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The Power of Generating Long-Term Client Loyalty in Your Commercial Real Estate Brokerage Business

By Jim Gillespie | November 9, 2011

It’s always amazed me in our industry how little attention is paid to creating ongoing client loyalty and getting constant, repeat business from one’s clients. So many brokers tell me that their training when they were new in brokerage consisted of being given a desk, a chair, and a telephone, and being told to sit down and start calling people.

With this in mind, a lot of brokers have gotten focused on continually finding new prospects to close transactions with, but no one ever told them how to cultivate their relationships with their past clients, too. Cultivating relationships like this helps you to build a solid foundation to ensure you’ll be representing your clients again on their next transactions.

Ask yourself the following questions:

1) How many people or companies have you successfully closed transactions with throughout your commercial real estate brokerage career?

2) How many of these people and companies that you’ve successfully closed transactions with, have you been in direct contact with over the past six months?

3) In now having answered these two questions, how could you be doing a better job of staying in contact with your past clients and building solid relationships with them, so that you’ll feel confident they’ll be working with you again on their next transactions?

Ideally, you want to create the feeling within your past clients that a broker-client relationship still exists between the two of you, even when these people are a long way from buying, selling, or leasing their next property. But you can’t do this if you’ve been out of contact with these people, or if you’re only contacting them with the same frequency and in the same manner as your competitors are doing it.

Here are some recommendations for improving this situation:

1) Identify the past clients who you haven’t spoken with in some time, and begin contacting them.

2) Begin socializing more often with your past clients, and taking them to lunch, dinner, and/or to special events during the year.

3) Buy your past clients gifts 2-4 times a year, and tell them how much you appreciate them working with you.

When you spend money on your past clients, socialize with them, give them gifts, and tell them how much you appreciate them working with you, you make it very difficult for them to begin working with your competitors instead of you. In addition, when you’re socializing with your past clients and spending money on them, this is the perfect opportunity for you to begin obtaining referrals from them, too.

There aren’t many commercial brokers who recognize how powerful this process is. Many brokers drop out communicating with their past clients for quite some time after they’ve closed a transaction with them, and as a result they often end up competing with all of the brokers in their territory to work with these same clients again the next time. The bond that once existed between the broker and their clients has simply disappeared through the lack of any serious, ongoing connection with them.

Don’t be one of these brokers! Cultivate your relationships with your past clients so they’ll want to work with you again on their next transactions. Get on the phone, begin calling the people you’ve been out of relationship with for awhile, and begin building stronger relationships with them. When you become an expert at doing this, and you begin doing it with all of your past clients, you’ll generate solid, repeat business from them every single year, in addition to the business you’re constantly developing with your new prospects, too.

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Keeping Your Clients Unbelievably Loyal to You

I’m inviting you to join me on my next two teleconferences for free. My upcoming teleconference in November is titled, "Keeping Your Clients Unbelievably Loyal to You", and my teleconference in December is titled, "Planning Your Commercial Real Estate Excellence for the Year". All I ask is that you pay me $19.95 to cover the shipping and handling costs for these teleconferences for the entire two months. If you’ve never been a member of my Million Dollar Commercial Real Estate Agent Inner Circle program before, and you’re a full-time commercial broker, you can join me on these two teleconferences and receive all of the audio CDs, written transcriptions, written highlights, the MP3 recordings, and a newsletter to send to your commercial real estate clients and prospects…all for just $19.95.

Click here for more information about this program and for the information about our upcoming November teleconference.

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If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching to take your commercial real estate brokerage business to the next level, click here to contact me.

"Jim has helped me to organize a game plan and work it with the tenacity that’s producing a greater number of transactions for me in my marketplace."

Scott Wilcott, CCIM
NAI Capital

Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.

 


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