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A RocketLevel piece for sales reps and sales managers, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 12-minute read.
Booking the meeting is the hard part, and then a lot of reps fumble it. A facility manager or property manager agrees to a site walk, and the rep shows up, makes small talk, hands over a card, says "let us know if you ever need anything," and leaves. The meeting that took weeks of follow-up to book gets spent on nothing. The site walk is where a meeting becomes a vendor approval, but only if you run it on purpose.
Treat the walk as a working session. You are there to learn the building and the person well enough to get approved as a vendor, and to leave with a real next step on the calendar. A friendly walk that ends with nothing scheduled was a wasted trip.
Everything in the walk serves that purpose: the questions you ask, the notes you capture, and the follow-up you commit to.
Twenty minutes before you get in the truck is worth an hour on site.
Pull the county assessor record. Year built, square footage, construction type, and the owner of record, which is frequently a different entity than the management company you have been talking to. Year built matters most, because a building from 1974 changes how you talk about demo before you have said a word about price.
Pull the permit history from the city or county. Permits are public. A permit for water damage repair, mold remediation, or a roof replacement three years ago tells you what has already gone wrong in this building and roughly what it cost to fix. That is loss history you did not have to ask for, and referencing it accurately on the walk lands harder than anything in your folder.
Look at the building from above and from the street first. Roof type and apparent age, where the drains and scuppers sit, whether the grade slopes toward the building, where the loading dock and the transformer are. You will arrive with questions you would not otherwise have thought to ask.
A rep who arrives knowing nothing spends the walk collecting basics. A rep who arrives informed spends it building credibility, and the decision maker can tell inside two minutes which one showed up.
Your questions drive the walk. The ones that matter: