Success Guide: CRM

Welcome to RE Technology's Success Guide for CRM products. You will learn how to become THE expert in your market with industry-leading ideas and solutions. We have hand-picked five of our favorite tools proven to help real estate professionals grow their businesses. Download the FREE guide to learn how you can leverage online marketing in new and exciting ways to beat the competition!

WHAT IS CRM?

Unless you have been a salesperson in a prior career, CRM or Customer Relationship Management may be a new concept to you. The idea behind having CRM software as a sales professional is that it organizes your contacts, tasks, and calendar for all customer activities in a single place. This allows you to plan your work and work your plan so that no customer opportunity is ever missed.

You may be thinking, why do I need a CRM if my contacts, tasks, and calendar are all on my phone. The answer is that CRM is all about tracking activities that keep you focused on developing customer opportunities until they buy or die. A CRM is also a relational database that allows you to track additional information about your contacts. For example, you can track how you met, family members, and create a pipeline or sales funnel report that allows you to visualize where customers are in the process of buying or selling.

Most importantly, a CRM allows you to assign contacts to step by step activities, commonly referred to as workflows or campaigns. A common example would be a new lead campaign that may start with an introductory email, a phone call, followed by a follow up email with a market report, followed by a weekly open house list, etc. Great CRMs have basic step by step activities available for all kinds of contacts that you can use, edit, or allow you to create your own from scratch.

The National Association of REALTORS® performs an annual agent survey to find out where most agents acquire their business. Although the percentage varies slightly from year to year, around 80% of all transactions come from friends, family, referrals, and repeat business. The report also indicates that the #1 reason why a Realtor is not used in a future transaction is because the agent did not stay in touch. If there is one piece of software that you invest in to build your real estate success, it should be CRM.

Key Benefits of CRM

• Strengthen client relationships
• Get/stay organized
• Qualify, nurture, and convert leads
• Support better client follow up
• Close more business
• Generate more repeat and referral business
• Develop strong sales habits

TOP TRENDS IN CRM

CRM is a constantly evolving category of technology for real estate. Many technology providers in this category regularly produce additional functionality to improve the breadth of services that CRM software enables an agent or broker to perform. Here are a number of trends that many for which CRM companies are developing functionality.

Integration with Google Suite – Office 365

Most real estate brokers, teams and agents are seeking CRMs that have integrated basic or core functionality from solutions like G-Suite and Office 365. With these integrations, contact records are synchronized between systems, along with emails sent or received with the contact. Users also have the capability to enter appointments or tasks in either system, and have those events synchronized between the two platforms.

Stand Alone CRM Is Preferred

Because consumer facing websites are a key area of new customer acquisition, many CRM systems are developed to manage leads from an agent, company, or team website. Over time, the trend to have an integrated CRM from the website provider has given way to separating the website developer from the CRM developer – making CRM a stand-alone offering that is capable of integrating with any website.

Crm As a Coaching Solution

One of the newest trends with CRM is the ability to integrate the workflow within a CRM with popular coaching solutions like Ninja, Ferry, or any of the other agent coaching programs. These coaching programs typically set agent goals and tasks for achieving those goals. For example, your CRM can reflect a coaching goal like making a certain number of calls each day, week, or month. The system can prompt you to make calls, and even have the call scripts or email follow up messages preloaded into the CRM.

Social Media Integration for Free and Paid

In terms of return on investment, social media posting (free) and social media marketing (paid) are among the top business development strategies for real estate agents and teams. Within many modern CRM solutions, the capability of posting to your business page on a site like Facebook or paying to boost a post on social media is integrated into the platform. This makes it easy for a CRM user to stay in touch with clients on social media platforms or expand your customer base by acquiring new customers from social media.

Mls Integration for Listings

Communicating with customers through your CRM is a key focus. Most CRM systems have integrated data feeds from your MLS to make is easy to share or market active listings, recently sold listings, or market reports with your clients.

Mobile App

CRMs today need to support agent mobility so that key CRM features and functionality are available anytime to the agent. Nearly every CRM is mobile responsive today. Being mobile responsive means that you can log in using the internet browser application. For the most part, this is fine. More advanced CRMs are offering mobile applications that you can download from the App Store or Google Play. These dedicated mobile apps are becoming more popular because they optimize the mobile experience. A key feature of dedicated mobile apps are notifications. Much in the same way that your phone can alert you to a text message, CRMs with mobile apps do an extraordinary job of alerting you of important reminders that are coming from your CRM.

HOW TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS USING CRM

The best strategy for growing your business today is to leverage your CRM. Everyone that you know should be a customer record in your CRM. Developing a database of customer contacts with complete information including telephone numbers, addresses, and email addresses is fundamental for your success, as a well-groomed database in your CRM becomes a significant asset. The more you communicate effectively with your customers, the greater the likelihood of converting those contacts into relationships that lead to future transactions.

The more you communicate effectively with your customers, the greater the likelihood of converting those contacts into relationships that lead to future transactions.

But be careful: remember that nobody wants to be spammed. You need to establish an appropriate cadence of communication from your CRM. An out-of-market customer who is not actively working with you to buy or sell may simply want to hear from you on a monthly basis. You can tag these customers to a sales stage that will only send them market reports by email each month, perhaps a flyer or postcard once a quarter and a telephone call once a month. Be sure that you spend time thinking about each customer and putting them into the right group that will deliver the correct amount of contact appropriate for them.

A significant amount of time should be spent on lead development. Our industry has done a great job of focusing on lead generation, but for the most part the follow up is a single phone call or email response from the agent. Most leads convert around 300 days after they are generated. The beauty of a CRM is that you can stay in touch with these leads using your CRM to incubate them during this time though a lead follow-up schedule.

It is a bad idea to dump a bunch of names into your CRM of people that you do not know or that have not given you permission to contact. If you have purchased a list, work the list until you have some type of successful engagement with that person before you add them into your CRM.

A key number to focus on is 2500 contacts in your farm area. If you can develop some level of relationship with 2500 households, you are likely to produce about 12 transactions a year.

WHAT MAKES A GREAT CRM?

When looking for a CRM for the first time, we recommend developing a checklist of features and a ranking system for each of those features.

Try this criterion:

• Feature
• Importance to Me
• Ease of Use

Here’s a brief walkthrough of how you might rank a feature.

Feature - Contact Record:every CRM has a contact record feature. Look at the details of the contact record to see what information can be stored. For example, does the contact record support sales stage, reference to spouse or children, field for where you met, etc.? When you are looking at the contact detail page, pay close attention to the fields. You may want to ask about your ability to add additional fields, etc.

Importance to Me – Obviously the contact record is important to you. You may want to score this feature as Very Important. However, your contact record may have integration with social media. If you are an agent who does not like social media, this feature may not be very important to you. Perhaps you are a person that likes to build business through telemarketing. The ability to click to call a customer from inside the contact record may be very important to you

Ease of Use – This is your impression. A contact record in the CRM that integrates with the contacts on your phone is super helpful because you do not need to enter the contact record into your phone, your computer, and your CRM. A CRM that syncs those records may be very easy to use

If you need to download contact records into a spreadsheet, load them, and de-dupe the records, the syncing feature may be inconvenient and cumbersome for you.

As you go through the demonstration, be sure to write down the features, their importance to you, and your measure of how easy it is to perform tasks that are vital to your success relative to your style as an agent.

Happy Selling!

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