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

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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

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Earlier this year during my monthly Million Dollar Commercial Real Estate Agent Inner Circle Teleconference, I interviewed a broker who clearly recognized a huge opportunity and has taken advantage of it. While finding investors here in the USA who are excited about buying commercial property isn’t easy right now, this broker recognized the opportunity that was awaiting her in working with international investors. You see, while things aren’t looking so great in commercial real estate to those of us who live here in the USA right now, to the international investor our properties are looking better than those in most every other country around the world. This is because so many other countries have experienced much worse economic downturns than what we’ve been experiencing here. So while many investors here in the USA have been thinking, "I’m going to wait and see what will happen with this real estate market", there are international investors who are thinking, "I need to buy more real estate in the USA right now."

And with this in mind, the broker I interviewed has been going to Canada, booking herself to speak in front of commercial real estate investment audiences, and as a result her business has completely exploded! At a recent event in Canada she returned home with leads from more than 300 real estate investors, people interested in buying commercial real estate here in the USA right now…and when I interviewed her she had the incredible total of 48 sale transactions going on! And when I asked her, "So is it safe to say that there’s a recession going on but you’ve decided not to participate in it?" She responded by saying, "As far as I’m concerned, there is no recession." And she’s now become so successful at doing this that she’s moving into building relationships and closing transactions with investors located in both Japan and Germany, too.

So if you’re having difficulty finding investors who are ready to buy commercial real estate right now, consider going after investors who are located outside of the United States. In many cases they’ll be more knowledgeable about how solid USA real estate is as compared with real estate in many other parts of the world, and they’re probably more likely to take action now instead of waiting to see where this real estate market will be one year from now.

And if you’re looking for a place to get started, take a look at the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate.

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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.

"Jim’s coaching and training has assisted our company in landing millions of dollars of new real estate business."

Pat Hall
Told Partners

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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

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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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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.

"With Jim’s coaching I landed $1.7 million in new business in my first eight weeks!"

Mark Whitman
Dorin Realty

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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

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To maximize the probability of both recognizing and creating these opportunities, I recommend that you start taking your past clients out to lunch on a regular basis if you’re not already doing so. Even though they may have mentioned that they’re not looking to do anything right now, the environment you can create over lunch between the two of you can generate creative thinking that can lead to new brokerage transactions for you. And this environment isn’t easy to create when the client is talking to you on the phone in their office for just 3-5 minutes, while other people are also trying to get their attention.

When you’re having lunch, relaxing, and socializing together, the client may mention that they could really use an additional 50,000 square feet of space, but that they don’t want to buy any additional properties right now. And in the process you may remember that the client has 200,000 square feet of land in the same area that’s just sitting vacant right now. So you could then propose 1) Selling half of the land and utilizing the money to help fund the construction of a new 50,000 square-foot building for the client on the remaining land, or 2) Putting a build-to-suit opportunity on the market for 50,000 square feet, and then when the new company has been secured for the build-to-suit opportunity, building 100,000 square feet of building in total, with your client occupying the remaining 50,000 square feet of building themselves. This would then in addition give your client the ability to expand into the adjacent 50,000 square feet sometime down the road.

These are the kind of ideas that can be generated when you’re socializing with your clients over lunch, no matter what area of commercial real estate brokerage you’re specializing in. But you oftentimes must create this kind of environment to recognize these kinds of opportunities.

So if you’re not taking your past clients out to lunch right now to create the kind of environment for these conversations to take place, I recommend that you begin doing so.

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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.

You can listen to the presentation on your own, but I’ve really designed it to be played on speakerphone during one of your brokerage company’s upcoming sales meetings. Just put the conference room telephone on speakerphone, dial 1-507-726-3727, and the presentation will then begin playing for all of the brokers in your office.

And if you’re not the manager of your office, please forward this onto your manager and recommend that they play the presentation during your office’s next sales meeting.

While many commercial brokers have begun to utilize online social networking, only a small percentage of them have actually made any money in doing so. So for most commercial brokers the payoff in terms of commissions earned vs. time invested really hasn’t been there for them. But this doesn’t mean that it all couldn’t change over the coming years.

In the early 1990s, the idea of using the Internet to market oneself and one’s commercial listings hadn’t really gone mainstream. Heck, back in 1990 I had my own desktop PC and I was utilizing ACT! contact management software for my own commercial real estate brokerage business. And other brokers would tell me that keeping stacks of business cards with rubber bands around them was working just fine for them.

They just didn’t see what was coming.

And now that we’ve experienced how much the Internet has changed commercial real estate brokerage over the years, the question then becomes, "Will online social networking finally catch fire in commercial real estate brokerage, much like the use of the Internet finally did?" And the only truthful answer I can really give to that question is, "We’re going to have to wait and see."

But I can almost guarantee you that over the next two years in your commercial brokerage business, you’ll make much more money from the time you spend prospecting, marketing yourself, and networking by other means than through online social networking. But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t engage in online social networking at all. Because if it really does catch fire over the coming years, you’ll want to be fully on board with it instead of beginning to start from scratch when that time finally gets here.

And in trying to determine whether or not online social networking will catch fire within commercial real estate brokerage, meaning whether or not it will begin making commercial brokers a lot of money, one arena we can look to in determining this is the residential real estate brokerage arena. Because as most of us already know, residential agents have been far ahead of commercial agents in terms of implementing new technology into their businesses. I mean, here we are at the end of 2009 and I estimate that less than 10% of all commercial brokers even have their own standalone commercial agent Web site up on the Internet.

But even on the residential side of the business, online social networking isn’t making the majority of residential agents a lot of money. And as one top Internet marketing expert for residential agents said to me, "Online social networking can be like a bright, shiny object distracting residential agents. It’s just one approach that should be utilized along with many other marketing approaches for them, and the truth is that there are other marketing approaches that are much more effective for them."

In addition, there’s another factor we have to consider in terms of where online social networking could be headed to in commercial real estate brokerage. I heard a future trends expert say when addressing a real estate audience, "We’re now entering the time when the people from Generation X are beginning to hold important decision-making positions within the business world. This is the first generation of people who were raised on video games, and when they want something they’re not accustomed to waiting for it. So when they look to hire a real estate broker, they won’t necessarily take the time to interview different brokers. They’ll gravitate towards hiring the first broker who responds to them."

And with this in mind, since the people in Generation X have grown up with both the computer and the Internet being a more normal part of their everyday lives, online social networking may become deeply ingrained in them by the time they begin making commercial real estate decisions. So while today’s commercial real estate decision makers may tend to be in their mid-40s to late-60s, the next generation will slowly be moving in. And if they’re dedicated to online social networking, you’ll want to be involved in it, too.

So while right now it’s very rare to see commercial brokers making very much money through online social networking, it’s possible that this could all be changing over the coming years.

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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 has helped my team, my company, and my development business to perform at substantially higher levels."

D. Alex Rhoten
Coldwell Banker Commercial

Click here to see more testimonials from my coaching clients.