture is highly desirable to marketers, guiding future moves, and the experience it provides provokes conversation and word of mouth, placing your project brand in front of a greater audience (queue ROI). Another item Lachlan notices trending on land developers’ shopping lists so far into 2022 are immersion rooms, which offer life-scale experiences of property floorplans, or further spaces such as local parks or residents clubs or centres. These sales tools really something different making your sales suite worth a weekend drive.
In short, when we look to multi-industries and what’s guiding consumer interest, it becomes clear that immersive, tech led innovation for the on-ground customer experience will be integral in guiding walk-in behaviours – not to mention facilitating positive team conversations when it comes to the numbers game on a Monday!
