I had a great time interviewing Jane. I just couldn't type fast enough to keep up with her. Her years of experience and expertise show in every word she speaks. I had to keep telling her to "wait, go back, that was awesome!" She has much to offer, I promise!
Meet Jane Meagher

Jane, tell us how you got started in this industry.

Actually my mother was VP SM for a few different builders so I had some early exposure starting as a hostess at the local communities. My second job out of college was working for Bill Becker in the 80’s as a Sr. Market Analyst. . Bill was one of the founders of NAHB’s MIRM program so I was extremely fortunate to sit through each of the IRM courses more than once, as I accompanied Bill as he and other top-notch speakers taught these courses throughout the country. I got my MIRM designation at a pretty young age.

Bill’s company, the William E. Becker Organization, is a national market research company. I spent my time doing feasibility studies on pieces of land, analyzing every community in the area, (price, square footage, floorplans, included features, amenities, sales success/failure and WHY), spoke with salespeople and realtors and then we advised the builder about what should be built on the property and what the anticipated sales absorption rate would be. I was really lucky to have such an awesome foundation for understanding new home sales and marketing…although at the time I probably didn’t realize how beneficial it would be to the rest of my career in this industry.

Since then I’ve worked for builders in-house in sales and marketing positions, and was the publisher for a New Homes Guide. I also spent about 9 years in the interior merchandising field which proved to be invaluable in what I do today. I was a VP for The Childs/Dreyfus Group. Our clients were large builders throughout the eastern half of the country, and I worked with them on motivating their target market segments to buy homes through the model merchandising, but I also provided many value-added marketing services such as developing floorplans with their architects, developing the on-site presentation theme, etc. Many of my clients had asked me to work with them as a marketing consultant, so in late 2001, I decided to open my own company to fulfill that need, with the end goal of focusing specifically on the sales and marketing aspects of options selections and the design studio world.

Tell us about your business.

I own a company called Success Strategies. We are the nation’s only full-service design studio strategy, training and consulting company. We view the design studio as a retail store, part of the builder’s brand promise, and an essential part of the home buying experience. Our niche is truly unique. We work in what I consider to be all four aspects of option selections and/or design studios. In a simple form, this can be viewed as the what, how, who and where of the home personalization experience.
What means what included and optional products are being offered? Is the builder offering the right mix? Where are the product and design trends going? How is the builder pricing their products? How are they clarifying what each optional product means or includes?

Where are they selling these products, i.e., what does the store look and feel like? We’ve designed studios from raw space ranging from 800-20,000 sq. ft. and I’m really proud to say that our approach has earned numerous national, regional and local awards for best design studios for our builders. But more importantly, these state-of-the-art spaces have led to increased home sales, increased options revenue and more satisfied buyers.

The “How” refers to improving and streamlining the internal processes, procedures and paperwork required to handle the personal selections function, to reduce costly mistakes, and to concurrently create a superb customer experience every step of the way. Because we work with hundreds of builders around the country, we are exposed to enough to have determined industry best practices that we can share with other builders.

Who – this is about the people that are selling these products. I really love the training aspect of our business, working with the community sales people and/or design studio consultants to improve their performance, to use empowering language, to improve their personal presentation, how to overcome common objections etc. Smart builders today are really leveraging their design studio elements as a sales tool to sell houses. Part of this is training, part of it is strategy. How can you create a USP around your company’s commitment to the personalization experience and leverage it as a sales tool to sell more homes? That is always a fun topic which includes elements of training, process improvement, event marketing, and the physical environment itself. I really believe that the design studio element……is a marketing tool for builders.

To me, that last statement makes Jane really stand out but I asked the next question anyway and I love the following analogy.

What makes your company different?

Our niche, the option selections process and personalization experience, in and of itself, makes us a unique company, but we are experts on all these inter-related areas instead of just one, and I think that makes us special. Here’s an example, if I wanted to be the best restaurant consultant in the world and teach all these restaurant owners how to have the most successful restaurant in their area, I couldn’t just focus on improving their processes of food buying, and marketing, and taking orders and kitchen procedures, I’d also have to train their staff in delivering a flawless customer experience, in properly describing the menu choices, in up selling deserts and restaurant merchandise, in developing empowering relationships among the servers and the chefs. But I would also have to become an expert in the physical layout of the restaurant to maximize the available space and create a mood and atmosphere that contributed to the end goal and the brand promise, and to make sure that the restaurant merchandise was well displayed and that the space layout reflected the latest trends in successful restaurants. Then of course I’d need to really understand the product: food. So I’d have to know a lot about trends in recipes and food and the art of describing those dishes in a provocative way, and presenting that food in a visually compelling way.
You can’t be an expert if you only know one part of your marketing approach. I also think that it’s cool that we have worked with builders in 33 states and throughout Canada, and with builders selling everything from active adult homes to entry-level mutli-family to high-end single family homes and towers and everything in between. It’s intriguing to me to understand the similarities and differences in product and geography, but ultimately, all buyers want and deserve the same excellent home buying experience.

We look at our company as a resource for this industry. Many builders have visited a few design studios in their marketplace, and don’t have a lot of exposure beyond that. We can share the best practices we’ve compiled and save builders years of research. I’ve been in literally hundreds of design studios and have focused exclusively on the personalization experience for over 7 years. It’s also really rewarding that our clients have told us that our reach extends way beyond just the design studio portion of their company. Our process improvement program often becomes the template builders implement in other areas of their company. The selections process touches virtually every department, including sales, marketing, construction, purchasing, accounting, warranty, closing, so our strategies often affect many other areas of the builder’s business.

What do you personally bring to this field?

I am very analytical but at the same time I think on a very visual basis. I tap into both the left and right brain functions depending on if I am analyzing current procedures or dreaming up a design studio environment. To be a true industry leader you can’t ever sit back and say you’ve learned it all. I’m a voracious reader and a constant student of our industry and definitely of other major industries. We study consumer purchase behavior, product presentation and retailing techniques, the science of shopping. It’s absolutely fascinating to me to understand how and why people make purchase decisions and what we can do to influence that. I think my entire business is based on really understanding how the builder’s actions and presentation affect the prospective buyer’s decision, and then affects every element of their experience with the builder they ultimately choose.

What changes are you seeing in our industry?

With the downturn in the market, the industry is forced to ramp up a higher level of presentation, expectation and customer experience. In the past our industry has been successful without being forced to really meet this demand. Over the last 5+ years every other major industry has continued to raise the bar in the presentation of their company, in their level of customer experience. In our industry we sell the most emotional and most costly product that most people will ever buy. But at heart, we are a construction based industry and for a long time many builders have focused on “we are a quality builder…we build a quality home”. Yes, that is critically important, vital to the builder’s success. But what our industry has often missed is that building a quality home is the STARTING point, not the ending point. It is just the cost of entry to be in the game. It is NOT a differentiating factor for most home buyers.

The other key thing is that if you look at any major global forecasting or international trends expert, inevitably every list of trends includes a massive societal and cultural trend toward individualization/personalization/mass customization. Virtually every consumer goods product you buy offers a multitude of choices, whether it’s your cell phone, a pair of jeans, or your orange strawberry mango juice. You can build your own Dell or Apple computer, you can choose your pillow type at a hotel, you can buy your daughter a doll which has 10 personally selected features, you can choose from roughly 85 types of bread at your local supermarket. One size no longer fits all, and the housing industry is going to have to really start embracing this…and find ways to do so which are consistent with their cycle time and revenue goals. Believe me, it can be done.

The average consumer is not going to walk into a sales center holding their $4.50 Starbucks Grande sugar free vanilla, half decaf, soy latte and be excited that their $200,000 or $800,000 investment of their life savings comes with a choice of two cabinets and a dark or light granite counter. Now that the customer is in the driver’s seat, our industry is being forced to face this fact. Over the past 5+ years, many builders have seen such inordinately high demand for their product, that they have been able to somewhat ignore this trend, and if Prospect A didn’t buy, we could sell to Prospective Buyer B next week, maybe even for a higher price. Ultimately, out of this challenging market, we will become a stronger, more customer-focused industry and long-term, we’ll be more resilient in down markets because we will be more closely aligned with consumer demand.

What have you had to overcome to adapt to the market changes?

We’ve added 2 new products over the last 2 years which are designed to be more affordable ways to access our consulting knowledge. I’m really proud of our industry-leading University of Success Webinar Series. Our Essentials level includes 6 one-hour webinars plus tool kits totaling over 100 pages of additional support documents such as sample forms, How To Guides, action lists, etc. for bldrs to use to execute the strategies we teach. We wanted all builders, regardless of their budget, to have access to these best practices. Each of the 6 webinars focuses on a different topic such as creating the ultimate customer experience, how to think like a consumer and act like a retailer, how to improve your own personal presentation style, key management techniques etc. Plus our Executive level adds another six hours of webinars, by leading guest speakers who are industry experts such as Bob Schultz, a leader in the field of sales training and management; Carol Smith, the customer satisfaction guru; Mike Benshoof, a management and operations expert, and others, who each address one of the six topics in our Essentials level series, adding their own pearls of wisdom.

Another product we just introduced a few months ago is “Do It Yourself Design Studio”…we think of it as a design studio in a box. This is a really timely product intended to give builders everything they need to create a first-class design studio environment, even in small space carved out from their corporate office or in the basement of a model home. It includes three components: 1)a manual bursting with display photos and design drawings to build the state-of-the-art product displays we’ve been using in award-winning studios around the country, 2)a layout of their space; and 3)one of our 60 minute University of Success webinars entitled “Inspire Them Higher” which is packed with over 175 design studio photos and key strategies to create the ultimate design studio environment.


One more thing I’d love to mention is that if anyone wants a FREE one-hour webinar, for a limited time, they can access one of our webinars via Hanley Wood’s Big Builder website at www.bigbuilderonline.com. Then click on “web videos”. The webinar Hanley Wood asked us to create is entitled “Cash By Design” and it is sixty minutes filled with free strategic information, there’s no catch, no sales pitch, just an hour of free advice. It covers two topics: How to increase options revenue and how to leverage your design studio and/or personalization experience as a sales tool to sell more homes. I hope it helps builders during these tough times.

To follow Jane more closely:
Jane's LinkedIn Profile
Jane's email - jane@opt4success.net

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