📗People

Managing contacts, communications and your sphere.

What is a CRM?

CRM is an acronym that stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a technology for managing all of your business relationships and interactions with your contacts, existing clients and potential clients. It has a simple goal: improve business relationships to grow your business. A CRM system helps you stay connected to your clients, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

CRMs are generally designed to streamline and improve customer interaction, the sales process, and the running of marketing campaigns. They do this by making workflow and the sales pipeline more efficient — automating tasks and analyzing data.

PS: It sounds more complicated than it is. If you are growing your real estate business, you either need to hire assistants and have them hustle, or put a system in place that makes it easy for you to stay on top of everything. That system is called a CRM.

Own Your Sphere

In order to be a top performing agent, you need to constantly stay in touch with your sphere. On average you want to have 30-40 touch-points per year to stay relevant to your clients. These would be a mix of direct touch-points such as calls or birthday and anniversary celebration messages, and indirect touch-points that you still need to customize for your sphere, such as sending mailers, online ads or email newsletters. Having frequent touch-points will result in your sphere knowing and trusting you.

Rechat will help you automate many of your touch-points and remind you to stay on top of the rest.

CRM Can Make Growing Your Business Simple

A CRM system can give you a clear overview of your clients. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a client’s previous history with you, the status of their deals, and more. You can think of a CRM as your own private social media with a ton of valuable information about your relationships: It’s an extension of your brain.

Utilizing a CRM will help you improve your customer’s experience, and agents who invest in a CRM are seeing extremely positive results. A recent industry-wide survey has shown that 89% of an average agent's time is spent on doing the "leg-work," such as administrative work, rekeying info, and other non-income producing work, while only 11% of an agent's time was actually spent on connecting with their clients and sphere.

Running Your Business Without a CRM Can Cost You Real Money

More administration and more data entry means less time for everything else. An active Realtor is involved with a growing number of relationships and transactions -- and a flood of data. Agents are out on the road talking to customers, meeting prospects, and finding out valuable information — but most of it ends up scribbled on a piece of paper or becomes a mental note likely to be forgotten later. Details can get lost, meetings lack follow-up, and prioritizing clients and prospects may become a matter of guesswork rather than a rigorous exercise based on data. Even worse, past clients may be forgotten. NAR reports that only 18% of agents follow up with their past clients in year one after closing.