Four Exercises to Hone Your Pitch to Real Estate Owners
Walking through what we'll cover in Thesis Driven's Selling Into Real Estate program
On December 11-12th we’re hosting Thesis Driven’s newest in-person bootcamp in NYC: Selling into the Real Estate Industry.
The course is ideal for proptech founders, sales and marketing leaders, vendors, and anyone else looking to sell products into and build relationships with the real estate industry.
The course will take place from 1-6pm on 12/11 and 12/12, 2024 at Industrious’s training center at 3WTC. Learn more.
Real estate is not an easy industry to sell into—particularly in the current macro climate as owners are often more concerned with saving their portfolios than evaluating new products or technologies. Tech fatigue is also real, with on-site teams managing dozens of separate point solutions and tools.
To stand apart from the crowd, anyone selling into the real estate industry needs to be locked in—winging it isn’t good enough. That’s why we’re excited to be hosting Selling into Real Estate Owners, a two-day Thesis Driven bootcamp for anyone selling products or services to real estate owners.
A case-driven program, the course emphasizes students applying the learnings from the course to their own products. We do this through live exercises which we’ll walk through in today’s letter.
1. Creating a Buyer Persona
Knowing who you’re selling to is the first step in building a strong case for your product—and sales funnel. Fortunately, product marketers have a framework for this: buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a profile of your product’s hypothetical ideal buyer. Think about it like a LinkedIn profile—with key biographical and professional details—that helps you and your team hone your messaging, targeting, and approach.
In the real estate industry, a buyer persona is about the firm and its investment strategy as much as it’s about the individual buyer—but both are important. On the firm side, vendors should be aligned on the target’s investment strategy (long-term hold vs merchant build?), asset classes, and size. Of course, individual buyers also matter; selling into site-level staff (e.g., property managers) requires a very different approach than does selling to principals or asset managers.
A good set of buyer personals won’t just help a marketing and sales target the right buyers; they’ll also give a team a vernacular to talk about the customer. If Michelle the GP is our target buyer, we can talk about features in terms of how Michelle would interact with them. So they’re useful not just for marketing and sales but for product as well.
2. Building the Financial Case for Your Product
As a vendor, having a good story isn’t enough to get a real estate owner to sign on the dotted line. Owners are increasingly focused on the bottom line as high rates and inflating costs deteriorate the P&L; any new product needs to be able to make a clear financial case to cut through the noise.
At the asset level, new tools must have a positive impact on NOI whether by increasing revenue or cutting costs. At the corporate level—where many real estate owners are paying out of management fees—the bar for the financial case is even higher.
Making the financial case for a product requires understanding a bit of real estate finance. In the course, we’ll cover how real estate developers think about financial returns and how vendors can speak to owners in their language to clearly communicate a financial case for any product—even at the earliest stages.
3. Crafting a LinkedIn Campaign
Once the buyer persona and the product’s financial case (and messaging) are in place, it’s time to start generating leads. While the course covers a wide range of lead generation strategies—both inbound and outbound—this exercise will focus on building a multi-faceted LinkedIn marketing campaign to reach your target buyer.
Why LinkedIn? While there’s a strong real estate developer community on Twitter—and smaller, less organized groups on Instagram and TikTok—LinkedIn remains the broadest pool of real estate professionals of all types, sizes, and levels of sophistication. Of course, most of the lessons we’ll learn in this exercise can apply to other social media platforms as well with some modest modifications.
We’ll cover two main tactics with this exercise: (1) launching an email course on LinkedIn and (2) a direct outreach campaign on LinkedIn leveraging an offshore team. We’ll discuss how to lean on the strengths of the targeting and messaging from the first two exercises to get the most out of these campaigns.
4. Modeling the Sales Funnel
Launching a lead generation campaign is only the beginning. The bulk of the work comes in iterating and optimizing the sales funnel, taking a step-by-step approach to a lead’s journey from awareness to prospect to close.
In the course’s final exercise, students model out the funnel for their business, highlighting key touches and nurturing steps along the way. Email campaigns, webinars, 1:1 sales calls, personalized followups, assessments, and more are a handful of the tools in the sales arsenal. Identifying where they can be deployed to maximum effect is the trick.
Mapping the sales funnel will also help founders and sales leaders diagnose sales and marketing problems. It’s inevitable that things won’t always go perfectly; having a framework to identify where a problem is originating in the funnel is key to continuous improvement and controlling your sales destiny.
In today’s market, selling into the real estate industry requires real thoughtfulness when it comes to both messaging and lead generation. That’s why we built this course and focused its exercises on real, practical applications to the real, practical problems we’re tackling.
You can learn more about the course and sign up here.
—Brad Hargreaves and Paul Stanton