The wholly trinity of prospecting in commercial real estate.

CRE Success Principle: Most agents give up too early and mistake minimal effort for follow-up. Big opportunities are uncovered through multiple, varied touchpoints until you earn the right to a conversation.

In commercial real estate, a strong pipeline is built long before listings are won and deals are negotiated. It starts with prospecting, and more specifically, how well you execute it.

Over the years, I have seen that the most effective prospectors all follow the same three principles: consistency, persistence, and proactivity.

Consistency Builds Momentum

Prospecting works best when it is scheduled daily. When it lives in your calendar, it becomes a priority rather than an afterthought. Daily prospecting builds habits, and habits reduce friction. If you are too busy to prospect, it is often a sign that priorities need to be reset. Stop prospecting, and you start creating holes in your future pipeline.

Persistence Creates Opportunity

One call or one email is not prospecting. It is a single attempt. Effective prospecting requires follow-up. Staying persistent does not mean being a nuisance. It means believing that speaking with you could be valuable for the other person and being willing to earn that conversation over time.

Proactivity Gives You Control

Inbound inquiry has its place, but proactive outreach puts you in control of who you speak to. Prospecting is not about pitching or closing deals. It is about listening, learning, and setting up the next conversation. When prospects talk more than you do, you are doing it right.

If you want more listings and a healthier pipeline, these three principles must be non-negotiable.

I break this down in more detail in episode 256 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. Listen to the full episode to strengthen your prospecting foundations and future-proof your pipeline.

Episode transcript:

It is time to talk about the Holy Trinity.

The Holy Trinity of prospecting, the three most important principles of commercial real estate prospecting.

This is episode 256 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name’s Darren Krakowiak. I’m your host here to help you lead better, grow faster, and stress less.

We’re here to kick off the first in a four-part series. We’re covering pipeline prospecting and production power. That is P-P and P-P. Yeah. You know me.

Alright. Today we’re unpacking the three-part prospecting model that underpins every strong pipeline in commercial real estate.

If you want more listings and more deals in 2026, this is where it all starts.

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Today’s episode is all about prospecting. Before we get into talking about those three key principles of prospecting, and I hope you don’t mind that I said Holy Trinity, I’m not trying to be blasphemous.

Let’s say I’m using the word holy as in whole. So W-H-O-L-L-Y.

If you’d like to know the 26 principles of prospecting that I previously shared in the A to Z of commercial real estate prospecting, you can grab that free resource at cresuccess.co/abc

Let me share with you right now those three key principles of prospecting.

It’s consistent, persistent, and proactive.

Prospecting was the topic in our monthly sessions within CRE Success membership in January, this month in 2022.

As part of the workshop that we did for members on multi-pronged prospecting, we also talked a lot about how you can speak to prospects in a way that resonates more with them by being relevant and talking about yourself less.

Before we got into all of that skills training, we did a recap on those three principles.

I thought that would make a really great episode for a podcast, so that’s what I am going to be covering today.

So let’s get right into it.

Consistent. What does it mean to be consistent with your prospecting?

I think the best way that you could be consistent with any activity is to schedule it every day.

When it’s on your calendar every day, that’s sending you the message that it’s something that matters, that it’s important, and it’s more likely to get done.

Once you do it every day for a period of one to three months, it’s more likely to become a habit that is a lot less difficult to actually execute on every single day.

So, start prospecting via your calendar telling you to prospect because it’s in there every day.
That’s the biggest tip I want to give you in terms of being consistent with it.

If you find that you’re too busy for prospecting, it might be that your priorities are a little bit upside down.

Or maybe there are things in terms of efficiency and effectiveness that you’re spending too much time on that aren’t as important as bringing in new leads to the business.

Because even if you’ve had a good day, a good week, or a good month, if you are busy right now, the problem with being too busy to prospect is that once that work is done, you won’t have much more work to do.

Unless you’re not relying at all on prospecting and you’ve got a huge flow of inbound leads, but let’s say that’s not the case for you.

If you stop prospecting, you’re creating holes in your future pipeline. You’re creating problems for your future self. It can negatively impact your ability to continue performing.

Don’t be too busy to prospect. Rather make sure that you allow the time for prospecting every day because you recognize how important it is to your overall performance now and into the future.

When it comes to prospecting activity, you don’t have to be contacting new people every day.

One thing that I would include under the umbrella of prospecting is contacting existing contacts and contacting existing clients.

In fact, I think this is a good way to start prospecting if you are one of the people that can feel a little bit disheartened when you start prospecting by not being able to get through to people by hearing the word no.

If you kick off your prospecting with one or two warmer calls, you can get yourself into the rhythm to not have somebody tell you to rack off by actually having a nice conversation with a person that can just get you in a good mood and give you the confidence to keep going with maybe some calls that aren't as warm.

Prospecting includes checking in with people you’ve already spoken to before and canvassing for any new needs they may have.

So first of all, with prospecting, we want to be consistent.

The next part is to be persistent.

One phone call, one email, one direct message does not mean an opportunity has been effectively prospected.

There needs to be persistence. We need to be willing to follow up.

When I used to lead teams, I would ask team members about certain opportunities we were chasing.

I’d say, “What’s going on with A, B, C company?”

Sometimes I’d be told, “They’re not interested,” or “We can’t get them.”

And I’d ask, “What happened?”

Invariably, I’d be told, “We emailed them and we called them.” That was it.

Sometimes it was just, “We emailed them.”

That’s not enough. We need to be willing to work a little bit harder than just making contact one or two times before we are willing to give up on being able to get through to people.

 We need to be persistent. We need to be willing to follow up.

 There is a line between being persistent and being a pain in the neck, but certainly that line is not crossed after trying one or two times.

The research shows that you need to make multiple attempts just to get on someone’s radar, let alone to be able to get the opportunity to speak to them.

One way to speak to people more quickly is through multi-pronged prospecting.

For example, you call somebody and they don’t pick up the phone. And there's an opportunity to leave a message on their voicemail, then you leave a voicemail.

You've just gotten in a couple more touch points and the more touch points that you can get in in quick succession, the closer you are getting to actually connecting with the person and just getting on their radar and for them to be familiar with who you are.

And maybe even if you've got a good short message to leave with them, a little bit curious about what it is that you can offer and more likely to speak to you when you do next, try and contact them.

So, persistence, not just once — we need to keep going.

I think some people can feel a little bit nervous about following up with people. They can feel maybe I am being a pain.

But if you have confidence in what it is that you've got to offer, if you believe that them speaking to you is going to be valuable for them, then I think that there's an opportunity to just shift that idea from being what's in it for me?  I'm being a pain in the neck, trying to get something from somebody to actually it being a good opportunity for that person to speak to you.

 So, the third element of prospecting is for us to be proactive.

And a couple of things I want to say here. One is that: some people can fall into the trap of being really active on social media, and they see some progress through this new channel that they've created.

They know that it's leveraged as well. So, you make a post and a few people see it, and maybe occasionally someone contacts you and you get an inbound inquiry.

The same thing can happen from signboards who've got a lot of signboards around that sometimes that can attract inquiry.

But the thing about inbound inquiry is that it is not really vetted. It is inquiry from people who are contacting us as opposed to people who we know we definitely want to speak to.

So, when we are proactively reaching out to new prospects, we are in control of who we're talking to.

So, I would encourage you to, yes, have an online presence if you are an agent who's listing things, having signboards up, but also getting into the practice of proactively reaching out to the specific people who it is that you want to talk to.

And when we are thinking about prospecting, remember that what we're trying to do is we're trying to generate leads.

We're trying to identify opportunities. We are not trying to close deals.

In fact, I think it's good if we're not even pitching our services or talking much about ourselves in the first instance.

So, you might have heard the old adage that we've got two ears and one mouth, and we want to use them in that proportion.

If you can have an initial conversation with a new prospect and you find them talking two times more than you, then I think that's a really successful call because you are more likely to find out things about them, which you can then reflect back to them in terms of offering them value in the future as opposed to if you're just talking about yourself and you're not really learning anything about the person who you've made contact with.

So prospecting is not about sales, it's all about connecting with leads and trying to get them through to the next step.

And the last thing I just want to say about prospecting is about this next step.

And the next step is usually a more in-depth conversation than the one that we're having, and it might be to get an in-person meeting.

So having an idea of what it is that you want to get from when you connect with a prospect is an important thing to do.

And not making it an unreasonable expectation, right?

If we get onto a prospecting call, we connect with somebody and then we think, “Well, I've got to actually close this person.”

That is an unreasonable expectation to have. I don't think we're going to close people within a three-minute call.

We are putting undue pressure on ourselves, which might mean that were wreaking of desperation.

And we're also not putting ourselves in a position to actually listen to what it is that the other person could be telling us, because all we're trying to do is perhaps close a deal.

Whereas if we approach our prospecting with the perspective of what I want to try and do here is have another conversation with the person.

“I want to have a more meaningful touch point with them after making this connection.”

Then I think that relieves some of the pressure on yourself, and it makes it more likely that you're going to achieve that much more achievable objective.  

Really appreciate you being there. Thanks so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.