How to Build Your Brand Faster Through Cold Calling

If you want to improve your results in commercial real estate brokerage, you will need to master the art of cold calling and prospecting.  You will need to improve your brand and profile as a top agent.  Are you ready for a challenge?

The new business that you need in sales and or leasing, will in the majority be personally created, and so cold calling and direct prospecting is part of that process. On that basis your prospecting model is very important to the traction and momentum that you individually create in the marketplace.

Trust and Communication

Our industry is predominantly built on established and levels of trust and personal contact. Relevance is the key to establishing trust as a professional broker or agent today. How well do you know the local area and the people within it? What services and skills can you provide as an industry professional that will be of higher quality to the local business owners and investors? Your competitive position needs to be relevant and real to the people in the location.  Self-improvement is required.

Some agents never really master the art of cold calling and on that basis they miss out on the opportunities in their local property market. Don’t make that mistake. Get your opportunities under control and drive more business your way through deliberate effort.

In making more calls and refining your skills accordingly, you will find people to talk to and assist when it comes to brokerage leasing, and sales. Ideally you should be focusing your efforts on marketing to and with the better quality clients and properties. Focus on quality will always help you convert higher levels of inquiry with better quality prospects.

The Rules of Call Contact

Here are the rules that apply to cold calling today in commercial real estate brokerage:

1. DO IT NOW: Someone has to make the calls, so it should be the person that understands the property market, the pressures of ownership and occupancy, and today’s market conditions. That person is you, and on that basis you should strive to improve your call contact processes each and every day. Practice will be required.
2. START TALKING: As you make more calls, you will create better conversations and find all types of opportunity. That being said, the number of telephone calls at you make will be important to the momentum and the results you achieve. Don’t spend too much time talking to people that really have no interest in commercial real estate. Create conversations with people that need help or could need help in the future.
3. TRACK NUMBERS: Understand the ratios between outbound calls, meetings, and listings. Soon you will see the averages that apply to your own prospecting model. Every broker and agent will have different ratios and trends to work through. Importantly, the numbers should improve over time. Soon you will see that a certain number of calls each day should create two or three meetings per day with new people. When you hit that ratio, it will find that your listings will start to evolve from the meetings created. Relationships need to be built over time and on that basis your prospecting should be professional and encouraging with the right people.
4. LOCALITY: Put some local property market information into your call conversations. You can discuss listings, local area activity, prices, and rentals. Business owners and investors will always be locally looking to talk about those things and those activities. Be prepared to expand on the results of the property market today. A simple conversation will allow you to move into a meeting opportunity. Build the trust through the conversation.

So the message here is that you should spend time in developing and improving your cold call prospecting processes as a commercial real estate broker. The skills that you develop here will improve your market share exponentially and quickly. Failure to recognize that fact and develop an improvement process will only frustrate your progress as a broker or an agent.

Don’t wait for people to come to you to seek professional help in the property industry; develop a contact system that pushes you into the marketplace every day to talk to new people in a positive and supportive way. You have the information that will help people locally with the challenges related to property occupancy and ownership.