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How You Can Improve Your Real Estate Prospecting Strategy

Real estate prospecting is the gateway to closing more sales, but you can make a lot of little mistakes that will impede your progress. Too many agents lack a solid prospecting strategy or don’t know how to make significant improvements to their strategy.

With even a modicum of effort, however, you can make great strides in boosting your performance.

Goals in Real Estate Prospecting

The ultimate goal of real estate prospecting is to find people faster and close more deals. To do that, you’ll have to accomplish the following.

• Target the right people. First, you need to target the right people. The process of prospecting involves finding potential customers who are interested in what you’re selling and leading them to the next stage of the sales process. If you’re targeting the wrong people, or you’re not reaching your target audience with messages that are appropriate for them, that may be the reason for your inferior results.

• Reach those people efficiently. It’s also critical to know the ways to reach members of your target audience as efficiently as possible, in terms of both time and money. You should be spending as little time as possible on prospecting, so you can focus on closing, and you shouldn’t have to exhaust your budget on it either.

• Get people to the next stage consistently. If we assume you’re talking to the right people and reaching them efficiently, the next step is to move them to the next stage as consistently as you can. This often means bringing them in for a consultation or setting up a meeting.

Meaningful Improvements to Your Real Estate Prospecting Strategy

If you want to improve your real estate prospecting strategy, these are some of the best methods.

• Create a better target customer profile. If you haven’t done this already, make the effort to put together a better target customer profile (or several). With the help of interviews, surveys, and other forms of market research, you can compile customer personas for each profile you want to reach. This will deepen your understanding of each personality type’s values and perspectives, and that should enable you to reach them more effectively.

• Get better data. As you’re prospecting, you’re probably relying on some external source for data, such as a list of email addresses or social media search. If you want to reach your target audience more consistently, it’s worthwhile to ensure you’re using high-quality, accurate information. That means working with the best vendors and partners you can and verifying the integrity of your records whenever possible.

• Use a variety of channels. There are many ways to reach prospects in the real estate market. Each has a unique blend of pluses and minuses. Try to use a diverse array of communication channels to maximize your reach, such as a combination of email, social media marketing, digital ads, and real estate postcards. Of course, if your target audience appears to favor one channel over the others across time, feel free to favor that one in your outreach.

• Automate what you can. Automation is a prospector’s best friend. It has the power to streamline your workflow, save you time and effort, and get you more consistent results. Try to automate everything you can, including drip email campaigns and meeting schedule.

• Tap into referrals. If you’re a real estate agent, you probably already recognize the utility of generating referrals. Lean into that power if you want to get more leads and close more deals. Ask for referrals from your existing clients, but also from the new prospects you contact; you might be surprised how many people are willing to send new opportunities your way.

• Personalize everything you can. While you’re prospecting, canned emails and templates aren’t going to make much of an impact – especially if they’re poorly worded. If you want to stand out and get better results, you need to personalize everything you can.

• AB test your copy and images. What’s the best email subject line to use? What are the best photos to feature in your ads? There isn’t going to be a clear, straightforward, and universal answer. Instead, you’ll have to AB test your work and experiment to figure out which combination of elements works best.

• Keep experimenting and improving. Finally, don’t stop experimenting and improving. Prospecting can’t be perfected through brute force; you’ll need to identify the nuances of your specific target audience, find your rhythm, and steadily ascend to a better place.

Prospecting isn’t something you’re going to master overnight. Even if you could somehow learn all the essential lessons and gather all the vital data, you’d still have to run tests and experiments to learn what works for your target audience.

If you commit to improving your strategy over a period of weeks, or even months, you’ll eventually see better results.