Guest Post by Keenan Baldwin, CEO & Co-founder of SiteZeus - a location intelligence platform.

How much of your time do you actually spend engaged in money-making activities? 

It’s probably a lot less than you think. Between talking to clients, driving, visiting properties, and working with engineers to develop concept plans, you are kept constantly on the run and your prospecting and presentation time suffer greatly.

You fall into pushing paperwork and those key closing moments are kept preciously few and far in between. You end up administering a lot, producing little, and are left yourself wondering why the heck you got into real estate.

Why does everything else consistently encroach on your selling time?

Two reasons. First, these pursuits aren't always the most exhilarating. These are the times where you’re left exposed to rejection and criticism, and if not managed, can cause you to develop the rejection-flu and phone-phobia. You get into a negative mindset and put off calling those tough clients or leads repeatedly, forever.

The second reason is that in the vacuum of sales activity, the paperwork just piles up. If you let it, you’ll spend all of your time building reports, doing research, visiting sites, and scouring for data, none of which actually pay the bills. It’s a safe space that’s dangerous for your output!

It’s time for a reset.

It’s time to get back to acting like CEO of your territory. It’s time to run your market like it’s your business, and here’s how you can go about doing that!

Top-selling brokers aim for efficiency

How can you improve your selling mindset and free up time to act on it?

Use technology to become more efficient.

And no, this isn’t an incremental increase from things like e-signature software or sharing files via the cloud. Those were last year’s tips. We’re talking about site selection software powered by artificial intelligence (AI). It gives you a major morale boost and cuts right to the heart of what consumes most of your time: research, report building, and presentations. 

What exactly is it? Imagine a single suite of tools that links all of your data sources, maps, research, and client sales data together. It gives you an interactive real estate map that layers-in demographics, property values, weather, and traffic to provide one single all-knowing screen. Within seconds you can produce maps advising businesses on where they should locate.

On the surface, the interface is simple. It spits out algorithmic answers. Under the hood, it’s a turbo-charged data nexus guided by next-generation AI which knows more than you could ever want to know about your market. It delivers deeply insightful answers instantaneously. 

Using it makes you a faster and more effective seller.

Here are the top 5 ways that site selection software helps you sell:Beat everyone else to the proposal. Brokers using site selection software can cram a full week’s worth of report-building into thirty minutes. It’s so fast in fact that it makes reporting economical as a prospecting tool. All you need is a general sense of their brand and rough sense of the sales and you can generate custom reports that are attention-grabbing in both their breadth and accuracy. When you cut your prep-time down to minutes, you’ll find that you have fewer excuses to avoid prospecting and will feel far more prepared for it.Supercharge your prospecting. Most brokers hesitate to prospect because they don’t have an attention grabbing hook. They simply send flyers and hope for the best. But what if you could use data to analyze your prospect’s business in minutes and provide jaw-dropping insights? Site-selection software allows you to hook prospects' interest with customized heat maps that show hot areas for their particular business as a prospecting lure. You can send these out along with or instead of your flyers, and of course, remember to leave plenty for the imagination - by dangling the carrot of instantaneous data-guided research as a carrot you can leverage your insights into an in-person meeting. When you always have something interesting to say, your fear of rejection melts away. Get access to data that’s always up-to-date. One of the major hurdles with using data is that sometimes it goes counter to commonsense. This is because data naturally lags behind reality - it has to be collected, processed, and made available by providers. Once you have it, it’s already growing old. This is especially true in newly developed areas which ironically, are precisely the spots that great undiscovered locations will be found. This creates conflict. Just by driving around you can see the construction, the traffic, and the potential, but when clients ask for your sources, it’s hard to fall back on intuition alone. Site selection software becomes your best friend and backs you up with real-time up-to-date data that confirms your hunches and gives you and your clients the competitive advantage of confidently landing in an obscure new market with high potential.Help brands make better decisions. More data means better decisions. Oftentimes, it’s doubly useful for figuring out where not to build as well as where to build. Site selections software can review the brand's current locations through an algorithm and approximate future sales in order to highlight the biggest winners and losers. In this way, you can help them cut out the 20-40% of real estate decisions that never pan out.Get access to all markets at once. When your New York client wants data on locations in Jackson Hole, what do you do? Most brokers either call up a few trusted firms or leverage a broker network. Both of these are extremely time consuming and after introductions and vetting it can be several weeks before your client gets the reports that they wanted to begin with. With site selection software, you have access to the entire United States. There’s no difference between running a report for your market or any other, and this allows you to deliver far more value, instantly.So much power, so little time

What’s a broker to do with all of this power? Get out there and sell! With reports and presentations completely covered, you’ll unlock additional hours for the hard work that you know needs to occur: prospecting. And not only will you feel empowered to hook new clients with far more compelling offers and morsels of valuable data, but you’ll be excited to take them on because you know that each one will be less and less work.

Site selection software allows you to free up your time for the money-making activities that make all the difference in blowing out your quota!

By: Keenan Baldwin

CEO & Co-founder | SiteZeus

(800) 611-0738

Twitter: @SiteZeus 

www.sitezeus.com