Young woman buys banana. Assistant helping customer at vegetable counter of farm shop
Selling real estate does not have a lot in common with selling bananas.
If you’re selling bananas, you’ve got a product that many people want and buy regularly and without a whole lot of forethought. They’re in the store, they see the bananas at a decent price, they buy the bananas. If someone mentions to you that they really like the bananas you sell and they plan to tell all their friends about your great bananas, you might be pleased but you’re unlikely to try to get contact information to follow up with their friends.
Real estate works a little bit differently.
When you’re selling real estate (or helping real estate buyers find a property), the lead time is a lot longer and clients do a lot more research about their choices for an agent. So if you’re helping a client and they mention that they’d like to refer you to their friends, it’s absolutely vital for you to get some contact information and follow up with those friends.
Enter a real estate CRM – Client Relationship Management – system. If you want to build an effective pipeline, one that will keep you closing deals all year round, you can’t just hand out your real estate business cards and hope for the best. You need to have an efficient, effective system for keeping track of who your prospects are, what they’re looking for, and when you last contacted them. Ideally, you’d also be able to track things like where you connected with them, what they’re interested in, and when they eventually converted from a lead to a prospect to a client.
Real estate CRM tools come in a lot of different flavors, from a simple excel spreadsheet or Google doc to apps, software, and sites like Insightly, Salesforce, Contactually, and (many, many) more. What matters is not so much the specific tool you use, but how consistently you use any tool.
As you gear up for your 2017 real estate marketing, it’s important that you’re able to keep track of how often you’re contacting your prospects, what marketing methods are most successful for you, and what factors make you more or less likely to close a deal.
If you don’t already have a solid real estate CRM system in place, now is the time to start investigating them. When it comes time to plan your next real estate postcard marketing campaign, you’ll know exactly who to send it to and what results to expect.