Intensify Your Commercial Real Estate Sales with More Cold Calling

Commercial real estate prospecting and cold calling are just like every other industry. They are essential to growing leads and opportunities. Many agents struggle with the process or choose not to do it.

When it comes to cold-calling prospects in your market, these are the facts of the matter:

• It is the fastest way to make contact with a lot of people
• It is an efficient use of your time to help in finding more prospects to serve or work with
• As part of a prospecting plan, it will integrate easily into your office work and client contact time.

Given these facts, many real estate agents will not make the calls or try to avoid them at every opportunity. That is a real opportunity for agents who can implement and control the telephone prospecting process.

Call reluctance can be a real frustration for most salespeople.  The modified skills and focus that call prospecting requires are just too difficult for them. That, then, is an opportunity for those that can act and improve.

Many salespeople struggle with changing habits. However, new habits are required if you want new results, and there is no other way to do it (other than luck). Successful commercial real estate agents build consistent and specific habits, which they then ‘tune’ as time progresses.

Changing Real Estate Habits

You can build a reasonable market share of clients and prospects slowly or quickly. The slow way is to let it build through a real estate office profile and meet new people when circumstances allow; the fast way is to push your name, brand, and personality into the marketplace through ongoing contact with new people each day. That is where call prospecting works.

Fast Track to More Listings

Here are some steps to help you establish a cold call prospecting model:

1. Know that you will struggle with the process. That fact will not change, so learn how to force yourself to take the right call action every day.  Setting the same time for the process is an excellent move to get things started.   Creating new real estate habits is essential.
2. Research each night new people to call.  That will allow you to focus your call time the next day on making the calls.  In 2 hours, you should be making about 50 calls.  You will not get through to 50 people, but you should get to about 15 and have some reasonable conversation.  From those 15 people, you should create 1 or 2 appointments.  After some time, those ratios will improve.
3. It takes about 20 to 30 minutes to get into the ‘call mindset’ and momentum. It will be tough each day until you overcome that barrier. Get used to working with focus for 30 minutes; after that point, the calls get much easier.
4. Create a standard form to write on as you talk to people and capture information.  At the end of the call contact time or the end of the day, you can go through the forms and extract the ones that require action in some form or another.
5. Have something valuable to say and practice the process. Over time, your dialogue will strengthen and improve. At the start, you may require some scripts to help you move forward. Soon, you will have your own dialogue that works for you.

These simple steps require focus and organization. When you control these facts, you are on your way to growing your database and source of leads. That is how commercial real estate works.