What is Canvassing Karma?

People ask me all the time what exactly is Canvassing Karma, and I know when people ask me, that they are not systematic or routine canvassers, because if they were, they wouldn’t have to ask.

I get a canvassing karma experience at least once, if not twice a month. I remember I was waiting for a huge deal to get approved by Bethesda Wellness Center, which is the main hospital corporation or facility in Palm Beach County. The deal was going to be over 15,000 sq feet on a second floor of a retail shopping center in Boynton Beach, and I had been working on this deal for months, and months, and months. They were finally going to be presenting it to the board and I was waiting, and waiting, and waiting.

I literally stayed in the office for a few days after the meeting because I didn’t want to miss the call, which was a big mistake, but I didn’t know better back then. So finally, after three days of waiting, and my boss telling me that I couldn’t call them, I had to wait for them to call me, you know, some negotiating ploy, I went out canvassing. And wouldn’t you know it, when I got back to the office, and this is before cellphones, I had a voicemail from the Facilities Director saying, “Congratulations! The deal was approved, send us the leases.”

That was my first example of Canvassing Karma, I was so excited, and it’s happened a lot since. In fact, when there’s something I want to happen, I purposely leave the office, even if I wasn’t planning on canvassing, just because I know that if I go canvassing, the thing that I want to happen on a deal, will happen.

Canvassing Karma is this unscientific result of what happens when the universe rewards the person for taking extra effort to prospect; to leave their offices, to get off their butts and actually go and do something that’s hard and welcome rejection.

Pretty much no one in their right minds would not want to get out of their comfort zone and welcome rejection in their lives, so what the universe does is reward them for doing the work.

So what happens exactly?

Sometimes you plan, some times you just wing it, but regardless, you’re out of your office, speaking to people that you don’t know, giving them suggestions of properties that you could offer them for them to open additional locations.

When you get back to the office or even before that, you check your emails or your texts, and you find out that the person you’ve been waiting to call you back on that deal has called you, or emailed you, or texted you.

That’s Canvassing Karma, and the reason why it’s called canvassing karma is because, if you were to just hang out in your office and wait for that phone to ring or that email to come in and let you know about that letter of intent or lease, those calls or emails don’t come in.

Canvassing Karma is the karma you receive with the good news on the deal when you’re out in the field, playing the game of offense or doing something that is not comfortable versus sitting in your office waiting for the phone to ring.

I constantly get calls from people around the country, and emails and texts, that say, “I had a canvassing karma today!”, so I know it’s just not me, it’s probably something that’s in our industry and it makes me very excited to hear it.

How does one just go canvassing when they don’t feel like it?

The simple answer is, like Nike, you just do it.

There are two kinds of canvassing, there’s target canvassing and market canvassing. Market canvassing is when you go from shopping center to shopping center and you’re just canvassing in the market. Target canvassing is when you pick a use that you want in your shopping center, for example, a bike store, you find out that there are 23 bike stores in your county, and you try to hit all 23 bike stores in a span of a week or two. Certainly, when you’re out, if you find a bike store in a shopping center, you can canvass it, but you don’t then go to the shopping center next door to it, you continue where you left off and try to go to the other bike stores on the list.

The best way to do it is to time block. That’s what I do; my goal is to go out every Tuesday afternoon from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm. I don’t always achieve that, but if I can achieve that at least twice a month, it’s good for me, considering I got a bunch of other things I’m doing now.

When I was a young leasing agent and canvassing was 80% of my job, I would go every day from about 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. I started at 10:00 am because that’s when the stores opened, and I wanted to get back to the office at around 4:00 pm so that I could follow up on anything that was happening in the office that I needed to follow up on.

So now that you know the power of canvassing karma and how to get it, create a system that works for you and GO OUT THERE AND CANVASS!

I’ll be hosting a canvassing breakfast in Las Vegas on May 19th at the Waldorf Astoria! Your ticket? Email me your canvassing and/or canvassing karma story at beth@azoradvisoryservices.com.