“In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.” – Seth Godin
Let’s face it. Being in the real estate business is akin to being a juggler. You need to multitask. A typical day for you involves: touching base with your past customers, keeping tab on referrals, scheduling meetings and calls, organizing open houses and doing a thousand other follow-ups. It is next to impossible to be successful at your job consistently without being super-organized (or superhuman!). In today’s world, that means you must have technology by your side. Enter CRM software.
Using the best CRM for real estate will not only allow you to be more productive on a day-to-day basis, but the right tool will also enable you to see the bigger picture of how your deals are progressing and where the bottlenecks are. CRM or a Customer Relationship Management software, will help you at each stage of the customer’s lifecycle - from tracking and managing your leads, sending drip campaigns, uploading contracts to booking and managing appointments. Just this one tool can help you provide a perfect customer experience, the differentiating factor for any business today that keeps customers loyal and nudges them to refer you to their friends and family.
What are your goals and how can a real estate CRM help?
As a real estate agent or company, your goal is simple: Make the sale. But as any sales guru would tell you, selling is an art. This is even more relevant in real estate because you’re not selling a phone or a car, you’re selling a home - the biggest emotional and financial decision that a person could make in their lifetime. At the heart of your job, more than anything else, is trust.
“Gaining trust is like filling a bucket one drop at a time.” -Todd Duncan
Building trust and relationships are the only way to be successful in business, and it can be like walking on a tightrope at times. But a good CRM for real estate can make processes easier, so that you can focus on nurturing relationships. Here’s how you can decide the best real estate CRM for you:
1. Does it capture all your customer data in one place?
“Not following up with your prospects is the same as filling up your bathtub without first putting the stopper in the drain.” -Michelle Moore
Imagine you’re at a real estate exhibition. You’re meeting potential clients, collecting business cards and contacts. You are talking to a prospect, giving your best sales pitch when they interrupt you to say that someone from your company is already in touch with them. They tell you about the various rounds of emails and phone calls they’ve had with the representative and find it strange that you have no idea about this. After all, you seem to handle the same territory and they’re one of your biggest clients. How embarrassing.
In most cases, deals take a while to close so it is important that every time you or someone from your company talks to a prospect, you can easily access all past communication in the CRM. A real estate CRM gives you a 360-degree view of customer information and also tracks every customer activity—calls, emails, and interaction with your website—in a chronological timeline view You can add notes, tasks, and appointments relevant to each customer, and also upload files like buyer contracts, purchase agreements, etc., without switching tabs. This way, you and your team members are always informed about potential customers and can collaborate over a deal when necessary.
2. Does it help improve sales agent's productivity?
“To be successful in real estate, you must always and consistently put your clients' best interests first. When you do, your personal needs will be realized beyond your greatest expectations.” -Anthony Hitt
As a real estate agent, you have to follow up with prospects, meet sellers, visit properties, etc., and update all the information in your CRM. Your real estate CRM should be able to automate all the manual grunt work, giving you time to do what you do best—selling. You need a real estate CRM that automates and schedules a lot of mundane tasks like assigning prospects to the right agent, enriching the prospect's profile, sending a welcome email, sending a reminder email to customers for payments, and being in touch with past clients, all while you are on the field.
A real estate CRM also allows you to prioritize tasks and personalize communication.
Let’s take an example: If a potential million-dollar customer only reaches out once every month while you have two smaller buyers emailing you multiple times per week, who should you focus your time on? The CRM simplifies this decision by prioritizing the prospects so that you can actively engage with the latter while still keeping the former buyer on your radar.
Customer list segmentation enables you to tailor your communication, instead of sending out a generic message. You can automate this by creating email sequences based on your segments. A customized drip campaign can improve your close rates and retention drastically.
Perhaps one of the most relevant features to look out for is whether the real estate CRM is accessible on the mobile or not, since you will spend so much of your time in the field, at open houses or networking. An android and iOS mobile app that allows you to keep a tab on the prospect's activities, add meeting notes, make calls, send emails, and update the status of a contact, giving you the freedom to close deals on the move.
3. Does it map with your existing sales process?
“It is not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it is that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.” – Gary Keller
Your sales process is unique to your business. The platforms and resources you need to acquire leads and convert them could be online or offline or both. A great real estate CRM should allow you to create the right workflows to map your processes. In this way, you know where your deals are in the sales pipeline, spot and eliminate stale deals, estimate revenue in the coming months, and analyze won and lost deals.
In fact, some of the modern real estate CRMs allow you to customize sales activities, deal stages, sales pipelines and even rename the modules to suit your business.
4. Does it integrate with other business solutions?
“The more you know about your customers, the more you can provide to them information that is increasingly useful, relevant, and persuasive.” – Jay Baer
The idea behind using a CRM is to make every detail that you might need, easily accessible for you to act fast. It should also reduce your time and need for any other, secondary product so that you can be more productive. This is why integration is so important.
When choosing a CRM for real estate, look out for one that integrates with your existing business solutions without additional cost on implementations and APIs.
A good real estate CRM should ideally be your one-stop-shop for everything, from marketing automations to invoicing, sales and even customer support. A real estate CRM like Freshsales easily integrates with Freshdesk, a helpdesk software, to view tickets raised by a customer before reaching out to them for cross-selling and up-selling activities. The CRM also has integrations with Freshchat that captures leads directly into the CRM.
5. Does it help make informed business decisions?
“You must learn that selling is not selling; it is providing, and the key to providing is knowing in advance what to provide.” - Todd Duncan
You have all this data. Now what? The best CRM for real estate should show you at a single glance what works and what doesn’t. These insights can then help create long-term strategies. Its easy reporting features should help you find your best sales agents, best-performing territories and weed out the inefficiencies in your current process.
How many deals have you closed this month or quarter? How have the buying and selling trends been in a particular time period? Which is your most valuable lead source? An easy-to-understand real-time dashboard can provide you actionable-insights to drive more business and give your customers what they need before they want it.
Ultimately, if you work in real estate, you’re in the business of building relationships. Choose a technology partner that allows you to do just that, while it takes care of the rest. You don’t need a CRM system plus five other tools to see results. You need just one great real estate CRM that not only makes day-to-day tasks a cinch, but also gives you big picture analysis through data-driven reporting.
