How to Successfully Cold Call in Commercial Real Estate Agency

In commercial real estate agency today, the cold calling process is critical to the market share that you require and commissions that you create.  You cannot avoid the process if you want to rise to the top of the market.

That being said, it is interesting to note that the cold calling process is something that many agents avoid with a great passion.  Call reluctance is a real problem in the industry.

Top agents that work in the industry know that you have to make the calls to get the business.  The strength and size of your database is fundamentally important to the commissions that you create.  Each day you should be phoning into your database to make contact with the right people.  You should also be creating new contacts and leads to help that database grow.

Here are some tips to help you in establishing a cold call prospecting system as part of your commercial real estate career.

1. From the very start of the process, you will have some mental hurdles to address and overcome.  Call reluctance is a big problem until such time as you see results and momentum from your efforts.  It takes about three or four weeks of hard work to break through this barrier.  Creating a habit to the call process is quite important.  Only a habit will take you through the barrier of call reluctance.
2. Determine the ideal property type and geographical area in which you should centre your prospecting efforts.  Each night you will need to do the necessary research to find new people to call the next day.  Don’t waste your precious calling time on research.  The research can be done the night before.  Keep up your momentum with calls and avoid in any distraction or diversion.  In a period of 2 or 3 hours you should be making 50 outbound calls.  You will not get through to 50 people as part of that process, but you should get through to about 20 or so people.  From that rate of connection you should create 2 meetings with people that have a genuine interest in commercial real estate agency activity.
3. Track your ratios of calls to connections, connections to meetings, and meetings to business opportunity.  The ratios are really important to keep you on track and also to show you what is working.  When something starts to get traction, you improve the process through practice.
4. Confidence and dialogue are two important parts of making the calls.  Both of those factors are personally controlled and can be improved.  What you can do here is practice your call conversations and scripts as part of rising each morning and in preparation for the working day.  Over a period of a few weeks, the call conversation and connection will significantly improve.
5. Use a database program that has significant flexibility to capture the information that you come across.  That will include a property type, location, price ranges, contact details, ongoing meetings and connection results, and future needs.  Make sure that the database program can integrate with an e-mail newsletter and also a direct mail merge.
6. Your confidence in making the calls will be significantly boosted if you choose to stand up as part of the calling process.  It is a known fact that the conversational ability of people improves greatly when you are standing on two feet and moving around.  Use this advantage to help you improve your call connections.

For an agent to be successful in commercial real estate, they need to be focused on growing their market share and their database.  Use some of these factors above to help you get the momentum and traction that you require from direct call contact.  Over time you can improve these things to a system that works for you.