The Importance Of Good Sales Prospecting for the New Realtor

In any sales job, you can sit back and ‘wait for prospects to come to you’. Or, you can be pro-active and start building a customer base yourself. The benefit to good prospecting is that you will always have a sales funnel. If you rely on people coming to you, you’ll end up with peaks and valleys of business rather than a steady stream of good prospects. For income purposes, you certainly want to strive for steady business throughout the year.

How to accomplish this is the obstacle many realtors face. You have an entire zip code of potential prospects, but how do you find them and get them to contact you? Sales reps refer to this as ‘mining your territory’. You need to attract potential prospects to you.

Every month, I receive the same, stale postcard announcing, ‘I’m Joan and I just sold a house on your street’. I can tell you as a home owner, my response is, so what? How does it benefit me that you sold a house on my street? It doesn’t. The only reason people respond to direct response marketing is because you’ve answered the question: What’s In It For Me? “ME” being your home owner.

You have to come up with a creative way to market yourself and your services. Let’s face it, you’re marketing your service as a realtor.

Get inside the head of your prospect. Ask yourself these questions:


- What do I know that can be of value to this person?
- How can I get them this information easily?
- How can I use a postcard campaign to build a list?


If you provide something of value up-front, you’ll start a relationship in the best possible way: by creating value. The more value you create, the easier it becomes for someone to pay you a commission-based fee. If your prospect doesn’t see you as someone of value, they’ll start trying to negotiate your fee downward.

If you do the proper prospecting, you’ll bring value to people before they ever approach you to sell their home. They’ll also be more likely to refer you to a friend or neighbor. You’ll be building your business quickly with the ‘right’ kind of prospects. It’s a lot easier than sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.