Author: Jeff Patterson, owner of Residential Appraisals - For the past 25 years, Jeff has been providing residential appraisals for most of southern and central Maine. Jeff's clients range from private appraisals to working with brokers, banks, litigation support and expert court testimony.
In Part 1 of How Do I Sell Myself? we learned that Marketing 101 - Is all about numbers and that Marketing 102 - Profit is all about effective marketing. In Part 2 Jeff will cover Marketing 103 - Recording what works and what doesn’t and Marketing 104 - It is all about your plan
103 Marketing is about keeping track of income being generated by marketing your doing and in addition to the inquires you receive you need to calculate the expenses that is contributed to specific marketing efforts.
We have all been solicited to purchase placement ads or banner ads on a website. The question is which ones work and which ones don’t. If you are not keeping track of it, you’re not going to be able to determine if it’s cost effective to market this way.
Personally a couple of ways of doing this for me is to offer a discount if they mention the website they contacted me through. I also check the statistics on my website.
Another way of doing this is asking the client questions. Such as where is the industry going, where are your leads coming from? What kind of loans are you doing and where are you doing them? Who are your clients? Do you direct them to an appraiser or do they go to the yellow pages or etc?
Collect and analyze . . .then choose what your going to sell.
The old adage: "You have two ears and one month and should be listening twice as much as you talk" rings true in marketing and defining what niche or campaign you want to utilize. It’s also true with respect to using a script when making telephone calls, or deciding what to wear and bring with you when making cold calls.
Yet before you send an e-mail out, make a call or get in you vehicle you have to have a plan. Some idea of what you’re trying to accomplish.
104 Marketing is all about your plan, your goals, what you want personally or for the company. A portion of a business plan per say. A plan to take control of what you want to provide, how you want to provide it and what do you want to provide it for. This plan takes into consideration benefits that are uniquely yours.
Let’s say to start in the business you decided you had to reduce your price to get the business coming through the door. Then let us say that as things have progressed you want to move away from selling fast and cheap to fast and good. Or visa versa
For the record, in most products and services there is a higher percentage of profit in good then cheap. Yet you can sell more stuff cheap, but you have to sell a lot to get the same amount of profit. So which do you want to sell? What kind of client is looking for this service, how do contact them, which method of marketing do they respond to the best.
Marketing is not new, it is simply being done better by others.
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One point that no one seems to agree with me on is the change in appraisal industry that seems obvious to me. Twenty years ago there were appraisal firms, owners of these firms would do the sales work, and they would go meet with clients, rub elbows, drop of Christmas cookies and do the sales and marketing of the company.
Over the years as lenders got bigger and bigger, local appraisal firms were pushed out by AMC’s as they offered these larger clients the same service or with additional services on a regional or national basis. Hence many appraisers think they are independent and will not work for an appraisal firm, but will work for an AMC at sometimes a reduced percentage.
I simply shake my head and wonder why they think there is a difference.
The reason AMC’s work, is one they are an extension of an appraisal firm, and two they have developed a plan, figures out the profitability of what they want to sell, and then went out marketed, solicited and got the business. Three it is an infrastructure that specific roles are supported by others in a team that support other roles that need to be completed in order to follow through on the work coming in. Appraisers need to acknowledge that we will have to wear more than one hat or be part of a team in order to get a bigger piece of the market.
If this article is of any interest to you, you're at a point in which you want to get more business. In order to do that let us review these marketing principles backwards.
1. Create a plan, decide who you want to go after, what type of business and write it down. Ask current clients questions, gather information of what your existing and potential clients are looking for.
2, Set up a system to track the orders you going to receive from your marketing efforts.
3, Think about the source or revenue, the fee, the cost of soliciting this type of business, the cost of doing business and choose several that seem to be the best. Or as we would say: physically possible, legally permissible, financially feasible, and then maximum profitability.
4, Then set up your self a couple of different methods of soliciting the business and put them in place with and understanding of the anticipated return from each method of solicitation.
As it has been said, success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspirations. So write down a plan that you put it into action, add in some names to your e-mail campaign program, and make some calls, send out some post cards, or knock on some doors, whatever it takes and eventually you will see results.
Lastly let me throw this out there for discussion. Let us say you know 6 fellow appraisers located all over the country. Let us say each friend has 200 contacts in their database. If all 6 put there contacts into a central data base, which would mean 1200 contacts. Although there would be some duplication, some you would not want to share and etc. However if the 1% ratio hold true you could receive at least 10 more inquires each month.
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Author: Jeff Patterson, owner of Residential Appraisals - Has been providing residential appraisals for most of southern and central Maine for the past 25 years. Jeff's clients range from private appraisals to working with brokers, banks, litigation support and expert court testimony. www.e-rallc.com - [email protected]
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