New unemployment claims hit their lowest level in four years during the week ending March 17. Initial jobless claims filed skirted down to 348,000, a decrease of 5,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 353,000, the Employment and Training Administration reported. The four-week moving average was 355,000, a decrease of 1,250 from the previous week’s revised average of 356,250.
The Administration also reported that the total population of insured unemployed U.S. workers during the week ending March 10 was 3,352,000, a decrease of 9,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 3,361,000. The four-week moving average was 3,385,750, a decrease of 13,000 from the preceding week’s revised average of 3,398,750.
Real estate was also a big newsmaker in last week’s economic news, with existing home sales slightly off February’s pace, but still well above the pace of a year ago, the National Association of REALTORS® reported last week. Total sales of existing single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops slipped 0.9 percent to an annual rate of 4.59 million in February from an upwardly revised 4.63 million in January, but were 8.8 percent higher than the 4.22 million-unit level in February 2011, thanks to improving real estate conditions.
“The market is trending up unevenly, with record high consumer buying power and sustained job gains giving buyers the confidence they need to get into the market,” said NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun. “Although relatively unusual, there will be rising demand for both rental space and homeownership this year.”
Looking at price, the national median existing-home price for all housing types was $156,600 in February, up 0.3 percent from February 2011, NAR reported. Distressed homes, such as foreclosures and short sales that are sold at deep discounts, accounted for 34 percent of February sales (20 percent were foreclosures and 14 percent were short sales), down from 35 percent in January and 39 percent in February 2011.
Total housing inventory at the end of February rose 4.3 percent to 2.43 million existing homes available for sale, which represents a 6.4-month supply at the current sales pace, up from a 6-month supply in January. Even so, unsold listed inventory has trended down from a record 4.04 million in July 2007, and is 19.3 percent below a year ago.
Permits issued in February for construction of privately owned housing units were at an annual rate of 717,000, which was 5.1 percent over January’s revised rate of 682,000 and 34.3 percent higher than the February 2011 estimate of 534,000, the Census Bureau reported last month. Permits for single-family homes issued in February were at a rate of 472,000, which is 4.9 percent over January’s revised figure of 450,000.
Construction starts of privately owned housing in February were at an annual rate of 698,000, which was 1.1 percent down from January’s revised estimate of 706,000, but was 34.7 percent over the February 2011 rate of 518,000. Starts on single-family homes in February were at a rate of 457,000; this is 9.9 percent below the revised January figure of 507,000.
Completed constructions of private homes in February were at an annual rate of 568,000, which was 6.2 percent over January’s revised estimate of 535,000, but was 7 percent below the February 2011 rate of 611,000. Completions of single-family homes in February were at a rate of 421,000; this was 8.2 percent over the revised January rate of 389,000.
This week’s financial news starts off tomorrow with consumer confidence scores for March from the Conference Board. Wednesday, the Census Bureau reports on durable goods orders for February.
On Thursday, the Employment and Training Administration releases initial jobless claims totals for last week, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis releases its third estimate for Q4 2011′s gross domestic product.
The week wraps Friday with February consumer spending and incomes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the University of Michigan releases its March consumer sentiment survey.
Existing Home Sales Above Last Year’s Numbers
Time for a Little Strategic Spring Cleaning
We’re now three months into the year, and it’s time for a little sales spring cleaning. Now that winter is thawing and you have a chance to dig out, you must take some time to assess and reassess your performance and priorities.
Hopefully, you took the time to develop a strategic sales and marketing plan for 2012 that meshed with your overall 2012 business plan, so that you could set some solid goals for revenue, customer growth and overall sales effectiveness and efficiency. If so, here are some ways that you can pause, take a moment, and review how well you are performing against that plan and those goals, and determine how you should move forward:
Measure your performance. Go back to your strategic sales objectives and review the goals that you set for the year. In that plan, you should have set goals that could be judged using objective metrics. That could be sales volume, or sales revenue, or new customers, or sales growth for specific territories, but whatever the goals, you should have been tracking your performance based on those measurable performance metrics. How did you do? Were you above your goal? If so, was the goal too easy, or did your performance benefit from an unexpected market trend or opportunity? If not, was that due to poor performance on your end, or your team’s? Was it due to unforeseen circumstances? You need to thoughtfully measure and assess how you did.
Measure the market. In the same way you have measured your performance, how is the market doing? If you don’t know, you need to take time to review whether or not the market has expanded or contracted, and if there are new marketing opportunities that might have developed over the past three months.
Review your referrals. If you set hard objectives for your referral relationships for 2012, how have you and referral partners progressed against those goals? Are your partners not pulling their weight in terms of sending business your way? Are their referrals high quality? How about you: are you keeping up your end of the bargain?
Consider your competitors. In the same way you have monitored and assessed your own performance, you must also gauge how well your competitors have been doing. Have their sales grown or contracted? Why? Can you observe sales and marketing efforts your competitors engaged in during the first quarter, and how successfully they were implemented? If your competitors have done poorly or done well, you need to know, because that can indicate weaknesses you can take advantage of, market problems you might experience in the future, opportunities you failed to exploit, or, simply put, ways in which your competition beat you out.
Do you need to reset your goals? Now that you have measured your own performance, the market, your referral relationships and your competition, you need to start drawing some conclusions about how you should proceed for the next quarter and the rest of the year. You might need to ramp up some goals, or rein in some others. Moreover, you might need to set some new goals going forward.
Launch a spring sales and marketing program. Don’t forget to leverage the season to set some immediate sales objectives and implement the marketing, sales and service programs to support them. This can include not only the season, but holidays that fall within the quarter.
Remember to set real, measurable objectives, and, at the end of the quarter, dive into this exercise once again, because smart sales pros realize that spring cleaning is a year-round affair!
Learn From Your Successes
“Learn from your mistakes.” It’s an axiom that too often dictates how we shape our decision-making. Certainly, learning that fire is hot by accidentally touching a lit candle is a lesson that will stick with you for life, but what of our successes? As sales professionals, we should focus even more attention on what went right and how, so that we can repeat those positive outcomes.
Certainly, a lost opportunity with a big client or a sales campaign that didn’t gain the traction you expected might impact your future decision-making, but let’s focus on the successes. By examining your positive results, you just might unlock the secrets to repeating those successes. This can be especially effective if your successes seem to be hit-and-miss. When your successes aren’t consistent, it could be that you’re not seeing a trait common to the positive outcomes.
So how do you get started? The first step is to start investigating. When something goes right, it is imperative that you begin breaking down every component of that activity to discover the keys to its success. For example, perhaps you launched a sales effort to back a specific offering that had dramatic results. What steps went into that? Start asking yourself questions:
- Did you support the sales effort with a marketing campaign? What were the elements of that marketing campaign?
- Did you tap into new potential customer groups? How did you reach them: lead generation, purchasing lists, partnering with referral sources?
- Was special pricing involved or special orders?
- Was the campaign timed with certain marketplace conditions or trends? Was it related to the season?
But don’t stop with yourself. Get your coworkers and staff into a meeting and conduct a group debriefing. Ask your professional peers what they think contributed to your success. Their perspectives might uncover key elements that helped yield the positive outcome. If referral partners or other sorts of business partners were involved in the sales effort, include them in this debriefing process.
You’ll also need to talk to your customers. Your clients could provide useful clues about what made the program so successful. Consider surveying the customers from the program about why they decided to sign on the dotted line. Targeted calls or meetings with some of those customers might generate qualitative feedback that could help, as well.
Then, start looking at how you can implement the elements that made the program such a success in other sales efforts and related elements of your business. Not all of what you find might be applicable, but don’t just stop at the lesson — make sure to apply it.
Lastly, make this a regular practice of your sales process. Close every successful sales campaign and program by engaging in this process. By being a regular student of success, you will also become a master of producing positive results.