Commercial Real Estate Brokers – A Few Important Words About Cold Calling and Prospecting for New Clients

Many commercial real estate agents and brokers spend far too much time worrying about cold calling scripts and what to say when establishing a telephone prospecting process. The reality is that you simply need to have and implement a regular cold calling process and build the personal confidence to back it up.

Doesn’t really matter what you say but rather how you say it when making cold calls. Conversational confidence will carry any cold call through to a successful or reasonable result. If you try to pitch and sell your services too early in the conversation you are likely to offend the other person and end the call. Most business people and property investors don’t want to be sold or pitched to in any conversation and the cold calling process

It should be said that the cold calling process is an important and critical part of commercial real estate prospecting. You can connect with a lot of people and create many meetings through the cold calling system of contact. Regularity in making calls and consistency in conversational quality are important parts of the process.  When you first start your career in the industry, this marketing strategy will give you reasonable traction and momentum to help you in growing market share.

Create Your Brokerage Focus

Most agents and brokers struggle with the cold calling concept and inevitably fail to master the process. This then has a direct impact on their ability to grow business opportunities and attract listings. To be a successful agent in commercial real estate you really do need to focus on certain aspects of the industry, understand the skills required, and then develop regular an ongoing practice to improve your conversions. Cold calling and prospecting are skills to be developed in that way.

When making lots of cold calls, you should simply have one specific focus in every conversation you create. You should simply be identifying whether the person you speak to has an interest or a need in commercial real estate today or into the future. Well-crafted conversations will help you identify and understand if the person you are speaking to falls into any of the following categories:

• property investor
• business owner
• owner-occupier
• purchaser
• developer
• property professional

Within these six groups of people, you will find plenty of opportunities and future new business. I go back to the point that you should not pitch your services across the telephone. The purpose of making a cold call is to understand if you can help these people in any way into the future when it comes to property matters.

If you are new to the commercial real estate industry, or if you are struggling with finding listings and converting commissions, it is time to have a serious look at your activities at a personal level when it comes to prospecting. Understand the simplicity of the new business process and then develop the confidence required to talk to a lot of people each and every day; to achieve that level of confidence you will need to practice each and every day. From those new and regular conversations, you will attract listing opportunity through identifying leads and new client requirements.