5 Ways to Manage Your Sales Funnel Using A Real Estate CRM
While typical sales wisdom is to keep your pipeline simple, the reality is that real estate transactions are complex, multi-step processes.
As a real estate agent, you're investing time generating leads and prospects, getting to know their needs and wants, managing all of the tasks associated with showings, listings, and contracts…well – you get the point. As you gain momentum as a Realtor, your days and weeks can get away from you pretty quickly, pushing you towards that ‘feast and famine’ transactional mode of doing business trap.
By contrast, a real estate CRM gives you the tools to effectively manage your sales process in an intentional, long-term relationship-building fashion. Instead of scrambling, you:
What does a real estate sales funnel look like?
Whether you’re a buyer’s agent, seller’s agent, or work primarily with builders, the general flow of your sales will follow this sequence, or funnel:
Lead: these are your inbound leads.
Prospect: this is where you’re doing that initial pre-qualification, answering questions, and assessing the prospective seller or buyer’s needs.
Active: you’ve sign a contract, and have an active listing or are doing a search.
Escrow: your customer has settled on a property, has a sales agreement and waiting on Escrow.
Closing: final conditions, taking possession and closing the transaction so you can get paid.
Follow-up: you’re staying in touch with your sphere of influence and past clients, getting referrals and recurring business.
Each of these stages requires that a unique set of tasks be accomplished in order to take the deal to the next stage of your pipeline. Each stage of the sale has opportunities for a client to drop off that you need to avoid. With all of these moving pieces, you need a platform built to handle this.
How does real estate CRM software help me manage my sales funnel?
1. Contact new leads and prospects ASAP
Given that the majority of individuals end up going with the first real estate agent they contact, the right sotware gets you following up with each lead as soon as possible. This is done via:
Real Estate Lead Capture
This means integration with and auto-import from your lead generation sources.
In this example from RealOffice360 your CRM connects with your website and lead generation sources such as Wordpress, Realtor.com, and OpCity. So, when a lead submits their information:
A contact profile is created with any information your lead provides, such as name, e-mail address, or phone number will be added to their contact information.
The lead is auto-populated in your opportunity tracker.
Buyer or seller? If they provide this information, it will be tagged.
Comments, questions, and further information will be saved as a note on their profile.
E-mail drip marketing campaigns
Are they house-hunting online at 3am? No problem! Provide them with service and value on their schedule with custom e-mail drip campaigns that will get in touch with them right away, and have them along the path of pre-qualification before you even wake-up.
Using the Mailchimp integration, you can set up custom real estate drip campaigns to immediately start a conversation. Embed a link to a calendar-sharing app such as Calendly to share your availability for a pre-qualification call and let them book themselves in. (Check out these e-mail templates for real estate leads for inspiration.)
2. Set clear expectations using task workflows
When you log into your customer relationship management system, you can set up your custom routine for each stage of your sales funnel as a task workflow (complete with automated due dates!). These workflows are your plan of action to consistently deliver an above and beyond experience to your customers. You can schedule these workflows, customize them to the specific needs of the client you’re working with, assign a particular task to a team member, and more - all from a single screen. These tasks can then be marked as complete and will show up in your client profile’s activity tab for your reference.
Your task workflow is specific to the deal type (buy, sell, lease, etc.), and what stage that deal is in. Not sure where to start? Here are RealOffice360’s suggested task workflows for each stage of buy and sell deals:
Lead/Prospect
Buyers
Pre-viewing meeting
Deliver Buyer Packet
Setup Property Search
Send Mortgage Professionals
Sign Buyer Brokerage Agreement
Sellers
Pre-listing Interview
Send Pre-listing packet
Set up property walkthrough
Set up listing consultation
Conduct listing consultation
Conduct Current Market Analysis and Value Positioning Analysis
Sign Listing Agreement
Active
Buyers
Showings Day 1
Showings Day 2
Showings Day 3
Showings Day 4
Showings Day 5
Sellers
Set-up Staging
Take Property Measurements
Take Photos
Input listing on MLS
Install Lockbox
Order Sign
Create and Print Feature Sheets
Conditional
Buyers
Waive Condition – financing, home inspection, condo document review, other
Collect Condo Documents
Deliver Security Deposit
Send Final Contract to Conveyancing
Send Utilities Reminder
Arrange Key Pickup
Sellers
Set Condition Waiver Date – financing, home inspection, condo documents review, other
Collect & Deposit Security Deposit
Send Final Contract to Conveyancing
Send Utilities Reminder
Arrange Key Drop-off
Firm
Buyers
Final Walkthrough
Deliver Keys
Drop Off Closing Gift
Sellers
Final Walkthrough
Collect Keys
Drop off Closing Gift
Real estate CRM sales pipeline task management.
3. Eliminate errors and missed follow-ups
The key to closing your deals is anticipating your clients' needs, and following through on what you’ve committed to them. While this sounds simple and obvious, it’s an organizational challenge for many agents facing a high volume of tasks.
The smart action items discussed above help you anticipate what information, process questions, and pain points your clients have right now, and which ones are likely to crop up next. This helps you triage your tasks to minimize customer drop-off in the middle. A formulaic approach turns your mountain of e-mails and phone calls into a doable series of actions, minimizing the chance of error or missed follow-ups on your part.
Using the planner, you can also anticipate busy periods and:
Time block when you’re going to do your tasks and follow-ups every day.
Be mindful of the turnaround time you’re giving yourself when you commit to doing something for a client.
Even better, RealOffice360’s Google Calendar sync means you can stay organized and on top of things using your existing workflows.
4. Execute a well-defined plan for fall-offs
Any mid-funnel drop offs, or inbound leads that decided to use the services of another Realtor are still sales opportunities. A good real estate CRM will equip you to nurture these leads as you would in any other situation. In RealOffice360, you would do this by:
Adding the contact to a specific group highlighting the drop-off stage.
For example:
Daniel’s listing expired and they went with another Realtor. Add them to a custom group such as EL Q121 for “expired listings – Q1 2021”.
Tamra submitted her information to your website form but you were never able to get hold of her. Add her to a custom group such as NRB Q121 to stand for “no response prospective buyers – Q1 2021”
These groups will sync over to Mailchimp automatically once your integration is set up.
Creating automations on Mailchimp for each of these specific groups, with timing and messaging specific to the stage they dropped off in.
Having timely e-mails that speak to their exact pain points sets you up to “catch” the drop-offs from other Realtors.
Scheduling tasks to call your drop-offs around the time they will be receiving those e-mail drips.
You can either create a task for each individual specifying when you’re going to call them, or create a time block in your planner where you’ll reach out to all of your Q1 no response prospective buyers, then another for all of your Q1 expired listings, and so forth through all of the applicable groups.
While automations are helpful, having an actual conversation to touch base with previous leads is a far more effective way to convert them.
5. Aerial view of your business
Savvy real estate agents avoid the feast and famine cycle by keeping their overall real estate business plan in mind, not just their to-do list this week. This means knowing what’s going on right now, what you need to do to hit your goals, and what’s coming up.
Happening now
The tracker is your digital whiteboard detailing exactly what’s on the docket right now:
Visual sales pipeline for real estate sales funnel management.
Where are you headed?
The dashboard’s goal setting features allow you to set your sights high and track how you’re performing. This at-a-glance snapshot of the numbers you need to hit to drive results is there whenever you need a dose of inspiration.
Real estate CRM sales goal setting and tracking from dashboard.
What’s next?
Moving away from a highly transactional way of operating means committing to doing follow-ups and staying in touch with your sphere of influence after the deal. The reminders section of your clients’ contact profiles allows you to flag the critical touch points when you want to reconnect with your client. Whether it’s a special occasion or a periodic offer to keep their CMA updated, the reminders help you do the work of relationship-building. Roll each win into a massively successful book of business by staying in touch.
Final Thoughts
Using a CRM that is purpose-built for Realtors instead of a generic one provides a night-and-day difference when managing your sales funnel. Industry-specific CRMs are engineered to help you manage the many steps you guide your buyers, sellers, and industry partners through when buying or selling property. You can stay organized, be highly responsive, eliminate room for error, and work towards a steady, sustainable sales cycle. Get up and running with your business right away.
Between marketing your business, juggling showings, and staying on top of your leads, you need a system to manage your workload in a stress-free and intuitive way. RealOffice360 is an unbelievably simple CRM, business tracker, and daily planner for real estate agents and Realtors®. Rather being just a data dump for client information, RealOffice360 helps you visually build your business plan, cultivate your real estate database towards your goals, and ultimately keeps you focused on what matters most: your clients and your deals. Get started for free - no credit card required!