Vendors: A Priceless Resource to Deals

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Vendors: A Priceless Resource to Deals

SALES?- READ THIS: Vendors: A Priceless Resource to Deals

After years in professional sales, in my case, Commercial Real Estate sales, I’m always pleased to share a success story that I think could benefit everyone I know. Most of us have a marketing “machine”. We use it, we rely on it. It works, and we make a living. For the residential real estate agent, the backbone of their “machine” might be MLS. For the commercial agent, that ‘machine’ could be a private broker network, LoopNet, CoStar or combinations of both. My team prides ourselves on the 70,000+ contacts we have assembled into our private, national email database. (Our Team Profile Here) We can cut that database into functional areas like the layers of a cake when we take on a new project. Texas, Non-Texas, Doctors, Dentists, Attorneys, Architects, Brokers/Agents, & Principals can all be sorted by zip, and then emailed our most recent offerings. Overlay social media such as FaceBook and LinkedIn, and voila’; we reach out and touch our target audience quickly.

Last week, we got a new lease listing. It is a medical office building in North Austin. (Listing Link Here: http://bit.ly/620MOBATX ). Our job is to lease the building to a new Tenant. We busily employed our ‘machine’, and started to get hits. But, then something happened that surprised me.

The building had a roof issue we wanted to have looked at. I called my favorite commercial roofing specialist, Jim Jaco, jjaco@smiamerica.com . Jim quickly went out, took a look and made the correction. Then, he said, “hey, I work on other medical buildings, and I know an agent that represents medical tenants”. Within a few minutes, I called that agent. Coincidentally, that agent IS already on my LinkedIn, but had not seen my “For Lease” posting yet. This direct, person-to-person referral was an immediate filter driving me directly to an agent with a medical tenant. Jim Jaco knew that connecting us could create a deal. In the end, that connection will lead to more roofing work for my commercial roofer and friend, Jim Jaco, jjaco@smiamerica.com We often reach out via email to engineers and attorneys, but I’ll be asking my other vendors if they are working on any similar projects and for the connection to those agents/brokers.

How has the story ended? Well, the other agent emailed last night to tell me that his client, a very strong medical group is making an offer on the site. This happened in less than 48 hours. Thank you social media, but more—thank you to the power of personal referral and to Jim Jaco, of Streetman-Mitchell Inc.

Jim Young

KW Commercial

jimyoung@kwcommercial.com