Opening Statements Help Win Presentations and Sales Pitches in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage
As commercial real estate agents and brokers, we are (or should be) always pitching and negotiating on a regular basis as part of the job. The pitching or presentation process therefore directly impacts prospecting, listing, and negotiating.
It is essential that every broker or agent is highly skilled when it comes to connecting with the client or the prospect in this way. Practice and role playing will help improve communication skills in presenting, listing, and negotiating.
Let’s say you want to improve your listings and conversions. Manage and merge the ‘practice processes’ into your daily business activities. Over time that ‘practice’ will help improve your listing conversions and market share.
To create traction and get better results from your prospect interaction, develop a series of opening statements that support your real estate relevance and specialisation. The top agents of the industry are highly relevant to the client or the prospect in any presentation. Those agents tend to stand out as top performers and property specialists; they say the right things at the right time.
So how can you work with this? How can you attract more clients and convert more listings? Have something specific to say about the local property market and the property type; tell the client or the prospect about things that they may have overlooked or not fully understood. Perhaps they are unaware of recent transactions and property activity.
Attract the interest and the attention of the client or the prospect, and do so with local market information and property specific commentary. Plan your comments with the client or the prospect so that they need to ask you more questions. In that way you have control of the discussion and potentially the opportunity.
It is hard for a client or a prospect to ignore a high quality opening statement from a good agent. So what can you talk about? Here are some ideas:
- Recent sales and leasing activity locally will be of interest. This is particularly the case if you were involved in a property transaction and the successful outcome. Show the client how you were instrumental in driving a positive sale or leasing outcome. Build your relevance on the back of industry success.
- Given that your brokerage will be marketing many properties at the one time, you can talk about the recent rates of enquiry specific to the property type. Throughout the year there will always be shifts and changes relating to sales and leasing enquiry. As you drill down into the inbound enquiries, you will see trends that can support future marketing campaigns.
- You can talk about the best methods of marketing given the prevailing market conditions. As part of that, you can have some photographs that relate to recent successes and specific properties. The ‘show and tell’ strategy works well in property presentations and pitches.
- Your database will give you significant leverage in any property presentation or pitch. In saying that, talk about the relevance of your database and provide a short list of qualified prospects that are ready to inspect the property. It is very difficult for a client or a prospect to ignore a list of people that are ready and willing to inspect the listing. In providing the list, it should be suitably edited to preserve confidentiality and allow you to retain control of momentum.
So the message is quite clear. To improve your pitch and presentation results with any property listing, prepare for the process by creating powerful opening statements and relevant information. In that way it will be difficult for the client to ignore your specialisation and services.