Progressing Sales

Progressing Sales is a significant part of the whole Driving Sales programme and we know it represents a massive chunk of your day, every day!

The Progressing Sales element of the Driving Sales programme recognises the great opportunities you have for problem solving on a daily basis.

In the Sales Manager’s role, you are at the very heart of every sale, the hub, the key point between the customer, your sales team, your external colleagues, and the business.

Sales Progression is an aspect of your role that we place great emphasis on in our Intelligent Selling and Driving Sales programmes. This is simply because doing it well has such an enormous impact on cashflow and ultimately, profit.

Here’s a quick exploration of what you can expect to learn in this module:

• Setting up for days to exchange
• Control through Collaboration
• Timely Exchanges and Completions
• Weekly targets
• Managing impact on cashflow
• Securing stalled sales

Here’s some more detail on each element for you to savour and consider how we can help you.

Setting up for days to exchange

Many developers partner with local ‘friendly’ solicitors, who are happy to get to know each of your developments really well, to understand the contract in great detail. Often each development may have 2 or 3 local firms who are all happy to act for your purchasers and their in-depth knowledge of your contract and any covenants, often makes for a smoother transaction.

We will help you to optimise these relationships and help you to hold regular meetings to brief both your company solicitor and local solicitors on all forthcoming developments, inviting them in at an early stage, boosting their technical knowledge, getting familiar with any quirks of the land acquisition. We will help you to build a stronger relationship between the solicitors.

We also have ways to help you to put in best practice to stress-test each contract and share ways in which you can get a handle on most of the likely enquiries for future sales even before the development is launched.

We want you to be set up for success, early! Effective Sales Progression is also dependent on

Control through Collaboration

Collaboration is key to your success and it is common industry practice to use known IFA’s and local solicitors.  Knowing how to be the host and custodian of these influential relationships will really ramp up both your credibility and results. 

Even if your business does not advocate recommended partnerships, it will still stand you in good stead to understand the principles of influencing external professional colleagues to achieve win-win outcomes.

We understand that some customers are super wary of having financial advisors or solicitors introduced to them by you, the Developer. We will show you how to coach your team in the use of power-phrases to increase customer understanding of why these collaborations are simply great business for everybody, especially them! And once you have these powerful relationships established, then work them well! 

We will show you how to develop and maintain robust partnerships which are professional and forged with integrity.

Timely Exchanges and Completions

As part of this lesson on the Progressing Sales Module, we dig deep with you into the sound business principles of winning by developing strong sales progression activity, we’ll show you how to promote this culture in your team.

We are big believers in using a central sales progression tracker which is visible to all the key internal players but still ‘owned’ by your sales team.

This part of the Progressing Sales module includes a suggested format for a winning tracker, we will look at ways for you to use this effectively and well. This approach has dramatically cut down extra phone calls and emails for other clients we work with and know it can become a key tool for you and your team.

We are really clear that all the sexy systems won’t result in timely exchanges if your customers aren’t motivated to achieve a 28-day exchange! 

This module also includes ways to:

• Educate and motivate every customer to work with you, particularly in sales with complex chains.
• Keep the production team on site in the loop – it’s critical
• Better understand progress in both the build programme and the sales progression.
• We will also look in greater depth in this module at ways to improve communication on site and between you and your Production Manager

Weekly targets

We will show you how to focus on the exchanges and completions that are due to happen each week. Talking to each of your external partners to flush out potential issues. We’ll share with you creative ways to exert your influence so that you can remove last minute barriers to progress and we’ll gift you clever hacks and imaginative ways to celebrate as a business, every Exchange and Legal Completion.

Managing impact on cashflow

Improved cashflow will be the applause you get for swifter Exchanges. Your ability to better control your progression is more control over your cashflow, something your Finance team want; greater confidence in managing the cashflow of the business and ultimately the profit margins too.

We are advocates of weekly Build/Sales meetings being attended by the Senior Management Team and undertaken with the main objective of managing cash and profit. We know that for Sales Managers this is often the most frantic and stressful moment of your week! All eyes are on you to provide robust detail and obviously everyone only wants to hear great news!

In this part of the Driving Sales programme, we will help you to better understand how to stay at the helm of each sale, we will share how to deliver bad news early, with a side offering of potential solutions.

Ultimately, we want to help you to successfully raise your profile both inside and outside your business as someone who has a strong handle on your patch and delivers great impact on the cashflow and profit of the business.

Securing stalled sales

This part of the Driving Sales programme is a set of lessons on the ‘moments of truth’ within the lifecycle of a sale, moments when a red flag is raised and a wise decision needs to be made promptly about how to proceed.

We want all sales managers to be heading up a sales team of winners, who know it is safe to share these moments with you – early! 

We want to help you to think more creatively and help you to find solutions to the most common reasons a sale might stall.

We will identify with you and develop an understanding of the differences between, delayed, stalled and cancelled sales as well as how to manage each situation with integrity and clear communication to everyone involved.

We have ways to harness the great relationships you need to have with your internal colleagues – in these moments, you need to call on your influencing skills and creativity and find a way forward together.

We’ll also help you when a delayed sale, becomes a stalled sale and is spiralling to a possible cancellation. We will help you to know how to decide to cancel a sale, when to hold on, and how to replace it quickly. These are key decisions and we know how to help you to set up the strategies that will help you tread that fine line, with grace!

Download our top tips on building winning relationships with external partners, an important element of Progressing Sales.

Tell us how we can help you, we’re here to share what we know. Email hello@ellare.co.uk or call us on 0333 305 7525 to talk about how we can share this information with you.