You’re getting leads, but don’t sell? You need more accurate information on how and when to exactly plan your next move but get lost in your own marketing data, only to discover that your leads are quietly drifting away? Real estate CRM solutions actually help you to sell, always working behind the scenes and seamlessly collecting valuable info about your leads from dozens of places.
There was time, not long ago, when a real estate agent had the complete power over the market. When someone wanted to buy a home, the only way to do this was to contact a broker who held all property listings in the neighborhood.
What could be better? A real estate agent was a gatekeeper, wielded all the power and set the rules. With that big book of all property listings available on the market, agents were the ones whose expertise people sought for every time they wanted to buy estates.
A single reason why this will never work again is these days real estate agents have to be online if they want to sell.
Did you know this?
- 94 percent of buyers start their home search online.
- 96 percent of the first-time homebuyers start their home search online.
This means that real estate agents – including yourself – need to master a whole variety of tools to totally transform their marketing and sales.
First of all, you need a beautiful and compelling website that helps people to discover your properties online and verify that you provide a quality service.
Second of all, the next big tool you should be using is a real estate CRM. Active Rain, the biggest real estate online community, tried to find out what differentiates a successful real estate agent from an under-performing one. Here’s what they learned: “richer” agents were eager to spend 6x more on technology and twice more likely to use customer relationship management (CRM).
So what is the rationale behind these numbers?
Whether you are a real estate agent, developer or franchise, you know all too well that real estate is all about building relationships. It relies on personal connections more heavily than any other industry.
Working your way into valuable personal connections with your leads is the only way to succeed. With a real estate CRM solution, that’s going to become tenfold easier.
An average real estate professional, however, is totally overwhelmed with current prospects, commissions, referrals, portal leads, past clients, finances and contracts. They have neither time nor energy to learn endless new tools (without even knowing if they’re going to work out) and add them to their plate.
They all know they should be tracking leads and following them up. But how to actually do this quickly and efficiently, without losing contacts they worked so hard on getting?
Real estate CRM solutions actually help you sell online
Yes, that’s where the answer lies. A really good CRM provides you with meaningful automation, streamlines follow-up and doesn’t create additional work.
Because every real estate professional deals with so many clients every day, they run a risk of getting lost in chunks of scattered data about their customers. When was the last time I contact them? Did I send them an email with the new property to the market I just discovered? When that happens, agents try to reverse the situation, only to discover that their leads are just drifting away towards someone who is able to sell them properties they want.
One home for all customer-centric data
Your leads have to be tracked somewhere, right? Well, that’s what you do with a CRM. This is the one central place to manage all data on leads and prospects, follow up, plan your next move and decide when the person is sales-ready. No one says it’s always going to be the right decision – but without this tool, you’ll be completely lost whatsoever.
The most powerful thing about a real estate CRM is it gives you as much info about your leads and prospects as possible. You are always in need of real insights into how exactly people are searching for homes online, which info they need, which properties they find most appealing, what they click on and how to reach them personally.
These are just a few things you can do from within your real estate CRM:
- manage contacts and referrals;
- integrate with your social media;
- get real-time reports on customer activity and interests;
- automate your marketing;
- outreach at exactly the right time;
- get a complete overview of past and current leads and customers.
Contact management, simplified
At the everyday level, there are at least 3 practical benefits a real estate CRM delivers:
- it constantly fills your sales pipeline with people who might become your customers one day – you call them ‘leads’;
- it gives you a granular overview of every lead in your database – why did that person visit your website, what pages they visited, which buttons they clicked, which marketing campaign you should enroll them in when you should next call, etc;
- it allows you to maintain personal connections on a much larger, even huge scale. When your business starts growing, you just can’t handle everything with several spreadsheets – not if you run your business online. On the contrary, with a real estate CRM, every message to your customers is personalized and automatic.
Reach your most important milestone
How do successful agents become successful? They stay on top of people’s mind. If the customer somehow remembers about the agent in a month, five months or two years, they will call that agent when ready for purchase – and that is an impressive milestone to be proud of.
How do you stay on top of people’s mind? You communicate with them all the time: unobtrusively, providing valuable info and verifying your expertise. More often than not, however, without a good real estate CRM this is next to impossible.
Final thoughts
In real estate business, managing leads, prospects and customers cannot be left to chance. This entire system of personal connections and past referrals that are supposed to bring you sales should be organized and seamlessly working for you all the time.
With that mind, a real estate CRM is a proven tool that helps you delight your customers, stay on top of their minds and see your business responding.
Are you using a CRM to manage your contacts and sell more? If not, it’s high time to start.
