You've Got a CRM! Now What? With Chuck Richards

A customer relationship management (CRM) software is one of the best tools for real estate agents, and you've just gotten your own. So, now what? Frank from Keeping it Real and Chuck from Reel Geeks are here to tell you how you can make your real estate CRM the biggest asset for your business.

The Basic Building Blocks

Think of your CRM as a bin that needs to be filled. Before putting in the small details, you'll want to start with the big blocks. These are the things that make the whole software work.

Who are you building relationships with?

 

The First Block: The Customers Need to Be There

CRM software is made for your clients, so the first thing you need to do is add them. Include everyone you know or have interacted with from these four categories:

● Past Clients

● Sphere of Influence

● Buyer Leads

● Seller Leads

Your minimum number should be 150 people — Dunbar's number. This is the ideal number of people you can theoretically form and maintain good relationships with.

Organizing Your Database

 

The Second Block: Set up Communications in the Platform

CRM works as a communication tool where you can touch points with clients and your team. Make sure that your number, email, lead sources, calendar, and other tools for communication are integrated into the system.

This will allow you to start prospecting active leads and monitor activities simultaneously.

Forming Relationships with Your Clients

 

The Third Block: Know Which People to Prioritize

The next step is setting up tools for identification and prioritization. Depending on their needs, you'll want to put people in groups or marketing plans. Keep in mind that you're acting as the solutions provider in this scenario, so knowing each customer's pain points is essential if you want to build relationships with them.

 

The Fourth Block: Know Your Leads by Listening to the CRM

Engage only with the relevant leads. To determine which ones these are, you need to check who's consuming what you send out through the CRM. If you choose only the most active leads, you have a higher chance of converting those leads and securing a transaction.

Engage With Your Leads

Once you've set up the basic building blocks of your CRM, it's time to engage with your leads. CRM software has many tools and integrations that allow you to reach out and provide solutions. These can be through

● Calls

● Texts

● Postcards

● A property search for home buyers

● A monthly market report for sellers

● and more!

Know How the CRM Works

Understanding how your CRM works is essential if you want your investment to be worth it, so take the time to learn how it works and make sure to pass the information to your team. You'll also benefit from a strong CRM methodology to streamline your processes.

Experiment

 

Take Advantage of Videos

Videos are one of the best ways to generate leads, and CRMs can usually allow you to send one. Whether it's a short, personal video, a long-form Q&A, or 15-second reels, it's up to you to choose the best format.

Final Thoughts

Follow the tips above when starting or transitioning to a new real estate CRM. You can also check out our video for a deeper dive into the topic.

Published on Jun 8, 2022 under , , ,

About

Real Leads by Real Geeks is a highly efficient and effective marketing solution for generating, capturing and managing home buyer/seller leads.

One of the best lead generation and management systems available. A fully integrated custom IDX and marketing solution to drive traffic, capture leads, manage-cultivate them and close more transactions.

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Coaching Keeping It Real

Keeping It Real: The Resources To Equip Your Real Estate Team for Success with Sascha Chatman

Keeping It Real: The Resources To Equip Your Real Estate Team for Success

 

 

In this episode of Keeping it Real, Sascha Chatman and  Frank Klesitz, CEO of Vyral Marketing, break down how you can equip your real estate team for success.

Learn more about the resources needed to manage your own team of real estate agents. Of course, a capable workforce is one thing for generating leads and obtaining success in the real estate world. However, having the right resources available is one of the critical factors needed to equip your real estate team for success.

Recruiting Presentation 

 
 
 
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Transforming Your Success into Their Success

 
 
 
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Creating a Schedule

 
 
 
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Buying this Year vs Next Year

 
 
 
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Discovery Phase

The discovery phase is meant to determine whether or not the agents being recruited are the right fit for their real estate team while providing the necessary details for the agents to know what their team is about. Sascha first discusses their team goals and strategies to ensure agents know exactly what they're walking into. He also discusses other matters, such as expectations from the agents themselves and their commissions.

The discovery phase may be one of the most important parts of knowing how to equip your real estate team for success. In order to succeed, you need to have a reliable workforce on your side that shares the same goals and is willing to cooperate with the rest of the team to move forward. Having a compatible and efficient team is one of the best resources you can have in real estate, as it can significantly affect your business' productivity.

Ad Educated Buyer is Easier to Work with!

 
 
 
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Agent Utility Belt

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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This is the highlight of the entire video. Sascha compares his utility belt of resources to Batman's belt of tools and trinkets. This belt essentially exists to store all resources and keep them within reach. Don't get the wrong idea, though. It's not an actual belt. Instead, it is usually a cloud or a compilation of all your valuable resources, such as videos, links, and other agent tools. Having a utility belt that is curated specifically for your team and your needs could help increase the productivity of your workflow because you won't have to scavenge for resources when you need them.

Not only does it make you more productive within your workplace, but it also gives off the sense that you are reliable and organized. When clients ask for something, you will easily have it within reach. 

Clients understandably have many questions before closing the deal, so one of the best ways to answer them is to grab a resource from your utility belt. For example, you're talking to a client about title insurance. Instead of answering their questions yourself, you could take an informative video from your utility belt and ask them to watch it. This makes it easier to understand and relate to.

Having a utility belt is a great way to equip your real estate team for success. It also comes in useful during business transactions. All in all, it's one of the best resources that a real estate team can have.

Having the right resources is essential in equipping your real estate team for success. Create an agent utility belt that caters to your team by signing up for the Real Geeks platform today. We provide valuable resources that you and your team can use to achieve the best possible outcome in every situation. Get started with us today!

Coaching Greg Harrelson Updates Abe Safa

April 2022 New Status Update and Urgencies for Segmenting in RealGeeks CRM

Work smarter, not harder, with these best practices for segmenting your CRM and organizing your workflows. Greg Harrelson, Lindsay Colbert, and Abe Safa discuss the new status and urgencies CRM update from Real Geeks.

Greg Harrelson, Lindsay Colbert, and Abe Safa discuss the new status update from Real Geeks CRM that will improve the segmenting process in dealing with new leads and existing leads to be consistent with the goals of providing timely and accurate information for clients.

They break down what we can do with the new status and urgencies and how they will be using them to improve your workflows and segmenting in your Real Geeks CRM.

Building Your Database

Segmenting Your CRM

What Are the New Statuses in RealGeeks CRM? 

The Segmenting process in RealGeeks CRM helps you better understand where your leads are in their buying cycle. This understanding allows you to take the appropriate actions to nurture them through to a sale.

Segmenting is also essential when managing your existing clients, as it can help you determine if they are ready for an upgrade or additional services.

The new statuses that have been added to RealGeeks CRM are as follows:

New

A fresh and new lead comes into the CRM; before, the system is not tagging the leads if it's new or not. With the new Segmenting process in RealGeeks CRM, any new lead that comes into the system will be automatically tagged as a "New."

This will allow you to more easily identify and segment these leads so that you can take the appropriate actions to nurture them through to a sale.

Attempted Contact

This status will be applied to any lead you have attempted to contact, either successful or unsuccessful. Once you make an activity (text, phone call, email, or leave a voicemail), the status will automatically change to "Attempted Contact."

This is a valuable status to have as it will help you determine which leads are more engaged and responsive and which ones you may need to reach out to again.

Nurture

After contacting the lead and the lead responding, the RealGeeks CRM will automatically change the status to "Nurture."

This status is vital as it helps you determine which leads are ready to be moved further down the Segmenting process.

At this point, you may want to consider sending them additional information or scheduling a consultation call.

Note: To use these new status updates, you have to go to the backend of RealGeeks CRM and enable this in the settings.

What Are the New Urgencies in RealGeeks CRM?

Qualifying leads and distributing them to the appropriate salespeople have never been more critical. With the release of new urgencies in RealGeeks CRM, we've made some significant changes to the urgencies handled in segmenting your CRM.

In Segmenting, there are now four types of urgencies: Fire, Hot, Warm, and Long-Term.

  • Fire Urgency are leads that are needed to contact daily.
  • Hot Urgency are leads that should be contacted weekly.
  • Warm Urgency are leads that should be contacted monthly.
  • Long-Term Urgency are leads that can be contacted quarterly.

It takes the agent to follow up or log activity for the statuses automatically kick in and move the lead to a different follow-up time frame.

This feature helps the CRM be more consistent with providing timely and accurate information for clients and further and faster by working on the database in RealGeeks CRM.

To have everything automatically tagged either in the new statuses or urgencies is a fantastic feature because now every lead is searchable, sortable, and reportable by these criteria.

FAQs

Will Real Geeks do the same thing with the old leads as we try to contact them and make notes?

Answer: Some statuses still do not automatically change, but you can do a bulk update by enabling this option in the settings.

Can we create a filter of leads we attempted contact by phone less than a certain amount of times?

Answer: The best thing you can do there is just do your status attempted to contact and look at your last contact date. You can't look at the number of times you've tried to in the advance search filters.

Updates Real Estate Lead Generation CRM

CRM Update: Status Bar and Urgency Messaging

One of the Real Geeks platform’s greatest strengths is its customizability–no matter the size of your team, no matter what market you operate in, and no matter what client segment you serve, the Real Geeks solution can be configured to boost your business.

That said, we and our Coaches often get asked about our recommended best practices for various tools and features, which prompted us to take a look at the CRM’s default system values. Two of the biggest stand-out areas of opportunity we recognized from this review were the lead Status and lead Urgency fields.

 

We set out researching industry best practices, interviewing customers, and talking to our Coaches so that we could better understand how to improve the CRM’s default Statuses and Urgencies. One survey we ran amongst a group of Real Geeks users revealed:

Only 36.8% of respondents consistently set Statuses for every lead, while a full 35% never touched Statuses at all

Among those not using the Lead Status field (either regularly or at all), 65% didn’t do so because they didn’t understand what the Status was for or why they should use it

Another 25% of respondents who weren’t using Statuses said that keeping them updated was just too tedious and time-consuming

Our conversations with real estate experts further impressed on us over and over again how important the Status is as a prioritization tool for telling the agent where the lead currently is in the sales pipeline. Additionally, the Urgency field should make clear how frequently the agent should contact that lead. With this focus in mind, we targeted the most critical changes we needed to make:

  • Revise system Status values to more closely match the steps in the home-buying/selling journey
  • Set the order of system Statuses to represent progression through the sales pipeline
  • Revise system Urgency values to explicitly illustrate contact frequency
  • Increase the visibility of lead Statuses to reflect their importance and usefulness
  • Reduce the amount of manual updating required to manage Lead Statuses

 

Last Fall, we took step one by updating the CRM’s Leads List table to include the lead Status. The response was immediate–before we even posted about the change ourselves, customers were commenting on the improvement. From there, the next step was to map out what the new system values should be and to make sure they were structured in the right order. Our research and the advice of top producers, such as Greg Harrelson, led us to define the Status pathway as:

 

After coding this new Status structure into the CRM, we then turned our attention to solving the challenge of keeping each lead’s status updated. If the agent was having to take the time to make every update for every lead, that’s a lot of time taken away from actually nurturing lead relationships and helping them to progress toward closing. As such, we wanted to make sure that the platform was doing as much of the work as possible with regard to the administrative tasks of record-keeping.

Our solution was to set up a new set of background logic in the CRM that would automatically update a lead’s Status based on other actions taken either by the agent or by the lead. For example, any new lead coming in would start out as "New", but would then be changed to “Attempted Contact” once the agent logged an outgoing call, text, chat, or email. If the lead responded, the Status would again automatically advance to “Nurture” until an appointment was set, and so on all the way to “Closed”.

 

Finally, we wanted to give these new system Statuses very prominent visibility in the CRM. Our Coaches and experts had stressed how important tracking the lead’s status is, so we knew we needed to show at a glance what an individual lead’s Status was and also show how many leads were currently in each stage.

The solution here was the all-new Status Bar, which rests just above the Leads List table. Agents will be able to quickly visualize the distribution of clients throughout their sales pipeline. Moreover, this tool enables agents to filter down to the leads within a particular stage so that they can prioritize whom they help advance toward closing.

 

Development wrapped earlier this year and we began beta testing in March. Along with making these new features available by default to all new Real Geeks customers, we also recruited a group of approximately 50 current users to try everything out and provide their feedback. Their response was overwhelmingly positive, sharing comments such as:

  • “I like the system’s ease of operation.” -Bill Frey
  • “Makes it easier to organize clients.” -David Rojek
  • “It’s a lot better than what we currently have.” -Marcus Edwards
  • “Allows more information at a glance.” -Keith Offord
  • “Makes the pipeline easier to manage.” -Jay Costa

It’s been exciting to see the early wins this latest update is bringing to customers so far. Now that we’re ready to release the all-new system Statuses and Urgencies to all Real Geeks users, you can look forward to saving time with better lead prioritization, too. Make sure you have system Statuses and Urgencies enabled after this feature launches on April 6, 2022.

Keeping It Real Real Estate Lead Generation CRM

Getting the Most Out of a CRM Platform w/ Craig Schneider

 

 

Sometimes, we need to leave something to see how valuable it truly is. 

Craig Schneider is the owner of Norchar Real Estate, a Rochester-based real estate brokerage firm. A user of the Real Geeks platform, he talks about his struggles with taking his real estate business online. He also goes into how he tried other CRM platforms only to return to Real Geeks after realizing that it was the platform that offered the most for his business. 

Read on to learn what led Craig Schneider from and back to Real Geeks and how it can help your real estate business!

Why Real Geeks?

Craig Schneider is an engineer by profession, gifted with expertise and acumen for all things tech-related. Nonetheless, for him, one of the most challenging areas in his real estate business is web development. 

The necessity for lead generation and distribution that comes with a CRM platform is what led him to try Real Geeks. He ended up becoming a user of the real estate CRM platform for quite some time.   

Throughout his initial experience with Real Geeks, he gained marketing tools for lead generation. With his investment in the platform, he also got multiple integrations, few of which he learned to use initially.

Craig’s Departure From Real Geeks

Despite what Real Geeks was able to do for his business, he confessed to trying other platforms after noticing a couple of pain points. 

Lead distribution had always been an issue at Norchar Real Estate. Due to management constraints, the Round Robin lead distribution feature of the platform did not deliver what Craig needed. This forced him and his wife to try lead shifting as an alternative method of lead distribution, only to abandon it after some time. 

Keen on using Slack for his lead distribution, Craig had wanted to integrate his Real Geeks page with it for his agents. While the integration was possible in Real Geeks, he was not able to figure it out. 

On top of the issues surrounding the Slack integration, he also had a problem integrating data from his MLS to the platform. This combination was what caused Craig to try out other platforms. 

The Return to Real Geeks

Craig tried several platforms on the understanding that he would have full backend access to adjust his pages and make the integrations he desired. Unfortunately, these platforms did not deliver on his expectations despite benefiting him in a handful of ways. 

Coming back to Real Geeks, he discovered a new array of features he did not know about before he tried other platforms. By spending a bit more time on the platform, he was able to finally integrate Slack to suit his “Shark Tank” lead distribution technique. 

His Slack integration has now allowed leads to funnel from his real estate site into Slack for his team of agents to pick up. This single integration alone has done much to streamline Craig’s lead distribution.  

Real Geeks Is Your All-In-One Real Estate CRM Platform

In Craig Schneider’s words: 

“Real Geeks is the best investment I have in my business in the sense of how much I pay and how much value I get.”

Real Geeks delivers most of the results Craig needs for his real estate business. It’s why he returned as a user of the platform and continues to use it as we speak. 

Real Geeks is an all-in-one real estate CRM platform that has taken care of his thriving real estate business. Let Real Geeks do the same for yours! 

Technology Updates

The Real Geeks CRM App puts the power of your database in your hands!

Working on the go has long been a reality for real estate professionals, and the new Real Geeks CRM App takes getting things done on the go to a whole new level! Now you can access and manage your entire database from your pocket!

 

 

Easy to use and navigate, the Real Geeks CRM App allows you to:

  • Seamlessly call, email and text your clients
  • Use your favorite email and text templates
  • Set follow-ups to stay in touch
  • Take notes to keep your team in sync
  • Use your advanced searches to find leads important to your business
  • And so much more, all without logging into a computer!

Make working away from the traditional office a breeze and ramp up your speed to lead conversion with the Real Geeks CRM App. Coordinate team efforts seamlessly as you and your team view current lead activity and communication in real-time, at any time! Get updates and send custom messages at just the right time and close the gap on follow-up!

The Real Geeks CRM App puts the power of lead management in your pocket. 



Download it today! 

Keeping It Real

How Lisa will Leverage her CRM to hit $5M GCI in 2018

In this episode, real estate broker, Lisa Chinatti of Westford, MA, shares how she grew her business from 8 sales a year to over $2 million in GCI in three years! 

Lisa goes over all the different systems she is using to build more business out of her database and the lead sources she’s working. This year, she will close more deals by leveraging her CRM to identify hot prospects and generate more business from her COI/SOI!

 

 

 

Podcast available on iTunes and Stitcher

Get Notified of Future Episodes

Learn how Lisa generates all her different lead sources, the exact systems and cadence of how she follows up with her various prospects, what she has her ISAs doing and how she hires them. She also shares how she got her farm started, the frequency of her farming, and the content she sends to her farm. You don’t want to miss this! 

Here are some timestamps to help you navigate to the section that will help you the most:

- 00:02:52 Lisa shares her numbers from 2017
- 00:03:59 Quick overview of how Lisa went from 8 transactions in 2015 to over $2M GCI in 2017.
- 00:08:10 Lisa breaks down the percentages of buyers and sellers
- 00:08:37 Lisa shares all her income-producing lead sources
- 00:09:24 Lisa dives in to her internet/FB lead sources, including cost per lead and percentage of sellers vs. buyers
- 00:12:55 Lisa discusses her follow-up process and how she nurtures internet leads
- 00:15:00 Lisa goes over her ISA’s process 
- 00:17:17 Lisa discusses the process between long-term and short-term leads
- 00:18:27 Lisa discusses her follow-up process in detail
- 00:20:45 Lisa shares how she works Zillow leads, including average conversion time, percentages, cost per lead, and follow-up process. 
- 00:29:53 Lisa shares her PPC conversion rates and cost per lead. 
- 00:32:11 Lisa shares how she uses market reports with her COI/SOI and past clients. 
- 00:33:50 How more COI/SOI prospects are using home valuation tool after receiving market reports 
- 00:34:38 Lisa shares how she works her past clients
- 00:34:44 Lisa shares postcard farming
- 00:39:00 Lisa shares how she streamlines her follow-up process by using one CRM
- 00:39:28 Lisa and Jeff share how to keep a positive mindset
- 00:43:37 Lisa shares the importance of role-playing
- 00:45:10 Lisa shares the positive affirmations that work well for her and her team
- 00:46:04 Jeff defines a positive affirmation and what that means for an agent
- 00:48:21 Lisa shares how she became confident during her first year of business and how the business became scalable
- 00:50:37 Lisa shares an example of the type of postcards she sends out
- 00:52:51 Lisa talks about how the market reports are created
- 00:55:35 Lisa shares her tips on hiring ISAs
- 00:58:10 Lisa talks about how many agents she has now and when she knows to add another agent

These LIVE Hangouts are hosted and presented by our very own Jeff Manson, founder of Real Geeks and Hawaiian real estate broker of American Dream Realty, in partnership with Frank Klesitz, CEO of Vyral Marketing.

Check out our past recording any time at our Real Geeks YouTube channel, and follow us on Google+, Real Geeks Facebook, and Instagram to get notified immediately whenever we announce new events.

You can watch all past episodes of Keeping it Real and opt-in to get invited to upcoming episodes here: http://www.keepingitreal.com 

Powerful, simple & easy-to-use, sign up for Real Geeks today.

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