Atlanta Real Estate Forum congratulates Tara Brown for being named Online Specialist of the Year at the OBIE Awards. Presented by the Atlanta Sales and Marketing Council, the OBIE Awards are the premier awards given in the Atlanta new home construction industry.
Tara Brown brings 14 years of real estate experience to the position of Internet Concierge for Ashton Woods, one of the largest private homebuilding companies. Tara has worked for Ashton Woods for 10 of those 14 years, selling a broad range of products, from homes to first-time buyers to high-end custom homes in both small developments and master-planned communities. Because of her tenure with Ashton Woods, she has become more involved in the entire process of home marketing and selling, model home designer coordination, pricing in purchasing, construction and quality control.
She is an integral part of the sales process and is skilled at driving leads to Ashton Woods’ communities while working to increase the traffic quality, not just the quantity of traffic, to their sales centers. This past year, she was involved in the opening of four new neighborhoods, where she generated and engaged the VIP lists prior to the grand opening, nurturing them and keeping them actively interested. She assisted in the final sales in six of Ashton Woods’ closeout neighborhoods while actively generating and selling leads for 13 additional communities. She is constantly receiving messages from leads thanking her for the “quick response” to answering their questions or “thank you for calling me back so quickly.”
Whether managing a live chat, or speaking to a lead on the phone or via email, Tara is actively working toward her end goal of securing qualified appointments for the sales counselors in the communities. On average, Tara contributes between 25 and 30 additional appointments for the sales counselors each month with an 85 percent kept conversion rate. She directly oversees the communication to more than 6,000 internet leads. Her personalized follow-up has contributed to 40 percent of Ashton Woods Atlanta’s sales being internet sales totaling over $91.5 million in sales volume.
In addition, Tara was part of the development of a new national CRM solution for Ashton Woods and Sales Force and was a Sales Force Power User for training of her division. She has worked closely with the Ashton Woods corporate team to launch the new eblast system, Pardot. Tara creates and sends eblasts for all communities, reaching out to the lead database to keep them engaged and ultimately have them visit the sales center. She developed and recorded the corporate training video that teaches new internet concierges and sales counselors about the role, responsibilities and daily activities of an internet concierge. This is played for all new sales counselors and internet concierges in the Ashton Woods National Training Program.
Tara realizes the website is her 24-hour sales center and updates the website daily with the latest details, from marking homes as SOLD right when they sell on the community plan and showing when quick move-ins become available to updating community and home plan information that has changed. This creates urgency with leads watching a community or home on the website to make them reach out via email, phone or live chat or visit the community in person. Also, by monitoring social media, she has yet another way to engage with leads and ultimately drive them to the sales center.
One of the keys to Tara’s success lies in her personality. She is truly a pleasure for all to work with. She possesses a positive attitude and eagerly assists in the training of new employees. She is a great team player, working well with all departments and regularly volunteering and taking initiative to work on inter-departmental tasks.
Tara is a proud member of the Sales and Marketing Council (SMC) since 2013 and is in her second year serving as the Special Events Committee Chair, hosting sold-out SMC networking events, compiling and presenting the Top Rung Awards and putting on the Realtor Bus Tour and the Silent Auction. She is also actively involved with Autism Speaks, participating in Ashton Woods’ Inagural Skeet Shooting Event that raised over $22,000 for the Georgia chapter, and she raised close to $3,000 personally for her team for the Autism Speaks Walk in May. When not working hard in the homebuilding business, Tara enjoys spending time with her husband and two daughters.
For more information about Ashton Woods, visit www.AshtonWoods.com.
The Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association’s OBIE Awards celebrates its 36th anniversary in 2016. The awards began in 1980 and have grown throughout the years to include more than 100 building, remodeling, marketing and personal achievement categories. The OBIE Awards are named after the obelisk shape of the actual award given. To see all of this year’s OBIE award winners, visit AtlantaRealEstateForum.com/OBIEs. Make sure to like, share and comment on this story.