Home Real Estate Tools Sales Enablement 101: How to Make Your Real Estate CRM System Work...

Real Estate Tools

Sales Enablement 101: How to Make Your Real Estate CRM System Work for You

September 28, 2016

For a long time, real estate businesses have been using CRM systems to manage their day-to-day operations, attract and retain customers and grow their profits. Indeed, a real estate CRM brings in innovation and higher sales productivity to the team which then translates into a more prosperous business. In this post, we’re going to take a look at some of the best ways to make your CRM strategy work for your brokerage.

Many companies adopting CRM systems expect the business to go up literally days after signing up. However, you need to embrace a CRM mindset in order for this tool to work for you. Let’s elaborate on what this actually means.

1) Make sure your team has adopted a real estate CRM system

Adopting a real estate CRM system is the most important thing to focus on first hand. Both agents and top management should understand what’s in it for the team and how the system will make their work easier and more productive, otherwise what’s the point in using it?

The best way to achieve this is to provide team-wide access and training. This is so simple, yet many companies overlook it hoping staff will be able to somehow go through the system on their own. Don’t fall into this common trap. Dedicate some time on CRM training, demonstrate how all the features work and how exactly daily work can be simplified.

2) Customer data is your biggest asset – manage it the right way

A real estate CRM system is all about helping you build better relationships within your SOI. One great way to do this is to keep all customer intelligence organized and easy-to-access whenever you need it. In order to make the most of your CRM system, try following these great practices:

focus on your customers, not yourself. The whole point of using the CRM in a digital era is to put customers in the center of marketing and sales. This makes it much easier to know what your target audience is, what they really want and how and when to reach out to them. When you start using a CRM, it’s customer-related data that takes the spotlight;
standardize your customer data. Your front-line agents usually collect the same set of data about leads, customers and past clients. It’s best that your real estate CRM system reflects this so everyone is following the same format for contacts, properties, transactions and projects. This way it’s easier to generate reporting and get real insights into performance;
cut down unnecessary fields. You should only capture customer information that is really helpful and empowers agents with better marketing intelligence;
qualify your data. Around 25 percent of your customer information will become dated over a year. Segment your customers based on how important they’re to your business so you have a clear view of who to work with.

3) Connect with your customers personally

As an agent, you can never overestimate how important personal relationships are to get the deal closed. Two of the most powerful online marketing channels that do a stellar job of connecting you with your SOI are email and social media – and it’s best to have these integrated into your real estate CRM system:

email follow up still remains one of the best ways to catch up with leads and keep them in the loop. By intelligently automating your follow ups, you can not only save yourself a great deal of time, but actually get a higher response rate (as well as excellent email intelligence like open and click rates).
95 percent of people use Facebook to find info about a real estate agent before contacting them. Make sure to connect your social media profiles with your real estate CRM to post your listings onto them automatically. In addition, power your Facebook page with helpful functionality to stand out from the competition.

4) Review your performance

It’s hard to know if you’re moving in the right direction if you don’t have a real insight into how your team is doing. This is especially true if you happen to run a franchise network, however small.

This is when you’re going to need your real estate CRM reports and dashboards. Advanced CRMs let you build a network of websites and portals right from within the CRM and automatically generate reports for each.

Real estate CRM dashboards give you intelligent insights into your marketing and sales at a glance. For example, a good CRM:

automatically generates reporting on all of your contacts, properties, customer requirements and transactions;
automatically calculates your sales pipeline progress so you can see how qualified your database is;
generates franchise reporting regardless of how many offices and locations you manage;
provides an easy way to get timely feedback – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.
tracks everything – properties added, proposals sent and printed, emails received, documents changed etc.

What’s next?

If you seek to refine and perfect your sales and marketing performance, it would be good to start with the above tips. Focus on them and you’ll see how they do all the heavy lifting for your real estate business, making a striking difference to your sales productivity and bottom line and empowering you to achieve brilliant results that you’ve always wanted.