Why You Need a Sales Checklist to Succeed in Commercial Real Estate
Let’s keep commercial real estate sales simple because that is how you find listings. Sure, you could do plenty of things daily to find new business, but too many things pursued will be challenging to maintain.
Consistent momentum in real estate prospecting is quite important. The best commercial real estate sales game plan revolves around talking to people. Yes, there are other things that you could be doing, like email marketing, social media, and direct mail.
Still, most of the new business in our industry comes back to the agent’s ability to create conversations in a regular and ongoing way with selected people. That is the ‘A-class’ business generation process.
The Numbers Matter
If this interests you, consider how many people you spoke to yesterday about their real estate needs and focus. Was it under 10, under 20, or over 30?
When you think about those numbers, it is easy to see that most of the new real estate business, listings, transactions, and commissions will go to the agents talking to about 30-plus people per day. Conversations create listing opportunities.
Creating a System for Agents
The way to make this work is by establishing a system on your real estate day. It is so easy to get distracted in brokerage sales.
Meetings, marketing issues, conversations, and travel time factors will affect your day. Don’t let that happen. Be prepared to decline or delay unimportant things that will not benefit your desired business growth.
Let’s look at the people you should be talking to daily and how you can do that at a reasonable volume. The groups of people that can offer you listing opportunities are mainly:
• Property investors
• Property owners
• Business owners
• Tenants
• Landlords
• Developers
Depending on your local real estate market and the current business economy, some of these channels will be more active than others, so you have a decision to make on the priority groups.
Conversation Quality
The quality of your conversations will increase if you practice and study the local property market for focus groups and any change and churn factors.
Practising your voice delivery for prospecting on the telephone is done simply by reading aloud a few pages of a book before you leave for work. You can do that at home each day.
The ‘stand-up’ strategy gives you better voice delivery, thinking processes, and command of word choices. This improved delivery is handy when people ask you different questions and broaden the conversations.
Improving the quality of your telephone marketing conversations is also easy when you stand up as part of the call process. Make your calls from a standup position behind your desk.
Researching the Right People
Research is required at this point, where the organisation becomes essential. By organising, what do I mean? Consider ‘cold calling’ and these questions:
- Who do you call?
- How can you find them?
- What relevant things can you talk about in the conversations?
- How will you track the results of each conversation?
- How can you progress from the first conversation to other conversations over time?
When you have the answers to these questions, you have the basis for building your real estate business. That is the game plan, which can be unique to your location.
