Consistency wins. That’s what many successful entrepreneurs cite helped them make it big and it’s also what many of our customers have told us have made a huge difference in their prospecting. One Resquared customer that is absolutely nailing their prospecting strategy is Fred Battisti, Managing Director and Head of Leasing at First National Realty Partners. We were lucky enough to sit down with Fred to discuss their airtight prospecting process and how Resquared has had a positive impact on his team.
What were the problems you were having that sent you looking for a solution?
The main issue we were having was getting access to decision makers and finding the right contact information for specific tenants. Resquared enabled us to broaden the scope of who we were going after and how we were handling our approach. The fact that Resquared is able to drill down on specific categories, and track and follow up on those lists was really key for us. Especially for second generation spaces, Resquared gives you everything right there without having to fly into the market.
For example, in the event we get a second generation hair salon back from a tenant where the leasing rep isn’t located near the property, Resquared enables the rep to go in and search for that category and email it out that day within 10 minutes of getting the space back. It's very specific, very direct, and very targeted.
What was your prospecting process before Resquared?
A lot of Facebook messaging, a lot of direct canvassing, and utilizing broker relationships and tenant relationships within specific markets. FNRP’s geography is the contiguous 48 states, so we’re going to get into markets where we’ve never leased before, and we don’t use third party brokers, we’re all in house.
So before we’ve even laid eyes on an asset, we look at the uses we’ve identified in our void analysis, and Resquared allows us to specifically target that market and blanket it for several uses within a week, which gives us a leg up if we were going to go knock on doors - it just takes that time doing it for a week and shrinks it into an hour or two hours.
What made Resquared stand out from other prospecting tools you may have tried?
It’s the only tool I’ve seen that consolidates all of the information directly for you. It’s all at your fingertips. You can contact hundreds of businesses within a specific use, and it’s very targeted and you can do it within an hour, or within 10 minutes - it’s crazy.
Before these platforms even came out, my leasing plan was I’d take out a map, I’d go out and look up locations on the internet when I was canvassing and doing deals in markets that I didn’t know. I’d map out 50 nail salons and it would take me two days to do it. Now you can really do it in 10 minutes.
Does it really give you a leg up or an advantage? Yes. Because somebody is going to respond to you out of those 100 that you send.
How did you implement/introduce Resquared with your team?
It was trial by fire, just go use it, see what we extract. The best way of figuring out the best approach is to do it. Trial by error. Some of our reps have been insanely successful with Resquared. It’s really those who are adopting it, and really utilizing it that you’re extracting the value, spending the time, and being intentional with doing it.
What was your team’s initial reaction to Resquared as a new tool?
I think they were excited. I got zero pushback from leasing reps. You’re gonna get the “is this a waste of time, does this make sense, is this gonna make me better, is this gonna help us prospect more.” But there was none of that.
There was really nothing you could argue against the tool. And the pricing made sense for what we were looking to accomplish and we’ve been able to extract the value out of it.
How do you keep your team so consistent?
We actually track it. The great thing about the platform is we can go in and see their activity, and hold people accountable to see who’s using it because obviously we don’t want to pay for a platform if we're not going to utilize it - it’s wasted money. We check in on it weekly and track how many active leads we get from Resquared. It’s really proved to be pretty productive for us.
We track two things:
We track when the reps are at the property level in the market and actively canvassing, knocking on doors, boots on ground.
We’re a remote company which enables us to spend a week in the office. So we’re typically doing one week in the “office,” one week out, one week in, one week out.
When we’re out - we’re canvassing, when we’re in the office - we’re handling all of the follow up, the deal flow, the paperwork to move deals forward, but in our down time we’re also building in 1-2 hours each day to spend on Resquared to help prospect for new tenants. So when our team is in the office they’re utilizing the Resquared tool. We extract that information from them, and track to see how many people are getting consistent leads from Resquared.
What did you like best or find most valuable about Resquared?
It goes back to when you’re targeting a specific second generation space when you get something back from a tenant. Within an hour the rep on that center was blanketing Resquared - “second generation space available, ready to go, good condition, has utilities, plumbing, has everything there you would need - are you interested in opening up another location or are you interested in relocating from your current location.” It instantly gives you a leg up on being able to do that.
Resquared has offered us another avenue to go down to make sure we’re extracting as much value from the platform and really utilizing it within our day-to-day business to achieve good returns for us and our investors at FNRP.
How was the onboarding process?
It was pretty seamless. Maureen and the team did a great job really walking us through the program showing us how to use the program and be very intentional. When things go well I typically don’t hear about it, it’s when things go bad or something’s not working, and I have yet to hear anything negative about Resquared or the platform.
How would you describe the results you’ve seen from using Resquared?
We’ve been using it for 7+ months, and since then we’ve closed on 5 deals that have exceeded 22,000 sq ft. One was a deal that we bought in Tennessee in a suburb of Nashville, it was a really well leased center, it’s Kroger-anchored. We only had 1 vacancy and the vacancy was something we didn’t know about. We inherited a church that was going out, and that’s a very specific niche category.
Our leasing rep Andrew Nesbitt was able to canvas hundreds of churches within a certain radius and we were able to get a deal out of it, within probably 30 days of the tenant vacating the space. So in terms of value creation alone, that was huge for us.
If a colleague were to ask you why they should use Resquared, what would you tell them?
I think Resquared, in our ever-changing business, and how mobile reps are, and especially with reps leasing in markets that aren’t in their backyard, it’s imperative to have a tool like Resquared. Because you can really get into the market, you can canvas hundreds of tenants in a day, that you’d never have the chance to canvas - even if you were in the market it’s just physically impossible to knock on that many doors in one day. So you can hit an entire category, you can hit across multiple categories, you can have a very specific targeted approach as to what you’re looking to accomplish all within a day time span. So I think it just gives you another leg up to be better than what you can do if you were just knocking on doors.
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