Making Cold Calls in Commercial Real Estate

If you have chosen commercial real estate as your career, you will soon understand the high value of having a database and many clients.  Unfortunately and at the start of your career you will have few people to talk to and in most cases absolutely no market share to work with.  This then says that you need to take some action quickly to build your profile as a top commercial real estate agent and your business base.

Commercial real estate agency is built on the good relationships that you create with key people in defined territories.  The more comfortable you are with prospecting and cold calling, the easier it will be for you to make inroads into your territory and build your market share.  At the start of your career, this is a significant issue of high importance.  Your skill set needs to improve in cold call prospecting.

Many salespeople hate the cold calling process for a number of different reasons.  Here are some of the most common ones:

• They do not like the discipline required to research the market and find the people to call each and every day.
• They do not like the rejection factor that comes with making telephone calls to people you have not met before.
• They don’t know what to say in any meaningful and professional way.
• They lack the discipline required to improve the process and their telephone call conversions.

The fact of the matter is that an ongoing call contact program can radically improve your client base and your list of prospects as a commercial real estate agent.  Yes it does mean that you will be uncomfortable with the call contact system and until such time as you have learnt how to handle the mindset and the process successfully.  That being said, there is still massive opportunity here for you providing you practice and build your skill set in telephone conversation.

To help you get started with making lots of cold calls successfully, here are some rules that can be adapted to your location and your agency.

1. Each evening you should be preparing a list of people to contact the next day.  When you have absolutely no contacts and people to call, start with a list of local businesses throughout the region.  You then make business to business contact calls from the local telephone book.  You will be speaking to the business owner, the business proprietor, the manager, or the person in charge about their property needs and the property location.  They will own the property or lease it, and either way you want to talk to them about their future property needs.  Given that they are local businesses, they can also share information with you regards the local area and what is going on with neighboring businesses.  It simply comes down to the questions that you ask.  Create a conversation; that’s what call prospecting is all about.
2. Understand how the ‘do not call’ process works with telephone calls to individuals, and follow the laws and legislation.  Fortunately we make lots of calls ‘business to business’ and so can talk to businesses each day. This is generally more productive than telephoning individuals.  Business owners will tell you so much when you ask the right questions.
3. Systemize your processes, your dialogue, and the records that you keep.  Get a simple database program to help you with the information that you gather.  On a daily basis you should be calling approximately 40 to 50 telephone numbers inside 3 hours.  You will not get through to that number of people, however you should reach approximately 15 to 20 people.  From that small group of people, you should be creating one or two new meetings with new people.  When you undertake this process every day, two new meetings with new people will help you significantly when it comes to building your client base and the future opportunity in the local area.
4. It has been proven that a repeat call process to the same people at least once every 90 days will allow you to improve your conversions to meetings.  Many people will not let you meet with them on the first telephone call.  For this reason the repeat call process and strategy will help you greatly.  That’s why you need a database.

Everything that you do in call contact will be significantly improved by daily practice.  It will also be improved by your discipline and mindset as it applies to making cold calls.  The commercial real estate industry does not need to be difficult or challenging; it is simply up to you and the things that you do every day.