The world is increasingly becoming digital. Tech tools and innovations have become vital parts of our lives. How long do you go without checking your social media? The business scene has not been left behind. Various innovations come up each day to help businesses streamline their operations and digitize their sales.
If you’ve been in the real estate industry for any period of time, you probably hear people throwing around these acronyms and all that jargon. You might be wondering what a CRM is and whether you even need it for your business.
In this article, we’re going to break down what a CRM is, and then you can decide whether you should invest in it for your business.
What is a CRM?
A CRM is essentially a business in a box. But what does it stand for? It stands for Customer Relationship Management system. It’s essentially a software tool that you can use to manage your entire real estate business. Think of it as the ultimate sales follow up tool.
It’s a vital tool because many real estate agents are not organized. Even for the most organized real estate agents, once they build a large successful business, it becomes challenging to keep the company on track using old-school methods, such as notebooks and pieces of paper.
This is where the CRM comes in. Here are various ways in which real estate CRM helps you step up your game:
-
Manage Follow-Ups
CRM’s gives you the ability to follow up with clients at such a high level, assign yourself follow-up tasks, create notes, email your contacts and keep track of the emails. The tool simply helps you keep your business organized and prevent things from slipping through the cracks.
As a business owner, you know that sending messages and running campaigns is not enough to convince clients to buy from you. You must respond to them promptly to ensure they sign with your company.
If you’re following up with leads and past clients, you want to make sure you do that on a practical level. In real estate, agents get so busy and forget to follow up with specific prospects and clients. You might call them a few weeks later once you remember, but they might have already bought or sold a house. This can be a $5,000 or $10,000 mistake.
You don’t want to do this because you leave a ton of money on the table, and it’s not worth it.
With a CRM, you can create really detailed follow-up plans. If you need to follow up with a client at a particular time and date, you can set a timer on your CRM. The software will send you a notification when it’s time to follow up.
You can also check your follow-up notes inside your client’s profile. This way, you can track exactly where you left off the last time you had a conversation. You can pull up the conversation in your CRM and have notes there that date years back. When you have a deal to follow up on, you just go through the notes and continue with the conversation just like you left it a year ago.
This leaves your clients impressed because they wonder how you remember a whole conversation even after they forgot about you altogether. They don’t know that you have an entire system working behind the scenes that has notes and every single conversation that you had with that client in such detail.
CRM helps you stay on top of things for your clients and be the best agent that they could possibly ever find.
-
Monitor your Prospecting
Real Estate CRM’s also allows you to track your prospecting. CRM solutions help your firm to know how many calls and conversations you make per day. It’s a great tool if you’re trying to keep yourself or your team accountable.
Remember you’re self-employed. You want to be able to hold yourself accountable and measure the amount of work you’re doing on a daily basis. You often find agents in situations where they think they’re doing a lot of work, but in reality, they’re not doing anything meaningful that could lead to closing a sale.
With real estate CRM’s, you’ll be able to track the number of profitable activities that you’re doing every single day.
- Manage your Pipeline
CRMs help you manage your current pipeline and the number of deals that you have in your real estate database.
As an agent, you know that it’s not only important to follow up with prospects and leave detailed notes, it’s also essential to follow up with clients that are already under contract with you. It’s essential that you stay aware of any important dates and deadlines so that you may not miss any significant things during transactions.
Suppose you don’t have a transaction coordinator yet, and you miss a mortgage commitment date or a home inspection contingency. In that case, you can put your clients in a lot of risks and bad situations for no particular reason.
How Much Money Does a CRM Cost?
The reality is most real estate CRMs are pretty affordable these days. There are many different options for real estate agents, from beginner level all the way to advanced. There are many great CRM options for really affordable prices compared to the amount of value you get.
The reason CRM companies are able to do that is because of the economies of scale. They basically sell their product to multiple people. They build the product once and have software engineers updating the CRM every single month or year. The company can sell it to so many people that they make massive profits.
As an agent, you also benefit because you get this fantastic piece of software that this company has poured, in some cases, millions of dollars into, and use it for your personal real estate practice. This is really powerful as you get this high-level and high-tech system to basically run your business out of for a minimal investment every month.
You should definitely get a CRM if you’re taking this career seriously and want to scale up in your real estate business, whether you’re a solo agent, a team leader, or even run a small brokerage.
- Boost Agent Productivity
A real estate agent’s daily life is a tad too hectic. Imagine having to attend client and broker meetings, show properties, follow up on your potential leads and marketing strategy, and still sit at your computer and record your data in the CRM. This might not be applicable.
However, with modern CRMs, you can enter your data in the CRM on your smartphone, tablet, or laptop remotely. Modern CRMs are cloud-based, meaning you can access them from any location as long you have a stable connection.
When you and your agents have access to the CRM on the go, you’ll notice an increase in your productivity as there’s more convenience.
Key Takeaways
Real estate CRMs are becoming more of a necessity than an option. Customer Relationship Management Systems put your entire business in a box and helps you manage it better. You stand to enjoy many benefits from investing in this software. You’ll be able to streamline your customer follow-ups, prospecting, and pipeline management.
The software also boosts employee productivity. A good real estate CRM will help you to get everything on track because it really is your business in a box. It would be hard for you to run a large real estate business and operate it the right way without a CRM. Invest in your business, in yourself, and check out CRMs for yourself.