Message From MD – February 2019

Dear friends,

January is always a month of new hopes and decisions. It makes us serious about the future and the year ahead. In United States of America, there is a widely followed stock market theory, the January barometer, which claims that as January goes, so goes the full year. Momentum is one of the primary reasons why some investors give credence to indicators like the January barometer. The thought process here is that a bullish start to the year will set the market in the right direction, propelling it throughout the year. Alternatively, a down January has not been a reliable predictor of an overall good year. Of course, historical trend is not a guarantee of what will happen in the future, and there are a myriad other, more important fundamental factors to consider, including opportunities, decision making, risk taking, and Government policies, among others. But it is truly unbelievable that we have done the record sales of current FY in this month and it’s truly a great start and morale boost to the team as a whole. Sales and acquisition of new clients is the backbone activity of any organization. Congratulations to the performers and best wishes to all members for a successful 2019!!!

So what is selling, really? If I ask five sales people, I will get five different answers. Ask five executives, we will get five more. But what is selling, really? I spoke with many on our sales strategy meeting held at Hotel Avenue Center recently. According to the team, real estate sales can be boiled down to the following five basic principles. I feel these are the five best observations put forward by the team members.

1. Real estate sales is 70 percent listening and 30 percent talking.

When we do conversation with a customer, our main goal is always to figure out how we can help that customer. This is possible only if we keep our mouths shut.

2. A sales message consists of two sentences.

1) Why our customers hire us and 2) why we do and what we do better than anyone else. If we can’t get our sales message down to these two short sentences in the shortest time, we are not selling, we are blathering.
3. Customers care about their business, not about Asset Homes.

Every sales conversation should take place from the customer’s perspective rather than from our perspective. It’s never “my product is great.” It’s always “here’s how I can help.”
4. Brand reputation always precedes.

In today’s hyper-connected world, we can assume that anyone who might possibly buy anything from us knows exactly who we are. Even if we are calling out of the blue, our total life history is just a Google search away.
5. Selling is all about relationship-building.

Contrary to much of the foolishness that gets passed around as “sales wisdom,” customers will buy from Asset Homes only if they trust us, respect us, and like us. Everything else pales in comparison.

I think that pretty well sums it up. There can be many other factors and definitions. But these can’t be excluded and avoided.

Friends, we cannot predict and preach all possible moments of business and create a process for the same. There can be many number of situations where a system or process is absent. This is where CULTURE dominates and helps us to go along the correct path. When every member of the team behaves in the same way where there is an absence of system and process, we call it a well-cultured organisation. As part of my plans to create a strong group of fifty cultural flag holders of our organisation, I propose an activity named Asset Town Hall meetings and I propose four such meetings in the current calendar year. The proposed meeting months shall be February, May, August, and November. The objective of the session is to instil ownership among team members and develop a strong ownership culture, based on values. I expect this will create a committed, super-charged, involved team of Assetians, with a minimum of 50 members, who will take ownership of the company’s vision and actions by 1st January 2020. The first set of team members will get invitations immediately to attend February session. Others who didn’t receive invitation need not worry as they get another three chances to get invited and finally be part of this group.

I wholeheartedly congratulate all performers of last month and my best wishes to all that we may be more passionate about our culture of speed and steady sprint.

Warm regards,

Sunil Kumar V.