Real Estate CRM Best Practices & Tips Archives - Page 7 of 14

Is the recipient not reading the whole email? Are they just too busy and don’t pay attention? Or do they simply not care? The last may be the single biggest reason to pay attention!

If you are guilty of this, think about the message you are sending. Do you really want a client or prospect to infer that you are unorganized, too busy, or don’t care?

On a daily basis I send emails with multiple questions. When I do – I usually number them to make it clear that there are multiple questions. Sometimes I will even encourage the person to respond inline. So if there are numbered questions, the answers to the questions should appear immediately below the question and maybe in bold letters or a different color. This is my favorite way to do it. If you answer in one paragraph at the top of the page, not only is it cumbersome for the person who asked the questions, but it is also much more likely that the person answering the questions will forget one or more, or be unclear in the answers.

In many email software programs, to reply inline is easy – you just type your response after the question. In Gmail after you hit reply you look for the little ellipsis (…) at the bottom of the reply screen. If you do not know how to respond inline, you might want to think about learning. If you don’t, another message you could be sending is that you are technologically challenged. Not a good thing in the world of real estate. If you know how and don’t do it – why not? It’s just one more way to set yourself apart from the mooing herd by showing that you are conscientious, focused on their needs and forming your answers so that they are easily read and understood.

It’s not uncommon for me to ask five or six questions, and have to go back and forth with three or four emails to get them all answered. This is an incredible waste of time and when it happens, my opinion of the person answering the questions drops a level with regards to competence and organizational skills. Don’t yours?

If you don’t already do it, consider numbering questions when you ask them, replying inline when you answer them and answering all the questions. Have fun out there!

Why not hire someone to build your own CRM?

June 19, 2014/0 Comments/in Real Estate CRM Best Practices & Tips/by Gary David Hall

This an excerpt from my book – Choosing and Using a CRM.

If you are an experienced agent, when you start working with a buyer you probably tell them in so many words to be aware that there is no perfect house for them. You will get as close as you can you tell them, but even if it seems perfect when you move in, you will always find things you wish it had or did not have.

Some tech savvy agents and brokers have gone through the very considerable expense of time and money to have their own perfect CRM built. After the large initial outlay of both, and the subsequent ongoing bleeding months or years later, the majority end up purchasing an out-of-the-box real estate specific CRM solution. Why? Because once you create it, you need it to continue to evolve and improve. Yes you create it. Think about that for a moment. You may hire someone to code the program, but you are the one who has to tell them in great detail what it is that you want. The programmer writes the code, but you design it to do what you want. It is you who are responsible to tell them in painstaking detail what you need, then correct the misunderstandings, beta test it, and then continue to improve it. That takes an inordinate amount of time. It is a never-ending lowest and worst use of significant blocks of your time.

You also most likely will eventually lose the person who coded/wrote it in the first place, and then you have to find someone who will continue making your changes for you. Consider that software design is as much if not more of an art than it is a science, and each artist has his or her own style. This often results in giving it different feels in different sections of the program, making it less intuitive or easy to learn, and typically more cumbersome than need be.

If you buy one out of the box, the software vendor takes on the job of improving it. It may not be everything you want it to be, but if you find the right one it can be most of what you need it to be. It is also their job to continue to add to it, based on user suggestions and industry changes and needs, as opposed to frequently spending your time doing it. Moreover, when there is a large user base making suggestions, there will be improvements made that may never have occurred to you.

There has been an interesting trend in the RE CRM industry for the last five to seven years. There are actually a significant number of RE CRM developers who were Real Estate agents, albeit for a short time.They originally decided to create their own CRM because they were agents looking for a CRM solution, and were not happy with what was available. At that time there were only a small handful of CRMs available. Something they did not realize though was that there were some others available but they were almost impossible to find in the search engines. Sadly, it is still difficult to find some. One of the best ones on the market cannot be found on Google by searching on real estate CRM software! They are just clueless about Web site SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

So these new agents who had a software background decided they could do a better job. Few of these CRMs have been out more than three or four years, so they have not had enough time to prove themselves yet. It remains to be seen if they were right about being able to do it better, and if they will last. The point is that it is such an overwhelming job, that they chose to make building a CRM their career, as opposed to selling Real Estate.

So if you’re considering having a CRM built for you remember that one of the primary decisions is what you want to be when you grow up – a software developer or a real estate sales person.

IDX versus Auto-population of Leads

May 14, 2014/0 Comments/in Real Estate CRM Best Practices & Tips/by Gary David Hall

I decided to write this because I get many calls from agents requiring the CRM they choose to have IDX integration.

Another way it is often asked for is they want “web site integration”. The vast majority of the time, that’s not what the agent really wants. What they usually want is for the CRM to add new leads automatically, saving them the time of having to key in the information.

IDX (Internet Data Exchange) is the ability for a web site visitor to do an MLS search.

There are a variety of features that come after that but that’s the primary function.

Auto-population of leads is the ability of the CRM to automatically add incoming leads from a variety of sources including web site contact forms directly, or emails containing the lead information.

While there are some CRMs that incorporate IDX solutions into them, they are typically only available in broker level or more sophisticated and expensive CRMs. They’re a time saver because instead of having to go to your web site to see what the prospect is searching for, that information can be contained within the CRM right with the contact’s record.

So the point is that if what you are looking for is a CRM that has the ability to automatically add leads, you don’t need the CRM to have IDX capability, just the ability to take a lead from a web site, lead generation solution, or an email. At this point most of the better CRMs do this. How they do it, and what kind of leads they are capable of adding vary significantly.

A detailed description of each method is fodder for another article, but I’ll summarize the primary ones here.

1) The first method most had was for the CRM to enable you to create a contact form from within the CRM. It then provided the HTML source code. You then replace your existing web site contact form with the new one. The downside is that many template sites are not capable of allowing you to replace the contact form, or if you do replace it, the follow-up capabilities on the site may be negated.

2) The next method that came into common usage was for the CRM to have a relationship with the lead provider so they could “talk to each other” and add the lead automatically.

3) The newest method is “Email lead parsing” – the ability for the CRM to receive an email from any lead source, analyze the content of the email and add the information as a new lead. This is probably the best overall because it doesn’t matter where the lead is coming from. All it needs to have is a consistent format. By that I mean it has to label the information by preceding it with a consistent name such as “Name: John Buyer”. The vast majority do this. The downside is that if the email is HTML instead of plain text, which the vast majority are not, it can confuse the lead parser utility.

The bottom line is that you can require IDX integration in your CRM, but if what you want is for the lead to be automatically added into your CRM’s database you don’t need IDX. What you want is simply the ability to auto-populate new leads into it.

Busy month! Now affiliated with Tribus CRM!

May 8, 2014/0 Comments/in Real Estate CRM Best Practices & Tips/by Gary David Hall

I was a little behind and am now catching up. I have been wanting to affiliate with several companies for a while now and this is one of them.

Tribus CRM is great for a large team or brokerage. Their target market is for users doin gover $10 million in volume. I’ve spoken at great length with the CEO’s and developers of the vast majority of the Real Estate CRMs on the market. Most of them have someone in the organization who has spent at least some time as a real estate agent. One of the two principals of this one has been a broker/owner with a large office. You can tell. The way this one was developed is clearly from one who understands the business very well from the ground up. There are many features I like about this, but one that was telling was that he addressed the “How do I get my agents to really use this” question. Every broker knows the pain of agent adoption of the solutions they try to implement. This one has an answer built in.

One of the primary reasons I like it is its extreme customizability. If you focus on a niche market like REO’s, Short Sales, Foreclosures, etc., you can easily mold this to your needs. It’s like SalesForce or Propertybase in that respect, but at a lower price, and created from the start for use in real estate.

This product is not cheap, but it’s worth it if you understand ROI. If you want to spend as little as possible, this one is not for you. If you want to make an investment into the future of your production as an agent, or into the company as a broker, this is a bargain.

I do webinars for different organizations around the country on the topic of the latest trends in Real Estate CRM. Tribus is right there on all the points I make in that webinar, and has set a couple new ones I will speak about in the future. They are cutting edge, not bleeding edge, the former being the best way to be.

If you’re a power user of Tribus CRM doing $10 million or more, feel free to leave a comment.

Are you sure you can’t do that in your Real Estate CRM?

January 20, 2014/0 Comments/in Real Estate CRM Best Practices & Tips/by Gary David Hall

Maybe this is a plea to CRM users everywhere to make sure you are correct, before you do a disservice to yourself and others.

If you think there is something you cannot do in your Real Estate CRM, don’t just think you can’t – find out definitively that you can’t. No matter how well you think you know the software, call support. And remember you are not trying to confirm that you are right; you are trying to figure out how to do what you want to do. Ask them how to do something and if they say you can’t that’s fine. But then call back and confirm it again with a different support person. Support people are human and sometimes don’t know what they don’t know, don’t like to admit that they don’t know something, or are too lazy to make sure.

I was doing a webinar the other day and someone in the audience was using a CRM and complaining that they couldn’t do some things and being negative about the CRM. In no time it was shown that it could do all of the things he wanted. It was already too late though because the negative feeling was out there in the room about that CRM. The participants perceptions of that CRM were forever damaged and in the future they will find themselves saying something along the lines of “I can’t remember specifically what it was but I think I’ve heard bad things about that CRM.” I hear it every day. That’s what prompted me to write this article.

Making uncorroborated statements can be a damaging thing in a couple ways. The obvious one is that you could be doing what you want but you aren’t, only because you think you can’t. If this happens with too many things, you end up starting to consider moving to another CRM. I get calls all the time from agents who are considering moving to another CRM because they are not happy with their current one. It’s also not uncommon to discover that their dissatisfaction is unfounded because they can do what they want after all. Almost without exception it is because they never called support to confirm it. Sometimes it even happens that support told them they could not do something but I showed them that they actually could. Hence my advice earlier about calling back again if you’re told you can’t do it.

The other problem with assuming is that when you tell other people incorrectly that your CRM can’t do a particular thing, you could be discouraging someone from getting it when it is actually the best one for them.

Another thing to consider is that even though you may not be able to do exactly what you want; is there a way that you can accomplish the same end result in a different way? Is there a work-around or maybe even a better way to do it? This is another common issue but it is most common with people who have used other CRMs before the one they are currently using. People often say “I could do ‘X’ in my old CRM but I can’t do it in this one that I’m looking at.” We often sit down and discover that the new one can not only do it, but sometimes do it better. It’s sometimes difficult to see that it is better when you are used to doing it differently.

Sometimes when I write something like this, by the time I think it is about to end, I discover that another point has evolved. I guess this is one of those times. I wrote another article about being very careful about listening to other people’s opinions. This turns out to be yet another reason why that is true. Without meaning to, this is another case where people can mislead you and you will have no idea that you are being mislead.

Let’s be careful out there :)

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