Traditionally minded businesses in India—of which Real Estate Development is definitely one—tend to equate CRM usage exclusively with customer service. And while a CRM does improve customer service, it can do much more. This article looks at the different ways a CRM can improve productivity and efficiency across the real estate organization.
Who needs a CRM?
For a long time, real estate businesses spent big bucks in sales-focused advertising, paying little attention to brand-building marketing efforts. The rising use of CRM in businesses across industry sectors has brought home the brand-building capabilities inherent in the skilled use of a CRM. Beyond sending greetings, and happy festival messages, your CRM can help your business stay closer to your customer through surveys that try to understand what your customer really wants; newsletters, emails and messages, among others. Your CRM can manage your contacts, conduct marketing initiatives, keep your people aligned and generally improve customer engagement.
So to answer the question in the headline, every business that wants to build strong positive recall, leverage their customer base, and grow their top line needs an effective CRM.
How a Real Estate CRM Helps Improve Efficiency
a. Creates a centralized database
The average real estate business runs multiple promotional and sales campaigns on multiple media, including both offline channels and online. A CRM provides the ideal repository for all the enquiries generated from each initiative. This creates a single source of truth that everyone in the organization can use for everything, from scheduling and acting on follow-ups to documentation and reporting. The database avoids duplication and keeps the data up-to-date.
b. Improves marketing ROI
A good Real Estate CRM is an invaluable asset in your marketing initiatives. Integration with applications such as Word, email, SMS, and, even, WhatsApp allow users to both create and deploy marketing campaigns in one go. You can create email lists/WhatsApp groups as per different customers’ preferences and create bespoke communications for each one. This improves traction and allows personalized interactions that get better results. In addition, it helps automate and streamline your marketing processes, thus, reducing the chances of manual errors and improving efficiency. Finally, you can measure and analyze the results of your campaigns, and make changes to improve metrics for future efforts.
c. Provides anytime, anywhere access
Sales personnel are often outside the office, busy showing apartments/sites to prospects, and meeting with brokers, and other channel partners. This means they don’t really have the time or inclination to sit down at their desks and enter updated information in the CRM. With a modern CRM, they don’t have to! With most CRMs moving to the cloud, you can connect to the CRM and use all the tools on offer from anywhere, using any connected digital device. This saves time, improves efficiency, and ensures the CRM data is always up-to-date.
d. Helps in closing sales
Your Real Estate CRM can help your salespersons close sales in the following ways:
By providing salespeople with access to customer information, including purchase history and communication history, thus giving them valuable insights into customer needs, pain points and objections to guide their sales pitch.
CRMs automate follow-up tasks and send reminders to sales reps to help them boost engagement with prospects.
CRMs provide up-to-date and accurate information about prospects, where they are in the sales funnel, etc, thereby allowing salespeople to track and prioritize leads based on the likelihood of closure.
The CRM provides access to the same database, thus facilitating collaboration and communication between sales and other departments that support sales efforts, such as marketing and customer service.
Automates routine workflows, for accuracy and speed
Since it operates on a centralized database, using a CRM makes it easy to automate various workflows without any chance of manual error. This includes tasks such as:
Lead capture and management: As we saw earlier, a good Real Estate CRM provides the ideal centralized repository for all the enquiries and leads generated through the various marketing initiatives you conduct.
Sales forecasting: Given the data at your disposal, you’re in a better position to segment customers, perform market analytics and forecast top line performance. Using the CRM effectively also ensures every lead is properly attended to, no calls go without being responded to, and no scheduled visits are missed, which improves your chances of closing more sales
Email and social media marketing: Integration via APIs makes it simple to conduct email campaigns and run analytics on which campaigns bring better results, allowing you to keep refining your messaging and customer segmentation.
Customer segmentation and targeting: One of the most effective aspects of marketing using your CRM is the ability to create ad hoc groups of customers as per their preferences, demographics, etc. and create tailored communications that offer a better chance of success. Better targeting brings better results. It also offers excellent opportunities to run analytics on various metrics—all the better to ensure ongoing success.
Quote and proposal generation: A good Real Estate CRM will offer tools to simplify and streamline such actions as proposal generation and cost sheet generation, and you will also be able to send them to your prospects directly through multiple channels.
Streamlines collections & payment tracking: Real Estate businesses depend on payment collection to run profitably. Your CRM can play a critical role in this aspect by generating demand letters and follow-up reminders at pre-set intervals. The reminders can also be set to automatically calculate such aspects as interest, penalties, and the tone of each reminder can also be pre-set to underscore the seriousness of the circumstances.
Analytics and reporting: CRMs operate using a centralized database, which automatically enables data analysis. Using in-built tools, which are usually provided by CRMs, you can generate reports on customer trends, sales performances, the effectiveness of certain marketing campaigns, and more.
A strong Real Estate CRM also provides tools to help users create customized reports as per their needs, and dashboards to help data visualization so you can better understand trends and customer behavior.
Finally, your Real Estate CRM should be able to integrate with other systems such as marketing automation platforms, which will offer even more powerful tools to understand changing trends or customer behavior and capitalize on them
Customer support and service requests: Your Real Estate CRM really comes into its own when it comes to responding to customer requests for support and service
The centralized database of customer information makes it easier to track and manage customer interactions. It also automates repetitive tasks, such as ticket tracking and response routing, saving time and raising efficiency levels.
Using these features teams are also better equipped to collaborate and share information about customer issues, leading to faster and more informed responses.
By creating a single source of truth, the CRM enables omnichannel support, so every business representative can respond to customer requests via email, phone, chat, and social media precisely and quickly.
The database also provides a comprehensive history of customer interactions, allowing support reps to quickly understand a customer’s needs and provide more personalized responses. Finally, users can run real-time analytics on customer behaviour, allowing businesses to identify and resolve issues proactively.
Conclusion
Modern CRMs are capable of doing a lot more than responding to customer requests to support. Used effectively, a good Real Estate CRM can improve efficiencies in almost every aspect of your operations, from marketing to collections. With APIs, you can further extend the CRM’s capabilities by adding stronger marketing and analytics tools.
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