How to Improve Prospecting in CRE with Technology

In the current climate of commercial real estate, prospecting is essential to generate and capture interest, create opportunities, and create a scalable funnel of sales-ready leads that brokers can nurture and eventually close deals. While every sales organization with which we’ve ever partnered is continually looking for more leads, many of today’s CRE firms are faced with growth challenges, both in identifying a clear strategy to maximize the investment in their sales team’s time, their resources and technology, and then how to consistently leverage their data and technology to build long term scalable growth potential. 

Prospecting Challenges in Commercial Real Estate

At the same time, commercial client prospecting is faced with unprecedented challenges.  The prospects themselves are exposed to overwhelming volumes of real estate information, on their phones, by email and whitepapers, to the point where a value proposition can be difficult to communicate.  Add to this an entire CRE sales lexicon of the same jargon, and ultimately most brokers and agents often sound the same. Furthermore, with the advent of all types of new valuation products built around consumers, prospects themselves are starting to see real estate itself more as a commodity than a product. Finally, modern business people are busier than at any point in history, and are harder to contact or connect with than ever before.

Establish Business Process Clarity

Whether it’s your vocation or avocation, the highest-performing organizations are built upon a foundation of clearly delineated business systems.  In commercial real estate, to survive and prosper, every brokerage has some sort of systematized competitive advantage built into the business operations of the firm.  The methods and processes can vary wildly across development and capital market shops, but every firm has a practice unique to their business that makes them efficient.  Some brokers succeed by hammering out hundreds of phone calls, while others target and nurture key relationships to get ahead. Salesforce is an incredible platform, but it is not a system; Salesforce itself is a tool- that should be aligned around a CRE brokerage’s existing systems to amplify existing efficiencies, and to identify where prospects might have slipped out of the real estate sales funnel.  

Identify Your Ideal Client Profile

Brokers spend so much time chasing business, it’s easy to forget to step back and get a 10,000 foot view of who the business is actually serving.  But knowing exactly they type of contact to prospect ultimately leads to more efficient use of time, higher closing rates, more repeat business and of course… greater profit from more closed deals. 

The first step is robust agent adoption of Salesforce, and importing as much historical data as possible onto the platform.  The more comprehensive your data set, the better of an idea of an Ideal Client Profile will be.  Think of an Ideal Client Profile as a sort of “VIP client list,” which should give the executives a better idea of the types of clients that are more profitable and easier to serve.  Once their agents turn their attention on certain clients and properties, listings and commissions suddenly become easier. Here at Union Square Consulting, we see CRE’s leading firms continually analyzing and redefining data to devote resources to better targeting and increased revenue. 

Visualize System Performance with Dashboards

After identifying your systems, its then important to be able to surface, benchmark and consume key performance indicators about the firm’s specific processes.  Regardless of your firm’s particular competitive advantage (whether it’s phone call volume or carefully cultivating a small set of key relationships), every single touchpoint can be measured, from emails to phone calls to meetings to BOVs and conversion rates for each and every step.  And to quote the old adage, “what gets measured gets done.” 

Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan

Dashboards not only allow you to benchmark performance, but also to begin to project the future expectations of performance, and strategically plan and set goals.  While out of the box dashboard components don’t have forecasting functionality built in, one simple hack is to write out the goal in the dashboard component title, subtitle or footer of the chart.  Executives, sales managers, brokers and agents can visualize their performance (or KPIs for their teams) every day, each week, month, quarter or year-end start to set growth goals. 

Block Time Every Day

Prospecting is one of the most consistently neglected part of commercial real estate. With all of the responsibilities of real estate sales and leasing, the act of actually picking up the phone or reaching out over email daily about new business often is overlooked, leading to an empty sales pipeline. Prospecting is more of a discipline than an art, which must be scheduled and executed.  Many of our most successful clients accomplish this by ensuring a sacred blocking for prospecting. Every. Single. Day. 

Data Integrity

Inaccurate, incomplete or dirty data is the greatest reason why brokers fail to leverage technology, inhibiting adoption as well as slowing overall performance of real estate firms.  Conversely, when real estate brokers have clean lists of companies contacts properties (and units), all with full and accurate information, they can work far more efficiently and productively.  Data standardization is the key to scalability, and, “...this consistency empowers greater efficiency, increased connectivity across systems and ultimately, more actionable property insights for both individuals and companies.”  Furthermore, there are many third-party data tools that can be used to cleanse and enrich data on companies, contacts and properties, such as Costar and Reonomy.

Long Live Email

FastCompany declared over a decade ago that “email is dead.” And yet, though we sing the song of the Sales Cloud, our customers spend most of their workday in their email client. And despite FastCompany’s claims, it seems like we get ten times as much email as we did in 2007. Having access to Salesforce in email then is an incredible value add.  Tools like Salesforce Inbox and Cirrus Insight enable the ability to add new companies, contacts and properties, as well as to log emails to any record, right from an email client or Gmail. Best of all, they provide additionally tracking tools like read receipts and calendar scheduling and syncing, which we see creating a huge amount of uplift in real estate salesperson efficiency.  And all of this information rolls up to managers and executives, creating a more robust and comprehensive dataset for reporting, and then opportunities for iterative optimization. 

Cross Device Compatibility

Let’s face it, successful brokers often spend (or should spend) most of the time out in the field building relationships, rather than sitting behind a desk entering data into Salesforce. However, especially for Lightning users, optimizing the user interface for mobile experience allows salespeople to log and retrieve information on the go, with virtually the same the same user experience on every single different type of device, allowing them to work productively and prospect in the field. 

CTI Integrations

In addition to tracking emails, tracking phone calls is just as important in commercial real estate. Despite the focus on omnichannel marketing over the past few years, studies suggest that a large portion of customers still prefer to actually do business over the phone. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) software connects phone services to the cloud, recording calls, automating messaging and offering huge efficiency-boosting tools like click-to-dial, where prospect lists can be uploaded from Salesforce lists, and automatically dial prospects (sometimes multiple prospects at a time) back to back until a connection is made.

Sales Cadence Solutions

Salesforce is incredible at organizing information, but the data itself doesn’t always lend itself to an intuitive sales flow, or the most effective high velocity sales process.  And while brokers try to follow up multiple times with prospects, organizing call lists and then prioritizing them can be incredibly overwhelming, not to mention time consuming. Sales Cadence tools like Salesloft and Outreach automate much of the prospecting strategy, and integrate with Salesforce with Contact lists or reports easily imported in pre-planned cadences or sequences, with a set of tasks and wait-periods, based on best practices or individualized sales paths. Beyond email and phone outreach, everything ranging from text messages to Linkedin outreach can be incorporated into a natural sale progression, with every interaction logged and stored in Salesforce. Commercial real estate brokers simply push “play,” and a schedule of action items and templates are ready to go! 

Tracking Progress 

Finally, prospecting is never truly done… After you have a plan to enrich and segment your data, and develop a process and system for follow-up, it’s time to measure success. KPI’s should continually be measured and contrasted. The more Salesforce becomes a single source of truth, your data will start to accumulate, building a virtuous circle of sales efficiency, productivity and success.