Winning the Deal: A Step-by-Step Guide to Crafting Your Commercial Real Estate Sales Plan
A sales plan is the best way to progress with commercial real estate listings and clients. You can ‘sell’ yourself and your services as part of that plan. That means more listings in the future.
Some agents overcomplicate things by marketing across a large portion of their territory or city, and then they wonder why things are so complicated. Specific and straightforward actions repeated over time produce the best results.
Tools to Use
As an individual, gather a few planning tools to use with your sales activities. They would be a notepad, a simple database for collecting data, templates for writing down property and client information, a mobile phone, a camera, and a computer.
From these things, you can get a sales plan started in your real estate business. They are your primary planning or system tools.
The logic behind using the tools is that you see things daily in your travels and can capture details of what you see and think as you go. The ‘good news’ is that many properties are available in a location (town or city) to research and evaluate for potential new business.
Research and Review
The best real estate agents usually keep an eye on the market, research properties, and look for opportunities. That simple system can be set up at the agent level. Doing too many things in too many ways will complicate your real estate business. The commercial real estate industry is straightforward, and there are numerous benefits for agents who can develop a simple long-term sales plan and business system.
Most commercial real estate agents today can use the following components of a straightforward sales plan:
1. A Territory Focus and Plan
Let’s look for some properties and people to collaborate with. Choose a territory in which to concentrate your efforts. If the territory or zone is large, divide it into about 200 buildings or property precincts. You can then investigate the property ownership records street by street and building by building.
The commercial real estate research process can be complex and time-consuming at times. It takes some research and investigation to find the right people to talk to and situations to work with in some buildings and with some clients. Our work in commercial real estate is heavily reliant on consistency.
2. Choose the Best Client Base
Determine and concentrate on the clientele you want to work with. Investors, property owners, business owners, and property developers will be divided into categories. Over time, each group will have opportunities to find work.
It all comes down to how you approach groups of people and keep track of the options you see in each conversation. It may take weeks, if not months, for the exchange to progress to a meeting or an opportunity.
Today, the best business tool for commercial real estate is consistency. Create your systems by following a consistent and professional contact procedure. Prepare to talk to many people and find only a few opportunities out of every hundred conversations.
You can see why talking to many people is essential to finding new business over time. Many agents do not call or initiate enough new conversations daily. Create more opportunities to find new commercial real estate business opportunities.
3. Contact Systems of Action
Create a few basic contact systems that you can use daily. The telephone will be the simplest and most effective business tool to contact new people.
Make many new telephone prospecting calls every day to generate new conversations. Some of those conversations will lead to meetings, while others will be archived for future work and opportunities.
Every conversation you have can be recorded in a simple database-tracking process. A top agent will typically work with 1,000 or more contacts on an ongoing basis. That number of people can be increased over time, but tracking the conversations as part of the process is even more critical.
As you call the right people repeatedly, previous notes and records of earlier conversations can help you progress towards a transaction or an opportunity.
Be aware of the potential problem where you have too many people in your database and are not keeping in contact with all of them; when that happens, you will start losing business.
4. Be Relevant and Real
What relevant points can you bring up in your conversations with locals? Recognise that your commercial real estate services are specific and can be directed towards sales, purchasing, or leasing.
Build your points of relevance around each of those services and ask questions of the people you talk to. As part of the process, provide property market information and real estate market updates.
When a client or customer is ready to move on a property opportunity or challenge, the real estate market information you share in a conversation today will assist them in moving to the next activity level.
Prepare to ask good questions directly. Every question can lead to extensive questioning to get to the bottom of the client’s thinking or opportunities. Professional agents have a lot of questions.
Simple and Effective Sales Planning Today
As a result, these simple strategies are now the foundation of a commercial real estate sales plan. They are not complicated, but they are distinct.
Consider these ideas and daily activities to increase your market share and client base. Can you reach out to more people? Are you going back to see people you already know?
