Four Tips to Maintain a Positive Attitude While Managing Backlog

It’s a Thursday morning, you just rolled into the sales office and you’re feeling motivated about changing people’s worlds. Because you’re proactive, you’ve established a list of priorities to accomplish today. You decide to check your email before getting started on your list and you see 17 new messages. Almost all of them are questions and concerns from people you have sold homes to.

Some have interest rate concerns, others have questions about windows that aren’t installed yet, oh, and there’s a message letting you know that you received a crappy customer experience score on a recent closing. I’ll defer to the Mike Tyson quote here, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” You probably feel like that just happened to you. Your day just got jacked!

Now comes the fun part. The first call you’re going to make will sound something like this. “Hi Customer! Remember I said you’d be able to move into your house in June, and then got pushed back to August. Well that date is now September.” In what lifetime does that call end well?

Over the past couple of years, our backlog has become more challenging than ever. Delays, escalation clauses, and now interest rate hikes are the most common accelerants fueling the backlog fires. Look, we know backlog management is part of this business and we should absolutely know how to manage it. Right now it’s all about the overwhelming quantity of the backlog we have to manage. We rarely see it this high!

With all of these challenges, having a bad attitude could be really easy to have.

Sales professionals have morphed into modern-day firefighters. The sheer number of calls and messages we receive from our backlog is crazy. People skills have always been a necessity in our roles but the severity of the current backlog is demanding even more communication and hand-holding than before. It’s providing a whole new meaning to the concept of “service after the sale”. Jeff Shore recently hosted a webinar on protecting your backlog and you’ll find valuable lessons there as well. The bottom line here is that it’s causing a lot more work and uncomfortable conversations with unhappy customers.

I probably don’t have to go into any further detail about backlog management to get you in a negative place. So I won’t. What I will do is share some ways to maintain a positive attitude with you in hopes that maybe we turn our whole outlook on managing backlog around. Sound impossible? You be the judge. Read on and let me know what you think in the comments.

1. Have the right perspective – At the end of the day, more people tends to equal more problems, right? Well, there is a positive to consider here. If you were selling homes in 2008 – 2011, you would have wished for the problems we have in today’s market. In other words, be grateful. Not having a backlog at all would be a much worse problem..
2. Focus on transformational interactions instead of transactional interactions – This current market has made us all transactional. The preferred communication method for those transactional conversations is email. This is actually a very shortsighted approach. Let me explain. Yes, it might be quicker to email an update, but you miss something in that type of communication. You miss the opportunity to catch potential issues early. My wife says it’s better to slay a baby dragon than a full-grown, fire-breathing dragon. I don’t know about you, but if I have fewer fire-breathing dragons to deal with, I tend to have a more positive attitude. It’s time to get back to two-way communication. Get on a zoom call, a phone call, or see them in person.
3. Change your focus – If you have ever been in training with me, odds are pretty high you have heard me say, “It isn’t about you.” When we focus on ourselves, that is where a negative mindset is born. We wonder how someone could treat us this way!? Or we think, “I did so much for them and that is the review I got?!” You see, if you can learn to take yourself out of the equation completely, your life instantly gets better. You don’t get triggered like you used to. You don’t get offended as easily. In other words, you maintain your positivity. Backlog management is not about you.
4. Have empathy – Backlog is a great place to practice your empathy skills. Let me ask you this, how well do you know your customer’s back story? Having empathy keeps you out of judgment. It’s very difficult to maintain a positive attitude when you’re judging someone. Empathy also helps you to do #3, take the focus off of you. Remember empathy is feeling with people according to Brene Brown. You may not have had these issues happen to you but you need to do your best to put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself how you would feel in the same scenario. When buyers know that you feel for them…or with them, it tells them that you’re not creating these problems and you are on their side. In other words, it humanizes you. Learn more about empathy from a conversation Jeff Shore and I had on an episode of The Buyers Mind podcast.

Sales philosopher Jim Rohn said, “You get paid according to the value you bring to the hour.” The hour itself is irrelevant, it’s the value you provide in that time period to which people pay for. The more problems you’re able to handle, the more worth you have and the more money you’ll make. I suggest striving to be someone who actively seeks out problems and finds even more opportunities to change people’s worlds…with a positive attitude!