Overcoming Objections by Targeting the Right Prospects

I was on the phone with some of my clients yesterday.

One young lady told me she is having a hard time getting nationals and regionals to come into a second-generation restaurant space in her shopping center in an ancillary market. The Nationals said the demographics of the market were not suitable.

I told her to remove the objection.

Remove the objection by changing the target from nationals to independents who already operate successfully in the market.

In this instance, we started by seeing how many restaurants were in the market.

We did a Google “best of” search, a Google “reader’s choice” search, and a Yelp search of the market and compiled a list of 30 successful restaurants.

I told her to reach out to those restaurants who have already invested in the market.

This reminded me of previous instances where this lesson was true.

A while back, I had a client who wanted me to find a steak restaurant to go into a space in Clemson, NC. We had no luck with nationals so we went to the next town over—Greenville. In Greenville, we found a steak restaurant operator with three locations who agreed to open another location in Clemson.

I had another client who had a restaurant space in the elbow of a center. He too was looking for nationals. But of course, nationals don’t want to be in the elbow, they want to be in the end-cap.

We drove around the market and found local restaurants who already operate in the elbow, or in an alley, or in the bottom floor of an office building. This way, we were not trying to convince an operator to do something they had not already done. We had effectively removed the objection.

These experiences taught me to remove objections up-front by prospecting the right tenant from the beginning.