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Getting and Utilizing Powerful Testimonials In Your Commercial Real Estate Brokerage Business

By Jim Gillespie | November 3, 2009

Something that continually amazes me in our industry is how few commercial brokers get and utilize powerful testimonials from their previous clients, when trying to land new business with their prospects. Because when you think about it, what someone else has to say about you will oftentimes carry more weight with your prospects than what you have to say about yourself. And this makes perfect sense because people have learned to be very cautious about what salespeople say to them.

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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Topics: Marketing, Persuasion | No Comments »