If you found a great way to do something or maybe found a feature that you didn’t know existed, share it!

Real Estate Grad School hosting Gary David Hall for CRM Webinar

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Rich Levin of Real Estate Grad School will be hosting a webinar where I will be answering questions such as:

  • Are there different CRMs you recommend for different levels of agents?
  • There is no best CRM. There is only the one that is best you, based on your aptitude, current needs and future goals.
  • What steps can I take to increase my chances of getting a CRM and sticking with it?​
  • ​Why not get a cheaper CRM with less features in the beginning and move to a better one when I can afford it?​
  • ​There are a lot of really good CRMs that are not specifically made for the real estate industry. When is it appropriate to get one of them vs one created for Real Estate?

The webinar was on August 21st at 11:30 EST.

Servicing your clients better

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Here’s a quick idea someone shared with me long ago, which I incorporated into my Trans-Plans workflows.

When you have automated your business with Transaction Management Plans/Workflows/Activity campaigns, it frees you up to be able to service your clients better and faster. One of the things you can do is create an email that gives the client a link to the USPS Change of Address page. Yes they can find that themselves, but how cool would it be if you saved them the trouble? Can you say Perception of Value added service? Make sure to time it right so they get it before they have to do it. Something like…

Dear Client,

I know you’re very busy preparing to move, so I thought I would save you a minute if I could. At some point you will want to change your address with the post office, so here is the link to the USPS Change of Address page.

As always, I’m here for all of your real estate needs!

Best regards,

If you’re using workflows, you can have this go out automatically so you’re servicing your clients better than you used to, but it takes zero time after you initially create the email. Nice huh!

 

CRM Drip Campaigns – Just a start

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If all you are doing to follow up with prospects and past clients is email drip campaigns, you’re only realizing a portion of your potential income.

When I started in real estate sales in 1987, there was no Internet and no email. I had to prospect and follow up with people the good old fashioned way. I called them and I even door knocked. I mailed post cards and fliers. I spent money. But it was an investment that paid off many times over. Then came the internet and email. You can reach out and touch everyone in your database – for free! Woohooo! Does it get any better?

But wait. What about the phone calls, fliers and post cards? If all you’re doing is sending email drip campaigns, do you know how many people are actually getting them? Do you know how many people are reading them or clicking on links in them? If you don’t, how do you know how well it’s working? If you do, you know that email drip campaigns alone are far from good enough, assuming you do want to do more business. I know it’s easy to plug someone into a drip campaign and feel like you’ve done your follow-up duty. But if that’s all you’re doing, you haven’t. You need to have phone call reminders interspersed throughout those emails in the drip campaigns. And you need to send them something in the mail. What you send them in email and what you send them in the mail is a whole ‘nuther discussion, but it needs to be done.

Real Estate agents on the whole are notorious for not investing in their business. I realize one of the primary reasons is because it costs money and you may not have any, or very little. I’ve been there, done that, got the t-shirt. But I saved enough to make sure that I sent out those post cards because I knew that whatever I spent, I would have many times that coming back to me from that investment. I could prove it because I knew exactly what the sources of my business were, how much I spent on each source, and how much income was derived from each source. I could calculate my ROI ( Return on Investment).

I suspect that most of you reading this already know that what I am saying ain’t rocket surgery. Hopefully, reading this will give you a little nudge so you will do what you already know you need to do. And the best part about it is that so many agents are just doing drip campaigns, you can stand out with little effort. Feeling a little guilty? Good! So?

Where do you start? If you’re using email drip campaigns, add some tasks to it to remind you to make phone calls on a periodic basis. Can’t afford the glitzy expensive post cards? They don’t have to be expensive. Might they work better. Sure – they might. But you can entertain getting the nice ones later, after the cheap ones have made you more money. Get something that has your name and your face on it and has something of interest to say. The goal is to be the first one to come to mind when they think about real estate. Good luck!

Intuitive Design, Navigability, and Learning Curve – Part 3

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Learning Curve: Somewhere along the line this poor phrase has gotten a really bad reputation. A learning curve is neither good nor bad. It just is. How long it takes to learn a CRM is directly related to how many features it has. If the CRM has very few features, the learning curve is short. If it has a lot of features, the learning curve is longer. I hear the following statement on a regular basis: “I want a CRM that does (and the list goes on forever) but I don’t want a long learning curve.” That’s like saying “I want to be the best, most knowledgeable real estate agent in my county, but I don’t want to spend too long learning how to do it.”

In the first post in this series I spoke of whether a CRM is very intuitive. Certainly the learning curve can be effected by how easy it is to figure out, but most of the better CRMs are getting to the point where they are intuitive enough that it doesn’t make much of a difference.

If you want a CRM that only helps you track your contacts and stay in touch with them, the learning curve will be relatively short. Each feature you add, adds time to the learning curve. Drip campaigns. Add time. Marketing Materials. Add time. Track Listings. Add time. Track Closings. Add time. Generate reports. Add time. It’s really that simple. If you want a bare bones CRM, your learning curve to get over the hump will be days or weeks. If you want more, it can be weeks to months. Since I believe agents should run as much of their business with a CRM as possible, short learning curves are not something to look at as a good thing because you are probably considering what is effectively a glorified Rolodex. How much will that help your business?

So any time you hear someone complain about a CRM having a long learning curve, it’s very likely that what they really mean is that it does more than they want their CRM to do. They want a bare bones CRM and the one they are looking at is a more comprehensive CRM, not a bad one.

“I don’t want to pay for features I won’t use.” This is a little off the topic but still relevant.  I just feel that it’s always good to reiterate it once in a while. Someone says “I want it to do A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L and M. But I don’t want to pay for N because I won’t use it.” That’s like getting a Mercedes with all it’s standard bells and whistles and saying you don’t want cruise control. Guess what? You’re getting it. If you don’t want it, don’t use it. Or better yet, it’s there because their users asked for it. You may find that it can help. Speaking of which – hope this helped!

Intuitive, Navigability, and Learning Curve-Part 2

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Navigability/Ease of Use: You want to be able to navigate from one thing to another quickly in your CRM. This should be true of all of its features but that just can’t always be the case. Some tasks you do frequently, such as entering a contact, searching for a contact, adding a property, or making an appointment with a contact in your database. At a minimum you should be able to accomplish these tasks with a minimum number of clicks, on a minimum number of screens. Since adding a contact is something you do a lot, it should be easy to get to a new contact screen very quickly, and then when you get there it should be quick to add information and quick to retrieve it. In this image, under the logo and to the right of the word Contacts you see an Add button. One click and you’re adding a contact. And that Add button is on almostIxact Contact Add Contact every screen. That is an example of ease of use.

Think about getting a call from a past client out of the blue. The first thing you do is go to their contact screen and review what you know about them while you are talking to them. How many clicks does it take to get to that person’s contact detail screen, and how many clicks do you have to make, or how much do you have to scroll, or how many screens do you have to go to, to get that information. When you’re looking at CRMs, go through that scenario with each one. Optimally, Name, Address, Phone, Email, Web Site, Notes, and Email History can be viewed with one click and with no scrolling. The closer you get to that the better.

Something to bear in mind with this one. None of the CRMs are easy to use for every single feature. My advice is to identify which things you will be doing the most, and see how easy they are to do. But then you have all the rest of the features. Some of which you will use, and some of which you will not. If you find that there are some things that are clunky (take too many clicks), don’t immediately eliminate that CRM. Instead try to look at the big picture. Does the CRM also have features that another CRM does not? Are they going to save you time that the others will not? If so, does the time those features save outweigh the time it takes to do the extra couple clicks for those other features that you think are clunky? Overall, which CRM is going to save you the most time?

Intuitive, Navigability, and Learning Curve

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These are three aspects of evaluating a CRM. You may want to bear these in mind when you are in any software program, and defining what they are may make it easier to do your evaluation.

Intuitive or Intuitive Design: Most agents have a fair understanding of what this means. If you are on a screen and you want to do something, is it pretty clear what you should click on to accomplish it? Or is it hidden away and hard to find or figure out. For example if you want to import contacts, is there somewhere on the screen that you would guess, and be right, that enables you to do it? In this image you can see that if you hover TP Intuitiveover Contacts, the drop-down offers “Import Contacts“. If most of the maneuvering is that obvious, then you could say that the CRM is intuitive.

Note that the more features a CRM has, the more difficult it is to make it so that everything you want to do is easy to find and readily available from any screen. There is only so much screen real estate to fit everything into. There will almost always be some things that require a little more work to find. That’s why one of the things you do when you get a CRM is to go click crazy. Any time you’re on a new page, click on everything. See what’s there. You won’t remember it all at first but it’s akin to moving to a new neighborhood and driving around all the streets. Little by little you’ll start to remember where everything is.

Next – Part 2 – Navigability

Real Estate CRM Reviews

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Real Estate CRM reviews by other agents or by industry experts can be tricky. It’s best to bear in mind that they are opinions, not facts. One of the larger CRM software sites has an article about the Ten Most Reviewed Real Estate CRMs. It does very well in the search engines so I don’t doubt that it gets pretty good traffic from agents. I’m writing this to raise awareness so you think to question recommendations. In this case I have to question why nine out of the ten CRMs being reviewed are not made for real estate agents. Although my personal opinion about using a CRM that is not built for real estate is simply not to do it in most cases, there are certainly agents who would disagree. But that does not change that there are an exceptionally small percentage of agents that have the ability, and the willingness to spend the time to create the work-arounds to a non-Real Estate CRM  that are necessary to use it for their purposes. So why would someone promoting Real Estate CRM mention only one of the 40 some odd Real Estate CRMs that are available? Is it because the generic CRMs are better? No.

What I’ve found over the years with most IT guys that help real estate agents with their technology is that they recommend products like Outlook, Google Apps, ACT! and Salesforce because that is what they are familiar with. In most cases their background and what they do most is help small businesses. Helping real estate agents and brokers is usually a small part of their business but most agents would be lost without them. But – most have never been in real estate sales or used real estate specific programs, so they recommend what they know best and what they can help people with. If you need a network set up, they’re your guys. If you need help selecting a CRM, find someone who knows Real Estate CRM.

Wherever you land looking for a CRM, be aware who is giving the advice. Find out what their background is. If they are recommending mostly CRMs that have nothing to do with real estate – why? If they can explain why generic CRMs are better for most agents than the plethora of CRM options available specifically for real estate agents, please, let me know.

Yes this article ends up being self-serving because I have a background in real estate. But does that change the points made?

Not Just a List of CRMs!

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IXACT Contact hosts free webinar by Greg Herder

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IXACT Contact is hosting a free webcast by Greg Herder, whom you probably heard of from Hobbs-Herder.

The topic is The Future of Real Estate Marketing. You need to register to attend. From IXACT Contact:

“This powerful one-hour webcast is brought to you by IXACT Contact and Greg Herder Training. This webcast will be held on Thursday, May 14th * 11 am EDT * 10 am CDT * 8 am PDT

Greg Herder explains the secrets to digital farming and shares the 3 fundamentals to real estate marketing you must grasp in order to succeed in the digital world.

There is a sea change happening that is transforming the future of real estate marketing. It’s called digital farming. It’s creating a targeted farm of people that you touch “digitally” consistently over time in a variety of different digital media. By and large, this revolution is being led by the new breed of young agents who are rejecting the old school sales oriented methods taught by old school brokers who do not think digitally.

Unfortunately, this new breed of agents are “eating the lunches” of many seasoned brokers and agents who are experiencing a rude awakening and are being shocked about how much and how fast things are changing around them. In this one-hour webcast, renowned real estate marketing expert Greg Herder shows you how you can fight back and gives you simple, step-by-step action items you can take right now to start harnessing the power of digital farming.

Find out more or register by going here.

For a special extended 60 day trial of IXACT Contact (their trial is 35 days) click here.

CRM – SAAS vs Desktop Installation

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If you’ve never seen the acronym before, SAAS stands for Software As A System. More commonly people tend to call it Cloud BasCRM SAASed or Web Based. It essentially means that the software and the data are on the CRM’s server instead of your computer. The alternative is installing the software on your computer. What are the advantages and disadvantages?

SAAS  CRMs have their advantages as do desktop applications. The latter though, is fighting a losing battle. Regardless of which one is better, the death of the real estate specific desktop CRM applications is inescapable. They simply can not make enough money to improve the product and support it. A one time fee based CRM with annual payments for upgrades or support works just fine for many software programs such as Quickbooks. Why can’t it work for us? The size of the market. Quickbooks sells what, hundreds of thousands? Millions? The market for real estate CRM solutions is probably around 2-400,000 agents. And there are well over 30 Real Estate CRMs vying for that market with new ones coming out all of the time. I’ve now watched 15 of them go out of business.

Backupscrm software backup

Perception – With SAAS you never have to worry about your data being lost because they have it backed up.

Reality – If you’ve ever lost all your data you know what it feels like. It’s bad. It’s really bad. What most don’t realize is that that advantage varies from one CRM to another. Some can restore you back to various points such as 24 hours prior. Some in shorter intervals. But what they can’t do is reverse a mistake you made such as deleting 100 contacts by mistake. They can take you back to a previous version of your data but anything you did in the interim will be lost. This is what the SAAS CRMs don’t tell you when they laud that advantage of their web based CRM and denounce the desktop CRM as poor in that respect. That said, it’s still typically vastly superior to having a desktop installation because the majority of agents are very poor about backing up their CRM. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to help someone recover who was not backed up.

Speedcrm software speed

Perception – Web based CRM is slower than desktop applications.

Reality – That used to be true but for most SAAS CRMs it is no longer an issue most of the time.

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Costexpensive

Perception – SAAS CRMs are more expensive than desktop applications.

Reality – This is true in the long term more often than not. With desktop applications, if you purchase support and upgrades regularly, then the cost difference is either not there or it is not much. But most agents with desktop applications do not get the ongoing support and updates, which is clearly less expensive especially in the long term.

Compatibility

One of the bigger advantages of SAAS software is that when they make a change, it works the same on all computers because the software doesn’t run crm compatibilityon the computer, it runs in the browser. With desktop applications, every single person using it is different. They have different operating systems, different hardware versions, and many different other software programs running on the computer. All of these can potentially cause a problem unique to that person and that computer. And each problem can require a unique fix. This causes a much bigger strain on the support systems the CRM has in place. The only issue SAAS has to deal with is the different browsers and their versions. This is by no means no small feat, but it much easier than the issues on desktop installations.

Long story short – I know – too late. SAAS for Real Estate CRM is here to stay and desktop applications are on their way, out. There are more issues to talk about in this context but these are the bigger ones. Hope this helps!