Presentation Tips and Ideas for Commercial Real Estate Agents

In commercial real estate agency today, most listing opportunities will be competitive events and presentations. You will have other real estate agents chasing the same property at the same time. That being said, your sales pitch or presentation to the client needs to be of the highest quality in every respect.

You will only have a short period of time to get your message and strategy through to the client. Choices will be made from the 30 minutes that you spend with your client pitching for the listing. Why are you the best agent for the job? Give the client the right answer.

In preparing for a property presentation, it is wise to understand the client, the property, and the motivation that puts the property on the market today. Every client will have a story to tell and a requirement to fill. You need to get inside the ‘clients head’ to identify the ultimate outcome required and the best timing that will help them achieve their property goals.

Here are some presentation tips that will help you position yourself for the property listing and to help satisfy the needs of the client:

  1. Confidence is a significant leverage tool when it comes to winning listings. To build your confidence you really do need to understand the property type, the location, and the available strategies to optimize the enquiry from marketing. You can then match these factors to the client in a confident and relevant way. A generic approach to marketing will not help you win listings.
  2. A question and answer process will help you get to the main factors and motivations behind the clients requirements in selling or leasing the property. You can improve your questioning strategy through regular practice and role playing. Given that the property market changes throughout the year, the questioning process will also need to change and adjust to the prevailing market conditions. Share experiences and challenges with your agency colleagues to improve the presentations that you are making.
  3. Your knowledge of the property type will allow you to show your relevance to the client. Give them some specific solutions to achieving higher levels of enquiry and inspections from the marketing effort. Put yourself into the marketing process so that the client feels that your offered solutions are more important than that provided by any other agency.
  4. In this property market, direct marketing takes preference over generic marketing. The direct marketing approach only applies to exclusive listings. On that basis you should be seeking an exclusive listing for the agency appointment. Make sure that the client understands the differences between open listings and exclusive listings from a marketing perspective. If they are genuine in the sale or leasing process, the choice will be logical and simple.
  5. Stories connecting to the property type and the overall location will help you in attracting the attention of the client. That will then give you that extra advantage when it comes to converting the listing from the presentation. Choose your stories relative to the property type and the current market conditions, using other clients that have had similar challenges. A prospective client likes to know that they are not alone in handling property challenges.

The property presentation today needs to be well planned. A generic approach will simply not win the listings that you require. Be prepared to be specific and direct with the client using information that will help them make the best choice when it comes to you as a commercial real estate agent.

Common Areas for Improvement When Delivering Presentations

It is very common for sales staff to use tools like PowerPoint to deliver information to sales prospects during a sales cycle. What is also very common are areas where we can tighten up our message and execution while giving sales presentations to deliver huge improvements in our sales effectiveness.

Below are a few examples of areas where tweaking our approach could be the difference when delivering presentations:

Number of Slides

It is very common for us to include too many slides when we build presentations. This is very natural because there is so much that we want to share with the prospect and so much that we think they are interested in. And we maybe correct that there prospect is very interested. But what is also correct is that they are likely very busy individuals and have a limited attention span. If you factor that in as you finalize your presentation, it can be helpful to trim any slides and tighten the message to make it as concise and powerful as possible.

Amount of Words on Each Slide

Not only do we typically put too many slides in our presentations, we also often put too many words on each slide. The problem with this is that most people cannot read and listen at the same time. When you put a large number of words on each slide, you are creating a competitor for yourself when trying to keep the audience’s attention when delivering presentations. If the audience is reading the slide, it is likely that they are not fully listening to you.

Focus the Presentation on the Prospect

It is also very common for us to build presentations that are too focused on ourselves We start out talking about who we are, what we do, where all of our offices are, our history, etc. While this is important information for the prospect to have to ultimately make their decision, if you are at an early stage of the sales cycle, you can make a bigger impact on the prospect by shifting the message from being on you to being more on them. The way to accomplish this is to talk more about their challenges and their interests and how you can help with those.

Shorten the Introduction

As sales people, we can be very good at being hosts when delivering presentations. This is where we perform very thorough introductions, detailed agendas, and then sometimes roll into our corporate overview. The challenge with this flow is that there are two points where you have the highest level of attention from the audience and those are the beginning and at the end of the presentation. In the middle of the presentation is naturally a lull or low point in terms of attention and comprehension and it is during this lull where we often deliver our key messages. Trim up the introduction portion so that when you are taking advantage of the high level of attention that you have at that time.

Trial Close Regularly

Trial closing is checking in with the prospect to see what their thoughts are and we can often not do this enough while delivering presentations. This is such a powerful sales tactic to use as it will give the sales person very valuable information. When applying to presentations, if you trial close regularly through the presentation to check in and see what the prospect’s thoughts are, the feedback provided could help you to tailor your message and flow throughout the rest of the presentation to improve your sales effectiveness.

Present an Evaluation Plan

We often wrap our presentations by asking for questions and then try to get the next meeting. If we present an evaluation plan when delivering presentations, we can map out all of the needed steps and actions that remain and get the prospect’s agreement or feedback on the direction forward.

Projector Hire – Choosing the Right One for Your Presentation

Calling a projector hire company will often get you confused as they ask:

What lumens do you need? (Lumens is the brightness of the projector)
What resolution do you need? (Resolution is the number of pixels at which the display device does not have to expand or compress the input signal)
What type: install, desktop or portable? (Install projectors tend to be larger and heavier, desktop ones are small and light and portable are somewhere in between!)
What you should ask yourself are the following simple questions:

How many people will need to see the projected image? A 1000 lumens projector will usually be sufficient for a smaller meeting – up to 20 people. 2000 lumens is better. A brighter projector will be needed for brighter rooms, bigger screens and larger audiences – some projectors go up to over 10,000 lumens but you shouldn’t need these for a simple presentation!
What will you be showing on the projector? Both data (from a computer) and video can be used to input into the majority of projectors. Most computers are XGA resolution (1024×768 pixels), but some older models may be VGA. This is not a problem for SVGA projectors, which will generally automatically lower the resolution, however if you are projecting high resolution photos and want near photographic detail, then it will have to be an XGA. If the projector is only going to be used to project video from a DVD or video, then there is little advantage in using the higher resolution XGA since SVGA can already project an image consisting of over 800 lines which is more than the resolution of a video signal.
How big is the room – do you need a PA system? Most projectors come with a small speaker that’s useless for anything practical. There’s nothing worse than being unable to make yourself heard! If you’ve got sound with your presentation or video, make sure you hire a separate PA system to let people hear it.