Training your growth team

I have discussed in previous blogs the different personalities that suit the role of a business developer. While most business owners naturally make a connection between the growth team and the property management team, growth team members are more aligned to the sales team. As a business owner, you should be recruiting salespeople into growth roles for the property management business, as growth is a sales function. Given these assumptions, let’s look at how the growth team should be trained.

Firstly you need to disconnect the growth team from the property management team. Remember, I have always advocated team integration across the entire business, so I’m not suggesting that you drive a wedge between the two teams, but the culture between the two have nuances. Outside of your whole business team meetings, the growth team should be attending the sales meetings, not the property management meetings, and these sales meetings should also cover growth goals as well as sales goals. The growth function and the sales function are identical.

Secondly, your growth team needs the same sales training that your sales team need. They don’t need to know how to manage arrears or do routine inspections, they need to be building out their sales capabilities, just like their sales colleagues. I’m not going to list out every capability of a salesperson, however I do want to endorse my point, so let’s look at a handful of topic areas so we remove any ambiguity around what you should be training your growth team.

Building a personal profile
Defining a farming area
Marketing
Lead generation
Closing techniques
Dealing with objection
Solution selling
Maintaining relationships
Building and leveraging a network
Cold calling

You will see by the topic areas that there is nothing related to property management. You don’t want your growth team learning about property management, this won’t give you or your growth team any advantage over your opposition. Promote sales topics and a sales culture in your growth team to truly leverage off a growth department.