Marketing is a hard job, no matter what you're selling. But when you're working with big-ticket items like commercial real estate, those with a small target audience that you must locate out of a huge number of people, it can feel like the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack. Still, there are some great ways you can maximize your marketing and sales techniques to find those precious needles and turn them into happy customers. Realize that the market today is slow, and that buying customers for commercial real estate are both rarer and slower to make their purchasing decisions. That's okay. One thing you can do is to get SMART. That's an acronym for a goals-setting technique: you want specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound goals. For instance, if you have a multifamily home to sell that you want to sell as-is, your SMART goals might be to identify and contact at least twenty potential buyers in one week. This is a specific number; you can measure your work; it is easy to act upon; for most people, the goal of twenty contacts is realistic; and it is clearly time-bound.
You should also recognize that getting your results may be slow, even with a SMART plan. Ideally, to ensure good sales results for your commercial real estate, make sure it's easy to modify your plan as you start measuring your results. In the above simple example, for instance, you may want to contact more or fewer people, or you may want to confine your customer search to a particular group: those interested in running a small ethnic grocery store, for instance, or those interested in opening a gas station.
To do this properly, you need to know who your target audience is, and how to reach them. You may reach ethnic grocers, for instance, by advertising in foreign-language newspapers for locals in your city. Or you could do some research at local restaurants; see who they know that might be interested in opening a grocery. If you're selling luxury homes, your target audience for marketing and sales will be very different; you might want to advertise in magazines and fliers put out by your local country clubs, for instance, or focus on advertising in business publications in your city's financial district. No matter how you promote your residential or commercial real estate, however, you want to test your marketing; talk to people who call you in response to an advertisement, see which ones are working, and realign as necessary.
Where are you advertising, and what tools are you using? If you're using broadcast media, you may be wasting your money. Radio and television are very pricey advertisement venues, and you may have results equally as good from your marketing and sales if you advertise in newspapers instead. Often, very specialized papers will return your best results, like the ethnic papers mentioned above. The key is to get inside the head of your potential commercial real estate buyer, and see what he or she really reads. That is your perfect marketing platform.
Once you're getting responses to your marketing and sales campaign, you need to set up a perfect close. This entails setting up an offer that your customers cannot refuse. A wide variety of sales incentives are being tested by developers and commercial real estate professionals, like no money down deals, cash back at closing to cover costs, or no payments for a year. Any of these you can afford and that actually work are going to be worth it. In the slow real estate market, an offer that puts money in the pockets of your buyer right away is going to be the offer that gets snapped up.
Every live marketing and sales lead is valuable, so whenever people express interest or contact you about a property, try to keep him or her on the hook. You want to get them through a door so they can see the property, start feeling proprietary of the commercial real estate you're selling, and ultimately be sold not by what you say, but by what they see and feel. For this reason, your number one goal once you have a customer targeted is to get them out to the property, where you can show them exactly why it's perfect for their needs.
Develop a personal relationship with your potential customers. This doesn't mean you baby-sit their kids and join them for fun nights out on the town. Instead, it means you are letting the buyer know that you care what their needs are, that you understand what kind of commercial real estate they are seeking and you know exactly how to see to it that they get what they want. Today's business world is all about trust and personal relationships. If you can develop good ones, you will excel. In addition, keep it about the customer and what they want and can use, never about you. When you turn the subject to yourself, it's just like a date - you'll lose your partner's interest.
Once you have that customer interested in the property and in you, be sure to follow up regularly, weekly if you're in a hurry to sell. Don't let the customer feel rushed, of course, but make sure they know you are always there to ask questions of, and that the commercial real estate they were interested in is still for sale.
Finally, as you're looking into ways to sell your commercial real estate, don't forget to learn your industry trends. How have local real estate salespeople been selling properties? What media venue are they using, and does it seem to work? Shamelessly copy the marketing and sales techniques that work, and don't use the marketing and sales techniques that seem not to work. Monitor, too, the price point at which commercial real estate is being sold. All the marketing and sales expertise in the world will be wasted if you value your commercial real estate at a price that does not work for your customer.
