Can’t an Online Sales Counselor Just Take The Lead Through Sale? NO!

I saw this question recently asked in a forum.  This goes right along with “Don’t Break The Process.“

You don’t want to take leads generated by marketing (The seed) and hand them off directly to the agents before they go through lead development for reasons discussed previously in Don’t Break The Process. Likewise, if your OSC became responsible for the entire buying process, it would be the same thing as handing off that lead to your agents right away.

If the OSC is showing someone a model, writing a contract, or dealing with buyer questions after the contract… who is going to answer the phones and provide fast personalized responses to the new leads coming in?

If you are a new home builder who has 200 sales a year across 5 communities, that means you probably have 5-10 agents who may sell 20-40 homes a year, and yet an online sales counselor assists in the sales 60-100 or more (30-50% or more) of those sales per year across all communities.Even more during COVID if most of your traffic was by appointment only.

An agent needs to be focused on what is in front of them. OSCs need to be trained to develop the leads and disperse them at the right moment. Putting an OSC on site, or making them write contracts will make it impossible to vet the leads they need to in order to hit their numbers.

Even if you want to go to a 100% appointment only model, you still need site agents. Do you need as many? Maybe not. Do you need to rethink the two agent, one model traditional sales plan? Maybe. But modernization and updating the sales agent structure doesn’t mean doing away with sales agents and making everything from seed to sale go through the OSCs.