Commercial Real Estate Brokers – A Short List of Essential Cold Calling Strategies

Like it or not, the cold calling process in commercial real estate brokerage is really important if you want to drive more new business consistently over time.  The same rules apply to sales, leasing, and property management.  Sure, there are other things that you can do to attract enquiry, but the process of making lots of calls each day is easy, convenient, and professional.  You just need to lift and improve your prospecting methods and systems to build results.

Take Control of Cold Calling This Way

So let’s talk about what you can do with this direct call prospecting process.  The concepts below are some of the main issues to get under control; you can take them, add to them, and shape them to your property market and location.

Here they are:

1. Make cold calling your main business event every day – Nothing is more important than making new calls to new people. To get your progress underway each day, research is required so you will need to create some lists and strategies to pull in the raw data to use.
2. Track your progress – As you make plenty of calls, track your results with conversations, meetings, and listings. The ratios that you achieve will improve over time.
3. Grow your skills – A telephone conversation is a special skill to develop; it doesn’t come easily without some practice. Whilst you may use the telephone every day, the prospecting call process is different and direct.  You need to make your call interesting, relevant, and professional.  Local property information will usually help with that.
4. Ask relevant questions – From a good conversation you can get to the facts of property occupancy and investment. Some people will not want to talk to you and others will find plenty of reasons to chat. Look for the conversational signs and be prepared to drop the call if there is no need or issue that you can help with.
5. Provide valuable information – You know lots of things about prices, rents, property enquiry and recent listings. Use your ‘property market intelligence’ to open up the discussions to help the other person.
6. Understand your call target and your target market – In most cases you will be making prospecting calls to create meetings. It is very unlikely that you will win a listing over the telephone; however, you will find people that have property issues now or potentially so in the future.  What you should target from the initial telephone contact is the ability to have a meeting.  As a general rule, don’t bother meeting with people that have no apparent interest in talking with you.  Protect your time and respect theirs.

So you can see why the cold calling process is so important to new business generation in commercial real estate brokerage.  Have you got your system organised?  Are you ready to pull in the enquiry?