Selling Well, Despite the Odds

Mira Tomljenovic of In2ition Marketing Insights talks about how she and her partner Debbie Cosic built esprit de corps within her Parkside Village sales team.Click here to listen.

Category//Sales Team of the Year — Urban
Gold Winners//Debbie Cosic and Mira Tomljenovic, Principals; Peter Vukojevic, Director of Sales; Danielle DeVaal and Michelle Ozimec, Sales Representatives; and Ivana Cosic and Tom Kotarac, Sales Assistants; In2ition Marketing Insights, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

The Parkside Village sales team just flat sold a lot of homes: 452 net sales of an estimated 1,532 in gross traffic from June 2008 to September 2008, which amounts to a 33 percent conversion rate. The homes were priced from $199,000 to $719,000.“They have consistently set new sales goals and achieved levels of sales that have been unheard of in the industry, especially in the Toronto market in today’s economy,” says Debbie Cosic, a principal at In2ition Marketing Insights.

The Canadian real-estate market and overall economy have slowed since last October, and potential buyers have been flooded with dire news as well. “When we get together with [our staff], we explain to them that they have to learn to address resistance,” says Mira Tomljenovic, co-principal at In2ition. “They need to arm themselves with information so they can show the purchaser that ... builders are still doing okay.”

They also face competition from other condo projects from good builders that are well-known in the area, but Tomljenovic feels Parkside’s advantage is its positioning as an urban village. When complete, there will be 18 high-rise towers with 5,000 units on 33 acres of land.

In2ition also launched a successful grassroots broker program that bumped Parkside Village up to the No. 1 sales position in the entire Greater Toronto area for the last two quarters of 2008.

The sales representatives all receive equal compensation — a set amount for every firm unit sold. The sales assistants receive hourly compensation with a graduated bonus structure. “This builds teamwork,” says Tomljenovic.

For education and motivation, the team had dinner with the builder and viewed an A&E biography on the late founder of that company.

“There’s a passion in completing this project that has been passed down from the family [of the founder] to us,” Tomljenovic says. “When we shared that video, that same passion was instilled in our team.”