Whether you’re new to Commercial Real Estate (CRE) or you’ve been at it for years, prospecting time for new clients never ends. Reaching out to old clients and kindling the spark of interest in new ones takes ongoing, active engagement and communication.
Learning the art of real estate prospecting is a rewarding activity – hands down, it’s the No. 1 lead generation method. But if you’re new to real estate, you might feel pressure to deliver results right away. Every lead generation method has one thing in common – they all take time. Most newbie agents and brokers find it difficult to dedicate prospecting time each day. Do you need to level up your CRE prospecting game?
Don’t wait for your phone to ring – use these eight strategies and initiate contact.
1. Use Data – Not Comfort – When Making Prospecting Time Decisions
Business professionals using historic data when making decisions nearly always come out on top. It’s no different in real estate prospecting. Always track your data. After examining your data from past connections, do you find certain strategies connect with your prospects better than others? For example, sending an email is easy. But if it doesn’t return results, it’s a waste of your valuable prospecting time. Leveraging the strategies that work – even if they’re not your favorite – can pay off big in the long run.
2. Set Weekly and Long-Term Goals
Prospecting doesn’t mean sitting and watching your phone. It means dialing the prospects that could soon turn into clients. It’s this activity, when you don’t see immediate results, that can feel as though you’re not making any progress. This is where goal setting comes in. Your weekly goals should be about work – your long-term goals about successful closes. In other words, set weekly goals for making a certain number of phone calls or sending a certain number of text messages.
3. Leverage Technology and Improve Your Efficiency
Not too long ago, CRE prospecting meant endless hours of grunt work gathering addresses and trying to find actual contact information. Thankfully, today there are several affordable software options that do all the work for you, like ProspectNow.
4. Attend Conferences – and Get Those Attendee Lists
Scope out commercial real estate conferences and attend as an exhibitor. Organizers usually put together attendee lists for exhibitors. You can normally obtain a partial list for free just for being an exhibitor. Organizers usually charge a fee if you want the whole list of conference attendees. Either way, you’ve got a list of warm leads who’ll likely remember you from the event.
5. Follow Other CRE Accounts and Hashtags on Your Social Channels
Prospecting isn’t a bunch of cold calling scripts, bulk mailers, and mass texts. Genuine prospecting is the starting and cultivation of relationships, ideally with those you might consider great buyers or sellers, whether they’re in the market now or they will be soon. There’s no better place for relationship building than on social media. Start noting popular CRE hashtags and see how they might fit with your agency. What advice can you offer to help those looking to buy or sell?
And remember, it doesn’t have to be all work and no play. Consider adding videos of your pets and their antics. Or post your thoughts about your favorite movies, books, or music artists. You can create real and lasting relationships by offering personal tidbits that connect on a deeper level.
6. Create Groups on Social Channels
Using the data you glean from the above tip, create groups on social media for your prospects. For instance, if you’re a broker in the New York area, consider a New York CRE group or New York Retail CRE. Prospecting on social media is popular but it isn’t easy. In fact, only about 10% of your followers actually see your posts. An even lesser percentage actually engages.
Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t prospect well on social. People enjoy joining groups. And if you make your groups private – where members must request admittance – they’ll feel part of something special. Plus, when you interact with your members on a one-to-one basis, it cultivates the relationship even deeper, slashes your prospecting time, and streamlines your business.
7. Build a Website or Lead Generating Landing Page
People feel more comfortable engaging with familiar people. What’s the best way to showcase what you do and who you are? Build or enhance your current website with a blog. Or create a landing page and request email addresses in exchange for access to newsletter subscriptions, CRE white papers, or industry news. Provide visitors something of value for visiting your site, such as buying and selling in your area, a list of current properties you’re showing, and various contact methods. You’ll find conversations become easier and conversion rates skyrocket when you can speak directly with your prospects.
8. Use ProspectNow
Commercial real estate prospecting software has come a long way since its inception. For instance, ProspectNow’s predictive algorithm identifies properties likely to go up for sale within the next year. ProspectNow developed this algorithm so it scans hundreds of data sets every week for properties that sold and then applies those characteristics to properties still sitting on the market.
Having access to this information can significantly cut your prospecting time in half.
We’ve been helping commercial real estate agents just like you for more than a decade. Ready to cut your prospecting time in half, find more leads, close more sales, and make more money? Contact ProspectNow to take your CRE game to the next level.