The four lead generation channels every commercial agency needs.

CRE Success Principle: If you can’t tell me where your last five deals came from, you can’t deliberately do more of what’s working.

If I asked you where your last five deals came from, could you tell me?

Most commercial real estate principals can't, at least not precisely. Business arrives from a mix of prospecting, referrals, existing clients and inbound inquiries. But when those channels aren't tracked or managed deliberately, it's difficult to know what is actually driving growth in your business.

1. Outbound Prospecting

I think good prospecting comes down to three principles: consistent, persistent and proactive.

It needs to happen for a certain number of hours every week, not only when agents have spare time. It also requires multiple touchpoints and deliberate targeting, rather than working through a random list and hoping something sticks.

2. Referrals

There are two main referral systems to manage: individual networks and high-value referral partners.

Agents need to stay visible to their networks, while the agency should build deliberate, mutually valuable relationships with people such as commercial lawyers, accountants, finance brokers and others who regularly work with property owners, buyers and tenants.

3. Existing Clients

One of the best moments to ask for a referral or additional business is immediately after a positive outcome, while the goodwill is strong and fresh.

Too often, the moment passes.

4. Inbound Leads

Many agencies don't need more marketing. They need better follow-up.

Every inquiry should be assigned to a specific person and there needs to be clear expectations about how quickly it will be handled.

If your pipeline relies too heavily on one channel, start by identifying the gaps. Then build systems around all four.

For a deeper look at how to generate more opportunities, listen to episode 284 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership.

Episode transcript:

If I asked you right now where your last five deals came from, could you tell me?

Most commercial real estate principals can't. Well, not precisely anyway.

The answer's probably something like a mix of a call someone made, a referral that came in, a client who mentioned something, an inquiry off the website.

Nobody was tracking which channel it actually came from because nobody was running four channels deliberately.

There was just business arriving from wherever it happened to come from.

Here's the problem with that. If you don't know which channel is actually working, you can't do more of what is working, and it's also harder to fix what is not working.

And most agencies, whether they realize it or not, are relying almost entirely on one channel, because that channel seems to be reliable and working, while three other legitimate sources of business sit almost completely untouched.

Today, I want to walk you through all four.

This is episode 284 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm Darren Krakowiak, I'm your host, and I'm here to help commercial real estate principals to build a business, an agency that can run without them so they have the choice to work on or off the tools.

Now, in the last episode, I said that we'd be covering pipeline, people, and process across a series of three more episodes, and it turns out that as I was planning today's episode, pipeline has a lot more to fit in it than one edition of the show.

So, we're going to split it into two. That might happen again with people or process. We'll see how much ground there is to cover once we get to them.

So, today is part one of pipeline, which we're going to call ‘generate’.

Because before you can qualify or convert anything, you need opportunities coming into the business.

And most agencies are running one channel for that when there are four that they should be deliberately running.

So, let's start with the one that every commercial real estate principal already thinks about - Outbound prospecting.

And I want to give you three words that describe what good prospecting actually looks like in the order that I think about them: consistent, persistent, and proactive.

We'll start off with consistent, and this is, first and foremost, a prospecting routine that runs every single week, regardless of how busy the team is with active deals.

The moment prospecting becomes a thing that happens when there's spare time, I think it stops happening because there's hardly any spare time left in a busy agency.

Consistent means it's scheduled, it's protected, and it's non-negotiable. The same way a recurring vendor meeting for an active listing would be a non-negotiable thing that happens no matter how busy we are.

So that's consistent.

Next up is persistent, and the best way to describe this, I think, is that a single call to a property owner is not prospecting, it's just a data point.

Real prospecting means a genuine cadence, multiple touch points over time through different channels before anyone concludes that it's not the right time to pursue that opportunity.

Most agents give up after one or maybe two attempts. The opportunities worth having, I've found, usually take a little bit more effort than that.

So, we've got consistent, we've got persistent.

The third thing is to be proactive, and this is about who it is that you are targeting.

Being proactive means going after specific properties, specific owners in specific patches with intent rather than working through a generic list and just hoping something sticks.

A targeted list of 30 owners that you've deliberately chosen will usually outperform a scattergun list of 100 randoms.

So consistent, persistent, and proactive. If your team's prospecting is missing any one of those three elements, that is where I would start.

The second channel is referrals.

And again, this is one that a lot of agencies tell me that is the thing that brings them the most business. It's the one that they rely on and, you know, it can be a bit of a vague thing, like it's word of mouth basically.

But referrals is a specific thing, and there's two different referral systems that I think need to be run differently.

So I want to take you through what those are right now.

The first one is the individual agents' networks. This is not just their past client contacts, it's also people that they know in the industry and other people within their personal circle.

This works best when agents are actively nurturing those relationships, not waiting for someone to think of them, but staying visibly in front of their network on a regular basis.

And I think this is why having a presence in the marketplace is so important.

The second side of referrals is having high-value referral partners.

Think buyer's agents, commercial lawyers, accountants, finance brokers, people who deal with commercial property owners, buyers, and tenants as part of their day-to-day work and who can send you quality opportunities on a regular basis.

This is a different kind of relationship to manage because it's not about staying visible to hundreds of people, like past clients and people in your network.

It's about a much smaller number of deliberate high-value relationships where you can be genuinely useful to them, and they can be genuinely useful to you. So value flows both ways.

There's the law of reciprocity that comes into play.

Now, most commercial agencies don't do any of those things deliberately. They just say, "Oh, I'm so great. I'm so experienced." “The referrals come in. They happen by accident.”

So, let's move on to the third channel now, and this is your existing client base. And I'm talking here about a particular situation, and it's what happens at the time of completing a transaction or delivering a service.

And I think the most underutilized source of new business in most commercial real estate agencies is activating this mechanism.

And here's the simplest version of how to do it well.

There's a moment when every satisfied client, like right after a deal or right after a lease renewal goes smoothly or right after they tell you how happy they are, when they give you a green light to ask for a direct referral.

That's the moment to ask. That's the trigger that your team needs to be trained to be looking for.

And the time to do it is not months later out of the blue. It's right then while the goodwill is fresh and while it feels like a natural, organic response to what the other person has just said.

"I'm happy." "Oh, you are? Well, we love working with you, and we'd love to work with you more or work with more people like you."

So it could be, "Do you know anyone else who needs help with a property?" It could be, "Would you be comfortable if I mentioned your name to someone who I know is in a similar position?"

And if not a referral, your team can offer to assist that owner with something that they already own that we're not providing any service on.

So, it's pretty simple. It's not complicated. Most agents never ask because the moment passes, you get the compliment, you say thank you, and then you don't use that moment as a trigger, as an invitation to ask for more business from them or for a warm referral or to have that person act as a testimonial or a case study for someone who might be similar.

And if you don't do it right then, then it sort of happens too late or it doesn't feel natural to ask for it later on.

So, that's three channels. We've got one more.

The fourth channel is inbound. Inquiries that come from your sales and leasing campaigns, from your social media content, general inquiries through your website or, you know, people just calling up your reception.

Now, the problem I see here is that the leads aren't being lost because there's a problem with sourcing or the marketing is wrong. They're actually being lost because the follow-up is bad.

So, the inquiry comes in, someone gets back to them in a day or two later, if at all, and it just sort of quietly dies.

So, the problem here is discipline. It's not marketing.

The marketing is doing the work. The problem is that people in the business aren't handling the lead the marketing just delivered to them.

Every inbound inquiry needs to land somewhere, it can't be ignored or forgotten about, with a clear owner and with a clear expectation that you have set so they understand how fast it is that that person gets responded to.

The agencies that are good at this aren't just generating more inbound leads than everyone else. The important thing is they're not letting those inbound leads leak once they've got them in the door.

So, four channels: Outbound prospecting - consistent, persistent, and proactive.

Referrals, that is individual agents, personal networks, and high-value referral partners run as two different systems.

There's also mining your existing clients for referrals or repeat business, specifically at that green light moment when the trigger is presented to you and doing it in a way which feels natural and organic.

And capturing inbound leads that your marketing is generating, where the fix is almost always follow-up discipline, not more marketing spend.

So that's the generate portion of the pipeline topic. Next, we're going to go into qualifying and converting. That's what happens once the opportunities are actually in front of you.

Now, if one of these four channels is clearly the weak link in your pipeline, in your business right now, I would like to hear about it.

You can find me on LinkedIn, Darren Krakowiak. Send me a message, tell me what's going on, and I will get back to you personally.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.