How to Stay Consistent with Commercial Real Estate Prospecting

CRE Success Principle: Relying on good intentions or bursts of motivation rarely leads to consistent results. Standards survive through structure, scheduling, and accountability. Build your system so it runs even when you’re busy or uninspired.

In commercial real estate, consistency wins. The agents who prospect regularly create predictable pipelines, while those who rely on motivation find themselves on the income rollercoaster.

The key difference is standards.

When you operate with standards, you replace good intentions with clear systems. Standards survive because they’re supported by structure – not by how you feel that day.

Here’s how I help agents do it inside our programs. One tool we use is called the Standards Operating Loop: clarity, commitments, cadence, consequence, and identity.

It starts with defining what “done” looks like. For prospecting, that might mean three 90-minute blocks of outbound activity per week. The commitment comes from if/then rules—for example, “If it’s 8:25 a.m., then I close my inbox and open my call list.”

You track your cadence with simple metrics: calls made, conversations had, and meetings booked. Then you apply consequences – both rewards and penalties – to keep yourself accountable.

Finally, it’s about identity. Decide that you’re the agent who keeps promises to yourself, even when it’s inconvenient.

If you want to build momentum, this is how you do it: set standards, stick to them, and let consistency compound.

Listen to episode 245 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership for the full breakdown.

Episode transcript:

If you or your team have the best of intentions when it comes to prospecting, but you're just not maintaining the standard, this episode is for you.

I'm going to take you behind the scenes of one of our recent members’ masterclasses inside Agent Accelerator, where we explained exactly how to operate with standards, not intentions, in the area of prospecting.

I'm also going to share the exact SMART standard that we've provided to our members to help them be more consistent, persistent, and proactive with their prospecting every single week.

This is episode 245 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name is Darren Krakowiak. I'm here to help you lead better, grow faster, and stress less.

And in our episode last week, I shared a bunch of affirmations. And it occurred to me after I, I guess, hit publish on that episode, that perhaps I was being—it may have sounded a little bit arrogant, like some of the things I was saying, like, “everything is always working out for me.” And I just wanted to clarify something.

This isn't meant to be arrogance; it's meant to be perspective, right?

If you go around thinking to yourself, or even saying to yourself, that the whole world is out to get me, you are going to find evidence of that. But if you have the perspective or the position, or the, I guess, the disposition that “everything is always working out for me,” then you will see evidence of that. And when you find evidence of that, and you believe that to be true, then more of that will start to appear in your life.

So, I'm not saying that the world revolves around me and that I'm the center of the universe—I didn’t mean to put it like that. What I'm really saying is that the perspective that you can offer yourself by saying affirmations such as “everything is always working out for me.”

Once you have that perspective, once you have that belief, once you start to say that to yourself, you will start to see evidence of it in your life.

So, let's talk about prospecting in this week's episode.

And just like in episode 243, a couple of weeks ago, there is a visual element to this episode. So, it is a recording of one of our recent sessions for members.

Now, you can listen, and you'll still get a lot of the benefit that's contained in the content. But if you want to see what I'm sharing on the screen, I invite you to jump onto our YouTube channel, which is @CRESuccess—all one word—and you can watch the episode where I draw out some of the elements that I'm talking about in this training session. Also, you'll see the table which contains all of the standards in relation to prospecting.

Now, if you like this and you'd like to attend sessions like this on the regular, you can go to cresuccess.co/waitlist

I'm going to have a never-to-be-repeated offer for Black Friday and Cyber Monday this month. It's going to be one of our final pushes for new members before the end of this year. And if you've been holding out to join, this month will be an ideal time for you to commit.

So go to cresuccess.co/waitlist, if you like the content of this episode and you want more of it, including live weekly sessions and also a new module delivered to your inbox every single week, that's what we offer inside Agent Accelerator.

Alright, let's check out the training now from one of our recent sessions.

I think when we're working with intentions, we're relying on our motivation and on our memory. Standards survive due to systems and structure.

So. we're going to call this the Standards Operating Loop. And this is how we turn the decision that you make into behaviors that continue to survive even when you're busy.

So, with clarity, we want clarity around what the standard is. And I think we want to word it in a way that is binary, right? Is it done or is it not done?

Another term is “definition of done.” So, what does “done” look like?

For example, with vendor reports, it might be 100% of active listings have received a vendor report by 4 p.m. on Wednesday. That is the definition of done if I have done my vendor reporting.

So that's clarity.

Commitments—this is where we convert that clarity through commitments, including if/then rules, designing the environment, and putting in place calendar blocks. Because, you know, we don't rise to the level of our goals or intentions—we fall to the level of our systems or standards.

So, like I said before, if it's 3:45 p.m. on a Wednesday, then we open the CRM and active listings, and we send the vendor reports for all active listings by 4:30 that day. That's the if/then statement—that's the commitment.

The cadence is like the scoreboard and reviews that track inputs, leading measures, and trigger action, including making sure it's seen by you and by others.

So, the scoreboard will be something like the percentage of vendors that were updated by the deadline. Was it 100%, was it not? And the review could be sharing a weekly snapshot or screenshot with your accountability buddy, or sharing the traffic light indicator with the group.

And then the consequence—we've just talked about whether it's reward or penalty for you, and what's going to drive you to uphold the standard. You know, what's the cost for slipping or the reward for maintaining the standard?

So, you build that “miss once” protocol, and I'll give you some examples shortly.

The consequence—so if I miss a vendor report, then I've got to call them the same day and give them a written update within 24 hours, log the reason why I missed it, and then the following week, I'm actually going to log 30 minutes on Tuesday for pre-draft time to make sure I'm not late again. That's how I fix that.

And the reward—if I do 4 out of 4 weeks, I'll go home at 3 o'clock on Friday because I've been a good boy or girl.

And then this is kind of like a loop, and here, the thing that's going to bring everything tighter and back together is identity.

So, you know, the identity: I'm the agent who keeps promises to myself even when it's inconvenient.

And it's also going to be the environment that you design. So, we talked before about things like booking the meeting room, making sure that we've got all the right things around us to make it difficult for us not to withhold the standard.

Now I want to get into designing some standards. I'm going to give you some examples, and my hope is that we'll be able to design two on today's call.

Before I go any further, does anyone have any questions?

I'm seeing shakes of the head. I think everyone's good. Alright.

So next steps:

First of all, decide your non-negotiables. We've all got the PDF plan that we put in place. What are the non-negotiables that are going to make that PDF plan a reality?

I would pick three standards, and again make them binary—either they're done or they're not done. It's very clear if you are upholding the standard or not.

Let me give you some examples.

Prospecting block—Monday to Thursday, 8:30 to 10 a.m. No email or social media during that block. That's the standard.

You might have follow-up standards, so all new inbound leads are contacted within 24 hours, or we always issue proposals within 72 hours of being invited to submit one.

It could be about pipeline management—we update our CRM daily, and we always have the next step and the date, and we do that for 100% of our active opportunities.

It could be fee integrity, right? We always use minimum fee minimums. I used to call it “get out of bed fee,” right? So, what's the fee that we are going to get out of bed for? And we always first articulate our value to achieve the fee threshold, as opposed to discounting just to get listings.

So that's some examples of non-negotiables. Hopefully you've got one or two in mind. I'll give you some more time to create them in a moment.

Next part is to install the standard system. So, we want to put blocks in the calendar, we want to design the environment because that environment beats motivation.

And we want to use a standards template, which I'm going to share with you now, which has if/then, time blocks, metrics, thresholds, and miss protocols for your most important standards.

Let me give you this example, which I've created. Hopefully you can all see this.

This is a prospecting standard example.

So, what is the SMART standard—SMART: specific, measurable, ambitious, relevant, time-bound. That's what a SMART goal is.

The SMART standard is 90 minutes focused on new business creation—outbound calls, targeted emails, LinkedIn messages, follow-ups in a 14-day cadence.

That's what counts as new business creation. No inbox, no admin, no research rabbit holes or proposal writing during this block—that’s what we’re doing at that time.

Here's the if/then:

If it's 4:30 the day before a block, then I load 20 names into the today's call list and I fill missing numbers for 10 minutes max.

If it's 8:25 on the block day, then I turn Do Not Disturb on my phone, the inbox is closed, the headset’s on, the CRM’s open to the call list.

If the call ends, then I log it in the CRM before the next dial.

If a meeting’s booked, then I send the calendar invite immediately and note the next step. If/then.

Time blocks—Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, 8:30 to 10 a.m. I'm going to create it in my calendar; I'm going to call it “Client Creation - Non-Movable”

What's the metric or lead indicator? It's the blocks completed—that's the input that we're putting into this system. Three is the target.

And then I'm going to put an additional layer here about quality. So, I'm also going to measure the number of calls or dials that I make, and the live conversations that I have, and the first meetings that are booked.

So, what are we getting out of this input?

Thresholds—green, yellow, red.

This is green if I get my three blocks done by Thursday close of business, and I've dialed 60 people with 15 conversations and three meetings booked. Then I'm in green—I'm very happy with what my prospecting block’s getting me.

Now, I'm yellow if I only did two blocks, or if I didn't hit the metrics on the 60 dials, the 15 live conversations, and the three meetings booked.

And for any metrics below, I clear the gap with the Friday make-up block.

So, if I didn't hit my green, then I'll just do another block on Friday to get into green.

And then if I'm in red—it's if I only did one or no blocks, then I didn’t get any meetings. I'm red.

So, then what's the consequence of that?

Well, if you miss a block, we make it up within 48 hours.

If we hit red any week, we run four blocks the following week. So, we either add it on a Wednesday or we add it maybe on a Friday.

And we perform a 10-minute postmortem.

So, what's the cause here? Why didn't we get to where we got to? Maybe we didn't load the numbers properly. Maybe we didn't do enough on pre-qualifying the numbers that we put in for list quality. Maybe we didn't protect the time. Maybe we haven't worked enough on our scripts, which is going to help us lead to meetings, right? What's the cause of this thing?

And if we've got two reds in a month, then we're going to keep the fourth block in place for four weeks. If that makes sense, right?

So now the new standard is they've got to do four days of prospecting a week because we're not getting the juice that we wanted out of the three days. So, we modify and iterate the standard.