To succeed in home building today, you must deliver an outstanding home-buying experience. This requires a selling process that delivers superior knowledge, conveys extraordinary value, and sets reasonable expectations.

By the time prospects arrive at your sales office, most of them have already been introduced to your company through advertisements, Websites, and other marketing efforts. The fact that they have decided to make a physical visit is often a sign that they have prequalified you as a possible choice in their home-purchasing quest.

Therefore, it is imperative that their experience with your salespeople and the buying process reinforces the image and information that has already been promoted. It is also vital that their first interaction with you yields more value than they could obtain from an Internet search. To do this, you must use a value-building sales process that is based on a solid foundation of knowledge. Here are some tips for achieving that:

Identify a clear value proposition: A long-winded discussion on features and benefits does little to build value in a homebuyer’s mind. Generally, people develop needs as a result of problems, and until you unearth those problems, it is impossible to offer meaningful solutions. That said, a clearly defined value proposition allows you to illustrate how your product will add more value or better solve a prospect’s problem than competing offerings will. Expert knowledge of your distinct value proposition insures that you do not waste time telling prospects what you are, but rather educating them on how you’re different.

Know your customer: Delivering a great customer experience requires the ability to match purchasers with what they believe to be their most perfect decision. A great recommendation does not occur haphazardly; rather, it follows a series of purposeful questions. In the home sales process, matching a solution to a purchaser’s needs requires not only strategic questions, but also exceptional listening skills to pick-up on what benefits are truly valuable to each purchaser.

Identify your specifications: A display of confusion or uncertainty can cause a homebuyer to quickly remove you from his or her short-list. Therefore, it is imperative that salespeople have complete knowledge of home specifications, standards, and available options. Misinformation at the early stages can magnify into unfulfilled expectations or customer disappointments later on.

Convey your process architecture: To produce a consistent customer experience throughout the building process, use transition points to re-establish expectations. These transition points occur as a prospect evolves from a shopper to a purchaser, to a planner and designer, to a confident observer, to a homeowner, and finally to a recipient of your warranty services. Carefully outline the customer process and convey it to buyers during the sales meeting. Then use it as a roadmap for establishing expectations and building trust and confidence.

Sell a dose of reality: Even the best-intentioned home builder will not be able to overcome promises that set unrealistic expectations for customers. To build a customer experience destined for delight, provide a few examples of potential pitfalls that a customer may experience. These “doses of reality” should be strategically placed in the sales process and combined with detailed assurances of the remedies. If done correctly, it’s like providing an inoculation for dissatisfaction — a dose of the disease to build up a customer’s immunity.

Stand by your promises: There is a considerable difference in delight when homebuyers believe you will stand by your promises instead of hiding behind your policies. A salesperson who has unwavering knowledge of what a home builder is able to promise to a customer can use that information to build a high level of trust and confidence.

Know how to say “no”: A salesperson who tries to accommodate everything a customer asks for is either setting the stage for future customer disappointment or is selling a product that only requires an order-taker. The truth is that it is acceptable to say “no.” Ironically, it is even necessary at times in order to stay on the path toward customer delight.

The key to saying “no” without jeopardizing a customer’s positive experience is to structure the “no” around what you A.R.E able to do. This means being able to propose Alternative solutions or options where possible; providing a solid Reason for not being able to meet a customer’s request; and being Empathetic to show that you really do care and want to help the customer. A skilled listener can often sort through the issues to diagnose the root cause of a problem. This can often make saying “no” irrelevant and strengthen the customer relationship by demonstrating a heightened level of understanding.

Conversant on service: Knowledge of warranty and service procedures needs to be part of any sales process designed for sustained customer delight. The role of a warranty representative is to reinforce and enhance a customer’s experience and not to struggle to resurrect it. That means that detailed service knowledge during the sales process is necessary to ensure that expectations are accurately set along the way. A customer misinformed on warranty or service procedures during the sales process can quickly become a disenchanted detractor for a home builder.

“Best efforts will not substitute for knowledge,” according to quality guru W. Edwards Deming. And knowledge is a critical component in the sales process. If the expectations being sold are designed to be exceeded, it forms a foundation for delighted customers and increased referrals. It is not just a home that is being built for a customer, but also a record of predictability and trust. Although records are often made to be broken — promises are not.

Tim Bailey is General Manager of AVID Canada, the leading provider of customer loyalty research and consulting to the home building industry. Through the AVID system, Tim’s team improves referrals, reduces warranty costs, and strengthens the brand of its industry-leading clients. He can be reached at tim.bailey@avidglobal.ca