Rob Rutherford came from a highly technical manufacturing background before getting involved in the higher end of the Factory Built Housing Industry.   Rob is now a real estate broker and owns two retail sales centers in Virginia.  His typical project involves land, the home, excavating, septic tanks, a basement, decks, porches and a garage with a price point between $180,000 and $250,000.  Rob usually pulls a PVR of 15%, but points out, "I do not turn down sales".

Rob's strategy of being a full-service homebuilder means that he can compete for anyone buying a home in his market and he does a lot of that competing on the Internet.  Rob has built eleven different web-sites each reflecting a different aspect of his services or a different approach to marketing.  From these sites he generates about 70 new internet visits each day with four or five of those visits turning into workable leads - everyday!

All of these sites have been constructed by Rob who taught himself over a period of six months to optimize the sites to get on the first page on the search engines.  Rob does all his own optimization and website maintenance using several tools such as

a la mode which provides templates for listing homes and sharing those listings between sites.

Once Rob captures a lead from his websites, he uses several technologies to pursue and sell that lead:

· Each sales person has a company issued cell phone to which incoming calls from the website are directed based on who is "on-call". Salespeople are expected to respond immediately.

· Rob uses follow-up tools he has incorporated with his web-sites and Rainmaker's Prospector Pro to facilitate the more personal follow-up from his sales team.

 ·Rob has collected over 3,000 leads over the last three years and he communicates with these leads regularly using e-mails and blogs.  He actively searches for information he can share to maintain top-of-mind awareness with these future buyers.

· Rainmaker's Dealmaker System is used to create and manage all proposals.  Rob credits the use of this system with helping his sales people address all the details of the construction project up front with the customer.

Since focusing his attention on the Internet three years ago, Rob has seen 40% - 50% of his sales come from Internet leads.  He recently had a million dollar sales month with the majority of that sales volume coming from people moving to Virginia from out of state.

Rob assigns just two sales people to handle all his Internet leads and he checks frequently to verify that these leads are being worked properly because the average time from initial contact to closing on these kinds of sales is often between one and two years.

Clearly, this kind of long-term sales process is not the norm for most sales people, but Rob has already sold as many houses this year as he did all of last year.  This would not have been possible without the long-term commitment to Internet Marketing that Rob started three years ago.

Rob's use of technology has spread beyond his sales and marketing efforts and he now uses technology to oversee many aspects of his business with tools such as: internet cameras monitoring jobsites, GPS tracking of all service vehicles and an on-line scheduling system program for managing his construction contractors.  With Terminal Services, he can do all his monitoring, communication and training from anywhere he has a computer. With ten projects currently under construction, this remote monitoring ability gives him much greater control over his operations without spending all of his time traveling between projects and sales centers.