In the commercial real estate agency, the skills required of the sales executive are specialized and numerous. Each real estate market, town or city will have unique trading and listing requirements. On that basis, you should train for peak performance.

Too many salespeople expect the boss to pay for some training session or send them to a workshop or seminar. While that process may seem convenient, most generally motivated salespeople don’t improve or learn much from any of the workshops or seminars.

You can remember a few things for a few days and try some of the program’s recommendations or tools, although the problem of breaking old habits and establishing new ones will always stifle progress. That said, the main players in our industry are people who can change their actions and improve their processes. They train to be the best in every aspect possible.

While we do a lot of things on a daily basis, there are really only 8 things that are fundamentally important to our career and progress. Self-improvement in these 8 separate items will radically improve listings and completed transactions.

Here are those eight special items:

1. Prospecting for new business will always be #1 on the list, no matter how busy you are on any given day. Prospecting should always happen without fail and with great focus. It will take about 2 hours per day. That said, you need to practice your prospecting methods and your dialogue. When contacting people, you are simply looking to understand if they have a need for or an interest in commercial or retail property.
2. From a successful prospecting process, you can move on to a meeting with a potential client or client. The frequency of your meetings and the growth of your market share will come from prospecting. That being the case, you’ll need to practice your meeting presentations and sales pitches.
3. From a successful sales pitch, you will have the opportunity to list the property. If you list with a predominant focus on exclusive listings, you will build better market share. In that case, you will always create a list of sale and lease actions that you can control and therefore avoid interference from competing agents.
4. The marketing process for each listing should be considered unique and special. Each listing should be targeted to the target market that best suits the property’s improvements and location. Gone are the days of generic marketing in commercial real estate. We really need to delve into the type of property and the levels of research that exist today. That’s what marketing is all about, and you’ll learn which types of marketing work more effectively than others in today’s economic climate.
5. From a successful marketing campaign, you will generate some inquiries with qualified prospects. Those inquiries will then turn into property inspections. The property inspection process can be streamlined and improved through deliberate effort. Understanding the features of the property and the best way to get people through the property will always help you get better results from property inspections. Preparation is the key. Knowing the property will help you a lot.
6. A successful property inspection will turn into a negotiation process. Since you are negotiating the client’s requirements with the prospective buyer or tenant, as the case may be, you can really optimize the outcome through self-improvement of negotiation skills. The best agents with excellent negotiation skills are self-made people. They have deliberately chosen to improve every stage of the sale or lease marketing process. Practice your negotiating skills. Control the negotiation at every stage.
7. A successful negotiation will progress to the creation of the correct documentation or an agreement in principle, as the case may be. Since this is one of the most important parts of the sale or lease process, there is no excuse for inaccurate or average property documentation. Understand what needs to be done, and then improve your document skills for accurate transactions. The clients we serve expect us to provide foolproof documentation. In some cases, a complex transaction must be referred to the client’s attorney for final documentation. If you don’t know what to do with the document, don’t start it; find someone who knows what to do.
8. When a transaction has been successfully documented, it is not the end of the deal. The transaction is at a critical stage that must be followed through to completion. It is interesting to note that many lawyers and accountants have been known to delay the property transaction for all sorts of reasons. As an agent working for the client, you need to track the progress of the deal and make sure no one is ‘pulling the chain’. It is your commission that is at stake here!

These are the key factors at the core of a top agent’s performance and focus. You can optimize these skills and drive the results you seek. Start practicing.