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Why Mailing to Your Commercial Real Estate Clients and Prospects is So Vitally Important

By Jim Gillespie | August 21, 2012

Most commercial brokers call or visit their clients and prospects two to four times a year…at the very most. In many situations the number of contacts that a broker makes with these people may be just one to two within the year…and sometimes, in reality, it’s zero.

Keep in mind that your brokerage competitors are for the most part doing the exact same thing that you’re doing…dialing their prospects, finding out if they have any upcoming needs, and then scheduling another prospecting call for sometime in the future. With this in mind, what is it that you’re doing to differentiate yourself from all of the other brokers who are doing the exact same thing, so that you position yourself within people’s minds as the one broker they’ll definitely want to work with?

This is where mailing can really come into play, and if you do it right, you can make it both very simple and very effective for yourself for positioning you within people’s minds for doing business with them.

When you’re mailing, frequency is very important, as the more often people are receiving mail from you the more branding you’ll be accomplishing within their minds. So the frequency with which your people receive something from you in the mail is more important than the length of your mailers and the number of pages that you’re sending to them. Keeping this in mind, sending postcards to your people twice a month will be more effective than sending a 4-8 page newsletter to them once every quarter. When you’re mailing only once a quarter, that’s three full months of time between mailings where your people are very likely to have forgotten about you completely.

You ideally want your mailings to come across their desk with a frequency such that when they finally have a need to talk to a commercial real estate broker, your mailer with your name and phone number on it lands right in front of them.

In terms of what to include within your mailers, helpful information positioning you as a consultant or an advisor within their minds is a great idea. Anyone can send out just listed/just sold information, but you really want to send people information about things like important trends you’re observing within the marketplace, and what people need to know to protect themselves and successfully close their next real estate transaction.

A simple way to organize the bulk of your ongoing mailing campaign is to brainstorm about 25-40 subjects that you could write about briefly in your postcards, subjects like the difference between net and gross leases, the difference between standard and ALTA title insurance, and how to accurately measure the correct size of office and/or industrial buildings. Since this is information that isn’t likely to change, once you’ve designed your 24 postcards you can now send the exact same mailing campaign to your people every single year. It’s unlikely that people will remember that they received the exact same postcard 24 postcards earlier and one full year ago, and even if they do, the information will still serve as a good reminder to them.

If you’re prospecting your people by telephone only 2-4 times a year, and all of your competitors are doing the same thing, you’re not doing much to differentiate yourself from all of your competitors. But if you’re mailing to your people 24 times a year in addition to doing your prospecting, and you’re providing your people with solid, helpful insights within your mailers, you’re now positioning yourself within their minds far ahead of your competitors, and you’ll be in a much better position to now represent them on their next transaction.

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"My work with Jim has given me better scripting and new approaches to get more listings and exclusive right to represent agreements signed by my clients and prospects."

Mike Spedden
MacKenzie Commercial Real Estate Services

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