Why Realtors Need More than a CRM to Maximize Conversions

Real estate is a relationship business. A person to person service. To turn leads into clients, agents must respond quickly when buyers first become interested in a property. To close the sale they must stay connected to buyers and sellers.

Successful real estate agents understand that working their connections is the best way to profitability. They mine their family, friends, and past clients for business.

20% of leads come from personal referrals. 19% from past clients. Less than 5% from personal websites and the rest tend to come from lead generation sources sites like Zillow.

They stay top-of-mind through notes, personal phone calls, text messages and remain responsive to every turn throughout the buying and selling process.

THE CASE FOR A CRM

Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform can help streamline this process of staying in touch and top of mind.

And Real estate agents who use a CRM more, earn more: a recent Active Rain survey showed that top-earning agents (those earning $100,000 per year or more) spent 22% more on their CRM solution than agents who earned less than $35,000.

In many cases maintaining an efficient process is what sets successful agents apart from those who struggle.

THE DEEP VALUES OF A TCM

Realtors — an other independent business owners — need much more than a CRM these days:

- Programmable voice phone numbers for signs
- SMS to connect instantly
- eMail for follow up and drip marketing
- Social to stay connected
- Lead source integration

I’m not going into every tool offered by AgentNow™ in this post but lets look at two key differentiators between a traditional CRM and what we call a TCM.

One of our early advocates describes AgentNow™ as “Grasshopper on steroids combined with SalesForce light.”

To give credit where credit is due, SalesForce defined the term, CRM. Creating an industry where there was chaos and disorganization. Grasshopper revolutionized the small business phone system.

Yet for many small businesses, SalesForce is a costly and complicated solution when only the essentials are needed. And Grasshopper is missing certain key tools.

PROGRAMMABLE VOICE

By offering local and toll free numbers with Programmable Voice inside the same dashboard as the CRM AgentNow™ saves steps, increases flexibility and lowers overall cost.

CONTACTS (tasks, notes, to-do’s, pipeline, calendar)

All CRM’s store contacts, but using tying each individual contact to eMail, phone calls, SMS and other communication activities is one of the most talked about features of the system.

Keeping all these essential elements together allows us to do some simple, powerful and beautiful things:

- When a call comes in from a new lead, just click to add the number.
- The entire communication history is displayed in a timeline.
- Reminders include everything with a date and time.
- Add contacts to groups then send email, SMS or click to call
- Route all incoming calls to any agent
- Every agent gets programmable voice mail with call forwarding
- And you can connect VOIP systems, or route to phones.

If that sounds too good to be true, but AgentNow™ has so many advantages over individual tools, we want to make it easy for you to try.

Whether you chose AgentNow™ or other great tools out there, organization is the key to building your income. Not to mention, saving time to enjoy the fun things in life that success brings.

5 REASONS YOU NEED A TCM VERSUS A CRM

1. Relationships matter

The most valuable asset agents possess is their database. Mine it. Use and cultivate it to deliver business on a consistent basis. The lifetime value of a past client is five times greater than an unknown prospect. Every closed client should generate four referrals and repeat business.

To do this you need to keep in touch before, during and after the sale. Here are a couple of ideas from successful Real Estate Pros.

- Set reminders for the anniversary of the home closing date and other key events related to your client. Send thank you’s every year with a link for referrals.
- Try different methods of communicating. Some people love email. Others only text. A friendly call once or twice a year never hurts.

2. Time is Everything

Every day we fight the battle for time. And in the end the time we lose is our personal time. The time to enjoy our success. AgentNow™ is comprehensive but with a Zen-like approach. When you buy a new smartphone it doesn’t come with a manual. So we figure if a feature takes too much time to learn, it is badly designed or effectively broken.

Our goal is to keep the learning curve around minute per feature.

We work hard at this so you won’t have to.

3. Your Past is the Key to Your Future

Over 40% of sales come from referrals and past clients. Lead generation and retention processes are each made easier when real estate agents can follow the conversation back to its inception. But these conversations happen in so many ways on a multitude of platforms. AgentNow™™ helps you manage several essential processes with a single login making it easier to maintain strong relationships with friends, leads and past clients.

4. Comprehensive Notifications

AgentNow™™ offers daily prompts for every note, task, to-do and event that has a date and time. Through dashboard reminders, email or text messages, agents can systematize their follow-up.

Never miss a beat with AgentNow.

5. Money Matters

Two of the top 3 reason Agents chose a CRM are cost and ease of use. Well no too on the planet offers more for less than AgentNow.

PROGRAMMABLE VOICE, CRM, SMS, EMAIL, VOIP INTEGRATION and more. All for $7 per month.

And ease of use is the mantra we design by.

Productivity Affects Everything

Did you know that more than 70% of agents use CRM to manage their database? Did you also know that the majority of real estate agents and brokers in a recent survey felt that CRM made them more productive than agents who didn’t use CRM?

AgentNow takes it to the next level.

Conclusion

There are so many ways that CRM can help you manage your database – in fact, it’s an important tool for managing your entire business. The key with getting the most out of CRM is to be disciplined about using it. Every time you speak with a contact, enter notes about what you discussed, and schedule your next contact. Every time you generate a lead, assign them to a follow-up plan. Over time, you’ll find that your relationships are stronger, your pipeline fuller, and your business growing faster than ever.

Future Tech

The (IoT) Internet of Things

In the next 60 days we will roll out REALPASS. A simple system to connect your signs and listings to the Internet of Things. Think of the Next Thermostat, the August Lock, Airline and Movie Passes.

Realtors Need More Than a CRM