In baseball, the time between pitches seems like hours.  In fact, in less than one minute the pitcher and catcher have scanned the field, mentally reviewed their notes on the current hitter, and the potential next hitter, communicated on a strategy to approach all these elements, and had little if any verbal exchange!  That’s quite impressive if you think about it.  Heck that’s more effort than most brokers put into their pitches for listings.

There are two keys to winning listings — convincing the prospect to list their property and then convincing them to list with you.  Both of these processes require different skills and a different set of pitches. But before you start pitching, you have to make a very important decision: whether or not you want to list the property.  Yes, most brokers quickly confirm they do, but several ultimately wish they didn’t.

You win listings by sharing with/convincing the client it is better to list than not to list and that it is better to list with you than with anyone else. While it’s possible to convince prospects of your skillset through rhetoric, it’s a lot easier to do it when you can point to specific listings that you have successfully closed. However, before you rush to list a property, determine if it is one that you can put in your “win” column.  If it is not clear, you should have a strategy as to why you would take an assignment when you feel you very well may fail.  Then determine how your pitch will need to be adjusted.

Some prospects understand the value of giving you a listing, but many do not. If you are dealing with a prospect that doesn’t get it, you will need to share some of the benefits of listing with them. There are the very basic ones:

• When you list with me, I can execute a full marketing program consisting of….
• I can tap into a database of ___ buyers sand ___ cooperating brokers.
• As your representative, I will negotiate on your behalf, rather than on the buyer’s behalf.

There are more articulate ways to express the value of representation, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Once you have shared with the seller the benefits of listing their property, you then need to convince him or her to list with you instead of another competing broker. To win the business, ask yourself this question: What can I offer that the seller needs that no other broker can and how can I demonstrate this? Figuring out your unique value proposition and then articulating it is the key to successfully beating your competition to gain the prospect’s business.

New, quality listings are great for your business. Not only do they lead to paychecks, but they also increase your profile in the market and give you a shot at additional buy-side business both on the listing and by selling other properties to buyers that don’t buy the listed one. With this in mind, it is well worth the effort to both refine and practice your skills at pitching the value of the exclusive and your unique client focused value proposition.  Unlike baseball, striking out when you pitch is not a statistic you should be proud of.

Industry’s revolutionary new-to-business coaching program for commerical real estate agents and associates:

CARY NC (March 11, 2013) – The Massimo Group, North America’s premier commercial real estate coaching and consulting organization has created the industry’s first coaching platform targeted specifically for new to business brokers, announced founder and president Rod Santomassimo, CCIM.

The new to business program, known as “N2B”, is the organization’s first coaching platform created specifically for those with little to no experience in the commercial real estate industry.

“In the past five years, we have created industry leading coaching programs for seasoned veterans, mid-career professionals, organizations and teams, but had stayed away from those first entering the practice of commercial real estate brokerage” says Santomassimo. “Recently we have been asked by our clients to create a program that would greatly enhance the likelihood of success for their new team members.  The market offers several training programs that teach concepts, but no coaching platforms that focus on production.”

The Massimo Group worked with their clients, who include brokers, owners and managers from most international, national and regional firms to formulate a program that would emphasize the three pillars of success for any new to business broker:

• Prospecting – focus on production to establish a pipeline;
• Time management – ensuring new to business brokers spend their time on the key activities that will create and grow their business;
• Accountability – providing a platform for both peer and mentor support.

The program will be led by senior coach and industry expert, Gary Tharp, CCIM.  Mr. Tharp is a nationally known speaker and trainer; he has served as consultant for many of the national real estate companies and franchises. He is a Fellow of the faculty of the CCIM Institute and the author of a series of real estate analysis templates for the popular spreadsheets.

“The N2B program we have created is completely different from basic training,” Tharp says. “Yes, participants will be exposed to several key concepts, but the emphasis will be on building their pipeline right out of the gate, so they cannot only increase their chances of survival in the first six months, but also help them build a book of business drive both them and their broker/owner.”

The N2B program will last six months and consist of twenty-four (24) weekly calls.  The first session will commence during the first week of April and new sessions will commence monthly thereafter.  Each monthly program is limited to twenty (20) participants.

“We listened to our clients.  We know this is an industry where brokerage owners simply hope 1 of 3 new recruits will survive the first six months,” Santomassimo says. “Our vision has never been simply to survive, but for all our clients to maximize their brokerage income.  We have proven this true with mid-career and seasoned-veteran clients, so now we want to do the same for new to business brokers.”

For information about this N2B program, please visit www.massimo-group.com or contact vince@massimo-group.com for additional information.

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During the depths of the recession, many real estate brokerage companies cut budgets and cut them severely.  Some of these cuts ranged from 25 percent to as much as 50 percent. For other companies, the cuts were a more modest 10 percent to 20 percent. In almost all cases these cuts allowed companies to weather the storm and comeback as the market recovered. Most made cuts of items that were non-essential. These were things that might have been nice to have, or in some cases somewhat important, but were not crucial for the ongoing performance of the company’s operation.

Imagine if these firms were asked to simply cut 2.23 percent of their budget. Surely that would be a cakewalk. Decision makers may have not wanted to make those cuts but the fact is that it would have been relatively easy. This is why the current catastrophic ramifications that some in Washington are portraying about the automatic budget cuts which kicked in last Friday (known as the sequestration) is so hard to understand.

Even with the sequestration, this year’s budget would still allow congress to spend about $15 billion more this fiscal year than last. Last week, speeches from the president (who came up with the idea), cabinet members and members of congress would have us believe that economic armageddon would kick in if these cuts were allowed to take place – lines would be hours long at airports, control towers would be undermanned causing flight delays and dangerous skies, federal prosecutors would stop cases with felons being released to run free in the streets, maintenance and construction on new aircraft carriers would stop, terrorist attacks would become “awfully tough” to stop and the economic recovery would come to a grinding halt.

The scare tactics reached a crescendo whenCaliforniarepresentative Maxine Waters claimed that sequestration could cause the loss of over 170 million jobs. Someone should tell her that there aren’t even that many jobs in theU.S.

We need some sanity when it comes to what cuts will be made. Within each area designated for spending reductions, those who run these departments should be given the autonomy to decide what is cut and what’s not. The things that were mentioned last week are the equivalent of an individual who needs to cut a few dollars from their weekly budget deciding to pull the plug on their refrigerator to save on the electric bill or deciding not to pay for medication that will keep them in good health. Clearly, they would figure out something less impactful to cut (with an average salary of $55,000, on an after-tax basis, the averageU.S.citizen has about $793 per week of disposable income. If this average Joe was subject to sequestration, they would have to cut about $18 per week).

The federal budget draft (we haven’t had a passed budget in 4 years) contains 3,709 pages, nearly three times the length of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. The budget appendix is where you find out what’s really going on. Its part of the budget proposal materials sent to Congress every year. News reports focus on the budget’s top lines. The appendix shows you what’s beneath. It notes the line-item spending for virtually everything theUSgovernment does. Some of those things include spending money on determining whether tweets can be trusted, $40,000 toilets in an Alaskan park, payments of benefits to deceased federal employees and studying monkey poop. Not exactly the kinds of things to bring the economy to its knees.

Here’s a thought – maybe Congress should read the budget appendix out loud, in session. They did it with the Constitution. Why not the budget? They could go through it and debate the value of every line item. I know that is unrealistic but it would make a great reality show.

It appears the world will not end with sequestration, however, exactly what to cut in each area should be thoughtfully debated by the folks we elected to do just that.

I once worked with a brokerage manager who said there were two types of people in the world – those that didn’t like to cold call and those that lie about liking cold calling. He might have overstated his point a bit, but he does have a point.  The odds are you don’t like to prospect by telephone, but it’s equally likely that you would like to grow your commercial real estate brokerage practice.

There is no better way to expand your business than to talk to new prospects. The easiest way to start a conversation with new people is to pick up the phone and call them, and it doesn’t have to be hard or unpleasant. Try to keep these principles in mind, and you’ll find that prospecting by telephone is easier than you expect. You might even have fun doing it!

1. Call in blocks of time. When you get a good rhythm going, calling gets easier. Set some time aside, close your email program, put your cell phone on vibrate, and make your calls. As you find your groove, you’ll find it gets easier.
2. Call similar clients together. Instead of just going through your CRM program’s database alphabetically, call thematically. For example, you could call only clients with mortgages that are rolling in the next six months, call everyone with between 20 and 30 percent vacancy, or only call people in a one or two block area. Calling similar clients lets you take what you hear on one call and use it with other prospects.
3. Call about something exciting or valuable. I believe there is always a reason to call. When you know that you have something valuable, your enthusiasm and confidence will come across and your prospects should respond. This is also a powerful brand building tool, since instead of being an annoyance like most cold calls; your telephone call will be valuable to your client.
4. Maintain perspective. No matter what you do, some of the people you contact will not react positively. It’s their loss. Move on and find someone else that appreciates the considerable value you can add to them.  Telephone prospecting is a numbers game, and occasional failed calls are part of the process.

One of the great things about prospecting by telephone is it can have an almost immediate impact on your business. If you talk to more people, you will meet with more people and get more opportunities to compete for sales or leasing engagements. Once you have the opportunity, all that you have to do is close for the business. If that isn’t a great reason to shut down your web browser right now and do some prospecting, I don’t know what is!

Your Pipeline Is Your Bloodline.

Being a commercial real estate brokerage professional means that you get pulled in many different directions all at once. To be great at your business, you have to not just handle but master all of these things. But, ultimately, there is only one thing that matters in your business.

Your pipeline.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that you don’t need to have a good reputation. I’m not denigrating the importance of marketing knowledge. I assure you that you need to have solid relationships with prospects, clients and third-parties. I also recommend that you earn as much money as possible! When you really look at your business, though, none of those things really matter if you lack a healthy pipeline.

Pipelines are more complicated than most commercial brokers realize. Your list of under contract deals isn’t your pipeline. It’s your list of deals under contract. It is a part of your pipeline, and it is the part that you may feel most acutely, but it’s not the most important part. After all, once a deal closes, it goes off of your pipeline and, in many cases, that client goes dormant for a while.

The key to your pipeline is to keep filling it up with new opportunities. This might sound obvious, but many commercial real estate agents never think about the top part of their pipelines. The meetings, proposals, offers and listings that you take get filtered out and make up the bottom lines of your pipeline. As long as you keep creating opportunities for yourself, your pipeline will continue to stay flush and your business will keep creating paychecks for you and your family.

Think of your pipeline the way that you think of your circulatory system. You’re healthy because your heart pumps freshly oxygenated blood throughout your body, nourishing every part of it. Your business is the same. For it to be healthy, you need to always have fresh opportunities coming into it. In other words, your pipeline is your bloodline.

With all of the challenges in managing the real estate brokerage end of a real estate brokerage office, many managers forget about the office. After all, office management is tedious and administrative, right? Wrong. The best offices are run by managers who look at office operational management as another tool to help them implement their vision. The way your office feels should reflect what you want your office to do.

Good operational management starts with setting up your own policies. Even the smallest things can have an impact on how your associates behave and on how your office ends up performing. Are your office’s official hours from eight to five or from nine to six? Can associates rifle through incoming faxes themselves or does your staff review the faxes, collate them and deliver them to the agent’s inboxes? Are Fridays casual for everyone? For no one? Or just for associates that hit certain performance benchmarks? The smallest operational issues can have an impact on the psychology of your office.

Managing resources also impacts performance. What do you provide for associates and what do you expect them to provide? Bear in mind that if you give them something, you can control how they use it. For instance, some managers provide free color printing to their associates, but have their staff control the printer. This not only gives the staff a chance to proofread anything before it gets printed, but also makes it easy for them to capture every file that gets color printed – building an archive that could be useful if an agent loses their copy or if the agent leaves the company.

Containing costs is crucial. After all, your profit is what is left over after paying your brokers their splits and paying the bills. Have your staff rebid every contract once a year. This will keep your vendors honest and will save you money. You’d be surprised how much saving fifty cents per ream of paper can add up to.

These are just a few broad areas but they should get you thinking differently about operational management. While minimizing cost is a good way to affect your bottom line, using your office as a tool to improve productivity and morale can have a much broader impact on your brokerage’s prospects.

Now that we’ve covered the biggest challenges facing owners and managers today, we’re ready to talk about the most important thing – the next stage for you and your business. Check back soon!

One of the best ways to retain your brokers is to periodically hand them good leads. At the same time, you also need to ensure that your office has a strong name in the market. This increases your agents’ credibility and makes it easier for them to close clients for business.

Sample Marketing Tips

While there are a lot of ways to build a market presence, doing it for free will really boost your bottom line. At the Massimo Group, we implement our “Presence Pyramid” of Personal, Physical and Digital components.

Every time that your office signs a lease, sells a building or lands a management contract, send out a press release. You’d be amazed how many of them get picked up by the local real estate and business papers. This strategy works even better if you already have a face-to-face relationship with the real estate reporters in your community.

Building a social network presence is another way to get your message out to hundreds or thousands of people at little or no cost. If you are with a national firm, your company is doing it and at least some of your agents are doing it but are you? Creating a blog, maintaining a Facebook page for your office and tweeting about the market are all excellent ways to keep your office on the top of your prospects’ minds.

Generating Leads and Doing Business

One of the easiest ways to help your brokers do more business is to go on meetings with them. It sends a strong message to clients that the firm cares about their business and it also gives you an opportunity to ensure that your marketing message is getting communicated to clients. It is likely that some of your more senior brokers will be resistant to this in the beginning, but if they see you helping less senior agent earn business, their attitudes will likely change.

Another excellent way to generate leads for your agents is to stay in touch with former clients. Whether you signed a lease with them, sold a property for them or just did a BOV or proposal, add them to your email list and social networking feeds. You can even check in with them periodically. This tool is especially powerful if the agent that originally did business with them leaves your office—you can then hand the client off to another agent.

We’re past the halfway point of talking about management challenges. Next time, we’ll talk about the operational challenges that you face.

Once you’ve built a great team, you’re going to need to keep them great. As you know, managing your team and helping them improve their performance is the biggest challenge in brokerage management. Here are four tips that I know to work from my experience as a broker, manager and as a coach to brokers and managers:

Avoid “One Size Fits All” Management

Many managers have one style which they apply to every one of their brokers. Then they wonder why people in their office are unhappy, unmotivated and likely to quit at any time. Are you the same person as your sister, your best friend or your second-most-successful broker?  Of  course not.

Different brokers have different motivations and respond to different types of management. Some like rewards, while others are motivated by the fear of sanctions. Others need a little bit of micromanagement to help keep them on track while others work best when left alone.

Get to know how your brokers want to be managed and tailor your style to each of them. Using a tailored style will help you to get better performance from them while also making them feel better about their relationship with you.  Refer back to Challenge #1 in this series regarding screening and assessment tools.  These are great products for understanding how to understand the individual motivations of each team member.

Be Ethical

You might think that this is obvious, but it isn’t. Most managers would never do anything egregiously unethical, but every manager has been confronted with issues that fall in an ethical grey zone. When you are in this situation, bear in mind that what you do will end up being telegraphed to your entire office. Once you bend your ethical standards, you will begin lose the moral authority to impose those standards on your office as a whole.

Be Consistent

Being consistent is more nuanced than it might seem. Consistency isn’t about treating every agent and every situation exactly the same way. Instead, it’s about having a system and set of standards that you apply evenly. Agents shouldn’t be surprised by your answer when they come to you for a decision or with a request, and they should get the same result as other agents in their situation.

Be Wrong

It’s okay to be wrong. The most important thing is to own it and move on. Saying such things as “Remember when I told you X yesterday? I was gave you bad information, and I apologize. Here’s the right answer…” will let agents know that you are human, just like them. When you also fix your mistakes you reinforce your quality standards.

Have Some Fun

We work in a demanding and intense business that has been through an uncommonly challenging few years. While you do not want to be the lead joker in your office, a bit of (appropriate) levity and fun can go a long way to improve your office’s esprit de corps.

Now that you’ve got a handle on how to keep a handle on your team, you’re ready for our next post about the third management challenge – developing business.

It’s certainly time to start preparing for your mid-year review. Whether you have a manager or owner who is holding you accountable or you work independently, this is the time when you need to take a step back as ask yourself “how am I doing”?

It’s easy to simply look to your pipeline and review the opportunities you have in process, as well as the amount of commissions you have closed year-to-date. However, this will only highlight the results of your efforts over the past 12 months and not necessarily those of the past six.  Don’t get me wrong, income is certainly a key indicator, but you have to look beyond your income to determine how you have progressed since January and more importantly how you will create income in the future.

Here are 10 questions you should ask yourself, and be as brutally honest as you can with your responses.

1. What was your income goal for 2012.  Based on your closing, pipeline and over all opportunities, where do you project your income to be on December 31?
2. Who are your top 10 clients for this year and how are you retaining those relationships?
3. How many prospect meetings have you held year to date, and how many have led to representation/listing assignments?
4. What are your top three sources of leads and how do you plan on leveraging these sources for the next six months?
5. How many relationship building (not prospect) meetings have you held?
6. How have you created a personal presence with your sphere of influence?
7. How have you engaged your “Top 100” thus far?
8. How much time did you allocate to working “on” your business, versus “in” your business?
9. How many hours a day are you productively giving your brokerage business?
10. What initial goals have not been met in 2012, and what are you doing about it?

Self-reflection is not easy, but it is essential if you want to continue to move forward and grow your brokerage practice.  Now is the time to make corrections in your 2012 plan.  Make them and you will enhance the likelihood of meeting your goals.  Ignore them and you may be setting yourself up for a less than spectacular 2013 and beyond.

Congratulations, you secured an invitation to present your proposal to a client. You can’t hit a home run without getting to bat, so now it’s time to take your swings.  Forgive the baseball analogy; corny as it is, it is true.  Now what do you need to do to make your presentation a success and win the listing or representation assignment?

If you haven’t already, and the opportunity is for a listing, get out to the property and become an expert on it. Take pictures, drive the neighborhood and drive all of the comps you will be using in your proposal. You should also do research on the area to ensure you are aware of any upcoming projects which could affect the marketability of the asset.    If this opportunity is for a tenant or landlord representation, find out everything, and I mean everything, about the company/owner.

We see  listing and representation presentations, almost daily, from across North America.  Many miss the point of the proposal.  Prepare a presentation you can be not only be proud of, but also addresses the specific needs/issues of the opportunity.  Believe it or not, many brokers frequently just slap a few pages together and hope for the best. If you’ve been invited to present, you can be pretty sure your competition was invited also. Put your best foot forward and prepare a well-structured proposal.  Remember, “You Can’t Wing It to Win It”.

Practice. Then practice some more. Make sure you know what you are going to say and that you can say it concisely and convincingly. Brush up on your ability to overcome the client’s objections. The best way  to do this is to role play with a mentor, colleague, your coach or your spouse.  Don’t laugh, my wife has  improved a vast majority of my speeches.. then again maybe she enjoys correcting me.. but I digress.  Whoever  you use, encourage them to throw you some curve balls, to make sure you can think on your feet when the time comes.

I know I just told you to prepare a great presentation, but when you get in front of the client, remember the most important thing is your ability to tell the story, which is completely different than telling your story.  It’s not about you.  It starts with telling the story of the opportunity and how the client sees it. Once you’ve told that story, you can tell the story of why you are the only plausible broker to service the account.  The presentation keeps you in the game, but articulating the right story is what wins you the business.