Secrets to Finding the Best Key Accounts and Deals

Who are the key accounts that you want to attract to your real estate business, and how are you doing that?  Is there a plan that you have, and are you working on progress?

Somewhere in your business model, make sure you have the topic of crucial accounts and VIPs well covered.  Know who those people are and why they are important to you.

They are the people you want to do business with on a regular basis.  They are the people who will give you high-value business and plenty of it over time.  Clarity will help you find those crucial people and engage with them.

Crucial Accounts Demystified

Here are the questions for you to consider about your critical accounts in commercial real estate today:

1. What is a crucial account for you, and why is that so?  A clear direction here is needed as your decisions will allow you to hone in on the right people and to do that in the right way.  New business can evolve from that approach over time.
2. What knowledge have you got, or will you need to work with and for that VIP list of people?  If you have any ‘gaps’ in experience, then now is an excellent time to fix that.  The VIP clients of the property industry like to test the agents that they may use on their property challenges.
3. Why should a VIP or Key Account client use your services?  This is a hard question to handle as it immediately requires you to compare who you are and what you do, to other people in the property industry.  If you work in a competitive town or city from a commercial real estate perspective, then you will require some significant points of difference to build on overtime. Those points of difference should be optimised for property investors and owners.

How to Get Plenty of Important Accounts and Clients in Six Months

When you have considered the list and your answers, do you think you are ready to proceed with building key account relationships in commercial property?  If the answer is ‘yes’, then think about these factors below and create your processes around that.

Build a six monthly plan of growth and client contact. The logic with that is your clients and accounts that fall into the categories you select can be approached every two (2) months in that time frame.

1. Start your list – the list of people should not be too long as these are people that you are going to service comprehensively in commercial real estate.  Twenty-five people is a good number to work with.
2. Know everything you can about the people on the list – this will involve what they own and what they prefer from property ownership and investment perspective.  You will also need to know what they own now.
3. Segment your key accounts into groups – you do this so you can optimise your approach to them using the channels of media and the contact strategies that you decided to deploy.  Client contact processes should include direct meetings, telephone calls, direct mail, emails, letters, and brochures.  When you know more about the individuals in your list, you can optimise your approach even further.  The groups generally in your crucial account list would be selected property investors, developers, business owners, franchise groups and funds managers.  They will all have specific property challenges and needs in your location.
4. Start to mix and match – when you have a list of people, factors of priority will evolve for you to work on.  They will be budgets, property types, spending time frames, and locations.  Your database should have all the required fields for you to track and measure all those things.

So, this becomes the foundation of your vital account relationship strategy and ongoing contact plan.  From this base model, you can optimise things further as you get to know the people and establish a contact frequency plan.