Faster, Smarter CRE Prospecting: How to Shorten the Sales Cycle

Prospecting can be one of the most time-consuming — and critical — steps in the commercial real estate sales cycle. It’s where sales teams begin outreach to potential clients, whether through cold calls, emails, or social media like LinkedIn. And because it happens early in the funnel, before you’ve qualified leads, it often means sorting through hundreds or even thousands of possibilities.

Before you even start prospecting, you’ve likely done the groundwork: researching your ideal customer profile and defining what makes a high-quality lead. But without the right prospecting tools, it can quickly turn into a slow grind.

The good news? There’s a smarter way. In this article, we’ll explore how CRE sales teams can reduce sales cycle time by using platforms like Biscred to work faster and focus only on the leads that matter. 

Step 1: Start with a Strong Foundation: Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Prospecting is not the first step in your sales cycle. It’s customer research and assembling your ideal customer profile, or ICP. An ICP is a detailed profile with the attributes of an “ideal” customer. No, you won’t find prospects fitting every criterion of an ICP, but you will have a better idea of what to look for in prospects that make them worth pursuing. For deeper insights into how to build an ICP, check out Biscred’s ICP eBook. 

Some of the most common mistakes when building an ICP are:

• The target audience is too broad without specifics on customer demographics, geographic location, priorities, and other crucial information to understand a customer and its value to your firm. 

• You’re using outdated criteria, such as stale information about the customers, annual revenue, products and services offered, and more. Biscred’s granular filters can refine your search based on updated criteria. 

• Your parameters ignore customer needs and other challenges that a prospect faces, which your product or service directly solves. (This happens when marketing and sales teams don’t share information.)

• You don’t refine or improve the ICP, especially after prospecting and gathering more feedback from your sales and customer support teams.

Step 2: Where Are Your Prospects? Go Find Them—Fast

Once you build your ICP, you can start finding prospects. The most efficient and effective way to gather CRE prospects is through a smart platform like Biscred. It’s a great choice because of our updated data sets and powerful CRE-specific filters that help you narrow your search to the most likely prospects. For example, narrow your search to the mixed-use asset class in the Midwest, and target investors, property owners, and asset managers.

Rather than cold calling hundreds of prospects, you’ll have access to contact information, which you can then narrow to key decision-makers with updated contact information, company information and building details. You’ll not only be able to find out who to contact, but also learn more about their organization and the best way to position your firm as a solution to their potential pain points. 

Unlike lead lists and other stale data, Biscred’s data is regularly updated, so be reaching out to prospects with fresh information. Speaking of effective outreach…

Step 3: Make Outreach More Efficient with Automation

Outreach includes the messaging, timing, and platform you use to contact prospects to spread awareness about your business and invite them to learn more about your firm. Good prospecting facilitates outreach: The data that you’ve collected will guide your outreach messaging. What does effective outreach to prospects entail? 

• Concise, to-the-point messaging conveying your firm’s value to the prospect

• Speaking to the specific pain points that your firm eases

• Following up with relevant information about a previous interaction you’ve had

• Personalization, even through automation

With these aspects in mind, it’s easy to see how outreach can get time-consuming. Automation is a necessity to prevent an outreach bottleneck in your sales cycle. Today, there are a lot of potential tools for outreach automation. 

CRM automation

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms are the backbone of your sales data. They store and organize everything about your prospects—contact details, deal stages, email history, meeting notes, and more. Most CRMs also include email templates and campaign automation to help you schedule and personalize outreach at scale. Think of them as your single source of truth for all prospect interactions.

Sales engagement platforms 

Sales engagement platforms are built for action. They help your sales team plan, automate, and track prospect outreach, across email, phone, and even LinkedIn. These tools often include AI-powered features that personalize messages using customer data, helping you scale outreach without losing the human touch. In short, they turn your CRM data into targeted, timely outreach. Learn more about CRE sales tools.

Hubspot and Salesforce are examples of well-known CRM and sales enablement platforms, both of which integrate with Biscred.

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Step 4: Follow-Up — Deliver Value in Every Touchpoint

Past customers, prospects that didn’t immediately reply, and contacts gathered from networking events and lead lists are still worth following up with after initial contact. Of course, your “check in” with a prospect shouldn’t be explicitly to sell, sell, sell, as this could have the opposite effect. Instead, your goal should be a timely follow-up with a clear value proposition about your business. 

If previous outreach was unsuccessful, you don’t want to immediately flood a prospect with additional marketing material. Instead, schedule several days or a week between messages to avoid a prospect becoming fatigued with your firm. 

It’s also important not to have repetitive messaging, as saying the same thing will likely get the same results. Try different messaging tactics, such as relating a market trend or recent piece of CRE news to their firm. Use CRE data to position your business as an industry leader and expert. 

Mixing the channels that you contact a prospect through helps ensure your messages don’t get lost. Phone, email, and LinkedIn direct messaging are all examples of cross-channel communication. 

As a final note, if you do get in contact with a company or decision-maker, be sure to set clear next steps so that you don’t waste resources following up or chasing a prospect who’s confused about how they’re going to do business with you. 

Tips for CRE Sales Prospecting Efficiency

Ditch the admin work

Manual tasks like research, prospect list building, and data entry and sorting can be some of the biggest time wasters with CRE prospecting. The Biscred platform automates your data collection and research while integrating with most CRMs (through an open API) for a smooth, automated process. There are several other common time wasters in the sales pipeline that your business can improve as well. 

Invest in the right tools (like Biscred)

Biscred is a CRE-specific tool that gives you updated, key data on prospective customers. With asset class filters and more, you can narrow your search to the right criteria, depending on your firm’s ICP. Enhance and enrich your existing data and learn more about how Biscred approaches CRE data. 

Comparison Table: Traditional Prospecting vs. Prospecting with Biscred

Category	Traditional Prospecting	Prospecting with Biscred
Time to Build a Lead List	Several hours or even days spent on LinkedIn, Google, or outdated or incomplete databases	Minutes – Use advanced CRE filters to generate custom lists instantly
Targeting Accuracy	Broad, generalized, non-CRE filters	Granular filters specific to CRE (asset class, seniority, company type, project experience)
Contact Information	Can be missing and outdated; requires cross-referencing across platforms, updating, and re-purchasing on multiple platforms	Human-verified emails, phone numbers, and LinkedIn profiles in one place
Workflow Automation	Manual research, copying data, and inconsistent processes	Integrates with CRMs and marketing platforms for seamless automation
Personalization at Scale	Manual personalization for each prospect message	Filters + enriched data allow for easy, meaningful segmentation and tailored messaging
Follow-Up Strategy	Reactive, manual, and inconsistent – easy to lose track	Automated sequences, template scheduling, and CRM integration ensure consistent follow-up
Cross-Channel Outreach	Often limited to email or cold calls	Supports multichannel outreach (email, calls, LinkedIn) with enriched data
Lead Qualification	Manual vetting required to qualify leads	Pre-qualified leads based on job role, company type, and CRE experience
Event Follow-Up	Relies on analog data entry, like business cards or partial attendee lists	Match attendee lists to Biscred to find missing contacts and build full campaign lists
Cost Efficiency	High cost per lead due to time investment and poor targeting	Lower cost per lead through precise targeting and faster workflows