What to look for in a CRM

First of all… yes, you need a CRM. If you haven’t onboarded a standard agent CRM for your brokerage, then 2018 is the year to do so. A CRM (customer relationship management system) is where all of your agents keep and nurture their contacts, market to their sphere, manage their sales flow, track their goals, and much more. The CRM glues everything together.

What impact could a CRM have on your business? Here are a few quick facts:

• ” 74% of businesses using a CRM report improved customer relationships (Annuitas Group).
• ” Conversion rates can improve by 300% with a CRM in place (Cloudswave).
• ” Lead cost is reduced by 23% with a CRM in place (Cloudswave).

Vetting technologies can be challenging and complicated, especially a system as robust as a CRM. So, what should you be looking for in a CRM for your agents? Below are our recommendations for what you should consider when it comes to a CRM for your brokerage.

Your CRM should ‘understand’ the real estate business.

In general, CRMs should be intuitive. The system’s sales flow, prompts, and coaching should align with your business process. The home sales process is a unique one compared to other businesses. When considering an agent CRM, make sure the system makes sense for this sales process, taking into consideration sphere marketing, a long sales cycle, GCI goals, the transaction process, etc.

It must support your sphere-selling efforts.

The sphere-selling methodology is the way of the future. When agents strategically leverage their spheres of influence, their businesses grow in a sustainable way. In a competitive landscape, where all markets are thirsty for leads, an agent’s sphere is their power.

If you’ve invested in training and coaching to encourage your agents to leverage sphere-selling, they should be using a CRM that supports those efforts. What’s this look like? It means having your CRM integrated with your other contact databases, relevant segmentation options, and aggregated public data to keep up with the people in your sphere.

Integration will power your business.

Integration powers your business. In a sea of ad hoc tools, we’re all left attempting to remember passwords and experiencing tool fatigue. Select technology solutions for your brokerage that integrate with each other. This means that an agent can use all of their tools with a single sign-on and a cohesive flow.

Take lead generation, for example. When leads are generated – whether they’re from the agent’s website, or purchased from a lead provider, they should immediately appear in the agent’s CRM, and the agent should be prompted to follow up. This is bare minimum for a CRM. When it comes to sales enablement, guiding an agent through the necessary tasks from lead generation all the way through closing is key.

Integration goes far beyond lead generation. With Moxi Engage CRM, for example, an agents’ leads flow straight into their CRM, but they can also purchase client gifts, advertise on Facebook, execute print marketing campaigns, manage transactions, and much more, directly from their Engage account.

It must have live MLS data.

When it comes to a CRM in real estate, MLS integration is a must-have. When agents win listings, those listings automatically with their CRM, enabling them to truly manage the transaction from start to finish. It means agents never have to manually enter property data, saving time, and negating errors.

It should improve agent productivity.

When we talk about CRMs, we often talk about “tasks” and “actions” which, for some, can feel like the system is adding work. That’s just not true. The tasks that your CRM prompts should be actions that agents are already taking (and if they aren’t, then it’s even more reason to get a system in place). What the CRM does is streamline these tasks and remind the agent, so they don’t miss a beat.

Logging into your CRM and seeing everything you need to accomplish that day will change an agent’s workflow for the better. They always know what they need to do in order to reach their goals. They’ll be able to see who in their sphere they should reach out to, and be reminded to follow up with that one lead they talked to last week. They’ll be able to look back and see when they last spoke with so-and-so, and be reminded to send Mr. and Mrs. Smith a gift for their house-versary.

This increase in productivity all comes back to your business. Agents are not only able to accomplish more, closing more deals, but they also find better work/life balance, improving retention at your brokerage. Improved productivity adds up to revenue, having a nice effect on your business’ bottom line.

It’s a component of your open platform.

Your agent CRM is a (vital) piece of a larger puzzle. Your brokerage platform is the ecosystem where all of your technology tools and services live, integrate, and share data. Powering that is the CRM, hosting agent databases, consumer data, property data, and driving business results.

To learn more about the MoxiEngage CRM and the MoxiCloud open platform, reach out to us to talk to a member of our team.