This may best be illustrated by mentioning the shift in how I’ve observed hotels asking me for my own E-mail address when I’m making reservations with them. It used to be that years ago when I had just completed confirming my reservation with them on the telephone, at the very end of the conversation they’d ask me, "Do you have an E-mail address you’d like to share with us?"

"No!" I’d say back to them, having these visions of all of the E-mails I might begin receiving from them, as well as all of the E-mails I’d begin receiving from all of the companies they’d be sharing my E-mail address with, too.

But in recent years hotels have made a shift in the scripting they’re using when asking me for my E-mail address, which has me now want to actually give them my E-mail address instead.

At the end of my telephone conversation with them, they’re now asking me something very similar to, "Would you like to receive a confirmation of your hotel reservation by E-mail?" And that’s definitely something that I want to receive from them! I want to have something I can print and have in my hands, so that when I check into the hotel, if they can’t find my reservation, I have the reservation right there on paper for them.

So similarly, when you ask for the E-mail addresses of your clients and prospects, you want to be scripting your question so they feel that they want to give their E-mail address to you. Say something similar to, "I publish an E-newsletter keeping owners like you informed on important trends affecting the value of your property. Is this something you’d like to receive from me?"

This is much more powerful than asking something like, "What’s your E-mail address?"…or… "Can I have your E-mail address?", which could have them wondering exactly what you’re going to be doing with their E-mail address once you get it.

When you have the right scripting for many different situations in sales, your life becomes so much easier as a salesperson. So when you begin asking for people’s E-mail addresses in the way that has them become more interested in giving them to you, you’ll start building a more powerful, accurate E-mail database for your brokerage business.

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Click here for my commercial broker prospecting scripts that tell you exactly what to say to the receptionist, to the decision maker, and how to leave powerful voicemail messages that get more clients and prospects calling you back.

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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 send me an E-mail.

"After 20 years in real estate I needed to revive my business and look at new options and ideas. Together Jim and I evaluated my entire business plan, designed new strategies, and implemented a game plan that’s now making more money for both me and my team."

Bill Ukropina
Coldwell Banker Commercial

Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.

When the mail and E-mail you’re sending to your clients and prospects focuses mainly on what properties are currently available on the market, you’re not really doing much to stand out from your competitors. Some or many of your competitors will be sending out very similar information, so why should any of your clients and prospects think that this information makes you stand out as the one broker they should be working with? In an industry where you want to be differentiating yourself from your competitors, you may be looking very similar to them if this is the kind of information you’re sending out to your people.

While sending out information about what’s currently available on the market can definitely be appropriate at times, what your clients and prospects are really looking for is a broker who tells them the market trends, where the market is headed, and important information about what’s happening in commercial real estate that they’ll want to know about. In addition, they’ll want you to be a broker who they feel confident will protect their own best interests, and a broker who projects certainty in his or her own opinions.

And you can’t transmit this image to people when you’re just mailing and E-mailing them information on which properties are currently on the market, or which properties have just leased or sold. This is because when doing so you’re simply relaying information that’s easily available to your people…something any broker in your market can do…and many brokers in your market are probably already doing this right now, too.

So you need to be different in order to position yourself in the minds of the people you want to be doing business with, before they become ready to begin working on their next real estate transaction.

And it’s definitely not easy to fully differentiate yourself during your prospecting calls either, as oftentimes prospecting calls are just for a brief, limited amount of time. But you can do a solid job of differentiating yourself through what you’re sending your people by mail and E-mail. (And if you’re interested in sending the newsletter I’ve created for commercial brokers to send to their clients and prospects every month, click here for more information on the newsletter.)

So send articles, a newsletter, and/or postcards showing people that you know the important trends and events impacting your marketplace. When you do so people will begin to feel that you really know what’s going on, and that you have the knowledge, ability, charisma, and character for them to want you to guide them all the way through the closing of their next real estate transaction.

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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 send me an E-mail.

"My work with Jim is making me more effective at finding new business with the kind of companies I want to work with."

Larry Crumbley, SIOR, CCIM
Fickling & Company

Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.

As commercial brokers, we oftentimes don’t have the luxury of having ongoing transactions throughout the year with our past clients, particularly when the clients normally close only one real estate transaction every 3-5 years or more. On the other side of the coin, these same clients will be interacting with their attorneys and CPAs on an ongoing basis throughout the year, and unless those professionals make a major mistake, they’ll most likely continue doing business with their clients on an ongoing basis year-after-year.

So your job as a commercial real estate broker, if you want to generate repeat business from your past clients, is to create the feeling within them that you’re always their commercial real estate broker, even when they don’t currently have a commercial real estate need.

And thinking that you can accomplish this by dropping out or reducing your communication with them, while your competitors continue on communicating with them, is hugely unrealistic. But it’s where many commercial brokers continue on playing the game.

1) Socialize with your past clients. Take them to lunch or to events throughout the year, and tell them how much you appreciate their business. This will help to create the feeling that you’re more of a friend to them, and it’s very difficult for people to ever stop doing business with their friends.

2) Give gifts to your past clients 2-4 times a year. Giving gifts to your clients shows your heartfelt appreciation for the business they bring to you, and it creates the feeling within them that there’s an ongoing business relationship with you during the year. In addition, it’s very difficult for people to ever work with another broker when you’ve constantly been giving them gifts over the years.

3) Call them on a regular basis. Continue calling your people throughout the year, beginning soon after you’ve closed your most recent transaction with them. Check in with them, see how they’re doing, and see if there’s any additional service you can provide for them. They’ll appreciate you showing that you care about them.

4) Mail to them on a regular basis. Send them thank you notes, greeting cards, and/or a newsletter throughout the year. Even if you just sent them a greeting card or a personal note once every quarter, this will help to build and maintain a solid relationship with them. But if you also mail to them once or twice a month, providing them with important information they’ll want to know about on what’s going on in your territory, you’ll position yourself within their minds at a much deeper level.

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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 send me an E-mail.

"Within 7 weeks after beginning my work with Jim I landed new business worth over $500,000.00 in commissions to me!"

Mike Giuliano
Lee & Associates

Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.

1. Finding the people you want to work with who will be closing commercial real estate transactions

2. Getting these people to work with you exclusively

This presupposes that you already have both the knowledge and the ability to successfully initiate, negotiate, and close commercial real estate transactions from beginning to end.

So if you’re having difficulty developing more business for yourself, the true problem will most likely lie within one or both of these arenas. You’re either not finding enough prospects, you’re not getting your prospects to work with you exclusively, or both of these.

Finding more prospects has to do primarily with both your prospecting and your marketing, while at the same time today’s economy is having its own impact, too. But let’s focus here on what you actually have control over, and that’s doing your best and doing everything you can to find the greatest number of prospects imaginable.

With this in mind, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Are you prospecting 10-12 hours or more every week?

The more you prospect, the more prospects you’re going to find. And if you’re not finding enough prospects to work with, while not prospecting at least 10-12 hours a week, you really need to just get this amount of prospecting done with no excuses.

2. Are you mailing to your clients and prospects two or more times every month, providing them with important trends, information, and observations on the marketplace they’ll want to know about?

I know that the money for spending on marketing may not be flowing as easily as it was before, but the best marketer I know of in commercial real estate brokerage is still spending his normal $100,000.00 a year on marketing, even though his business is down by 30%.

In addition, there’s only one residential agent who’s mailing to me at my home right now, and it’s no surprise that he’s got the only two listings on my block. In fact, he’s the only agent in my neighborhood whose name even comes to mind right now, and this is what you can accomplish in people’s minds by mailing, too.

One commercial real estate broker who I’ve coached put together a system of prospecting, mailing, faxing, and E-mailing all of his clients and prospects 105 times a year, and it’s no surprise that he soon became the #1 multi-family broker within his state. He even bought his own private airplane to fly his clients and prospects around in to look at properties.

Marketing isn’t just an expense. The returns in commissions will come back to you many times over, even in this economy.

3. Are you constantly improving your presentation skills?

Your presentation skills get your prospects to work with you exclusively, or they get them to work with your competitors instead of you. And unfortunately so little time is spent working on presentation skills within our industry. With this in mind I recommend that you videotape your listing presentation, or your exclusive right to represent a buyer or lessee presentation, and have someone role play with you as the decision maker. Go through your presentation as you normally would from beginning to end, then leave the camera running and get the person’s feedback at the end of the presentation. You’ll be amazed at what you’ll discover, and this one process alone can greatly assist you in landing a higher percentage of exclusives in the future.

If you’re doing something in your presentation that’s interfering with landing more exclusives, wouldn’t you want to find out about this, make the correction, and successfully land more business because of this? I had one coaching client do this process and he found that he was constantly tapping his fingers on the decision maker’s desk, something he had been completely unaware of, but something he realized had probably been a huge distraction to every single decision maker he had made presentations to.

Your success in this business comes down to effectively doing activities like the ones I’ve been describing, and the better you become at mastering these activities, the more successful you’re going to be in your brokerage business.

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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 send me an E-mail.

"Just one marketing idea Jim gave me produced $14,500,000.00 in new listings for me. His coaching program really works!"

Mark Groves
Marcus & Millichap

Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.

1) Include Testimonial Letters

Including testimonials from your clients in your presentation packages makes a very powerful statement to all the people you want to do business with. Because when they’re interacting with salespeople, most people are cautious about believing everything that they’re told. This is just human nature from our own past experiences in dealing with salespeople. But when you’ve got 10-40 testimonial letters included within your presentation packages, now your people are reading what others have had to say about their own experience of working with you. And the more testimonial letters that you include in your presentation packages, the more this communicates to your prospects why they should be working with you instead of your competition.

2) Include Articles That You’ve Written

And if you’ve never written articles before, that’s OK. You can begin writing them right now. And if you’re not currently publishing, mailing, or E-mailing your articles to the people you want to do business with, you can begin writing them specifically for the purpose of including them in your presentation packages. But I recommend that you mail and E-mail them to your people also!

When people read articles with you speaking to them as the expert, and you’re advising them on the important things they’ll want to know about commercial real estate, you’ll begin seeming more like the broker they should be doing business with. Your competitors are most likely not writing any articles, and when people write articles they’re perceived as being the expert within their industry–because experts within an industry are the ones writing the articles. And let’s face it…in commercial real estate, when people are making one of the most important financial decisions of their lives, they want to be working with the person who they feel is the expert.

So by including many testimonial letters and articles you’ve written within your presentation packages, you create the feeling within others that you’re someone they should be working with. And creating this feeling within others will definitely lead to you getting more brokerage business.

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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 send me an E-mail.

"After just 4 weeks of working with Jim, my team has developed more new business than we have in the past 6 months."

Mica Berg
NAI Las Vegas

Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.

1) Unlimited Selling Power: How to Master Hypnotic Selling Skills by Donald Moine and Kenneth Lloyd

This book does a solid job of showing you the language patterns that effective salespeople utilize to move their clients and prospects towards the sale, and you’re given examples of the language patterns that less effective salespeople will often utilize, too.

2) The Psychology of Persuasion: How to Persuade Others to Your Way of Thinking by Kevin Hogan

I recommend reading Unlimited Selling Power before reading Kevin Hogan’s book, because it will give you a solid foundation for the detailed persuasion techniques described in Hogan’s book. These techniques and approaches are powerful and will spin your head at times when trying to understand them for the very first time. But I recommend reading this book if you truly want to become a master of persuasion.

3) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

This book is one of the most acclaimed books ever for understanding what motivates people, how to influence people with integrity, and how to recognize more often when you’re being influenced by others yourself.

Take a look at people’s ratings of these books and what readers have had to say about them on sites like www.Amazon.com, and you’ll understand even more why I’m recommending these books to you.

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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 send me an E-mail.

"We own a commercial brokerage company, a real estate development company, and a property management company. With Jim’s help we’ve now substantially reduced our overhead, and have implemented a marketing approach that’s bringing us more quality transactions than we ever would have imagined."

Jeffrey Weitz & Matt Schweitzer
North Rim Partners

Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.

With this in mind, here’s a simple approach that you and/or your team can utilize that can have more owners feel like moving forward with you.

1) Buy the domain name for the address of the owner’s property and tell the owner that you’ve purchased the domain name.

During your listing presentation you could say something similar to, "We want to get busy marketing your property as soon as possible, so we’ve bought the domain name ‘500MainStreet.com’. We want the entire commercial real estate world to know that your property at 500 Main Street is now on the market and available for sale, and this will help to get the word out to everyone in commercial real estate about it."

2) Create a simple Web site for the property at the domain name you’ve already purchased, and show the Web site to the owner during your listing presentation.

The combination of you owning the domain name with the address of their property, and already having a Web site for their property online at that exact domain name, can help them to feel that they’re already moving forward with you. And if you don’t know of someone who can create a simple Web site for you very inexpensively, you can definitely find someone at www.Elance.com.

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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 send me an E-mail.

"After just weeks of working with Jim I’m getting much more done now with far greater ease, and he has my agents completely on fire and much more passionate about their business!"

Mike Spears, SIOR
The National Realty Group

Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.

As a commercial real estate broker, sometimes it’s not easy differentiating yourself from all of the other brokers. And part of the reason for this is that oftentimes no one has ever really taught you how to do this. But if you just add several simple approaches within your presentations, you’ll find yourself standing out from your competitors much more often, and landing a larger percentage of the business for yourself.

With this in mind, getting and utilizing testimonials from your previous clients can really help you to differentiate yourself. When a prospect is hearing claims from your competitors about what these brokers are going to do for them, and those claims sound very similar to what you’ve been telling the prospect, and you then provide the prospect with 10-40 testimonial letters from your previous clients along with your presentation package, this can definitely help to differentiate you in the mind of the prospect. The idea being, "If all of these clients had such great things to say about this broker after working with them, I’ll probably have great things to say about this broker after I work with them, too."

So if you don’t have 10-40 testimonial letters right now from previous clients to include in all of your presentation packages, you’ll want to begin getting these testimonial letters from your clients. Because these letters can be very powerful for you to utilize throughout the rest of your career.

The best time to get these testimonial letters is right after you’ve closed a transaction with someone, when they’re feeling great about all that you’ve just done to assist them in closing the transaction. And even if it’s been awhile since you closed a transaction with a given client, you can still contact them to get testimonials letters from them.

You can contact them and say something similar to, "Stan, I really enjoyed working with you on the transaction that we closed together. And something I’d like to do with your approval is get a testimonial letter from you. And I want to make this really easy for you, too. So what I’d like to do is write a testimonial that I believe covers what we both experienced in working together, and have you take a look at it and then approve it. And if the testimonial works for you then you can copy and paste it onto your stationery, sign it, and then I can pick it up from your office. Does this sound like something that will definitely work for you?"

So all you’ll then need to do is begin gathering these testimonial letters from your previous clients, add new testimonial letters from the clients you’ll close transactions with in the future, and begin including all of these testimonial letters in the presentation packages you’ll be giving to the people you’ll want to do business with in the future.

I certainly know that for me 10-40 good testimonial letters in a presentation package given to me by a residential agent, would go a long way towards having me become interested in working with them. And I know that the same will apply to you, too, with all of the prospects you’ll want to begin working with in your commercial real estate brokerage business.

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Click here for my downloadable E-book with prospecting scripts for commercial brokers, and my live audio interviews with top commercial real estate agents.

In short, the more your clients and prospects trust you, the more easily you’ll be able to persuade them. Because these people all need your guidance, and when they know they can trust you they’ll relax more and let you guide them all the way through their next real estate transaction.

And there’s no more important time for building the effective foundation for persuasion than in the very beginning of your relationship with someone. Because it’s this first impression and their early impressions that have people get a feeling of whether or not they can trust you, and whether or not they want to do business with you.

With this in mind, here are three important questions to be asking yourself to determine whether or not you’re doing your best to lay the proper foundation for doing more business with your clients and prospects:

1) Are you well-dressed…at least to the level of the top commercial brokers in your marketplace?

Because if you’re not, I can almost guarantee that it’s costing you money. First impressions are extremely important, and if your prospects are getting better first impressions from your competitors than they are from you, you’re going to be losing business to your competitors.

This may sound like a simple subject that you’ve probably heard about before, but it’s an extremely important one. How you look, act, and sound to people creates a feeling within them about whether or not they’ll want to do business with you. So you want to make sure you’re dressed in a manner that will have your people have an even better impression of you than they do of your competitors.

And as long as we’re talking about creating good first impressions, when I first began my full-time brokerage career right out of college back in 1980, I was driving a high-performance Ford Mustang that I absolutely loved. But as much as I loved that car, I couldn’t continue driving it in my brokerage business and pretend that it wasn’t hurting my success, and one of my first prospects was direct enough to point this out to me. So I bought a more conservative luxury car, a Cadillac Seville, but still continued to drive my Mustang every waking moment when I wasn’t working.

You have to keep in mind that your clients and prospects are going to be making one of the most important financial decisions of their lives in their next real estate transaction, so you want the clothes that you wear and the car that you drive to reflect that you’re someone who has the success and experience to expertly guide them along the way in this next transaction. I think most of us, if we were to interview an investment expert for the first time and saw that they were driving a small, inexpensive economy car, we might wonder if they really had the level of financial success to guide us to where we wanted to be ourselves financially. So keep in mind that your commercial real estate prospects could easily be thinking like this, too.

2) Do you come across as being a true expert at what you do in commercial real estate brokerage?

Dressing the part and driving the right car are one thing, but you need to also be congruent with the image you’re creating and be able to talk intelligently about what’s happening in your marketplace. And you need to do it with a presentation style that’s engaging to your people, too.

WARNING: Avoid using jargon terms that you’ve learned in commercial real estate brokerage. Any terms like BOV, BPO, PTR, LTV, COLA, and C-Suite. And if you don’t know what some of these terms I’ve just mentioned mean, you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about here. When brokers throw out jargon terms like those, they make their prospects feel like they should already know what those terms mean. And when the prospect doesn’t know what those terms mean they feel stupid…and the last thing you want to have happen when trying to build a relationship with someone, is to have them feel stupid whenever they’re around you.

3) Do you convey to your clients and prospects that what you stand for is serving their own best interests at all times, far above and beyond the importance of you earning a commission?

Because if you don’t convey this your clients and prospects will most likely end up working with one of your competitors instead of you. And they’ll never tell you that it was because they didn’t trust you either. There are a lot of commercial brokers out there who think that they’re so very smooth with their presentation style, and that their clients and prospects will never know that they’re willing to bend corners when it comes to them getting paid a commission.

Don’t be one of them.

The people you’re doing business with have gotten to where they are in life because they’re smart, and along with that intelligence usually comes a well-developed sense of intuition.

The crazy thing about this business is that the more that you take care of your people and the more they get that you’re about serving their own best interests, the more they’ll want to work with you, and the more they’ll refer you to other people they know that you can work with, too.

I mean, wouldn’t you want to work with a salesperson who made you feel that way? And wouldn’t you probably be loyal to them and refer other people to work with them, too?

So when you create the feeling of trust within people, they’re more likely to relax and let you guide them more easily through their next commercial real estate transaction. And that’s one of the most effective forms of persuasion that any salesperson could ever want to achieve.

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If you want to learn more about persuading your clients and prospects, my next Million Dollar Commercial Real Estate Agent Inner Circle Teleconference call is titled "Mastering Your Power Persuasion Skills". And in terms of my expertise in this arena, the title of my 210-page dissertation for my Ph.D. degree was "Utilizing Rapport, NLP, and the Hypnotic Language Patterns of Milton H. Erickson in Commercial/Industrial Real Estate Sales and Leasing". If you’d like to learn how to more effectively persuade your commercial real estate clients and prospects to move forward and take action with you, and learn how to more effectively overcome all their objections, click here for more information on this teleconference.