It’s hot and muggy. Hell, it’s August. Most of the summer vacations have been enjoyed, and for those of us with kids, we are now hustling in preparation of the upcoming school year. For some, this is an exciting time; for my wife and me, it’s a sense of loss. We love having the kids at home.
From a professional perspective, many are still taking long weekends. Some organizations, I have heard, have moved weekly sales meetings to bi-weekly. That’s big mistake, but I understand the thought process. There is no time during the year when there is less of a buzz in the air than now.
So what can you do to inject some mojo and put yourself in position for maximum production when the rest of the industry and related clients come back to life in a few more weeks?
5 simple tasks that will have a major impact on the “Final Four” months of the year:
1) Set an End-of-Year Goal
Certainly you have goals that you have been pursuing, or at least, some time earlier this year, identified. Set a new goal, right now, for completing a tangible, meaningful initiative before the end of the year. It could be completing a transaction or something that has to do with working on your business. See items 2-5 for other goal-oriented ideas.
2) Identify Your Target Prospect List
Take the next three weeks to identify your key prospects for each of the next four months. Identify the channels and frequencies of reaching these prospects (calls, letters, and meetings) and the associated campaign for each of these target markets.
3) Clean Up Your Database
Having a CRM is vital to your commercial real estate success, but having a list of invalidated, outdated, irrelevant and/or redundant contacts decreases the efficiency of prospecting efforts. Export your entire list of contacts and purge those that are either not engaged or have no impact on your CRE business. Of course, you will keep your personal contacts, affiliates, and key influencers in there, but be realistic. For example, this week we are going through over 100,000 contacts in our database with the goal of getting our database down to 30,000 at most – 20,000 preferred.
4) Review your Marketing Efforts
What is your message to the market in September, October, November and December? If you plan this now, you will more than likely implement these efforts. For every month you do not implement a personal, physical and digital initiative, it’s another month your competition has put themselves in your competition’s mind.
5) Read a Book
There is no better, or smaller investment in yourself than reading a book and opening yourself to new ideas of personal enhancement. I like to spend 50% of my reading within the industry and 50% of my reading outside of commercial real estate.
We are still 3 weeks away from Labor Day weekend, or the unofficial end of summer. How you spend these three weeks will go a long way to how you feel during your winter vacation. Share with us in the comments what you will be working on in the next 3 weeks to put yourself in position for a strong finish to 2019.
