5 Reasons to "Be Nice" to Your Salespeople

If you’re responsible for marketing your apartment community or communities, you probably spend a fair amount of your time interacting with salespeople. And maybe there are days when they take up so much of your time you begin to view them as an annoyance. I hope not, because good salespeople can be a vital link in determining your occupancy rates.

As both a small business owner and a sales manager, I see both sides of the art and science of sales. I make sales calls and receive them. I track down prospects, and I unwittingly make other salespeople track me down. I hear the word “no,” and utter it just as often. Most of all, I approach my job as a professional, hoping to be treated with respect, and I try to provide the same respect to every salesperson who knocks on my door.

There are five clear reasons why you should respect salespeople – outside of it simply being the proverbial “decent thing to do.”

1. Salespeople can notify you about local market trends that could affect your apartment community. We have unprecedented access to your competitors – we know their current situations and their next moves. Often, we can tell you when your market surveys are correct or inflated. We might not pass along confidential information, but we can use our multifamily housing industry knowledge to help your apartment community.
2. Salespeople can introduce you to new marketing products to help you attract more customers. The core of our business revolves around helping you. To do this, we have to constantly innovate. And these are the innovations that you can use to get a leg up on your competition.
3. Experienced salespeople have a knack for vetting marketing ideas. We’ve seen more folks fail than succeed, and we generally know why those tactics tanked. Ask your staff if your grand plan will be successful, and I bet you’ll hear 100 reasons why it will have your community at 100% in a week. Ask us salespeople, and we’ll give you 100 tangible examples of why it might fail and 100 more ideas on how you might tweak your plan to make it better.
4. We’re great “secret shoppers.” Salespeople spend a considerable amount of time waiting in your office or calling in on the phone, and we’re good at being an extra pair of eyes and ears watching over your leasing staff. If I see something fishy at a client’s apartment community, I let the leasing manager know immediately. After all, I’m held just as accountable for the success of the apartment community as the staff is.
5. More important than all of the reasons above… have you ever heard of “word of mouth”? Our mouths are bigger than most – we talk for a living. Instead of having a few social friends and a handful of office colleagues, it’s our job to have hundreds of people within our networks. So the “word of mouth” that we generate can often travel faster and farther than that of your regular customers. It’s OK if you don’t purchase our product, but you should make sure that you’re respectful towards us as human beings. Treat us right, and we’ll return the favor.