Cresa Houston Generates More Qualified Prospect Meetings

Cresa is the world’s leading global commercial real estate advisory firm that exclusively represents occupiers and specializes in the delivery of fully integrated real estate solutions.

Carl Mueller is a Principal in Cresa’s Houston Office where he helps to manage every aspect of the office’s business including crucially the firm’s sales strategy and execution.

Before working with Cosmic Growth, Carl states one of the challenges they were facing was, ‘’we have so many ways to contact people now and their contact info has become easier to get, so messaging has become a lot less personalised.’’

‘’Cosmic Growth helped us step back, evaluate the market as a whole and selectively choose which prospects to go after instead of just doing a shotgun blast into the Houston market that’s moving at 1,000 miles per hour.’’

For Carl personally, ‘’it helped me personalise my messages in an efficient and relevant way. I’ve become a lot better at being authentic and personable,’’ the balance of quantity and quality.

When Carl came over to industrial Houston he also immediately thought, ‘’we need training for the industrial brokers… They just hadn’t really been shown a systematic way to prospect and go after clients from start to finish. A lot of them would get tired or disheartened after reaching out to prospects 4 or 5 times.’’

How Cosmic Growth Helped Cresa Houston

‘’Cosmic Growth really helped us think the first 4 or 5 times only matter because you’re setting the base. You’re not going to win any worthwhile accounts on your first cold call. You’re going to win with repeated touches that continue to show you care about what the prospect is thinking about, not necessarily what we think they should be thinking about.’’

Cosmic Growth began their work by analysing all Cresa Houston’s existing sales documentation, and conducting a number of interviews with management and their broker team, to understand the company’s processes, ideal clients, challenges and target market.

With this information – along with their internal processes and expertise in commercial real estate sales training – Cosmic Growth created a custom sales playbook, sales cadences, and a sales training program to help their broker team on the industrial side of the business effectively position Cresa to the Houston market.

Speaking of the training process, Carl states, ‘’it was a great mix. We had a lot of small group training. We had a few large group sessions. And then we did some one-on-one training.’’ 

The Real Impact

‘’I think the most helpful thing for me as one of the leaders of the industrial team is having someone else help with accountability because that’s the biggest struggle you face, especially early in your career. Continuing to follow up and be accountable with your different prospects and clients.’’

‘’You also helped us think of prospecting from their perspective and not our perspective. Brokers can be way too quick to just think that tenants care about the market and data, but they only care about the things that are affecting them directly.’’

In terms of the brokers involved in the program, ‘’we had people who had just been hired, and then we had people who’ve been in the industry for 30 or 40 years.’’ 

‘’And, what’s funny is that everyone got something out of it, but even some of the more senior people, I feel like sometimes they got more out of it than the younger brokers, which I didn’t really expect.’’

‘’It was kind of refreshing. They’ve been doing this for 30 years and have had their head down working hard, and this was a step back to think about the process of prospecting and make sure that we’re doing it intentionally and effectively.’’ 

The Numbers

Looking at specific results, for Carl personally, ‘’when I came over to Cresa, it’s expected that in your first year you do 10% of what you’ve done over the past five years. The next year you’re at 50% of that. And then the third year you’re fully up and running at 100%.’’ 

‘’I’ll say that I attribute a lot of this to Cosmic Growth. I was at 100% of my previous revenue in year one at a new company, moving from a very large company to a smaller one.’’

For the wider team, ‘’I definitely noticed the amount of prospect meetings, qualified prospect meetings go up, since we started working with Cosmic Growth, and especially during the 3 or 4 months that we were working very closely together.’’

On the emotional side, ‘’I think the authenticity that Cosmic Growth encouraged throughout the whole team has been helpful. It’s more sustainable. It’s easier to make calls if you’re being yourself and you have a personal touch to it.’’

‘’If you’re just kind of reading from a script or every call sounds the same, then you get you get tired and you’re not as effective.’’

‘’I think it made prospecting fun again.’’

The Final Verdict

With feedback from Carl and the wider team, ‘’it was really cool to see people in rooms calling together. I got a lot of great feedback directly but I also saw feedback just watching the team.’’

For anyone thinking of working with Cosmic Growth, Carl concludes, ‘’good training is going to cost money. And, I feel like we got more out, much more out, than what we paid for it.’’

‘’It’s been a big cultural benefit and it’s absolutely made up for itself in the revenue that it’s produced.’’