In new construction, HR departments face issues such as shortage of both construction and professional staff. Many people left the new home building industry in 2008, and when the market stabilized and started growing again, new home builders faced a labor shortage. This kind of environment makes it essential to retain top talent. Everyone knows it’s far more cost-effective to retain great employees than to have to train new ones.
So, what are new home builders doing today to retain their top talent? Take a look at some of the best strategies that will ensure you retain your most qualified in-house talent.
1. Maintaining Overall Job Satisfaction
To create teams who want to remain in a high performing setting and work together, you need to employ staff with both technical and interpersonal skills in mind. The job demand is high, so people employed in construction are not as worried about their job security as they were six years ago. However, that doesn’t mean everyone feels secure about their job. Most employees in today’s market will talk to a Recruiter if they call. You need to provide a good work-life balance, competitive benefits, and healthy team environment to make your staff confident and satisfied with their connection to your company.
2. Provide a Clear Career Path
Unlike passive employees (those satisfied with their current job position), active employees will seek growth opportunities. In other words, they want to see whether there’s room for career advancement. Talk to them about their career plans or goals and create career paths and individual development plans. You need to know where your employees want to go and find ways to help facilitate that growth.
3. Build a Feedback Culture
Millennials don’t want to spend their working life in a company that is organized top-down. Today it is about clear communication and building and nurturing quality relationships. Be sure to provide honest feedback but also ask for it. It will allow your employees to feel like they’re an integral part of your team and that their opinion matters. Reach out to them for ideas, engage them to help you with initiatives, and you will earn their trust and energy.
4. Empower Your Employees to Succeed
As a leader, you need to find the perfect balance between being the leader and having confidence in your staff to meet and exceed your expectations. With strict timelines and budgets, frequent changes, and many moving parts, this is very difficult. No one likes to be micromanaged, but you can’t avoid it entirely and leave everything unsupervised. Have the protocols in place but also empower and motivate your team to succeed.
5. Praise and Reward
Don’t focus on praising only those who show the best results. In that case, other employees will easily get demotivated and stop giving their best. Give competitive salaries, have your incentives in check, and provide non-cash rewards. Throw a small party, take employees to lunch, or take them for a team building activity.
The construction job market is tight, so you need to be creative and think outside the box to retain your top talent. Competitive benefits and salaries are always among the key factors, but there’s more you can do to inspire employees to stay connected to your brand. Think of ways to improve their work-life balance, provide innovative benefits, build trusting relationships, and work to keep your communications clear and authentic.
Check out
www.builderpromotions.com for gifts you can brand to reward and recognize employees and teams who consistently meet their goals or contribute to innovation and growth.
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Salesforce is one of the most used CRM solutions. It is a cloud computing and SaaS (software-as-a-solution) software that helps organizations handle tasks such as performance analysis, marketing campaign management, sales and spend tracking. It allows Sales teams to contact their leads in real time and close more deals, without missing a potential “hot” lead. However, it takes time to get salespeople to overcome their resistance to a new way of managing prospects and customers.
Why Salespeople Avoid Salesforce?
Sales professionals are hunters by nature, and they would rather make calls than spend time entering data. Using a CRM system is essential for a good sales process, and every business leader knows that. However, salespeople resist it for different reasons - they are action-driven, lack training about the benefits of a CRM to both the company and themselves, or believe that it slows them down from the next sale. It is hard to convince sales reps to use the software if they have this mindset.
Let’s see what managers can do to get their salespeople to use Salesforce and to do it consistently.
1. Sell It to Your Salespeople
First, explain to your salespeople why they need to use the software, and then show them how. Tell them what’s in it both for them as individuals and for the business. Outline the top four reasons they should care and reinforce them in simple bullet points which can be repeated and reinforced in emails, on conference calls and on your internal company branded gear.
2. Demonstrate the Results
Take every opportunity to demonstrate the cause-effect link between Salesforce use and the positive results that it brings. For example, a sales rep got a lead delivered via Salesforce. He or she quickly made a follow-up and closed a sale, which increased lead conversion. Some sales reps are underperforming because they manage their opportunities poorly. With Salesforce, this can be caught and addressed quickly. Be sure to make these things known to the team whenever there’s an opportunity.
3. Provide Support
Whenever a sales rep has a challenge or question about Salesforce, you need to be there to help them and provide support. You can also make an FAQ and roll it out to them to help them address the problems they encounter. It’s important to understand that Salesforce documentation is dynamic and you need to provide clear, simple updates as it evolves.
4. Mention Salesforce in Conversations
Whenever you engage with Salespeople in person or via conference calls, reinforce the benefits of the Salesforce platform. Be prepared with a simple 1-2 sentence overview that reminds Salespeople why it’s important to document their engagement with a qualified buyer at a recent Opening. Let Sales know when their verbal feedback does not coincide with documentation about that prospect in Salesforce. It is proven that if it’s not in Salesforce, the critical Sales follow-up required to close will be far less consistent.
Check out our training tools to promote your Salesforce launch. Builder Promotions can provide you with a set of branded USB drives with preloaded Salesforce training content that can be viewed from any device with a USB port. Visit our Connected Lifestyle e-Storefor tech-related products that provide sales teams with a useful tech tool that promotes the Salesforce URL as a reminder to use it.
Thanks for stopping by and hope to see you soon!
We hope you’ll return to check out our blog, Marketing Blueprints to see what resources we’re sharing to support Builder Marketers.
We are tweeting, pinning, posting, writing and Linking In. Here’s where you can find and follow us if you like.
Twitter: @HomebuilderMktg
Instagram: @builderpromotions
Pinterest Board: Fun, Creative, Useful Gift Ideas
Facebook: Facebook.com/builderpromotions
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/builderpromotions/
Our blog is sponsored by Builder Promotions, Inc., a complete solution of builder-centric branded products and print collateral that support the entire new home buyer journey.
As a working parent, you’ve got more than one team to collaborate with and who relies on your output. One group waits for you to develop marketing campaigns, and to work with Sales to convert prospects into happy new homeowners. They depend on you to interpret the data from your last market research analysis. And they ask for your opinion on marketing collateral.
Then there’s the other team whose members depend on you to ensure the fridge and pantry are stocked. They ask for your help to build an erupting volcano for their science class. This team also relies on you make sure they make it to soccer practice on time and find their favorite hat. This team supports you most and love you for doing what you do. And it’s this team that makes everything you do every single day worth it.
You don’t want to let either team down. Every day, you work through the guilt of not devoting enough time to your kids as much as you wish as well as consistently deliver your best output at work. You take on the challenges of juggling both responsibilities but always battle with the voice in your head that tells you that you should be doing more.
It’s understandable why parents often feel they are losing control. You’re certainly not alone. In fact, 
You’ve invested in the right team. Each member is passionate about new home sales. They have what it takes to establish close relationships with top-performing realtors. They know all the right questions to ask their customers while also answering financing concerns like a pro.
However, no matter how enthusiastic your sales team is when they started, they can become demotivated and feel under appreciated. Remember, the sales process can be exhausting. Your sales team is continually engaging with prospects online, at the Sales Center, inside Model Homes and online again. They are fighting for the attention and focus of prospects who have visited a community and go home to search online again. They’re making proposals, offering incentives, and negotiating sales and shepherding new home buyers through the new home building process. And once they’ve closed the deal, their work isn’t done; they need to provide customer care and be of service after the purchase.
Fortunately, there are ways to fortify your sales team. You can reignite their passion while also encouraging them to work together as a team to achieve results rather than stick to an every-man-for-himself mentality. Here’s how:
1. Be Transparent
When you open up your sales tracking metrics, the entire team sees who is doing well. Not only will it give your top performer a morale boost, but it will inspire the others to achieve that same level of success. When they see that those numbers are achievable, they can’t make excuses for why they’re not hitting them.
2. Offer Incentives
Incentives work for everyone; not just your customers. Incentives can be in the form of a specified percentage per sale, a vacation package, time off, or something else valuable that is worth working towards achieving. The incentive shouldn’t be only one prize that whoever hits the target first wins; it should be something they can all gain once they’ve hit their goal. It ensures no one gives up on meeting their target once someone has already won.
3. Eliminate Ambiguity
You want teams to work together but also don’t want the chaos that comes with confusing who is responsible for what or who gets credit for converting a lead. For example, how do you assign sales reps to leads generated from your social media marketing?
You need a structure defining who can establish the first contact, and make inquiries through post comments or private message. Without this, you would have a situation where everyone will step over each other. In this case, the natural competitive nature of people can cause a rift in the team. To avoid this and to keep your team motivated, be clear about sales territories and what would be considered crossing over boundaries.
4. Share Best Practices
When sales reps are too focused on achieving sales superstar status, they become so competitive that they keep their strategies to themselves. It’s up to leadership to manage this behavior and create a company culture that supports each other’s success. It sounds obvious, but many managers are sales-centric rather than customer-centric. If Sales is organized around creating a great customer experience, the team has a common goal and it provides a reason to share best practices which lead to more sales.
While professional training is great, it demands a dedicated budget. Until you have it, your team should meet regularly and share experiences. Role play with sale scenarios. Learn from each other.
5. Make Sales Meetings Fun
There is nothing that motivates more than a meeting that focuses on the targets you have met or exceptional sales performance. You haven’t pulled off a successful sales meeting if no one is cheering about the achievements. Ending meetings on a high note leaves everyone feeling charged and excited to hit their quotas.
Thank for stopping by! See you soon.
Cheers!
Leslie Bridges, Chief Blogger
You already know how valuable blogging is to your overall digital marketing strategy. Your blog is the key to establishing yourself as a credible source of information while giving your brand a voice. And once your readers identify you as a leader in your niche, they become fans who ultimately convert into people who ask you to build a new home for them.
However, creating content and publishing it on your blog is just the first phase of your content marketing efforts. Without more eyeballs on your blog, you can’t resonate with an audience big enough to develop brand awareness. What you need is to increase traffic to your blog so you can attract hot leads to your site. Here’s how:
1. Social Media
Facebook remains the largest social media platform on the planet with its 2.20 billion monthly active users. Instagram now has 800 million users and growing. Twitter can still boast 330 million monthly active users while LinkedIn’s community of users has reached the half billion mark.
You can’t ignore the influence that social media has and why marketers don’t hesitate to leverage it. Promote each blog you publish across all your social media channels Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You should also have a link to your blog on your social media profiles.
Each time you publish a new blog, you can post a related image on Instagram with a caption that says the link to the full story can be found on your bio; don’t forget to update the website link on your Instagram bio each time you publish a new article. As for Twitter, 
