Follow Up...Are You Doing It?

I'll never forget my first leasing job. It was a brand new, luxury community that was opening during the height of the "3 month free" craze of 2002. We had 6 or 7 other brand new properties within a 5 mile radius, so competition was fierce. Being the "green" leasing professional that I was, I figured that once I concluded a tour and sent a quick thank you note, I just sat back and waited for them to lease or not. Oh the horror! It wasn't until about 3 months later that a new manager came in and introduced follow up logs that I was totally thrown for a loop. Surely she couldn't have expected me to call these people back, right? How embarassing. If they wanted to live at my community, then they'd be back with their applications. I didn't want to be that high pressure salesperson who they labeled as "annoying." But I quickly realized that if I wanted to keep my job, I had to give in. It took me a few weeks before I was completely comfortable on the phone. There were several times I was hung up on and nearly brought to tears, but alas, I made it through. And surprise, surprise, I actually got a few leases out of it. This is pretty neat, I thought. So I kept at it and before long, I was the number one leaser in my company.

I look back on that experience and laugh to myself. But the sad part now is that this is happening all across the country and thousands of leases are being lost because of one simple piece to the puzzle...no one is taking the time to follow up. It's not rocket science, but for some reason, it's still not getting done. I've done a million property shops over the years, and I've probably only received a form of follow up from about 25% of them. Seriously. For me, the biggest factor was embarassment and fear of rejection. I would imagine that's still the largest roadblock for most leasing professionals, with laziness and lack of training following closely behind. So let's take those roadblocks one step at a time and see how to fix them....

Fear of Rejection: No one likes to be rejected. That's just a fact of life. But the thing to remind your staff here is that when someone chooses to live someplace else, they're not rejecting them, they're rejecting the product. If a person can convince themselves of that fact, it'll put their mind at ease and slowly help them to get over that fear.

Embarassment: It's not fun when someone yells at you, calls you out on something, badgers you for a better deal, or (gasp) hangs up on you. I think the only way to get over it and develop a thick skin is through practice. The more and more conversations a leasing professional has, the easier it will be to deal with these feelings. So to build up their skin, assign a different leasing professional to follow up with the entire office's traffic each week, not just their own. By making a large amount of calls at one time, they'll build up their thick skin and be able to better handle the reactions they hear on the other end of the phone.

Laziness: It's so easy to get complacent in a community. Particularly if your community is in a good position. But there is always traffic and there will always be a need for leases. So if you have a staff that you know is capable of following up with none of the problems mentioned above, more than likely, they're suffering from a case of lazyassness. The cure is motivation, and if that doesn't work, then a good swift kick in the aforementioned region will give them a jump start. Help motivate your team by offering an incentive for them to follow up. Maybe tape some $5 bills on the back of randome guest cards. Or how about creating a contest for the person with the best conversion rates on old traffic. And if all else fails and you have a staff member that just isn't coming around, a good talking to about the importance of staying on top of your prospects is in order.

Training: In my case, the reason I didn't follow up when I first began my new leasing job was that no one had ever told me how important it was. Every leasing professional has to start out somewhere, so I'm sure many of you have team members that are new to the industry and probably sales altogether. Make sure your team members know how to follow up appropriately and also know why we follow up. Knowledge is power!

Even if you're staff is not doing a great job at following up right now, rest assured in knowing that you're not alone. The community down the road is probably having the same problem, as is the community down the road from them, and the one down the road from them, and so on and so forth. Give yourself the competitive edge with these tips and get ready to take all of those leases out from under them!

Morgan
http://www.mynewsletterconnection.com/
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