Sales Presentation Tips for Commercial Real Estate Agents

In commercial real estate agency, it is common to be presenting services and strategies to clients and prospects on a daily basis.  If you are doing enough prospecting and cold calling, you should be presenting and pitching your services of least once per day.  This then says that your skills in presenting should be of the highest quality.

One of the things to track as part of this process will be your conversion rate between presentations and listings.  You will not win all of the listings that you chase, however you should win at least 50% of them.  As your skills improve with the presentation and in your market share, your conversions should rise to about 75%.  That will only occur when you are recognised as a top agent of high skill and market relevance.

It is clear to see that a sales pitch or a listing presentation needs to be well considered and planned.  To improve the process for you, here are some tips and ideas that you can adopt:

1. Seek to understand the client and their property needs before you go too far into the proposal preparation and marketing strategy.  The best way to do this is to meet the client on site and inspect the property with them.  Ask them about the history of the property and their reasons for taking action today.  Consider the timeline and the strategies behind the process.  Be quite specific and not generic when it comes to marketing, inspecting, and negotiating.  Service the listing from an exclusive perspective.  Open listings are a waste of time for both you and the client.
2. Every property will have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to listing and marketing.  Some of the weaknesses will need to be addressed prior to the commencement of marketing.  That may involve property upgrade or changes.  That extra expense may also have an impact in the listing choices or issues that you raise to the client.
3. Determine the target market that clearly has an interest in the property type.  Build your marketing campaign around the target market, the existing competing properties, and the prevailing economic circumstances of the region.  Understand the comparable properties, prices, and rentals that will have an impact on your marketing efforts.
4. Give the client a timeline to the process of listing, marketing, inspecting, and negotiating.  The best way to show the client this process it is through a visual graph such as a Gantt chart.
5. Provide the client with some marketing alternatives and choices.  Be aware that they may require flexibility when it comes to marketing costs and promotional strategies.  It is always advisable to have three separate marketing budgets for this reason.

Just about every presentation and sales pitch that you undertake will be a competitive event.  Expect that some other agents will be meeting with the client to sell their side of the story and push their strategies.  That is why your presentation needs to be of the highest quality and very specific to the needs of the client and the property.