Sectors
Outsourced SDRs for selling to estate agents.
A market that gets called every day, where the decision sits with the person whose name is above the door and that person is out on valuations. We kept a diary at three meetings a week with UK estate agents, from independents to national franchise networks. What is different, and what it took.
Everybody sells to estate agents. Portals, proptech, lead generation, photographers, board suppliers, software - the branch phone rings with it all day, and whoever answers has heard every pitch and is paid to protect the diary. Outbound into this market is not won by the size of the list. It is won by calling the right person at the right hour with a pitch short enough to land between two viewings, and doing it every day.
What is different about this market
- The decision sits at the branch. Owners, directors and franchisees decide for themselves; a head office passes it on and it goes nowhere.
- The buyer is out most of the day. Mid-morning, between viewings and the end of the day are when an agent is at a desk, and the calling rhythm has to follow that.
- A good offer sounds too good. When the product is free to the agent, the first job is not persuading them they want it but getting them to believe it, and a sample in the hand does more than any call.
- It is a business of branches and personalities, not procurement. Persistence is rewarded, and every agent stays on the board until they sign or say no.
What running it taught us
For 3media, a publisher of bespoke printed property magazines for estate agents, we ran a full-time, phone-led campaign into branch owners and directors across the UK: three meetings a week on average, with branches of national sales-and-lettings franchise networks, a London agency with dozens of offices, and independents across London, the Home Counties, the Midlands and South Wales. A meeting was only a meeting if the agent had the stock to fill a publication and the authority to sign for one, so 3media’s team walked into conversations they could close. Agents signed, and the route from first call to contract was measured in weeks. The detail is on the case study.
Who gets called
Branch owners, directors and franchisees, at the hours an agent is at a desk, with a printed sample as the first ask rather than a demo. Qualified on listings and ownership: the stock to fill the product and the authority to sign for it.
Do you work for proptech and other suppliers to agents, or only publishers?
Yes. The market is the same whatever the product: the branch decides, the owner is out, and the pitch has to be short. What changes is the qualifying question.
How do you get past the front desk?
By calling when the owner is in and asking for the owner or director, not by arguing with whoever answers. The list is built at branch level, so the call goes to the branch that decides.
Can you cover the whole country?
Yes. The campaign above ran London, the Home Counties, the Midlands and South Wales from one desk, and the board carried every branch that had engaged until it closed one way or the other.
What does the weekly review look like?
Meetings booked, meetings sat, contracts out and contracts signed, every week, with every agent still on the board until they sign or say no.
The other markets we have sold into: B2B software and SaaS, healthcare and the NHS, technology firms and Microsoft partners, finance software, deep tech selling to enterprise and agencies. All of them are on the sectors page.
Branch by branch, every week.
Fifteen minutes on the branches, the offer and how to get it into an agent’s hand.
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