No matter how slick your brochures, business cards, hardware, and Personal Marketing Plan, the key to successfully launching your business is acquiring clients.

Follow these tips to find prospects:

• Make sure all family, extended family, and friends know that you're working in real estate sales and are available for their buying and selling needs. Send them your new business card and personal brochure and follow up with a friendly phone call in the first few weeks.
• If you're involved in community organizations, activities, or other personal interest groups, be sure to let everyone in those groups know of your new career. Inform members of your religious congregation, your children's sports leagues, your doctor, your insurance agent, your dry cleaner, and other service providers.
• Find a high-producing sales associate in your office and offer to assist him or her with open houses or other aspects of his or her transactions to gain experience and possible referrals. Consider joining the sales team of a high-producing practitioner until you can establish your own client base.
• Offer to work floor time in your office in order to answer incoming calls and find prospects. If your company has a general e-mail box, offer to respond to incoming e-mail inquiries from potential prospects.
• Develop contacts with the human resources departments of any major employers in your area and offer your services for relocating employees.
• Contact organizations that you are involved with or that interest you, and offer to provide free home buying seminars to their members.
• To meet people in the new no-call world, target half a dozen neighborhoods and knock on doors. Have something of value to offer residents-a competitive market analysis of their home, recent stats on turnover of homes-and ask if you can contact them periodically with such information. They'll become part of your sphere of influence.
• After talking to prospective buyers, send them a small gift, such as a little box of chocolates or a pack of flower seeds. When you offer something for nothing, you build loyalty. Even if they don't buy right away, they'll come back to you when they're ready.
• Insert your personal brochure into the real estate section of your local newspaper. For only a few cents per insert, you'll be able to reach your target audience without spending a fortune on mailing. With larger circulation papers, you can target select ZIP codes or neighborhoods.
• Get affiliated businesses to prospect for you. For example, an in-house title company could thank customers for their business by phone or e-mail and also ask them if they know anyone who could use your company's brokerage services.
• When prospects inquire about your area, send them free brochures produced by your city or chamber of commerce. Get stickers made which you can attach to the brochures that say "Compliments of [your name, company name, contact information]," and mail them with a personalized letter.

Hope these tips help you in acquiring new clients.

See you next week.

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