How to Engage With More VIP Clients
In commercial real estate brokerage, some clients are better than others from a business perspective. Your database should reflect that fact and allow you to build different contact strategies for alternative client groups, locations, and property types.
Choose your clients with care and consideration. If someone is wasting a lot of your time, then redirect your efforts to others that can use your professional skills at the right time and in the right way. Selectivity is a good thing in commercial real estate sales and leasing; the same can be said in property management, albeit in a different way.
Your VIP Client Choices and Focus
Focusing on your clients in different ways will help with engagement, retention, and new business conversions. So, you can have a group of VIP clients that get your special treatment and unique communications based on their location, property preferences, and budgets. The VIP clients to you are or should be those that are of high value in new business over time. Think about these questions:
- What will a VIP client be to you over time? Differentiate between sales, leasing, and property management. Make some choices when it comes to transaction types and sizes.
- How can you differentiate your contact processes and make them more frequent with the better clients and prospects?
- How are you tracking your new business efforts, meetings, and conversations now with your contacts? Every ‘touch point’ in your working day should register in your database for ongoing reference.
- Are you integrating your social media efforts into your real estate business now? You can add articles, blogs, media releases, audio, podcasts, and videos to your social media strategies.
- Are you sharing local property prices, rents, availability, and facts in your client contact processes? Every completed transaction is a ‘story’ to be shared in the future. Track the trends in the local area when it comes to prices or rents. Share that information.
- What would be the ‘target groups’ of clients and prospects that you closely relate?
- How can you offer your specialist local area knowledge to property people and professionals?
Setting Priority Client Rules
So, there are some choices to be made here with your client list and ongoing contact. Apply the following rules to your business activities and client lists.
- Split your client list into investors and company or business owners. You must work with those groups separately as they have unique requirements of investment, ownership, and occupancy.
- Set some geographical boundaries to your real estate business, so you know exactly where your primary zone of activity is. If anything comes to you outside of that zone, then you have the choice as to whether you want the business or the listing. Don’t spread yourself too far in what you are doing with listings and opportunities.
- With all enquiries, you have the choice of action. Some people will be ‘time wasters’, so qualify the people you talk to and know how you should work with them over time.
We all need client engagement strategies in commercial real estate. In most cases, the new business of the future will come from ongoing regular contact. Sure, some listings will come to you through ‘luck’, but that process is not the ‘mainstay’ of the business. Get involved in talking to you people. Each day and each week, reach out to new people in ways that reflect your professional position as the agent of choice.