I’ve written about CRM’s for real estate agents in the past because they started popping up several years ago and all of a sudden you just need to inquire about a property for sale and you’d be on the “keep warm” segment of the agents mailing list!
I’ve since found a great CRM that is available on a Freemium model and it is build to work right in your email program!
Every business has different pipelines and it can be VERY hard for small business owners to keep track of who they need to speak to and why. Email programs like Outlook and G Suite have tools to allow you to categorise and tag email messages but once you start getting into a selling process that could take 1-12 weeks you need something more specific that’s why many real estate agents use industry specific software.
CRM’s – Important if you spend money on Google Ads, Facebook Ads or even Content Marketing
Business owners spending $1000 per month on advertising might be throwing it down the drain if they can’t handle the inquiries that come in. I was speaking with the owner of a granny flat builder in the Central Coast recently about sales and marketing and he struggled to find the time to return calls from his customers because he has so much work on.
It made me wonder whether he had a lot of work on or just wasn’t organised enough to manage the work he had. After going through the sale of an investment property in Newcastle I realised how hard it is keeping track of everything you speak to everyone about. I’ve know about CRM software for a long time and used different ones but needed something simple that worked within my email program and I found one, a FREE CRM..
We expect our customer to know us instantly these days and hope they’ll love you after one chat and buy what you offer at your asking price. That’s not reality though and sometimes customer take you through the motions because they just want to be sure they’re making the right choice.
Real estate agent CRMs
Real estate agents are very experienced in the sales process and they understand that there are several steps you need to go through with most people before they feel comfortable sharing the details about their home ownership and financials.
The free CRM software that I Installed for my recent property selling adventure is called Streak and there is a paid version but they have a freemium model where you can get the basic functionality for free and only need to pay if you want to delve deeper into the advanced features which would be great for teams of sales people.
The other application that spring to mind that is ideal for a CRM is Hiring Managers who need to sift through dozens of resumes for job applications.
HR CRM’s
If you’re a HR Manager in a big company you’d have your own CRM system to keep track of lots of different things but as a small business owner you need something low cost and that fits into what you’re already doing.
I love Google G Suite because it’s in the cloud and it’s quick. Some people don’t like the way it shows email threads but like everything once you get used to it, it’s not a problem to work with. Streak is an extension on Google Chrome that works directly with your Google G Suite email. You can add prospects to your Streak CRM and then add them to a “box” or what I would call a process or project and then change their status as you take them through the sales funnel process.
See who opens your emails
A great feature of Streak is that it shows you who has opened the emails that you’ve sent but the feature I like the most is that you can very quickly broadcast a message to every person in a particular stage of your sales funnel. This saves you integrating with something like MailChimp or other paid email marketing software.