As part of our ongoing mission to improve the efficiency of CRE deals – to allow people to do more, better deals in less time – we’ve been considering the role that trust plays in enhancing, or reducing, the efficiency of a deal. Previously we asked whether you can afford not to trust and looked at where trust resides in any deal here.
When it comes to nurturing trust, it is clear that although trust between your team and trust with your negotiation counterparties are equally important, trust must start with you and your team.
Team trust is foundational
“Trust starts with your team, hands down. It’s an inside-out thing. If you BS your own team, imagine how deceitful you’ll be with your counterparty,” says Kris Krisco, Chief Customer Officer at Buildout.
Dan Spiegel, Managing Director at Coldwell Banker Commercial agrees: “I expect that if someone is joining a team, there should be a process to establish the trust to work as a team.”
In particular, trust and communication and customer service are closely intertwined. “The most successful brokers don’t go it alone, even though they could. They have a team, and to have a team you have to have good communication and trust,” says Courtney Stanford, Vice President of SVN Dunn Commercial. “You have to present a unified front to provide excellent customer service to your client.”
When it comes to the deal itself, “you have to trust your development team to provide you with up-to-date development/construction costs and project-specific site costs as well. All of these factor into a negotiation, particularly with land,” says Jerry LoCoco, Senior Vice President at Paladin Partners
From a technology vendor perspective, trust within your team is essential to support sales. “It is very difficult for someone to successfully sell a solution if they do not trust that their company can deliver on their promise,” says Glenn Felson, Managing Director at Kastle Systems. “In order for a company to be successful in the long run, a positive culture, with accountability across all levels and departments must exist. Otherwise, the best employees will churn, and the long-term success of the company will be elusive.”
Failed team trust can be costly
Failed communications and reduced trust are challenges for teams of all sizes. Larger teams have more chances for miscommunications, while smaller teams can easily run out of bandwidth resulting in increased human errors. In a broker’s world, where only successful deals result in income, mistakes along the way, for whatever reason, can be very costly. Further, recovering from trust issues within a team can be extremely difficult and takes a lot of work and time.
For a deeper dive into the role trust plays in driving effective CRE deals, and to hear more from the industry experts quoted above, download our free white paper, The modern-day handshake: Exploring the evolution of trust in the CRE industry today, here.
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