5 Prospecting skills every commercial real estate agent needs.

CRE Success Principle: The prospecting session your agents skip this week represents the revenue you're missing out on three months from now.

Prospecting is essential to create more success inside a commercial real estate agency. Yet knowing that new business development matters doesn't mean your agents will consistently make the calls, protect their time or follow up with property owners.

In episode 293 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership, I walk through five practical training sessions designed to help agents turn prospecting knowledge into action.

1. Make the First 30 Seconds Count

A cold call can lose momentum almost immediately. I teach agents to acknowledge the interruption, share something relevant to the property owner and ask a question that starts a conversation. Each agent writes an opening line and receives feedback.

2. Understand Why You Skip Prospecting

Agents often skip prospecting because they feel too busy, believe their pipeline is strong enough or don't feel ready. Identifying these recurring thoughts helps agents recognise the pattern and decide how to interrupt it.

3. Design a Week That Protects Prospecting

I use the Find, Mind and Grind framework to help agents allocate their time. Find creates new opportunities, Mind looks after existing listings, and Grind covers admin. Prospecting blocks go into the calendar first, making them harder to put off.

4. Use Pipeline Numbers to Guide Decisions

Knowing your gross commission income (GCI), remaining target and weighted pipeline coverage ratio helps you make better decisions. Rather than relying on how busy you feel, you can assess whether your pipeline supports your goals.

5. Follow Up With a Plan

One unanswered call doesn't mean an opportunity is lost. A structured cadence of calls, voicemails and emails gives agents multiple opportunities to start a conversation with a property owner.

Turn Training into Action

The best training doesn't end with providing information. Agents should leave with something written, scheduled, calculated or decided.

Listen to episode 293 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership to hear how practical training can improve commercial real estate prospecting.

If you'd like to explore Agent Accelerator for your team, visit cresuccess.co/sales. Alternatively, if you’re a commercial real estate agent who’d like to become part of the program, more information is available for you at cresuccess.co/agents. 

Episode transcript:

Every single month, our members inside Agent Accelerator are asked to do something that most training sessions never get around to.

They're doing things like writing the opening line for a cold call, reading it out aloud, and then getting peers to score it out of five.

It's not a presentation that they sit passively and watch. It's a real workshop where they actually do work right there and then while I'm on the call with them.

So, if you've got commercial real estate agents, I reckon you'd want to know what they're doing in that hour.

So I'm going to walk you through the last five months of master classes that we've presented for our members inside Agent Accelerator.

Welcome to episode 293 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name is Darren Krakowiak, and I'm the host of this show, and I help commercial real estate principals to build an agency that can run without them, so they have the choice to work on or off the tools.

At Inside Agent Accelerator, which is our training and coaching program for commercial real estate agents, we meet every single Tuesday, and on the second Tuesday of each month, we run a master class.

It goes for about an hour. It's on Zoom. And every session covers one topic, where we're trying to just equip our members with one new skill.

Typically, we start off with a poll or a question just to check where people are at, and then I teach the idea.

And then people do an exercise from a worksheet that we've prepared, like writing an opening line, filling in a calendar, or putting their opportunities into a spreadsheet.

Some of our members speak. Some of them type into the chat. Everyone's expected to contribute, and it finishes with every single person that's attending saying one thing that they'll do within a defined period of time.

Now, the last five sessions that we've run tell a story because they bring together what an agent actually goes through.

Things like, how to start a call when you're cold calling or prospecting? Why it is that they are not prospecting, so what's going through their head and what they can do to interrupt that thought to make sure that they do prospect?

How they're making time for the prospecting that they need to do? How to know if what they're doing is enough? And also, what to do when the person you're trying to reach on the phone just doesn't pick up?

So, I want to take you through those last five calls. We'll start in June. We'll start five months ago.

And the topic of that session was the first 30 seconds of a cold call.

I think most cold calls are won or lost in that first 30 seconds, or even sooner, perhaps, because a cold call generally doesn't fall flat because the agent doesn't know their market or don't know their stuff, or they're not qualified to be making the call.

The reason why it fails is because the opening moments of the call just aren't strong enough. So, we wanted to fix that.

We gave them three things that they should include in every single call in the first 30 seconds.

The first thing is to acknowledge the fact that the call wasn't expected for the person who's receiving it. So, we've got to acknowledge that interruption, or at least break the ice in some way.

The next thing that we need to do is say something that is relevant to the person that you are speaking to, like a recent sale or a lease that's coming up.

Make it about them. Show that you're relevant and hopefully something that will resonate, so then you can do the third thing, which is to ask a question that gets them talking, and that means it stops being like a cold call, and it starts feeling more like a natural conversation.

So, they're the three things that we wanted to get all of our members to design to happen in the first 30 seconds of the phone call.

And we then got every agent to write their opening line. And we got some of them to read out on the call what their opening line was, and then the group scored the ones that they heard out of five.

Other people typed their opening line into the chat, and I gave some feedback, and we also went through a couple of objections that come up early in prospecting calls or in cold calls. And the two common ones we, we sort of gave people ways to deal with are, "I'm busy," and also, "Okay, just send me an email."

So, by the end of the hour, all of our members had an opening line for cold calling that they'd written themselves and also a way to overcome those common objections that you often hear in the first 30 seconds of a call.

All right, so let's move now to July, which the topic we had was why you skip. So why agents are skipping prospecting that they know that they should be doing.

So, this session wasn't about how to prospect. It was about the moment when an agent is deciding that they're not going to do prospecting.

And what I wanted to do was pinpoint the moment that that decision is being made and to have our members identify which are the four main reasons that agents give or that they're providing themselves the out for not prospecting.

So those four excuses that are common are, "I'm too busy today," so we're just too busy to do it.

"Things are going well, so I can ease off." So basically, I've got a strong pipeline, so I don't need to do it.

"I've missed a couple of sessions, so what does it matter if I miss one more?" So that's sort of permission to skip.

And the other one was, "I'm just not ready," as in, I'm not good enough to start dialing, so I may as well not do it.

Now, none of those excuses are about laziness or not understanding that prospecting is important.

It's a specific thought that's coming up at the exact moment when prospecting is meant to begin that is giving the commercial real estate agent permission to skip the prospecting that they intended to do.

And there's a price when that happens. One prospecting session might lead to one appraisal if we kind of average out the number of connects that we get, the number of conversations that leads to, and the number of appraisals or meetings that we book off the back of that prospecting session.

And if we say that every so many appraisals turns into a listing, that turns into a deal, we might say that every appraisal is worth maybe $10,000 in GCI.

Might be less, might be more, depending on your market, but, you know, let's just say it's worth about $10,000.

So, if that's the case, whatever the number is, whether it's $5,000 or $8,000 or $10,000, there is a price, there is an invoice that you're sending yourself every single time that you skip a prospecting session.

It's just that you don't get the invoice now; you get it in 90 days' time in the form of commission and GCI that isn't being received.

So, in this session, we got every agent to identify what is the main reason why they're skipping prospecting, because usually it's a similar recurring thought. It's a reason or excuse that they are typically using. So, we identified that.

And then we also asked them to identify the early warning sign that that excuse will be used, and then every agent wrote one thing that they will say or do to interrupt that pattern.

And then they open their calendars, they book their next prospecting block, and they type the day and time into the chat for accountability.

So, let's look at what we did in August.

We went a layer deeper and we went into the calendar. So, you've heard of an ideal week or a perfect week. So that was kind of the template that we were using to build this session.

Most agents typically ask themselves, "When have I got time for prospecting? When can I fit it in?" And that question is the problem, because it puts prospecting last after everything else is done.

So we asked our members to flip it and ask the question, "What are you currently doing that you can stop doing or do less of so there's more room for prospecting?"

We sorted an agent's time into three categories, their week into three buckets. Find, mind, and grind. You've probably heard me talk about that on the podcast before if you've been, a regular listener.

So ‘find’ is anything that creates a new opportunity, like prospecting, appraisals, meeting with prospects, or preparing submissions or actually pitching.

‘Mind’ work is looking after what we've already got, so listings that we've won that we're working on. So doing things like inspections, vendor reports, negotiations.

And ‘grind’ is admin and the like. So, the aim is for the find work to be the last thing that we decide not to do, as opposed to being the first thing that gets sacrificed.

We asked our members then to have a look at their calendar in the previous week and to tell us how much time roughly are they spending on find, mind, and grind. What's the split?

And before we asked them to look at the calendar, by the way, we just asked them to self-assess, what do you reckon is the split between find, mind, and grind once we've defined it?

And most of them were quite a way off. They were overestimating how much time they were spending on find.

So based on that information, we then built a week, an ideal week, with the prospecting blocks in first, labeled so they're harder to delete. So, what I mean by that is actually putting into your calendar: ‘prospecting do not move’, or ‘non-negotiable prospecting block.’

And then we got mind work grouped together and doing it at the time of the day that works based on when the best time to do our prospecting is.

Then after that, we put the mind work in.

And finally, we said we'll do the grind work within a window when probably your energy is the lowest because the grind work requires the least mental energy, and we don't want to be doing this most important stuff when we're at our best.

The other thing we did was we polled the group at the start and the end of the session on how deliberately designed their week was, and it went from about a six out of 10 to about an eight out of 10 as a result of the work that we'd done on that call.

All right, let's have a look at September now.

September, the topic was knowing your numbers. I asked the group three questions. Do you know your GCI year to date? Do you know whether you're ahead or behind your target? And do you track the weighted value of your pipeline?

Now, a few of them had a good sense of their target and maybe where they're up to, but very few knew all of their numbers precisely, and hardly any of them were tracking the weighted value of their pipeline.

And that's a very important number because that's what tells you your coverage ratio. That's the value of your pipeline weighted by stage compared with what is left to write in your target for the rest of the year.

And if your coverage ratio, that is how much opportunity you have in your pipeline, is four times your remaining target, then we said, “You know what, you can actually got a legitimate reason to ease off find work and focus on converting the opportunities, the listings that you have. You can invest more into mind work. But if you're below four times, that is if you don't have that much coverage in your pipeline for the target that you're trying to achieve, then you probably shouldn't be sacrificing any of your prospecting time, your find time, no matter how busy you feel.”

Knowing the ratio takes the feeling out of the decision, and it makes it more data-based.

Now, this session included a spreadsheet template where every deal goes in at its stage and only passes through if three questions are a yes. Is it real? Can we win it? And do we want it? So a bit of a qualification filter.

And the spreadsheet also works out their coverage ratio, which shows them where they sit against their commission structure, and the sheet that we prepared includes all the key major commission structures that exist, so it was relevant for all of our members.

So, one more session to tell you about, which was what we did on October, and that's where we got to the part where owners just don't pick up the phone.

So, I asked at the start of this session, "How many more times would you try to reach someone after a first failed attempt?" So, you've tried to call someone; they didn't pick up.

Most people said once or twice, and then they would move on. And the research that I've seen says that it commonly takes between seven and 13 touch points to reach a cold prospect.

So, the reflection that we shared then was that most of you are stopping before the maths is working in your favor. And the solution to this problem is a cadence.

A cadence is a series of touch points, and we recommend over a three-week period where you mix calls, voicemails, and emails, and maybe some other channels depending on the relationship, where every touch point has a point.

That is, there's a reason for contacting and a new angle to share, so we're not being repetitive.  

And the job of that cadence is to get you in a conversation with the prospect. It's not to pitch. It's just to have a conversation to get permission to pitch later.

We also covered this idea of stalled campaigns, which are more common in the market right now, which is where a property that's been sitting on the market with another agent and the authority is expiring becomes fair game.

And we said that before you pick up the phone to target that potential listing, you've got to run the stalled campaign diagnostic.

Just five questions that you need to be able to answer about that listing, including what you would do differently to help the owner get a result.

And then each agent on this call made the commitment to contact three owners in their market that week: one cold prospect, one stalled campaign that they've seen or identified, and one past client.

And everyone committed to doing that on a Thursday and to come to the following Prospecting Power Hour with three numbers tracked: owners contacted, conversations held, and next steps secured.

So that's the last five members masterclasses inside Agent Accelerator. How to open a call, why you stop prospecting, how to protect the time that you've committed to prospecting, how to know if you're doing enough by knowing your numbers, and how to keep going until you get into a conversation with a prospect.

As you might have noticed, each of the masterclasses is just a single topic. Now, they do all build on each other.

And in each of the sessions, though, agents finish by having done something. They've written something, they've booked something, they've built something, or they've chosen and selected something. They've made a decision.

And each one of the masterclasses ends with them making a commitment about what they're going to change before the next one.

In a recent survey of our members, 96% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that what they've learnt in the program is practical and easy to implement.

91% agreed with the statement that it's helping them to become more effective as an agent. 100% would be great, but I'll take the 91 and the 96%.

So, my question for you is, if you asked your agents today to write their opening line, to tell you what their numbers are and their coverage ratio, and to name three owners that they're going to contact this week, how many of them could?

If you'd like to know what the masterclasses and the rest of Agent Accelerator could look like for your commercial real estate agents, visit cresuccess.co/sales for more information.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.