« | Home | »

Why Marketing is Your Most Important Brokerage Activity

By Jim Gillespie | November 20, 2007

Commercial real estate brokerage is an industry that lags behind many others in terms of effectively utilizing marketing approaches. Salespeople are often trained to pickup the phone and call prospects, or to maybe even walk an area and canvass businesses if they’re working with users. But that’s oftentimes about it in terms of utilizing effective approaches for developing new business. The problem with this, though, is that agents end up relying on just one way of developing their business, and this can oftentimes lead to problems.

While most agents believe in the idea of prospecting and feel they should be doing it, most agents end up dropping out their prospecting, and prospect only until they have enough leads to keep them busy. But in the end this will usually lead to inconsistent levels of production, and hanging on to the more marginal leads that just happen to come the agent’s way.

This is why reinventing yourself and marketing your brokerage business is very important, and probably the best way that I can illustrate this is through a true story involving one of my own one-on-one coaching clients…

Scott came to me 3-4 years ago as a brand new agent in the business and made his goal very clear to me. Within just months he wanted to create the impression in his prospects’ minds that he had already been a commercial broker in their area for 8-10 years. And when I began discussing with Scott the power of direct response marketing to his clients and prospects, Scott immediately recognized the value in this because he had already done this successfully in other businesses he had owned. So we began a direct response marketing campaign, and within his first few years in the business Scott had developed the campaign into pure art form. Working from a database of the 600 property owners he wanted to do business with, Scott began contacting each one of them 125 times throughout the year utilizing phone calls, mailing, broadcast faxes, and E-mail. And in just his fourth year in the business Scott sold more apartment buildings than any other broker in the state of Texas.

So if you’re relying right now on prospecting alone, and you’re not always getting your prospecting done, you’re costing yourself a lot of money. Begin doing direct response marketing and mail to your clients and prospects two or more times every month. Between this and doing your prospecting, you’ll be branding yourself in the minds of the people you want to work with, and they’ll begin thinking of working with you more frequently then they’ll begin thinking of working with your competitors.

——————————————————-

Tonight I’ll Be Interviewing Top Commercial Broker
Lawson Martin on a Live Teleconference Call

Tonight I’ll be interviewing Lawson Martin of Travers/Oncor International, and Lawson is one of the top tenant rep brokers in the business. His clients include AIG SunAmerica, Time Warner, Credit Suisse First Boston, EMI Music Publishing, Kaiser Permanente, Texaco, Unocal, and Warner Bros.

Lawson and I will be talking about what you need to know to keep your clients loyal to you throughout your commercial real estate brokerage career, and at the end of my interview with Lawson you can ask us any questions you want to about successfully building your commercial real estate business and taking it to the next level. For more information on this live event, click here.


Topics: Blogroll, Marketing, Prospecting | No Comments »