Your agency can tap into positive sentiment from your landlords to help ensure their continued loyalty, encourage more take up of all the services that you have to offer, and win more instructions. Find out how, in this extract from "How to win more landlords in a challenging environment".
A landlord’s journey doesn’t end when they decide to take up your services. In fact, it’s only just beginning, and a successful relationship could drive even more business for your agency.
If you can provide tangible evidence of the value you have brought to your customers, they will be significantly more inclined to keep using your services - or purchase additional products or services from you when you offer them - and shout about you to their friends, family, and colleagues.
It’s vital, therefore, that you can demonstrate the value you are providing to your landlords. A “customer success” approach to customer relationships can help agencies to achieve this. Customer success, which emerged from the tech giants of Silicon Valley, means “ensuring that your customers achieve their desired outcome through their interaction with your company”. Businesses of all shapes and sizes, operating in a range of industries, are now adopting the principles of customer success to ensure that as many customers as possible are seeing the full value in their services.
Educate your customers
How can you do this at your agency? Most of the time, for customers to really see how your products or services have truly benefited them, you need to actively show them. If you have a busy landlord or a tenant with other priorities, be sure to highlight the time savings you have provided them. Also, don’t be afraid to provide a comparison of those time or money savings compared to your competitors.
“One of our main challenges is the education of the landlords,” says Neil Baldock of Charles David Casson in Essex. “Landlords will fight back against increasing cost until we show them the value of our service. When we lay it down on paper in front of them - that we’re charging them an extra X amount of money for this, because a simple renewal can involve 10 points of action for us - and things like that, they start understanding why some services are costing them more now.”
Understand your customer goals
It is important to bear in mind that the value of your service will vary depending on the customer, so you need to have a good understanding of their goals - their “desired outcomes” - from the outset of your relationship. One landlord might view value as a fully comprehensive service that takes care of everything, fully managing the property and including insurance, while for others, value might mean simply finding suitable tenants for the next year. Whichever it is, show your customer that you’ve provided them with what was expected, where you’ve been able to provide additional value, and how you did this.
Poole’s Leader Fox has started sharing more insights with their landlord to showcase the value of the service they provide, says Ryan Woolfenden. “We’re trying to communicate more about the value of what we actually do, for example, to say to our landlords on average, we’re saving you X%, and give them more insight into exactly what it is that we do behind the scenes.”
Looking for more tips and advice on how to win new business? Download "How to win more landlords in a challenging environment".
