The ONE activity that every agent should never stop doing.

How is your year shaping up compared with what you were expecting?

If it’s not panning out as you would like it, I know that it's tempting to blame things like the market, your competitors or something else that is beyond your control.

This week, I want you to shift the direction by focusing on what you can do to create meaningful change.

Here are some key points:

👉 Lead generation is a fundamental activity in commercial real estate.

👉 Prospecting is one of the main things to focus on when you’re not happy with your results.

👉 A steady stream of leads is crucial to driving revenue results.

If you want help with getting started, here are two things for do.

Firstly, register for How to Build a Prospecting Pipeline. After this one-hour workshop, you will have an outbound prospecting system that will re-engage with existing clients, warm up stale contacts and get you in touch with completely new or cold prospects.

Secondly, listen to episode 139 of CRE Success: The Podcast for more details on how to get this year on the right trajectory by generating more leads.

Finally, please remember that blaming external factors is unproductive; you can take control of your lead generation by committing to consistent, persistent, and proactive prospecting.

Episode transcript:

We are deep into May.

And if your 2023 goals are currently off track, well, you still have time to course correct, but the time to take that action is right now.

So, if you want to get your year back on track, because it's not panning out the way that you're expected, then my advice is to stop blaming other people, stop blaming the market, stop blaming other things that are outside your control and start looking at what it is that you can do in order to get things back on track.

If you're willing to do that, then I want to help you in today's episode of the show.

Hello, and welcome to episode 139 of CRE Success: The Podcast. My name is Darren Krakowiak, I help commercial real estate leaders to develop their people and to grow their business.

If you're a longtime listener of the show, really appreciate you being there. I know there are some people who are with us every single week, they're downloading the episodes as soon as they come out. So, thank you to you. 

And if perhaps you're a little bit newer, and you haven't been listening to the show or watching it for so long, then I really appreciate you taking the time to find us. And hopefully, you'll be with us for a while as well.

Today, we're talking about finding out where the blockage exists in your revenue pipeline, so you can get 2023 back on track if perhaps it's not panning out the way that you would like it.

And I wanted to first just talk about when we're looking at a revenue pipeline, the way that I'd recommend that you look at it because at the top of the pipeline, you put in leads.

And at some point, you need to turn those leads into listings or projects or whatever it is that you are doing for most of its listing. So therefore, we need to convert those leads into real opportunities.

And then once we've got the real opportunities that we have the right to work on, then we need to close those deals, and be able to charge revenue, as send out an invoice, earn a fee.

Now along the way, we've got opportunities to improve our efficiency and effectiveness.

Now that can be activated through creating leverage, whether we create leverage through having people work with us or for us, whether we implement certain processes which improve productivity, or whether we invest in our platform, often through technology.

On today's episode of the show, I want to talk about the lead generation side of things.

Now, back in episode 137, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how to increase your win rate with five ways to win more listings in a market downturn.

So today, we're moving further up the pipeline, and we're talking about lead generation.

Now, when markets are appreciating, and when economic growth is stronger, I think the market does a lot of the work that needs to be done when it comes to lead generation, right? 

But what the market gives during good times the market can also take away during bad times.

If you're noticing that you're not getting as many leads through the same amount of activity or through what you were previously doing in the past, then you may need to course correct to get more leads, to get more prospects in order to be able to convert them into opportunities and listings that can actually turn into deals in your revenue pipeline.

So, lead generation, or prospecting is a fundamental activity in commercial real estate.

And I think when I'm starting to work with a client, and they're wondering why aren't I producing at the level that I would like to, the first thing I want to look at is their prospecting activity.

And that is often the biggest problem to overcome when it comes to your journey towards becoming a top performer.

And it's also as you're building a team of top performers, if you're a leader, the one area where I would spend the most time making sure that people are really committed to the activity of prospecting, because without prospects without leads, then we don't have any business to do.

Now, when it comes to the issue of leads or a lack of leads in the market, one thing that I find that some people will say is that, "Well the problem is, the market downturn means I can't generate so many leads."

But when we blame the market, we are blaming something that's out of our control.

So, I would encourage you to have the perspective to say, "I don't have a problem with the market or the economy. What I've got is a problem of lead generation."

And if you're willing to take some steps to do some work to generate more leads, then that is a problem which is within your control that you have the capacity to fix.

And the best way that you could fix that problem, you probably can guess what I'm going to say, is to do more prospecting more often.

And I've talked on this show a few times about the three principles of prospecting that I recommend that you take on board.

The first one is to be consistent with your prospecting activity. And that is to make sure that it's a scheduled daily activity. It's something that is important, it's a high priority. And because it's on your calendar, you know, it's more likely to get done.

The next point about prospecting is to be persistent. So, we need to make sure that we're using not only several channels, but also that we're making multiple attempts in order to engage somebody into a conversation.

And the last thing when it comes to prospecting, in terms of those three elements of prospecting, that I would encourage you to take on board is that we want to be proactive.

So rather than just sitting back and waiting for people to contact us, or relying on an inbound channel, to provide us with leads, we need to take more proactive measures to generate leads.

Now the traditional pipelines of referrals and repeat business, which for those of us who are more established, we're probably relying more on than we are relying on outbound prospecting.

Because as you become, I guess, more experienced, and as you have more client relationships, more of those inbound opportunities naturally come to you.

But just as I was talking about when the market is good, you get more of those opportunities, but we're in the market isn't so good, less of them come to you, then you might find that some of those inbound opportunities are drying up.

So, it's time to start generating more of your own opportunities, if that is the case.

Now, if you're not somebody who has yet, I guess, built their business to the point where you are relying on or benefiting from lots of referrals, and also lots of repeat business, then the opposite may be true.

Perhaps you're already doing lots of prospecting, but you have the opportunity to activate the referral, and also the repeat business pipeline.

This could be great channels for you. And there could be some low hanging fruit there. Or maybe your existing clients’ circumstances have changed. 

So last episode, we were talking about 'Not now prospects' and the fact that a 'no doesn't mean no forever', then prospects that we have spoken to before but weren't ready is another place that you can look, apart from the activity of generating new leads. 

I think the key point that I want to get across today, in this short episode but important one, is that you may need to work harder to generate the same amount of leads that you would have to work with in an upswing market.

So, I'm saying, if you're expecting that you need 100 leads every single month, in order to achieve the results that you're looking to achieve, then it might take more from you to generate those 100 leads in the current market situation, than it would previously. 

And you also, in fact, may need more leads than you usually do. Because the deal cycle could be longer in the current market context, or because your conversion rate, (as we talked about in episode 137) could have actually been negatively impacted by external factors. 

If you can increase your conversion rate, then you can work with the same number of leads and still get a better result.

But if you're getting less leads, and your conversion rate is staying the same, then where you need to look is improving your lead generation in order to make your income stable, or to actually see an increase in the current market.

I hope that has been helpful for you and just gives you a little reminder about the importance of prospecting.

So many people I talked to just they're kind of like, don't stick with prospecting throughout their career.

It's something which becomes less important because I guess they have seen success in other areas.

Or they say that maybe it's something that you know, that's things that people who are less established and may need to do well.

In this market, it might be something that you need to start doing again. And if you want some more help with that, we do have a live and free workshop coming up very, very soon.

If you're watching this, when we release it, it's actually coming up on the 3rd week of May, 2023. But we're planning on actually repeating this workshop a few times. 

So, if you're watching this in the future, you can go to the registration page and see when the next one is.

Its 'How to build a prospecting pipeline.' You can register now at cresuccess.co/pipeline

It's live. It's free. And we're going to be showing you how to build a prospecting pipeline using various channels and numerous touchpoints.

So, you're more likely to get the prospects that you're looking for into a conversation, which then gives you the opportunity further down the track to actually convert that opportunity into a listing, into a project, into a future revenue event.

That's our episode for today. Always appreciate you spending some time with us. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.