The 5 Cold Calling Commandments that Work in Commercial Real Estate Brokerage

A lot of new agents and brokers in commercial real estate today struggle with the cold calling as part of a new business generation model. That is simply because they fail to master the process.  They do not recognize that prospecting via the telephone is an essential part of the property business; they then do not practice their contact processes and improve their activities over time.  If you want new clients and listings, there is no better way to do it.

(N.B. these ideas are also sent out to regularly to our friends in Commercial Real Estate Online Snapshot to help amplify brokerage results…. Get your access here)

Call practice helps

Practice will always help you improve what you are doing as part of the prospecting process, and give you the essential confidence that you need to connect with more people in different and meaningful ways. The pain and the discomfort of telephone prospecting will diminish through the sheer fact of making more calls and improving your conversations. Practice will get you there faster and with greater levels of success.

Get your call priorities right

There are a lot of new things to learn as you move through the different disciplines of commercial property brokerage. It doesn’t matter whether you work in sales, leasing, or property management, as the prospecting and new business process will or should always be at the centre of your business activities. Failure to recognize that fact and do something about it will frustrate your growth of market share and the identification of new clients.

I go back to the word practice as part of the concept of improving cold calling activities. You can easily put some conversational practice into your business activities before you get the office every day. You can practice and role-play the typical situations that occur as part of making more calls to different people locally.

Use the telephone confidently

Telephone conversations can be more meaningful and direct. Professional conversations always attract better results. Here are some of the things that you can do with this:

• Develop different dialogues for local property types and client activity. This is even more important as you specialize in segments of the industry dealing with certain types of businesses and particular categories of clients. Dialogue is something that you learn and develop over time; it is a personal process and something to be learned.
• Use local information in making the calls. The more that you know about the location and the results being achieved across sales, leasing, and investment, the easier you will find the flow of conversations and negotiations. Information locally will always help you with your prospecting and client conversations.
• Understand the pressures of the property marketplace today in your location, and then work towards the appropriate scrips and dialogues for the most common situations. Throughout the year you will find that the property pendulum swings between buyers and sellers, as well as tenants and landlords. Given that you work with all of these categories of people, your dialogue and your services should be refined accordingly.
• Use your current base of listings to start the conversation. You can simply call to discuss a listing nearby or a property that is coming to the market soon. Your call prospecting should be location-based, so that you are calling businesses and property owners with in a restricted location. On that basis, it is a lot easier to feed the local listings in the adjacent streets and suburbs into your outbound calls to new people, investors, and business owners.
• Forget about the pitching and pushing process when you make new calls. Most of the people that we work with in the industry are highly experienced investors or professional business people. They don’t need to be pushed through a property pitch; they are too intelligent for that and will switch off if you try. Pressured conversations or any sales pitch across the telephone will very quickly end the call; leave any pitch requirement to a face to face meeting. Learn how to converse on the telephone with the people locally. Practice the professional part of a business conversation. Get better at it.

So there are plenty of good things that you can do here to simplify the prospecting and cold calling process in commercial property today. The skills are personally learned and improved through practice; it’s a personal thing and you can delegate it to others. Take the time to discipline yourself and learn the right processes of call contact and database development.

(N.B. these ideas are also sent out to regularly to our friends in Commercial Real Estate Online Snapshot to help amplify brokerage results…. Get your access here)