Stop blaming the market and start fixing your pipeline.

CRE Success Principle: The moment you stop blaming external factors and take ownership of the top of your pipeline is when you regain control over your results.

If your year feels like it’s drifting off track, the first thing I want you to look at is your pipeline.

When opportunities dry up, it becomes easy to point to the economy, interest rates, or buyer hesitation. But none of those things are within your control. Your activity is.

Every commercial real estate business runs on a simple pipeline. Leads turn into meetings. Meetings turn into listings. Listings turn into offers. Offers turn into negotiated deals and revenue. When income slows, there is always a blockage somewhere along that chain.

In stronger markets, lead generation often feels effortless. Referrals increase. Repeat business flows. But what the market gives in good times, it takes away in tougher ones.

When inbound activity slows, the ability to prospect becomes the difference between agents who maintain momentum and those who stall.

Prospecting is not something you graduate from having to do. It’s the foundation of production at every stage of your career.

If you need the same number of leads, or more, than you did before, then you probably need to work harder to generate them. That is not a setback. It is an opportunity.

If this resonates, I encourage you to listen to the full episode of Commercial Real Estate Leadership and take the next step toward rebuilding momentum.

Episode transcript:

If you want to get your year back on track because it’s not panning out the way that you 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.

This is episode 257 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. My name’s Darren Krakowiak. I’m here to help you lead better, grow faster, and stress less.

This is the second in our four-part series where we’re talking about pipeline, prospecting, and production power.

And today I want to talk to you if your year already feels like it’s a little bit off track.

Now, I originally recorded this episode in May of 2023. And if you get to May and your year is off track, it may be too late for you to course-correct.

Or at least it’s going to be a lot harder to course-correct than if you have already realized that you are not doing the things right now that you need to be doing to set yourself up for a fantastic year in 2026.

So, I want to bring forward this discussion to have it now.

And it’s a discussion really about your pipeline, looking at the different stages of your pipeline.

And I’ve since, I guess, deepened the development of this concept, we’ve talked about how we turn leads into meetings through prospecting, and we go from meetings to listings by making proposals, and then we turn listings into offers by marketing the listing.

And then finally, we turn those offers into revenue, into deals, by negotiating.

And because we are talking about pipeline and prospecting, today’s episode is all about what you need to do in order to make sure that you’ve got more leads coming into the top of your pipeline.

And I think this is a timely topic to be talking about because of where the market is at.

And I do go out and talk to commercial real estate agencies, and I sometimes hear the excuses that it’s just tougher at the moment.

And this episode is all about creating your own market, creating your own reality by virtue of the activity that you actually conduct.

So, if that is relevant for you, now is the right time to get that course correction, and you can still have the year that you are planning to have in 2026. Enjoy!

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If you’re a long-time listener of the show, I 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.

So 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 would 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 us, it’s listings. 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, 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.

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

So, 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, you know, 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 are 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 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 are 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 are 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 are 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 when 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 are 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 lots of repeat business, then the opposite may be true.

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

These 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 had 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 have 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 it 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 talk to just 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 see that maybe it’s something that people who are less established may need to do.

Well, in this market, it might be something that you need to start doing again.

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.