Podcast: Dealing with Difficult Buyers – Bob Mirman

Bob Mirman | The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast

In this week’s episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast, Bob Mirman of Eliant joins Greg and Kevin to discuss dealing with difficult buyers and how managing expectations is a key factor in doing that.

Some home buyers have become more challenging in recent years and Bob says,

“There’s a reason for this. Everybody’s frustrated. We’re tired of this pandemic. We used to be empathetic about the pandemic. We accepted it. We accepted the excuses. We understood. No, the honeymoon’s over. We don’t understand anymore. We don’t want to understand anymore. So, yeah, these were the same buyers that are coming into our sales offices and our design studios, and they’re creating havoc in our sales offices, unfortunately.”

He continues,

“We’re impatient people these days, and I think that was obvious even before the pandemic. The pandemic has just exacerbated the whole situation and made it much more obvious, much worse.”

Home builders can alleviate many of the challenges they face with home buyers by managing and setting realistic, honest expectations. Bob says,

“Changing expectations is the number one thing that our builder clients can do to ameliorate some of the problems they have right now with their angry buyers. That’s really the number one thing to do.”

Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about handling problematic home buyers.

About the Guest:

Bob Mirman is CEO and founder of Eliant. With offices in Aliso Viejo, CA, and Raleigh, NC, the mission of this 37-year-old firm is to assist consumer-driven firms in systematically delivering an extraordinary experience to every customer, thereby turning delighted customers into referral generators.

Eliant has provided international customer experience monitoring, training, and consulting for over 1,600 homebuilders and major mortgage and escrow firms across the U.S., Canada, and the Middle East.

Eliant has also provided customer experience management services for BMW, Toyota, Beckman Instruments, IBM, and many other consumer-oriented organizations.

Trained as a Clinical Psychologist, Bob left clinical practice to join General Mills as Director of Customer Perception Research and sales motivation programs. He left General Mills in 1984 to start National Survey Systems, now known as Eliant.

Bob is well recognized as one of the building industry’s highest-rated speakers and is a familiar face on the stages of the International Builder Show, Pacific Coast Builders’ Conference, and the boardrooms of many of the nation’s most successful consumer-driven companies.