Staying Personal at Scale: Sandy Highland Talks About Service and Relationships at Nearly 2,000 Doors

If The Property Management Show looks and sounds a bit different this time around, it’s because the podcast has new hosts. Marie Liamzon is the Director of Product Development at Fourandhalf and Brittany Stephens is the Director of Client Success at Fourandhalf. They got together with Sandy Highland of Sacramento Delta Property Management just after PM Grow to talk about the overarching theme of the conference and the current buzz in the industry: customer experience and customer relationship. Sandy does a particularly good job of making people feel important, which is a critical component in improving your customers’ experiences. Sandy Highland’s Story: A Brief Background Sandy has been the Business Development Manager (BDM) at Sacramento Delta since 2015, and she started with the company in 2007. The VP who hired her was a mentor and a true professional who was willing to teach Sandy everything she needed to know about property management, which was a new industry for her. After Sandy became the VP’s assistant, her mentor became ill and passed away. One of the last things she said to Sandy was get your license, so she did. She finished her licensing courses and convinced her broker she was ready to jump into the management process. “She’s with me every day,” Sandy said. “Sometimes I feel her words coming right out of my mouth.” Sacramento Delta manages between 1,700 and 2,000 doors depending on the season. It’s a large company that maintains the feel of a small family business. Talking to Customers about Pain and Fear If you could listen to Sandy’s sales calls, you’d find it interesting how naturally she gets people to open up to her. It’s because she’s willing to let them talk about their fears. Everyone who calls your property management company is afraid of something. Maybe it’s an investor with a large portfolio who is coming off a bad experience with another property manager, and they fear that every management company is the same. Maybe it’s someone who has been self-managing and is afraid and overwhelmed. Sometimes, callers can’t articulate what exactly they’re afraid of and they don’t know what to ask. It’s your job to talk them through it and figure out how to fix it. Finding out where your prospect’s paint point is and what they’re afraid of will help you close more business and develop a better customer relationship. This is the same strategy you use with content marketing. People go online to ask questions and if you can offer solutions and answers in public and in real time, they’ll feel more comfortable. When someone is worried that a tenant will trash the house, you know that this is a personal investment as well as a financial investment for that owner. When someone calls to share their fear of having to evict tenants, you need to really listen and ask questions and do everything you can to alleviate the fear. Asking Questions and Establishing Personal Connections Start with the basic questions. What’s the status of the property? Is there a tenant in there now? Even when a property is occupied by a great tenant and things are going well, managing that home is time consuming and exhausting. That’s how many of your self-managing landlords will feel when they call you. If your caller is currently with another property management company and unhappy, find out why. This is important because if they’re angry about something that’s pretty standard in the industry, you can find yourself the next target of their frustration. For example, fences are notorious for taking time because there has to be due diligence and neighboring properties have to be on board with the fence. So if an owner wants to leave his property manager because the fence...