Who answers your craigslist ads, manager or 3rd party?

We are aggressively selling homes in all our parks and currently have our managers answering calls, showing homes and closing the deals. We then do the lease agreement and send it to our manager for signing. Im playing with the idea of having an 800 number on our craigslist ads and all calls would go to one person that we would hire to do the sales. This individual would be much more professional than our managers and offer better customer service and hopefully do a better job at
closing the deals. Does anyone use this formula and if so how is it working for you?

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YES. If you have a manager who is great at sale then by all means make sure they do it - but then consider the time it takes to do this.

As I have been onsite for 6 months running a major turnaround park, I can tell you this takes A LOT of time to do this!! Also, you need to assess what your manager’s strengths and weaknesses are. Typically, good operational managers are not good salespeople.

We have several parks with lots of hispanics. We hired a great VA for Mexico who takes all our calls and does all the initial sales and pre-screening. It has really helped our sales process.

of course this adds an additional layer to our process which can be a negative but considering all the ‘Crap’ calls we get this has allowed managers to do all the other tasks they need to.

PS: This only makes sense if you have a lot of homes to sell. If sales is a very small % of your overall operations then this model does not make sense. You need to assess the role of sale and time of sale to the overall time commitments required.

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I would say that it makes perfect sense to have a centralized sales person. The more parks you have, the more sense and more necessary this seems to be. We’ve yet to do it, but I imagine it will be something we put in place just before next tax season. We have decent managers who are ok at selling homes, but I know without a doubt that we are missing opportunities in our parks. Opportunities that a real sales person with some skills would be able to close.

The spanish speaking virtual assistant is absolutely genius! Thanks for that Howard