Relationship Marketing
Relationship marketing is an ongoing process of customer relationship management strategy, primarily used to encourage and build a strong and lasting customer connection to your business.
When you are selling and leasing real estate, the quality of the client relationship is really the make or break to the long-term results you achieve. The most successful real estate agents in the market are those that have established a solid database of qualified contacts with whom they maintain significant and relevant contact.
In many cases, some real estate agents will only have 5 to 10 key clients. In business terms, this is relatively low unless you are selling and leasing some of the largest property in the local market. These could be substantial commercial office buildings, industrial parks, and retail shopping centers.
It would be best if you were connecting with at least 25 well-qualified high-end prospects or clients constantly in your pipeline. In addition to that, you should have another 25 prospects that can advance into this elite group. Creating this essential core of higher-end prospects for your business is a constant and ongoing strategy. There should be at least 50 prospects in this upper level of your business pipeline. In addition, you should have at least another 300 suspects to work with and convert to prospects.
All of this takes personal contact strategy and implementation. This is not something that you can pass to your sales manager or office principal. It’s a personal thing requiring commitment and consistency.
To establish a solid client relationship, the following business model is useful:
- Identify the key properties in your local area and seek out the property ownership detail in each respect. Contact will need to be made with those people.
- Review the history of all local and significant property transactions over the last five years and create a list of relevant property investors. They will be the sellers or buyers of property in each case. These are people that you will need to contact and meet with personally. They will likely act one day again. It will take you some time to build trust and connection with these people, but do not give up.
- Create a list of essential target relationships to be established and nurtured from key people and businesses in the region of your property activity.
- Cold call prospecting should feature as part of your business model. Every working day you should make at least 50 calls. 50% of those calls should be to new people that you have not spoken to before.
- You need to establish face-to-face meetings where ever possible with qualified contacts.
- Some clients or prospects will be repeat purchasers. Understanding their needs will be part of the ongoing contact process.
- Maintain contact with the local business community constantly and regularly. The larger businesses in your local area may own or rent a property. Either way, they are sources of market intelligence and listing opportunity for sales or leasing.
- Some local businesses will have essential property criteria as part of their business model. Identify these needs and capture them in a database.
- Have several contact tools and processes which make your repeat approaches to your clients and prospects relevant and informational. You can use newsletters, flyers, brochures, success letters, market trends and information briefings, presentation nights, and having regular ‘one on one’ coffee meetings with your prospects.
- Professional people associated with the property industry are also good sources of sales and leasing leads. The people you should contact here are typically solicitors, property lawyers, engineers, quantity surveyors, property valuer, accountants, bankers, or financiers.
These steps are simple, but powerful are the outcomes if you commit to the process.
Relationship marketing is an important ingredient for any marketing strategies and campaign. if you have poor relations with current and prospective customers, you will spend more trying to attract new clients instead of nurturing those you have. Realtors must enhance the customer experience by giving more value to create long-lasting relationships.
