Four sales standards every commercial real estate principal should set.

CRE Success Principle: Make the standards you want to see inside your agency visible in your weekly meetings, your one-on-one conversations and in the performance benchmarks you hold people accountable to.

Commercial real estate sales performance isn't just about how many deals your agents close. It's also about the habits, relationships and activities that create those results.

In episode 292 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership, I share four principles that emerged when I reviewed mentoring sessions with three experienced commercial real estate leaders operating across different markets and business models.

Their advice was remarkably consistent.

1. Play the Long Game

Commercial real estate prospecting shouldn't be about winning the next listing at any cost. The goal is to build relationships with property owners and tenants over time.

That means understanding their needs, creating reasons to stay in touch and making regular contact, even when there's no immediate deal to win.

2. Never Go Quiet on Clients

Silence creates uncertainty. Whether an inspection attracts plenty of interest or no one turns up, your client deserves an update.

Consistent communication builds trust, even when the news isn't good. As a principal, you need visibility over when clients last heard from your agents and what they were told.

3. Define Each Agent's Market

The best agents don't try to know everything about everyone. They work a defined patch and build detailed knowledge of their target streets, buildings, owners or contacts.

Give every agent a market they can describe, quantify and take responsibility for developing.

4. Measure the Inputs

When an agent isn't performing, look beyond the result. Are they making enough calls, having meaningful conversations and securing meetings? Are they converting those meetings into pitches?

Measurable sales activity helps you identify the real problem and coach your people towards a solution.

Turn Good Advice into Standards

If you want better sales management, make these principles visible in your weekly meetings, client reporting and agent development plans.

Listen to episode 292 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership for the full discussion.

Want to see how Agent Accelerator can help your agents improve? Visit cresuccess.co/sales to learn more about Sales Management as a Service.

Episode transcript:

In 2026, we've had three commercial real estate leaders come in and speak to our Agent Accelerator members.

One of those leaders, industry experts, ran a commercial office specialist business on Sydney's Lower North Shore for 20 years.

One of them has built a franchise group to 14 offices across Australia and New Zealand in five years, and another one leases large office buildings in Melbourne's suburban market.

So, they're all in different businesses with different business models, servicing different ends of the market.

But when I went back through the recordings, the things that they told our members were more or less the same things.

And I don't just mean that there were similar themes. I mean that they basically had the same instructions said in different words.

Because the brief was, "Can you come in and act as a mentor and share with our members about what it takes to be successful, to get to where you've gotten to in our industry?"

Now, if you're a commercial real estate principal, there's a good chance that you've been telling your agents many of the same things that they told our members for many years.

So today, what I want to explore is why it's a little bit different when that same message comes from someone else.

Welcome to episode 292 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak, and my job is to help commercial real estate principals to build an agency that can run without them so they have the choice to work on or off the tools.

Now, I want to start our episode today talking about how these mentoring sessions, and yes, when we get experts in from the industry to come and speak to our members, we call them mentoring sessions.

That's what I was talking about at the top of the show, because I'm going to be referring to them throughout this episode.

Now, inside Agent Accelerator, we run a mentoring session on the fifth Tuesday of any month that has five Tuesdays in it, and that works out to be around once a quarter.

We invite an experienced commercial real estate leader in to speak to the group, and I ask them to make sure they keep it really practical.

Now, most of the time it's a fireside chat, and that means I just ask them questions and they answer them, and then some of our members put their own questions to them directly as well.

Occasionally, one of our mentors will bring a set piece presentation that they've delivered before, and Dan O'Brien of X Commercial, he did that for us in June.

Now, before the mentor says a word, I always frame the sessions by giving our members an important instruction.

And that is to make sure they enjoy the session, engage with the content, but just listen out for what you can take away and apply in your own market.

And I am kind of prescriptive about how much I want people to apply.

Don't try and grab 10 things. Just two or three takeaways will do the job.

And there's one more thing I want to mention, particularly if you're a commercial real estate principal and you're wondering who is it that you'd be letting talk to your people if you had agents in the program.

The mentors we invite are advised to treat the contact as privileged access, and that means it's got to be handled with sensitivity.

And what we mean is, is that they've got to respect our members' privacy, and it also means not approaching any member about employment as a result of their involvement in the session.

So, these sessions are there for our agents who are our paying members, and they're there to learn something from someone who's further along than they are.

So why bring an outside voice in at all? Well, I reckon there's three reasons, and I think they'll make sense once, once you hear them.

So, the first one is that your agents already know you. They've heard your version of this advice. Like I said, it's nothing new, it's just a new voice, a different voice, an outside voice.

And they've probably heard you say it more than once, and it comes with that context because you're the principal, you set the targets, and kind of you're a little bit biased, right?

It's hard for advice to sound neutral when it comes from the person who has a stake in the result.

The second thing is that a mentor has no stake in what your agent does, right?

And they have a record that they can stand against that they've produced in their own market.

They're not there to manage anyone. They're just describing how they operate and what's worked for them over the years.

And the third thing, and I think this one's the one that matters the most, is that it moves the standard off the person.

You've heard me talk about holding people to the standard, right? And an outside operator is a very effective way of showing the standard because it sounds like the market's expectation rather than yours.

But there's a catch. One mentor's advice is one person's opinion, however good they are. So here's the test I use.

When one operator tells you something, it's an opinion. When three operators in three different markets with three different business models tell your agents the same thing, I'd stop treating that as an opinion and start treating it as a standard.

So, let's look at what the standard is. There were four things in common that we heard from our last three mentors.

The first is that all three of the mentors that came and spoke to our members this year treat the relationship as a long-term arc, not a single call or a single deal.

So, Chris Hartigan, who was one of the mentors who came and spoke to our members, he built his business around staying with an owner across the whole life of their property.

He was really clear that if you only prospect to land the next lease, the next deal, the next listing, then you only get to engage with that person occasionally.

When he described how a new agent should start from zero, because he said, "Hey, if you're just getting started, what would you do?" His answer was 50 calls to 50 tenants.

Take the one inquiry that activity produces and then use it to call 50 owners. And what you talk about in those calls is what the owner wants to hear, not whether they'd like to sell their building or appoint you as a leasing agent, but about a potential tenant.

Josh Tebb, who was another one of the mentors, made this point crystal clear. He never tries to pitch on a first call.

He says who he is, why he's calling, he sends an email that carries the detail, and he leaves the person with enough to want more without telling them everything that they need to know, because then they've got no reason to speak to him again.

His view is that you'll almost never win a significant deal on the first call, particularly with someone sophisticated on the other end of the line. The key insight was to build rapport first.

And Dan O'Brien put it into numbers. He said, "Speak to every one of your contacts at least three times a year."

And he said, "What most agents have is a nurture problem, not a data collection problem."

So, three styles, but one principle, as in one point that they're all making.

And here's the question I think it raises for you. What does your weekly sales and leasing meeting reward?

If the only thing you're asking in that meeting is whether the listing came in, you are training your agents to pitch early.

If you ask them about the conversations that moved a relationship forward, you're training them to play the long game.

Now, the second thing that we talked about was radio silence, and all three of them in different ways said the worst thing an agent can do with a client is just to go dark, to go missing, to stay quiet.

Chris gave us a really good example. He said, "If you've booked an inspection on a campaign, tell the vendor. When the inspection's done, tell the vendor. It can be a quick text. If you've had no inspections, then tell them that, too, because that's still relevant information."

He said, "It's surprising how easy it is to run a round of inspections and then forget to tell your client and then to ring them a week later to find that they think that nothing has been happening. And there really is no excuse for letting that happen.”

Josh came at it from the other side. He said, when a prospect goes cold on him, he doesn't keep calling them every day, but he doesn't give up either.

He'll send them a short note a week or so later and he'll ask them, "Hey, why did you disengage?" And he frames it as him wanting to know so that he can help his own client with the next one.

He said, "Most people will give you something when you ask them out. If you say, 'Hey, can you give me some help here? I just need to give some feedback to my client,' you're likely to get the response."

And Dan's version of this was that good agents deliver bad news.

They do it politely, but they do it directly. And I think that's something that people respect.

Now, here's why I think this one probably matters more to you than it does to your agents.

Silence is invisible. A client who hasn't heard from your agent in nine days doesn't always call you to complain, but they will be wondering what's going on.

And unless you hear about it, you have no visibility that's happening.

So, here's a question for you to take away.

For each live campaign in your business right now, when did the client last hear from your agent, and what did they hear?

Now, the other two points that they made were all about how to run a week, how they create an ideal week, and I think this is where it becomes practical because both of these are things that you can measure.

The first one is that every one of them works to a defined list, not the whole market, their own list.

Chris and his business partner worked out that their whole business lived in about 30 streets, right?

And over 20 years, he had about 40 key clients. They knew the owners, the prices, and the deals on those 30 streets.

Josh, well, he talked about how his team tracks 400 office buildings in the Melbourne suburban office market.

They've built their own vacancy model. They know what's vacant, when leases expire, and the quality of each building.

His point wasn't that you'll get to do every deal, it's just that you should know about every deal.

And Dan's list and the target that he sets for agents is that everyone should have 2,000 personal contacts.

So, notice what all of those things have in common. They're all a number that you could write on the whiteboard, that you could quote in the weekly meeting, 30 streets, 400 buildings, 2,000 contacts.

So, if you asked each of your agents to tell you their patch in one sentence and to put a number on it, how many of them do you think could?

Maybe you could help them define that.

The second point here is that all three of our mentors run on inputs they can count. They define what good looks like.

Dan said for a new agent, he wants them to have about 175 connects every single week on the phone.

If they're making those and they're only getting in front of, say, three owners a week, then they've got a dialogue problem.

He'd expect 10 to 12 meetings out of the 175 connects. And if they're getting 10 meetings a week and nobody's asked them to submit on anything for a month, then they've got a presentation problem.

Okay? I think it's a simple but important insight.

It takes my agent isn't performing and turns it into a specific problem that you can actually define and coach towards solving.

So, is it the calls? Is it the conversation? Or is it the presentation?

Chris's line about what he'd do if he was starting over with 50 calls, and Josh expressed the view that effort is everything.

Now, these are more or less the same idea. Effort you can count is effort you can improve. It's the logic behind the accountability calls that we went through in episode 290.

There was one more thread running through all three mentoring sessions that we've held so far in 2026, and it's the one that I think is more relevant for a commercial real estate principal than for their agents. It's what to do with someone new.

Dan has a development plan by year. In year one, he doesn't expect a new agent to be, you know, acing leasing presentations. He realizes they'll probably only be a 3 or 4 out of 10 on that score after one year.

But what he wants for them is to know their local market well enough to be able to talk about it, to be a black belt on the CRM, and to be able to generate meetings for a senior agent. That's the standard he set for the first year.

By year two, he wants six or seven out of 10 in terms of how good the listing presentation is, and GCI in the range of about $400,000.

And there's also a weekly check-in against all of those to make sure people are on track.

In some agencies I see, the year two expectation is applied in year one with nothing written down about what should happen in between.

Now, I'm not seeking to criticize, but what I am saying is that the plan is only living inside the principal's head. It hasn't been communicated.

Josh's version of this was about the first 30 days, which is something I often use with my clients.

That is, define what success looks like in the first 30, 60 or 90 days. Use the experience in the team. Shadow a senior person, but don't sit through the meeting saying nothing, and don't try to be heard for the sake of it.

Know what the meeting is about before you walk in, the asset, the size, why you're seeing them.

And his team runs a Monday morning huddle where everyone says who they're seeing and whether they can bring along someone to attend that meeting so nobody goes to a meeting alone if they don't have to.

None of that needs a mentor or an outside speaker. It's just a structure, and you could make that happen in your business.

So let me just pull all of this together. I've talked about three senior leaders from our industry and four things that they all said. Play the long game, don't go quiet, work a defined list, and count your inputs.

If you recognize those things as stuff that you've been saying to your team, that's good news. It means you're saying the right things, and the opportunity now is for your agents to be hearing them in another voice.

That's not meant to suggest that what you're saying is falling on deaf ears, but it's that advice from someone with no stake in an agent's performance might land with some extra weight, and there's an opportunity to use it.

You can make these standards and structure visible in your business, in what you ask in the weekly meeting, in how often you check client updates, and whether every agent has a patch and a plan.

In the next episode, I'm going to go inside another part of the Agent Accelerator program, which is the Monthly Members Masterclass, and I'll share a bit about what the agents are learning in and applying from those sessions.

And if you'd like to know what the mentoring sessions, the accountability calls, and the rest of Agent Accelerator could look like for your agents, go to cresuccess.co/sales

Leave your details on that page. I will send you more information about how sales management as a service works in practice.

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