How much research should you do on your commercial real estate prospects before you finally pickup the phone and call them? Because there are some brokers I’ve encountered over the years, and they’re oftentimes with the larger brokerage companies, who believe that they need to spend a significant amount of time researching and learning about a company or an organization, before they ever pick up the phone and call them. But to me, this can oftentimes just be a cop out, and a way to minimize the number of calls that you’re making during every prospecting session.
It’s helpful to know more about the people who you’ll be prospecting, but not when it gets in the way of your productivity, and the number of people that you can be prospecting every hour.
When you’ve called your prospects in the past, have you ever been grilled with questions coming from them, wanting to know everything that you already know about their company? This would only happen very rarely, as normally when you prospect someone, the subject of the conversation focuses on whether or not they’re looking to buy, sell, or lease commercial real estate. So after you’ve then identified a prospect who has a potential need that you’ll want to follow-up on, this would then be the time to learn more about them, so that you can learn the bigger picture around what they do, where all of their properties or locations are, etc.
But doing detailed research on every single company you’re going to prospect, when a high percentage of those prospecting calls will not be generating any immediate new opportunities for you, is overkill.
Usually during your prospecting calls the conversation will focus on the company’s real estate needs, and not necessarily on what the company does, their product lines, how long they’ve been in business, and what their financial performance has been in recent times.
So just pickup the phone and call, and if you feel the need to learn more about them, do so after the initial conversation, when you know that you’ll be following-up on a potential new opportunity with them.