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Your First Important Goal When Doing Your Commercial Real Estate Telephone Prospecting

By Jim Gillespie | May 26, 2010

When you’re doing your telephone prospecting, there are certain goals that you want to accomplish. And these goals for the most part revolve around the information that you want to obtain from the person you’re calling on the telephone. If they may be looking to get involved in a real estate transaction, you’ll definitely want to know about it. And if they’re not looking to get involved in a transaction right now, you’ll want to get an idea of when they may be looking to get involved in one in the future.

With this in mind, what you say when you’re initiating your prospecting conversation is extremely important in laying the best foundation for how successful your prospecting call will be, and many agents are really missing out on understanding this. Many agents are focused on getting information as quickly as possible from the person on the other end of the phone, and because of this they don’t realize how easily they can be causing the other person to just want to end the conversation.

Here’s the beginning of a script a broker recently told me had been recommended to them for doing their telephone prospecting:

"Hi, this is Bob Byers with Bob Byers Real Estate. When is your lease expiring?"

The problem with opening a prospecting call like this is it’s asking the person for information they most likely consider to be private, while there’s been no rapport and no prior relationship established with them. This would be similar to a residential agent calling you on the telephone and immediately asking you, "How much equity do you now have in your home?" This just isn’t the kind of information you immediately want to share with someone you don’t really know at all.

When you’re initiating your prospecting conversation, your first important goal is to immediately get your prospect interested in getting into a conversation with you. This gets you out of the zone where you’re hurriedly trying to get information from them, and they’re wishing they hadn’t picked up the phone to talk to you when you called them.

With this in mind, here are two ways that you can begin your conversations that have a higher probability of getting your prospects interested in talking with you:

1) "Hi, this is Jim Gillespie with Capital Business Properties. There’s a new property that’s just come on the market that I think will give you an excellent idea of what your building is worth in today’s market. Would you be interested in learning about it?" 

2) "Hi, this is Jim Gillespie with Capital Business Properties. I’ve just published a report showing what all the properties in your area have sold and leased for within the past six months. Would you be interested in receiving this report in the mail from me for free?"

When you’re initiating your prospecting calls, you need to immediately answer the "What’s in it for me?" and "Why should I be talking with you?" questions that are going through your prospect’s mind, and these two approaches will help to address answering these questions for them. And when your prospect gets that you’re trying to provide them with something that could be of value to them, they’re more likely to get more interested in talking with you, especially when they decide to take you up on what you’ve offered them.

Once they accept what you’ve offered them, the law of reciprocity then kicks in. And now since you’ve done something nice for them, they’re more likely to stick around and answer the questions that you want them to answer.

With everything that I’ve just discussed in mind, if you’re interested in my prospecting scripts for commercial brokers, please click here.

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Dorin Realty

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