Avoiding These 3 Pitfalls After the Sale

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Your customer just purchased and they’re happy.

Now, how do you keep them happy?

Today we’ll look at how to avoid three pitfalls after that home sale.

Are there pitfalls to avoid after a home sale, after the customer has purchased? Yes, there are, and you need to understand that your customer is on an emotional roller coaster. This means ups and downs, twists and turns, and unexpected moments that cause you something of a fright. 

As your customers go through the process, the fear is that sometimes they feel like they’re going through that process alone. If that happens, they fall prey to a mental phenomenon called catastrophizing. When something goes wrong, they believe that the worst of scenarios is coming true, and we just can’t let that happen.

When a customer purchases, they purchase at a time of high emotional altitude. Emotional altitude describes the level of positive emotional engagement that a customer has at any point during the process. When they decide to purchase, it’s because their emotional altitude is high, but things go wrong in the process, and all of these things serve to attack and lessen the emotional altitude.

That’s where we come into play. If we’re not careful, mistakes commonly get made that will derail the sales process. I will share three of them today, three things that salespeople sometimes get wrong. I’m going to encourage you to be honest about this. Is there an opportunity to improve in any of these three areas or perhaps all of these three areas to ensure that we’re sustaining that customer’s emotional altitude? 

That’s when we’re slow to respond and when we’re slow to answer questions. When we’re not getting back to customers, they feel like their problems are not being addressed or resolved. What happens if a customer is concerned and we are slow to respond? What do they do? Well, they tend to obsess over those concerns. They tend to start thinking about them over and over again. Then they get on the Internet and start trying to answer their questions on the web. You already know what’s going to happen in that scenario.

They start having conversations with other people who may have had negative experiences. Pretty soon, that customer is down a negative rabbit hole dragging down their emotional energy. We want to make sure that the remedy to this is to ensure that our communication is not just thorough but also fast. Speedy communication is critical.

Stopping the Sales Process: Because a Contract is Signed

Often, we think that the sales process is over once the customer has signed a purchase agreement. It is not.  We must continue to provide value to support value throughout the entire process. There’s a rule that says when situations change; when a customer is going through a difficult financing process; when mortgage rates have been increased; when they hear bad news, all of these things can raise the fear level of our customers.

We have to prevent that. The way to avoid that fear from skyrocketing is to make sure that we’re constantly reaffirming why they were shopping for a home in the first place and why this home is the best possible solution for them. We need to keep them connected to what their future is going to look like because if we get them thinking long-term about how great their life is going to be, it’s going to help them get over the hump of the short-term problems and issues that invariably arise with the purchase of a home.

We talked about this earlier. We talk a lot about emotional altitude during the five-minute sales training, but that measures, as I mentioned, the amount of positive emotional energy a customer has at any point throughout the process.

Maintaining that emotional altitude is the responsibility of the sales professional. You’ve got to constantly challenge yourself to ask, how can I raise the customer’s positive emotional energy? How can I watch out for those times when the energy is otherwise down? This is up to you.

For more on what you should be focusing on after the sale. Be sure to check out my new book,From Contract to Close. I co-authored this book with Bob Mirman to help you create compelling home buyer experiences that earn referrals.

Until next time, my friends, learn more to earn more!