Commercial Investment Real Estate is the magazine of the CCIM Institute, the leading provider of commercial real estate education. CIRE covers market trends, current developments, and business strategies within the commercial real estate field.
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issues critical to the prospect. Remember everyone's favorite radio station — and I mean everyone's — is WIFM: What's in it for me? Focusing on your prospect's needs will set you apart from the average broker who is simply trying to sell services. Critical issues can revolve around building space, budgets, the industry, or more specifc items such as changes in the prospect's employee staf size. Focusing on your prospect's needs will set you apart from the average broker who is simply trying to sell services. Ocean Photography/Veer Making the Call Once you have fnished preparing, generate a call list so you can sit down and do your prospecting in one block of time. As you go through your call list and contact your prospects, remember the reason that you are calling — to get the prospect to sit down with you. In response to your call, prospects can give you one of the fve reactions discussed below. If the client says yes, book the meeting and end the call as quickly as possible. Send a confrmation via email and, if the meeting is more than one week out, send additional information between your call and the appointment that adds value. For example, if you are meeting to discuss a lease, send a client testimonial regarding a lease you just renewed or a tenant you successfully relocated. When the prospect says no, try to fnd an area of interest that you can use to book a meeting. Remember the cardinal rule of WIFM. Use your research to address possible business issues the prospect is facing, or share what their competitors are doing in the market. Also, if the prospect is rude or hurried, consider that you may have called at a bad time. In that case, call back in one to three months. When the client asks you to send information, consider ofering to send it as long as they agree to have another conversation with you to discuss it. You can send the information without such a commitment, but inevitably you will end up chasing the prospect for weeks if not months. If you fnd out that you have the wrong person, ask who the correct decision maker is or go back and re-research your contact information. If the prospect isn't interested in meeting with you, fnd out why. If the timing isn't right for them, attempt to get a sense of a better time to call. Tis is also an excellent opportunity for you to re-examine the value proposition that you're presenting on the phone. If it's not compelling, you probably will get a lot of uninterested responses. Sharpen your pitch and call them back in one to three months. and where you can use some improvement. Again, it's not about the quantity of calls you make, it's about the quantity of targeted, quality calls that you make. As you prospect, remember that persistence is key. If you don't get someone on the phone, leave them a voicemail message, then leave another if they don't respond to the frst one. If you send out a blast email, send out another one the next month. When a prospect turns you down, try again and respectfully give them another reason that a meeting would be valuable for them. I have captured numerous opportunities based on my persistence. True, there is a fine line between persistence and annoyance, but very few of us ever get near this line. We quit much too early. If you have never been called a pain, then it's highly likely you aren't calling as much as you should. Every phone call you make brings you closer to your ultimate goal of winning assignments and fulflling them. Every contact you have with a prospect increases your likelihood of securing that meeting, and that is what prospecting is all about. Ultimately, prospecting is one of the key factors in building a successful brokerage business. Rod Santomassimo, CCIM, is president and founder of the Massimo Group, a commercial real estate brokerage coaching and consulting firm, and author of Amazon. com's No. 1-rated commercial real estate book, Brokers Who Dominate: Eight Traits of Top Producers. Contact him at www.massimogroup.com. Evaluating Your Performance Te most important thing about any prospect call is to evaluate each call when it is over. Record your notes from the call in your database, but also take the time to record what you did well CCIM.com May | June | 2013 37