Commercial Estate Brokers – Prospecting and Cold Calling Success

Do you want more commissions and listings?  You simply have to be great at prospecting and cold calling.  The rest of your business will follow.

Guess what? Most real estate agents and brokers are not sufficiently disciplined to do the right levels of prospecting on a daily basis.  That is the most significant opportunity that exists in the property industry; you just have to be better than the rest at prospecting.  Sure listing, negotiating, and closing are other important skills, but they will come as a natural by-product of prospecting.

Focus on cold calling and prospecting. So how do you do this?  You set some prospecting rules and you start practice.  The words ‘rules’ and ‘practice’ are another couple of problem words for many in the industry.  Many struggle with doing both.

So let’s get away from the negative and presume you have the determination, the focus, and the drive to prospect for new business on a daily basis.  Here is a ‘killer prospecting model’ that really works.  The rest will be up to you.  This model takes 3 hours a day, 5 days per week. 

1. There are no gaps and Saturdays and Sundays are the only days off in the prospecting process.  That is the first rule; probably the most important.
2. The second rule in the process is that you must prospect on the telephone in the morning because after that you will be distracted by other things and not stick to it.  Without going deeply into it, there are established facts of personal performance in business that show the morning is the right time to do prospecting.
3. Get away from setting any meetings in the morning.  Tell the boss that you prospect at that time and that you would prefer to set meetings with him and anyone else in the afternoons.  Even meetings with clients and prospects should not occur in the morning unless it is an absolute necessity.  The only reason to break the rule is if the meeting is for an active deal that is closing.
4. The 3 hours of prospecting each day in the office is done from the telephone.  In commercial real estate you are predominantly dealing with business people and they generally will take your call if commercial real estate is an issue for them.  If it is not an issue then you simply move on.  Do not set up a meeting with someone who has no interest; remember that your time is precious.
5. Drop the cold calling scripts and use your own words; that will be the way you will feel comfortable with the process.  Use trigger words to flow the discussion, but do not use scripts as the listener will sense the processes and turn off.
6. Know that it takes you about 20 minutes of cold calling every day to get the process into momentum.  Once you are through the 20 minutes you must keep going and not stop for 2.5 hours.  In that way you will make progress.
7. Find a quiet place to make your calls so that you can focus without distraction.  Your success in tele-prospecting depends on it.
8. Research your call list the night before so you do not waste critical call time in research.  This is critical to the call process.
9. Create a series of simple forms to use in the call process so that you can capture the results later in the database.  You must not stop the call momentum.
10. Try to contact 10 new people on the telephone each day.  If they are not in the office when you call then simply make a note to call back.  You should be able to make 50 calls in 3 hours.
11. Your only reason for calling prospects is to see if they have a need or an interest in commercial property.  When you really understand that yourself, then the calls will be easier and the quality of the discussion will be higher.
12. Have a great database to record everything.  Use something that you are comfortable with.  At the basic end of the database alternatives you can use Microsoft Outlook, or Access.  Both are useful, low cost and user friendly.  When you want to move to something more relevant to the property industry you can spend many hundreds dollars; personally I believe you can do very well with the basics providing you know how to use a computer well (in that you have no choice).

These are the rules that you need to set in your cold call prospecting.  After you set the rules, you start the practice and you will need to do that for a couple of weeks until things are moving well.  To your success in commercial real estate prospecting!  You can get more detail on prospecting and cold calling in real estate here at http://www.commercial-realestate-training.com/