CRM software is rapidly becoming an integral part of lead management for companies of all levels worldwide. Gartner estimates that 91% of businesses with more than eleven employees are using CRM software. The benefits of a CRM aren’t industry-specific, which is why there’s also great utility for such software in the real estate market. By using a real estate CRM and accompanying it with a viable strategy, you can effectively create a profitable method of lead management.
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Common Challenges for Real Estate Lead Management
The challenges faced in the lead management process primarily depend on the business model, but it is a problem across industries. The below points highlight some challenges that are common to real estate businesses. By understanding these challenges and roadblocks, it becomes easier to see how a real estate CRM strategy will result in better lead management.
Segmentation
Not all your leads will have the same requirements or would like to be communicated with in the same way. Identifying the differences in your leads and managing them based on these differences and their preferences is key to successful lead management.
Consistent Communication
Your leads are probably being contacted by similar businesses every day. This makes it hard for you to stand out, but consistently communicating with your leads in a valuable manner will make them more likely to remember and work with you when they need the services you offer.
Scalability
As your business grows, the number of leads and information you’ll be dealing with will also grow. Keeping on top of increased workloads as your business scales up is a lead management challenge that isn’t just unique to real estate.
Not Identifying Key Metrics
If you’re just going through the motions and not stopping to analyze your data, you’re missing out on profit. By diving into your data, you can identify the common causes for deal loss or inefficiencies in your sales process.
How Does a Real Estate CRM Help With Lead Management?
There are many ways a real estate investor CRM will help you with lead management. The entire point of a CRM is to make it easier to manage customer information. Therefore, all of the features are generally designed to help with lead management. This combination of features helps reduce the time taken to allocate and complete tasks, improve efficiency and cut down on mistakes. Let’s take a look at some of the specific ways in which a real estate CRM can help with lead management:
Better Communication With Key Parties
Studies show that most deals require multiple phone calls and emails to close. This is why it’s important to make communicating with your key contacts as easy as possible. Most CRMs contain features that allow you to rapidly find the contact details of key individuals and contact them within the system via phone or email. This is a great example of how strategic use of a real estate CRM can improve the efficiency of your lead management processes by making contacting your leads faster and easier. You will also see benefits by communicating with them using their preferred method.
Improved Internal Task Management
Most CRMs have features to help with internal task management. For example, a team manager can use the CRM to allocate the task of calling a list of customers to one of their employees. The employee would be notified of the task being allocated, and they would immediately be able to retrieve the list and start calling. These kinds of task management features reduce wasted time and improve overall efficiency. When dealing with lead management, you always want to be fast in responding to potential clients.
Keeping Log of Key Information
One of the main benefits of a real estate CRM is that it helps keep logs of key information for the lead management process. For example, your employees will be able to leave logs of any conversations they’ve had with the clients. Then, anybody interacting with the account where the logs were left will be able to get up to speed on the progress of the lead. Having this information instantly accessible, along with lead contact information and task management features, allows multiple agents to work on the same accounts and pick up the work if another team member is away.
Selecting The Right Real Estate CRM
Now that you know how a CRM can help tackle the common challenges of real estate lead management, the next step is to find the right CRM for your business. If you’re planning on scaling your business effectively or you want to reduce your personal workload, then selecting a CRM that makes use of automation is ideal for you. Some of the other key features an ideal real estate investor CRM should have, aside from the obvious, are below:
- Third-Party Integrations: Being able to integrate your CRM with other software, such as social media tools, auto diallers and email tools will go a long way in improving your efficiency and will ensure that you win deals more quickly.
- Pipeline Management: Having pipeline management features is critical to getting full visibility into your lead management process. With this feature, you can also identify where in the deal process do the majority of your problems appear.
- Real-Time Data: Having real-time data in your CRM allows you to make better and faster decisions. For example, you may be able to identify that a property is not receiving much interest in the real-time data, so you would know that you need to either increase the marketing of the property, or make changes to how it is advertised.
Conclusion
The ideal real estate CRM strategy is based on identifying which leads you have that actually fit your criteria. Once you’ve established this, you can contact your leads as soon as possible to lay the groundwork and expectations. Reminders can be set using your CRM. From this point, it is a case of continually logging each interaction so you have full visibility of the status of the lead. Of course, success is also dependent on the quality of the CRM that you use, so choose wisely!
