Do you need a BDM or a sales associate?

Do we need a BDM in our business or would it be better to appoint a sales associate to work with the investment buyers in the sales business that we meet at open homes every weekend?

A sales associate would sit with the sales team, attend the sales meetings, be expected to attend open homes on the weekend and would therefore have an expectation of working Saturdays. This can be a complication with BDM’s who sit between the PM business and sales business with little leadership or measurement because they are basically Switzerland and no one knows what to do with them.

If a BDM was instead a sales associate, well everyone knows where they fit in and the new sales associate feels a greater sense of belonging as they can definitively say that they are on the sales team.

Quite often I witness BDM’s commence in their role without a target tied to their remuneration, a job description, or a database from which to begin mining for new clients. A sales associate would still need all of these things but they already exist because we already have a sales business and we are not trying to reinvent the wheel.

I wonder if we asked a BDM what their ideal career progression would be if they would say sales associate? Perhaps they would prefer this title to begin with? Perhaps if they did not like the idea of a sales associate we would choose not to have them in a selling role at all?

My message is, I think we’ve missed a cultural beat here. We are asking salespeople not to be in the sales team but to be in a team all by themselves, with no other like-minded beings or direct leadership.

There are examples of businesses with multiple BDM’s hitting their targets and cultural success however, these businesses have turned business development for the rent roll into a department with measurement and leadership and there are many being’s in these teams.

There’s an efficiency not many have correlated yet. A sales associate is tasked with buyer management and the best source of leads for a BDM is investor sales leads. These clients receive service before expectation and this provides the opportunity to list the investment property to the rent roll right under the nose of the external selling agent. Not only can we list the properties our business sells to investors, the high return opportunity is to service everyone we meet, regardless of which agency they purchase from.

Could growth of the rent roll be the training ground for new sales associates in your sales business?

Emily Sim - CEO Property Management | Ray White Group