This course takes a bottom-up approach to the art and science of selling to real estate owners and developers. We’ll dive deep into how vendors, technology entrepreneurs, and sales teams can hone their product messaging, reach new customers, and drive revenue growth. The online cohorts run for 5 weeks.Sign up here.
Brad Hargreaves personally teaches the course and moderates cohort discussions
Real estate is not an easy industry to sell into. While many billions of dollars flow through the sector every year, only a tiny fraction of those dollars are up for grabs by vendors and technology providers.
But with the right tools and strategies, vendors can dramatically increase their win rate. Across five weeks, we’ll use a case-based approach to the best practices of selling to real estate developers and investors. Specifically, we’ll tackle eight key topics:
Identifying your audience: Companies: How to identify your top target customers, including an analysis of the different types of real estate firms, investment strategies, asset classes, and more.
Identifying your audience: Roles: Who is your decisionmaker and what process must they go through? A look into the various roles in the real estate ecosystem and how they are all incentivized. Exercise: Building a Buyer Persona.
Making the Financial Case for Your Product: Real estate decisionmakers are a financially-minded set, and your product won't get far without a strong financial case. In this section we’ll also cover the basics of real estate finance and key terminology you’ll need to know. Exercise: Building a Financial Case for Your Product
Crafting the Message: A strong marketing message will break through the noise. With your financial case in hand, we'll craft a marketing message tailored to your target audience.
Top of the Funnel: Inbound: The best leads seek you out. In this section, we'll learn how to generate inbound leads through strong awareness campaigns focused on both earned and owned media.
Top of the Funnel: Outbound: Outbound lead generation allows you to take control of your funnel. From cold calls to LinkedIn campaigns, we'll look at best practices and tactics to reach real estate decisionmakers. Exercise: Building a LinkedIn Campaign.
Nurturing and the Sales Cycle: Most leads don't convert on the first touch. We cover how to nurture leads through content, education, email, and more, building trust and growing engagement.
Conversion: Finally, we take a holistic look at the sales funnel, learning how to identify sales problems and win the business. Exercise: Charting Out the Sales Journey
This is not a “sell me this pen” sales coaching course. Instead, we’ll take a clear-eyed look at the real estate industry, giving sales leaders the tools to hone a message that resonates with both the wallet and the heart. And the four exercises laid out here will give students the opportunity to get direct feedback on their specific product and sales funnel challenges.
The Case Study: Felix & Excel Grease
Felix the proptech founder has spent the better part of the past year building a product he’s confident will transform the real estate industry: Excel Grease, which allows acquisitions analysts to underwrite new deals at least 40% faster.
While Felix has tremendous confidence in the efficacy of his Grease, he has struggled to reach the right people in the real estate industry and convert them into paying customers. While he’s had a few positive conversations—and a handful of (unpaid) trial runs—he doesn’t think he’s getting in front of the right buyer and hitting them with the best message.
While Felix—the subject we’ll follow through this case-based course—is a proptech founder, the program wasn’t written solely with founders or proptech companies in mind. Profiles that would benefit from this program include:
Sales and Marketing Leaders;
Business Development Representatives;
Founders, CEOs, and GMs;
Brokers and others regularly pitching real estate owners.
Brad is the founder and editor of Thesis Driven (www.thesisdriven.com), a publication covering innovation in the built world. Over the past decade he has co-founded General Assembly and Common which generated a combined $500M+ in enterprise value.
