Send three buildings in the counties they named, not a calendar link
The first reply either advances the requirement or asks the prospect to do work, and the second kind gets ignored.
An occupier who just told you they need thirty thousand feet near Alpharetta does not want a scheduling link. They want to know whether anything exists that fits, and roughly what it costs.
Reply with a short shortlist. Three buildings, the county each sits in, size, and what the approach looks like from where their people drive. Then propose a time.
Build a template per asset class so a broker can assemble that in a few minutes rather than starting from a blank email. Speed is the point.
If nothing fits, say so and say what would. Honesty at that stage produces more return contact than a polite holding message ever does.
Your brokers are on I-285 for hours a day, so intake cannot wait on a desk
Coverage, not effort, decides how many inquiries survive the afternoon.
Mid-afternoon is when tours happen and when inquiries arrive. If the answer is that everyone is out, the callback slips past the window where the prospect is still thinking about it.
Decide who owns first response and make it a role, not a hope. An assistant who can acknowledge, qualify and book beats a senior broker who calls back tomorrow.
Instrument both channels. Plenty of commercial inquiries arrive by phone and never touch the form, and a missed call at four in the afternoon looks like nothing in your analytics.
Set a written internal standard for time to first contact and report against it monthly. Teams improve what gets counted, and this is the number that moves tours.
Add a stage between inquiry and deal, or you cannot see the leak at all
Most brokerage systems track inquiries and closings with nothing in between, which makes every diagnosis a guess.
Add booked tour as a stage, and add qualified requirement before it. Two fields turn an argument into a measurement.
Tag each record with county, submarket, asset class and source. Blended numbers across intown office and suburban industrial hide which half of the business is actually leaking.
Review the drop between stages, not the total. A firm converting inquiries to qualified requirements well but qualified requirements to tours badly has a scheduling problem, not a marketing one.
Agree on definitions before you start counting. If two brokers disagree about what qualified means, the data is decoration.
The unanswered question is usually parking, power or the drive, and it kills the thread
Threads rarely die from a bad building; they die from a question nobody answered in writing.
Parking ratio, loading, power service and how the site is approached from the interstate come up on almost every requirement. When a broker answers verbally and never puts it in an email, the internal decision maker never sees it.
Keep the answers in the reply. A prospect forwarding your email to a CFO in another state should not have to translate anything.
Watch for the multi-site question too. Occupiers with more than one location want to know whether you can serve DeKalb and Cobb with the same team, and an unclear answer stalls everything.
Where the question is regulatory, describe what generally applies and point them to the local building department, their insurer or their own counsel. Do not offer a conclusion about a specific site.
Ten inquiries a week will never settle a button color argument
One metro rarely produces the volume that small-effect page tests need, so spend the effort where the change is large enough to see.
Split testing a headline requires a sample most brokerages will not reach in a year. Running one anyway produces a result that looks decisive and is noise.
Test the process instead. Change the first-reply template for a quarter and compare tours booked per hundred inquiries against the previous quarter. The effect is big enough to read even in a small sample.
Where page-level work is worth doing, change the whole template rather than one element. A listing template redesign is a large intervention; a button is not.
Accept that some of this is judgment rather than proof. Say so out loud instead of dressing a small sample in the language of statistics.
The nine month follow up is a Cobb submarket note, not a "checking in" email
Occupier decisions run long, and the firm that stays useful for the whole stretch is usually the one that gets the tour.
A requirement that goes quiet in spring is often live again in the fall. What determines whether they come back to you is whether your follow-up was worth opening.
Send something with information in it. What leased in their submarket, what landlords are conceding, what came available near where their staff drives from.
Segment by county. A note about Gwinnett industrial sent to an intown office prospect trains them to ignore you.
Keep it human and infrequent. Two or three genuinely useful notes across a long cycle beat an automated sequence that runs out after four weeks and then goes silent.
Questions we actually get
- We get inquiries but very few tours. Where should we start?
- Time to first response, then routing. Pull the last fifty inquiries, record how long each took to get a real reply and who handled it, and the pattern usually appears immediately. Most brokerages find a cluster of afternoon inquiries that were answered the next day, and those almost never convert.
- How many inquiries do we need before a test means anything?
- More than a single brokerage in one metro typically produces, which is why process changes beat page tests here. Compare a full quarter under a new first-reply approach against the previous quarter, and look at tours booked per hundred inquiries rather than raw counts. It is not a controlled experiment, and it should not be described as one.
- Should we answer inquiries outside business hours?
- Check when yours actually arrive before deciding. Some firms see meaningful owner-user activity on evenings and weekends and some do not. If the volume is there, an acknowledgment with a real time for a call is enough; if it is not, spend the effort on afternoon coverage instead.
- Is a chatbot worth adding to a brokerage site?
- Only if it routes to a person quickly. Commercial requirements involve details a scripted flow handles badly, and a prospect who has to repeat everything to a broker afterward is worse off than if they had just filled the form. A short qualifying exchange that hands off cleanly can help; a deflection tool will not.
- How do we tell whether the problem is the website or the follow up?
- Add the missing stages and the answer appears. If inquiries arrive but almost none become qualified requirements, the site is attracting the wrong people or the form is not asking enough. If qualified requirements do not become tours, the problem is response time, routing or scheduling, and no amount of site work will fix it.
