CRM Basics

What is CRM in Real Estate?

August 15, 2017

4 min.

Any real estate professional worth their salt knows that building rapport and an image of professional authority is not just a touchy-feely soft skill, it’s a solid strategy and long term investment. After all, your clients are putting their trust in you to help them with one of the most important financial decisions in their lives. They are emotional and know it, so they expect your expertise to guide them through uncharted waters.

In this post you'll learn:

Building Relationships and Professional Image as a Sales Strategy

Even experienced property buyers and sellers know that they can’t do it on their own - they need you. This kind of relationship demands that you not only demonstrate an air of professionalism, but that you also embody trustworthiness and caring.

Of course, you can do a lot of things to improve the client’s image of you, but none of it is as effective as your ongoing personal interaction. Why? Because to the client, that’s the real you. Your fancy business cards, your good reviews and client thank you notes certainly help to shape their initial impression, but actual interactions eclipse those things every time for two main reasons:

  • Clients do not actually care about your other clients, they only care about themselves and their own experiences.
  • Marketing sets the expectation for that experience. If you don’t live up to your claims, the client will interpret it as either false advertising or (even worse) that you’re not giving them your best

So, building good personal relationships is the very best way to project an authentic image of professionalism and improve client experience, which in turn, leads to increased sales.

The Influence of Relationships on Sales

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

We’ve all been on the customer side of a purchase, where the sales person made you feel like much more than a sack of cash. I recently purchased my first bespoke dress, which was a large and scary investment for a person who has only bought clothing off the rack. Well, the dressmaker not only proved that he knew his stuff, but he also took special care to show that he understood my uncertainty. If expertise was where he stopped, I would have been satisfied, but I wouldn’t have been delighted.

In fact, I was sure that I received better treatment than most clients. Surely, he didn’t spend as much time on the details with everyone, did he? Surely, he didn’t give them all the little tips and tricks he gave me. Did he advise them to buy certain materials from a competitor? And that little discount - he wouldn’t give that to everyone, would he? Logically, I know that he was just doing good business, but I still couldn’t help feeling special. And guess what? I’ll certainly be recommending him to friends and family.

If you’re good at building relationships, the long term payoff is huge (especially when you do a little maintenance to keep them up). When Joan Creek — a client who you delighted — needs to scale up from that charming apartment suite you helped her find in her 20’s to a three-bedroom house in the suburbs, guess who she’ll call? And when her nephew is getting married and starting his own family, whose number will Joan give him? Repeat customers and word of mouth are golden tickets. That’s why getting good at building relationships is one of the best things you can do for your career. There’s just one problem…

Paperwork

The Problem of Scaling

In your quest to build a mountain of relationships, there’s one big problem: as you scale up and as you stay in business longer, there’s more and more information to manage, and it can easily get out of control.

When you’re dealing with a minimal number of clients, it’s easy to use a spreadsheet or a manual filing system. But does that spreadsheet have space for the little details? Does the manual system slow you down? Does it keep info up to date on your clients from 5 or 10 years ago? It’s for this reason that CRM — a software tool originally designed for corporate salespeople — is one of the best real estate solutions for professionals who want to grow their client base and still use relationship building techniques.

So, What is CRM in Real Estate?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are software tools meant to make the sales process more systematic and efficient, and they do this by empowering you, the user. CRM takes the burden off of the user to remember things, keep up with tasks, and even warm up prospects.

Instead, you rely on the machine to do those things, so you can focus on the human aspect — building connections, meeting the needs of clients, negotiating, and closing deals. So to answer the question: what is CRM in Real Estate? In essence, it’s your all-in-one personal assistant. And it’s one of the top real estate solutions that is most frequently overlooked.

CRM in Real Estate pipeline

Now, if you’ve ever seen or heard about some of the incredibly complicated CRM systems that big corporations use, you might have decided that this software is not for you.

But don’t be intimidated!

Many solutions, such as Kommo, have been created in direct opposition to this, focusing on a design that is intuitive and requires no training. But even cutting out all the corporate-centric vendors, there are so many choices that it can be hard to choose a Real Estate CRM.

All CRMs in Real Estate vary, so it takes some reflection to find the right one for you.

🚀 Make a personal sale with Kommo

✅ Kommo is a pioneering Messenger Based Sales CRM software that helps businesses achieve more sales and create long-lasting relationships with their customers. It is a tool that enables companies to reach better results and increase their profits.

Jacqueline Phillips

Marketing Specialist, Kommo

I'm on a mission to help small teams win more sales!

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