In 2004, at the age of 39, Bob Moesta decided to apply his skillsets in sales, marketing and engineering to a local business where he could make an equity investment. He picked a small regional home builder based out of Detroit. Years later, in his 2020 book Demand Side Sales 101, he wrote: “I told them I would partner as an investor over time, but I wanted to spend a year learning about the business first. So, I became vice president of sales and marketing.”
The amount of work done by Bob Moesta to understand the customer is breathtaking.
And it seems to make sense given the complexity of the decision to move from one house to another that there might be many factors involved. The idea of just listing features and benefits seems primitive by comparison to what they had by the end.
Knowing the triggers for the customers decision
Knowing the buyer journey
Knowing what tends to block the buyer’s progress
This then leads to what I like to call “focused creativity”. A person could brainstorm out of the box ideas to try to raise home sales. But knowing that having to sort your belongings is a barrier, you can then come up with out of the box solutions to THAT problem such as having a storage facility across the street with space to sort items with other family members. Brilliant!
Or knowing that the dining room table is so meaningful (and a barrier to moving), they ensure there is a room with space for it so they can bring it with them (but not so much they’ll be asked to host the family).
