A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool is a suite of products designed to create, manage, curate, and maintain relationships with existing and potential clients.
These are systems built around the life cycle of a relationship with a client. CRM's can automate workflows for a wide variety of purposes, including lead responses, email drip campaigns, transaction management, client retention and more.
For real estate professionals specifically they provide you with key client insights, improve response times, and increase conversion rates of leads into transactions. They can also improve referral success & long term relationship maintenance with your past clients.
At AgentFire, we have hand picked a list of our favorite CRMs we feel are most beneficial for our clients (more information on our pricing for integrations and popular CRM's are available here). While there are many real estate CRMs, we've highlighted a select list that we find offer the best value/cost/flexibility for your industry's specific needs and goals. All of our highlighted CRM's are Zapier.com compatible, guaranteeing that you'll receive accurate and complete payloads of lead data instantly from all areas of your website.
Why is a CRM important?
If you are investing your time and hard earned money into acquiring more leads you will want to ensure you have the tools that will help you get the best results possible. At its core, a CRM provides you with a few key benefits that as a Real Estate profession you absolutely need.
1. Efficiency
Maintaining communications with existing clients and building relationships with new clients can be time consuming, especially when the processes used to communicate are cumbersome, inefficient or ineffective. Response times matter. Being in the right place and available at the right time can be difficult, so automation of your daily tasks, lead nurturing & communication strategies will improve your overall results.
2. Lead Nurturing
Not all leads are created equal. Receiving a lead requires knowing not just what to do with it, but also where in the process time can be saved investing in its cultivation. Clear & efficient processes for lead routing, continued contact, and initial response times are all areas a CRM can improve your conversion rates of each lead received. Some leads, like a direct contact request, can be efficiently routed to specific team members within a CRM. Other leads, like an IDX signup can be automated to deliver response emails, sign up for drip campaigns, and offer reminders for repeat contact opportunities.
3. Client Management
Communication strategies can be heavily affected by how well you balance time. Organization of your client data, notes & ongoing conversations will improve how quickly and accurately you can deliver the right information to the right people or groups with less time spent.
Key features you need!
For the purpose of this article we will share these features using our preferred CRM, LionDesk. We love LionDesk for its modern, easy to use user interface and the fact that they pack in so many powerful features for only $25 p/m. So let's dive in and walkthrough some key CRM features you will want to have.
Reporting Options help to better understand and nurture your lead sources for hot deals.
Your lead pipeline will provide an accurate picture of your financial picture, from source through closing
Build and manage lead sources to ensure every lead has a workflow type
Import leads from a wide variety of sources
Route leads to team members automatically:
Make communication a breeze by scheduling emails, and building auto responses
Create Drip Campaigns for repeat contact & communication to your leads
Respond faster with SMS texting capabilities, VOIP phone calls, or create videos to provide to your audience
Push onsite property visitors to your lead curation processes with text-2-sign riders
Stay organized with a task calendar to coordinate your tasks with clear time frames & due dates
Manage properties & escrows in your pipeline.
Other CRM’s we like:
In Conclusion
Ultimately a CRM will make you professional life a heck of a lot easier while simultaneously increase the results you get with your leads & clients. If you are actively spending time & money driving leads to your brand, you want to ensure you get the most out of your marketing budget. A CRM will help you work towards less wasted dollars and a higher ROI.
Further information on our integration options and pricing is available on our Marketplace page, located here: