Has your brokerage already updated its sales and marketing processes to reflect on the big changes in today’s real estate marketing landscape? Do your agents have the tools to cope with the new challenges effectively or do they stumble in the dark every time it comes to closing a deal? If you feel you’re not cutting it and prospective buyers are slipping through the cracks no matter what you do, the time has come to revitalize your marketing and sales strategy with a real estate agent CRM.
Real estate technology empowers agents to win exposure in such simple and cost-effective ways, something traditional tools can never do. However, we observed that sometimes agents find it hard to decide when exactly they need to adopt these tools, including a real estate CRM. We can totally understand it: new methods take some time to get used to and agents don’t want to add more to their plates than they can handle.
However, we also observed that technology is one of those skills you can only get better at. In fact, Active Rain which is the biggest real estate online community, found out via one of its polls that “richer” agents were eager to spend 6x more on technology and twice more likely to use a customer relationship management (CRM).
It turns out there are some common issues most of agents face that typically ring a few bells. Plenty of agents are often frustrated when trying to explain their marketing and sales performance, not being sure where to start exactly. We decided to brake things down as knowing about them helps take a bit of an outsider look at your own performance which is usually not that easy for any salesperson.
5 signs you sell less than you really can (and how a real estate agent CRM can help)
1) Your contacts are scattered
When you just started, it was easy for you to manage your contact list with usual tools like spreadsheets. But once you start growing, the workflows are getting more complicated and it’s hard to track everything like you used to.
Moreover, if you’re generating leads online (and we believe your real estate website does just that), you need some sort of database platform. Otherwise, you’ll simply lose most of your opportunities – 80 percent of leads are never followed up which can make all of your previous marketing work a huge waste of time.
If you noticed your contact list is getting out of control, you use different channels to communicate with the same lead, or that you miss out important sales info – it’s high time to go a bit more advanced. Get a real estate agent CRM, start pulling all of your clients’ data into a central database and your life is going to be essentially easier.
Contact management with real estate agent CRM isn’t just about storing your contacts data in one place, though; it offers you so much more. Why don’t you segment your clients to see who matters most to your business? Just in a few clicks you can set up your sales funnel and plan your next move better. Defining your contacts as subscribers, leads, prospective, customers, etc. takes a few seconds but gives you a full understanding of how qualified your database is.
A real estate agent CRM also empowers you to get a 360-degree view of each of your contacts. How exactly? By helping you track every single interaction you have with those leads and keep all valuable info for future records. In other words, a real estate CRM is invaluable for lead tracking and lead nurturing. And did you know that an astonishing 75% of companies have no process of nurturing sales leads? Now, this is what a CRM does for you.
[We have a whole post on lead tracking that you might want to check out: Insider’s Guide to Lead Tracking with CRM Software for Real Estate].
2) You use different channels to communicate with leads but don’t track all conversations
In a nutshell, if you spend a good deal of your day flipping through multiple inboxes and social media accounts, it might be time to find a simpler way.
A real estate agent CRM that unifies your inboxes and social media accounts does a stellar job of saving time and sanity. But more importantly, it lets you keep track of all conversations regardless of the channel through which they occur. In turn, this means you now know better what exactly you should do to move that lead closer to the purchase without missing important bits of information and delivering poor customer service.
So this gives you a pretty good opportunity to streamline conversations and map social signals via one system. That leaves you enough time to come up with a meaningful follow-up and research on your leads better.
Lastly, can you actually ignore the fact that 75% of sales professionals say that using a CRM helps them to drive and increase sales due to simplified communications? All the more reason for you to take a look at the tool that has already helped so many salespeople.
3) You won the first touchpoint but fail at the follow-up
A huge reason why you need a real estate agent CRM is that your ability to make money in real estate is tied in closely with your ability to follow up.
The problem with the old tools is they don’t really help to measure engagement. You wouldn’t like to miss the next right moment to follow up but at the same time, you can’t be insanely pushy.
In turn, a CRM and marketing automation provides 451% increase in qualified leads! This is precisely because it creates the right kind of knowledge that every agent needs: what to say, when, how often and via which channel.
Here are just a few ways to rev up your follow up strategy with a real estate CRM:
- automated email campaigns;
- email scheduling and tracking;
- SMS campaigns;
- automatic agent alerts;
- automatic tasks and reminders;
- library of follow up templates and much more.
The reason why a CRM is so great with follow-ups is it creates something marketers call context marketing. What does this mean exactly? Just the fact that any marketing you do must be in context with the relationship you had with your clients so far. You have to communicate some value, not just “checking in”.
The best context marketing you can do is track all of your relationships with each contact in your database. It’s hard to make it happen with the outdated tools but a real estate CRM is exactly what works both with generating new contacts but also particularly well with existing relationships.
This is especially true for when asking for referrals from your past clients. If you don’t have the records of past clients, it’s going to be hard and stressful and you won’t be able to put this process on fast track.
In the meantime, you simply can’t ignore referrals as a lead source – as much as 70 percent of real estate sales come from referrals which makes communication with your past clientele invaluable.
[Here’s a bigger guide on getting referrals: 6 Proven Ways Top-Producing Agents Get Real Estate Referrals].
Again, this is where a real estate agent CRM helps. It creates a positive customer experience. As a result, 70% of customers who have had a positive experience will refer that company to family and friends. Isn’t that huge?
[We have a more detailed post on great follow up practices: CRM for Real Estate: 6 Perfectly Actionable Follow-Up Formulas].
4) You struggle to provide better customer service
The whole idea of using a real estate CRM is to create a better customer experience in every facet of your interaction with them.
The best part is a real estate agent CRM actually does this. It puts your customers into the center of your marketing and sales work and this is something very much needed in today’s marketing landscape.
If you see that your team is struggling to:
- respond to customer inquiries quickly;
- keep documentation organized;
- get positive customer reviews (or the number of negative reviews of your agency grows);
- grow your contacts database;
- get more online leads, be it via your website, social media or portals;
- grow sales,
then the odds are huge your traditional sales and marketing activities are leading you to nowhere. Taken together, these issues put your whole business at stake while a real estate agent CRM solves the above issues without creating additional strain on the team.
5) Your team is growing!
Now this one sounds great, right? So it is, and your major concern here is to make sure that your growing team has some great tools to back up their marketing and sales strategy.
Imagine investing in a powerful real estate agent CRM and at the same time cutting as much as a quarter of your budget? This is what plenty of salespeople have already seen after implementing CRM solutions – A CRM slashes marketing costs by 23%.
Moreover, the average ROI per $1 spent on a CRM is 8,71$! In terms of sales productivity, it boosts an agents performance by as much as 41 percent. This is the ROI you can hardly expect from any traditional sales tools and methods.
Here’s a quick recap of all the great work a real estate agent CRM does for you:
- keeps all sales and marketing in one place;
- allows for easy contact, property, transaction, task management;
- syncs with your inbox;
- automates follow up;
- is web-based (most of CRM solutions including AgentDrive’s CRM are);
- makes team collaboration straightforward and easy;
- levels up lead generation efforts and boosts sales.
Additionally, when a company engages a customer using a CRM, that customer is likely to spend 20–40% more the next time they make a purchase with that particular company.
What’s next?
So a real estate agent CRM makes agents more productive, helps them sell more and get more positive customer referrals. This is a stellar tool to flag opportunities that might otherwise be left unnoticed – and do that at a fraction of traditional marketing expense.
Now the point we’re trying to make is not saying that traditional methods are actually bad. They might be ok, and there’s nothing wrong in using spreadsheets to keep your documentation as long as it works for you. But you always have an alternative that might make your life as an agent essentially simpler and your sales ultimately better, and who can ignore that?
