I have been in property investment for some years now as well as running the training company and have watched as the market lurched from boom to bust. And I have marvelled how this sector seems to foster the best and worst in sales techniques.

I was struck by the recent news that 40 of the biggest house building companies in the UK have been fined nearly £130m for rigging the market. In effect, whenever one of them bid on a contract, they discussed the price with the others in order to push up how much the buyer paid.

Anyone who has had to deal with local builders will know that familiar sound of air being sucked between teeth and the inevitable comments about a job costing more than they thought! So, frankly, Balfour Beatty and the others were simply doing this on a huge scale.

Now contrast that with the concept of buying houses using back-to-back (or sandwich) lease options. Now I don’t intend to turn this into a property seminar so it is enough to say that this is a new way of helping sellers to get the price they want for a house, letting a buyer get a house and to make money as an intermediary. Everybody wins. The exact opposite of the house builders’ game of ‘heads I win; tails you lose’ as described above.

We all know the market is tight for a lot of products and services. This can be the mother of invention for new ways for you to sell your company and its wares. Alongside improving your existing routes to market, why not explore other ways you can help buyers to buy?

If yours is a high value capital good, maybe buyers just can’t get the cash to buy it. But they desperately want it. So could you find some way of letting them borrow it and pay for it over time? Maybe let them share with you a proportion of the cost saving or revenue generated? Alternatively, can you bring two different customers together and your product or service sits in the middle?

Try a little lateral thinking, in the style of Edward de Bono. Remember the saying “If you do what everyone else does, you will get what everyone else gets”.

Using some imagination costs nothing. Taking a risk might, but then again you might unearth another way to sell that will tide you through the recession and beyond. Build on what you have got and you might find the foundation of more stable sales.

A good friend of mine described a concept that is not readily translated from the Sanskrit into English. The word “dhairya” is generally translated as patience. However, it is a lot more than that. It is not a passive thing: in other words you sit back and wait. It is more a constancy of purpose and effort. Or to have the will to maintain effort through hard times when results might not be immediate.

I see the confusion of dhairya with patience frequently when it comes to sales. Maybe you recognise it in yourself.

That process whereby you wait for the prospect to come around; you don’t want to bother them too often in case you scare them off. That is patience.

The dhairya version is to keep believing the prospect will be ready to buy. But you need to DO something to keep that vision alive. You need to have a reason to contact them: useful information, chat about a latest industry development, refer a potentially useful partner to them, invite them to an event – social or business – that they might find interesting.

It is this ability to build long-term relationships that distinguishes the best consultative salespeople. It applies more to higher value goods and services where the margin justifies the ongoing effort. But even lower value goods can integrate the long-term marketing with the occasional sales call.

A friend of mine who is heavily involved in property development remarked that in the last few years, “even a dog with a bank account could have made money from property”. With property prices falling now, it would be a mistake to think that all investors are such dogs and thus are now all losing money.

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that shrewd investors are snapping up repossessed properties at auctions at half their previous values. With smaller mortgages but rents pretty much at 2007 levels, it means that these are profitable investments with yields around 10%. So their capital value is less of relevance.

But why am I talking about property investment in a sales training blog?

When times are good, it is not so difficult to be among those making a profit from a particularly buoyant sector. The best operators are lumped in with the “lucky” and those jumping on the bandwagon.

Now, the good salesmen and good sales managers will shine. I worked in telecoms in the late 1990s and I saw all manner of charlatans make huge commissions selling mobile phones. Where they good salespeople? I think not in many cases, because most of these are out of the market scraping a living in a different sector.

STRATEGIC
The pie is smaller and we are all fighting over smaller slices. One of the biggest issues is how to reward the good sales people. These are the individuals that you want to hang on to when the upturn comes.

The consistently best salespeople have been shown to be the ones that don’t do the job just for the money but for the satisfaction. Big commissions and fancy holiday rewards are affordable when the business is flowing in and the more mercenary staff are bringing home the bacon. When the new business acquisition tap turns to a drip, we need to get smarter about motivation.

Why not try reducing the differential between the rewards for the best sales people and the poorer performers? The good guys should understand it is a team game and be willing to take a cut in commission and the poorer performers will be brought back into the game.

TACTICAL
There is an odd paradox that occurs in sales when times are tough. The buyers are more reluctant to commit AND are more demanding. In contrast, salespeople feel the need to close harder and generate more commitment, sometimes due to pressure from management.

This smacks of unstoppable force meeting immovable object! It is my view that buyers buy when they are ready and there is little (notice I don’t say “nothing”) we can do pin them down against their wills.
Look at it from your point of view; when you are buying, is there nothing more irritating than the salesman that wants to lead you to the checkout when you want to just have a look at the other colours available? I have certainly left shops where I might have otherwise made a purchase, but was hassled by a pushy salesperson.

Indeed, this recession is the time to REALLY build on the relationships. Spend more time researching your prospects and building the bond. Send them useful press cuttings, come up with free seminars that are useful to a client group, telephone for a chat or to pass industry intelligence. There are dozens of ways to put yourself more front of mind with the client than your competitors.

When the purse strings loosen, who will the prospects come to for a quote or to make a purchase? The pushy salesmen that just wanted the order or the “advisor” that wanted to help the prospect to make the buying decision?