Technology: Using Data Effectively

Commercial real estate has always been driven by the numbers. Successful commercial brokers have hundreds of information sources at their fingertips surrounding inventory, trends and market conditions.

You’ve probably adopted smartphones and tablets well in advance of the general market, purely for the convenience and access to analytics: the more you know, the more you can sell or lease. However, while most brokers successfully utilize technology to assist in evaluating and closing a transaction, many still rely solely on referrals and word of mouth to find new business.

What About Sales Intelligence?

We know that technology opens up new opportunities and increases capacity. Software advances have driven down the costs of data acquisition and there are multiple platforms that can now aggregate data faster than ever. This provides increased access to real-time analysis that can directly impact your business. Cloud computing and storage technologies that reduce lag time on data transmission make it faster and cheaper to acquire data and interpret it.

Modern sales intelligence platforms go beyond the basic numbers that drive most commercial real estate analytics. Great sales solutions also include data that has been mined from news, social media, email and other hard-to-find sources. This in-depth research gives you the ability to find new prospects within your market that are outside of your normal referral sources. Additionally, data that is specifically-tailored for your individual market can help you better understand your client’s situation, build a stronger relationship and provide better service to help meet their property needs.

Generating New Prospects

Even the most experienced commercial brokers would love to increase the number of prospects in their pipeline. Whether you are new to the business, or have been involved with commercial real estate for decades, it’s beneficial to utilize as many tools as possible to keep your pipeline filled. Cultivating contacts through a combination of referrals, direct contact and through social media helps keep you relevant in the minds of your prospects.

Some platforms help you mine your ‘likes’, ‘follows’ and ‘+1s’ and other social media shares for new prospects. By automating the process and keeping original contact via online channels, you can continue to stay top-of-mind. The most successful commercial brokerage firms all have direct consumer referral options to make the process quick and easy.

Measuring Client Intent

A successful sales intelligence and lead-generation platform can help align your prospecting efforts to improve the conversion rate on leads, all by measuring not just whether or not the prospective client is interested, but also by measuring their immediate intent. Generating a large volume of leads is not the solution in commercial real estate. Instead, lead quality plays an increasingly important role in determining which prospects ultimately improve sales numbers. Data intelligence platforms can improve your lead quality by sorting those prospecting into different quality categories. Commercial brokers can then use a combination of prospecting analytics and their own intuition to prioritize precious client-facing time.

Continually Improving to Grow Revenue

The most important thing for commercial brokers to remember is to always pay attention to new and better ways to generate quality prospects, service clients efficiently and limit wasted efforts on ineffective lead-gen methods. Successful brokers spend their time interacting with prospects and clients, not constantly researching for new leads. There are a variety of tools out there - start using them.

TermScout

TermScout (www.TermScout.com), a NAR REach® Class of 2015 company, provides a predictive sales intelligence tool for commercial brokers. Tenant rep brokers waste precious time researching dozens of information sources in search of new clients. TermScout completes that research with SCOUTS - trigger events such as executive changes, funding events and lease expirations delivered right to your inbox or CRM. Your SCOUTS always contain the key contact information you need to connect with new clients and close more deals. Commercial brokers can now grow their business using the actionable, timely and accurate market intelligence with TermScout.