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How to Reach Your Sphere of Influence When It Matters Most
By Maddie Jostol, Senior Marketing Manager
Timing is everything. 75% of sellers and 68% of buyers end up working with the first agent they get in touch with (NAR). So, unless you’re already in flow with someone, it’s unlikely you’ll win their business. And that’s out of pure lack of visibility. You weren’t their first. It’s no longer good enough to be able to be found, but instead, you need to be actively communicating with your sphere of influence (SOI) in order to stay top-of-mind. This way, the next time one of your contacts is even toying with the idea of making a move, you’re the first one they’ll call, and you’ll be there to help before they even consider working with another agent.
Growing and nurturing your sphere of influence is a key tactic to business growth in today’s competitive landscape. Focusing on driving repeat and referral business could make all the difference in reaching your income goals and growing your business. A typical REALTOR receives 12% of their business from repeat clients, and 17% through referrals (NAR). Agents who do not make the effort to market to their sphere of influence are likely leaving money on the table. Growing and maintaining your personal database is a high-quality source of business that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Tips for reaching your sphere of influence
The art of long-term nurturing can feel daunting, but it doesn’t have to be as all-consuming as it may seem. The key is to apply a combination of timely, personal touchpoints with set-it-and-forget-it marketing programs. In order to effectively stay top-of-mind with your sphere of influence, the first step is to get a system in place that will support all of your marketing and sales activities. Embrace a system, whatever that system is. Any technology tool is only effective if you actually use it. If you’re just getting ramped up with MoxiEngage, here are some resources for getting started.
An easy set-it-and-forget-it marketing method that is a no-brainer for agents is to sign your contacts up for automated market snapshots. If you’re a MoxiEngage user, you know this as Neighborhood News. This type of automated marketing keeps you in flow with your contact database in a relevant, useful way, without you having to do a thing. When consumers receive market snapshots of their local market with your face on it, they’ll be reminded of who their real estate expert is and be appreciative of the high-value report that keeps them in touch with what’s happing in their own neck of the woods.
For more personal touchpoints, leverage data to keep tabs on everyone in your sphere of influence and build stronger relationships. Typical agents have hundreds of contacts in their database, so keeping up with what’s happening in everyone’s lives isn’t quite realistic. Insights, for example, is the predictive analytics tool available to MoxiEngage users that augments an agent’s database with public records data so they can get to know everyone in their sphere of influence better, faster. Most importantly, it pings you when someone in your sphere is likely to list so you can prioritize who you follow up with. When you have hundreds of people to stay in flow with, it’s vital that you find a way to prioritize who you should reach out to, check in on, and follow up with today in order to win more business tomorrow.
Special dates are another a great excuse to reach out to your old clients and contacts. Holidays and annual reminders are a great set-it-and-forget-it tactic, while reaching out to congratulate them on personal special dates such as house-versaries, birthdays, and anniversaries reminds them that they’re a priority.
To closing and beyond with your sphere of influence
Closing a sale is only the beginning. Once you delight your clients with outstanding service, you want to stay in touch with them long after the sale, remaining their go-to real estate expert so that next time they’re thinking of buying or selling a home (or they’re talking to a friend who is), you’re the one who comes to mind. Get a system in place, along with scalable marketing tactics, that enables you to effectively keep track of everyone in your sphere of influence, so you can grow that influence, and in turn, grow your real estate business.
Your Dirty Database Is Eating Away at Your Real Estate Biz
By Tiana Baur
It’s hard to keep a house clean, but it’s even harder to keep contacts clean. People get married, get divorced, move away; life happens. For all these reasons, it’s extremely important to keep an up-to-date client database so you know you’re putting the right focus and marketing efforts on the right people.
The best way to put it: living with a dirty database is a lot like living with termites. At the beginning it’s not a big deal; there’s not many of them and you probably haven’t even noticed their existence yet. Then, all of a sudden, they creep up on you and before you know it, you have to re-do your basement. As time passes, one out of date contact quickly turns into dozens of contacts. If you could do something today to prevent the flood of bad sphere marketing, would you?
The Solution: Get your contacts cleaned with Concierge.
Concierge is our new-ish MoxiWorks Support offering. One of the ways our MoxiWorks Concierge team helps you is by scrubbing your database of contacts and appending them with the most current data available today. Once it’s been scrubbed, you can choose between uploading the final list yourself or have us do it for you.
Here are the highlights:
- Identify and merge duplicate records
- Consolidate contact data for seamless upload and search inside of Moxi Engage
- + Guaranteed turnaround of two business days
Whether you have us clean your contacts for you or you DIY, these are some marketing tools you’ll be able to use more effectively when that database of yours is squeaky clean:
Neighborhood News
Neighborhood News sends automated market snapshots and overviews, personalized for each subscribed contact in an agent’s Moxi Engage account. These monthly emails keep your sphere up-to-date on market happenings in their part of town. It’s a must-do for all Moxi Engage CRM users as a vital touchpoint.
Moxi Insights
Insights is like concierge, but for extra data you don’t currently have access to, and it lives inside your Moxi Engage CRM. It instantly supplies your database with extensive public data on your sphere. With the subscription of Moxi Insights, you can “set-and-forget,” while it always updates you with the most recent available information out there. Expect to get data from general demographics, housing info, lifestyle choices, financials, and hobbies to where clients/prospects donate and invest their money. Agents can potentially see if their clients have pets, drive certain cars, or if they’re a value shopper. With the help of notifications and badges signaling if they’re highly likely to buy or sell, it’s easy to know how to best conquer your precious (and newly-CLEAN) sphere!
Without a clean database, you’re not able to properly use the powerful tools you have at your disposal. All of this dramatically affects your ability to market to your sphere, the bread and butter of a well-run real estate business. Don’t believe us? See what Matthew Ferrara has to say about it.
Trying Easier to Create Growth
By Matthew Ferrara, renowned Philosopher & Speaker
What will it take to grow your business this year? Will it be more mailings, longer hours or a social media campaign so outrageous, you finally go viral? Let’s hope not, because none of these ideas are desirable or sustainable, something that thousands of salespeople will realize as they beat their goals this year by doing the opposite of such strategies. They won’t try harder to be successful.
They will try easier.
Trying easier is an idea first introduced to me by Dr. Price Pritchett in his book, The Quantum Leap, and it has helped me create consistent and dramatic growth in my business year after year. It works by challenging ourselves to look away from the common-sense approaches to growth – like making uncomfortable prospecting calls or sending out thousands of generic emails – to the uncommon sense of discovering true paths to growth. For real estate professionals, this contrarian mindset puts our focus back on the most productive source of achievement and encouragement: Our sphere of influence.
Any top salesperson will tell you the same story: They tried the harder approach many times. They doubled down on lead generation schemes, bought more marketing and poured money into mailings. They learned snazzy new scripts and six ways to overcome objections to a free lunch. And for a while, they got busier and handled more emails and chased more leads. Some of these even turned into deals, because with huge volumes, some percentage is bound to pan out. But the effort, the costs and the impact on their overall performance eventually wore off.
Today those same top salespeople will tell you the rest of the story: That one day they just happened to call up a past client to talk. Or they caught up with a friend from college. Maybe they sent an email to a good neighbor or had a long chat with someone in their social club. Simple, easy, comfortable conversations with people they already knew and who already knew them. All of which led to the easiest deals they ever did, the simplest presentations they ever made, and the most profitable growth they ever generated.
When you discover that trying easier leads to better results, you should listen to your uncommon sense. Over the life of your career, or just the next few months, you don’t need to perform crazy, risky, uncomfortable techniques to generate growth. Just make a concerted effort to contact a few friends a day. Reach out to them on social media, or send them a text, or leave them a voicemail to meet for lunch. The technique doesn’t matter – do whatever is easier for you – because the key is that you’re reaching out to people who are most likely to engage in a conversation.
You don’t even have to remind them that you’re in real estate or you love referrals, or you’d like to help them again sometime. Just listen to them; talk casually about how your career is unfolding, and perhaps ask them for a little help or advice. As your friends, they’ll do the rest – easily. Decades of experience bear this out: Most career salespeople confirm than 80% of their growth comes from nurturing relationships they already had, as opposed to prospecting to people they didn’t know. More business will be generated by people who already like you, already trust you, and want to see you be successful. That’s what friends do.
Imagine if you started every day with a friendly conversation or an encouraging text message or an inspirational social media post to someone you already know. Imagine if you told your technology to keep your sphere of influence front and center – in your CRM and on your social media feeds – because you wouldn’t hesitate to engage with them. What would it be like not to have to use stale scripts and bland clichés to convince complete strangers to contact you? How much more fulfilling will it be to add so much value to your sphere of influence, they become bursting with enthusiasm to introduce you to even more people? That’s what happens when you get referred by a client you keep in touch with more than a few holidays a year; or your cadre of peers who share your latest positive message on Facebook with the rest of their social network. Even as simple as looking up the name of a for-sale-by-owner on LinkedIn, to see if you might already know somebody who knows them, so your offer to help can be introduced to them rather than hoping your email interrupts their attention.
There’s a lot of growth to be earned in your career. It’s up to you to decide to win it. You can try hard to get strangers to notice you, trust you, and pay you. Maybe you’ll take the challenge and try easier this year instead and strengthen your contacts with the hearts and minds that are happy to see you grow, too.
8 Ideas to Make Your Real Estate Marketing Stand Out
By Tiana Baur, Content Marketing Manager
Your sphere is the lifeblood of your real estate business, but there’s only so much you can know about every client in it. Public data is the one thing that can make all the difference. Using public data can help your marketing efforts be more tailored to your sphere, and, in return, make you stand out above the rest. Instead of focusing on a given neighborhood, with public data you can drill down to personal interests, like where people like to invest and donate to and if they enjoy reading books or watching sports.
This is where Moxi Insights comes into play. It’s our public data offering for real estate agents to get the most out of their databases and to notify them when their clients are most likely to buy or sell. Moxi Insights gives quick and organized client information to agents through their CRM, from general demographics, housing info, lifestyle choices, financials, and hobbies to where clients/prospects donate and invest their money. Agents can potentially see if their clients have pets, drive certain cars, or if they’re a value shopper.
Notifications and badges let you see when people in your sphere are looking to downsize or could afford a larger home, signaling if they’re highly likely to buy or sell. All of this makes it easier for agents to maintain control of their sphere, and of course, save them some precious time.
Here are eight ways to use public data to make your marketing shine:
1. Instead of hosting a party for everyone, host smaller get-togethers with people who have a mutual interest. Invite golfers out for a round, get a guide for your fisherman fiends, host a wine/tapas tasting evening for your foodies.
2. Know your audience. Send investment opportunities to investors and charity/donation drives to those that like to give their money to a good cause.
3. It’s the little things that count. If you know someone is a book lover, invite them for a coffee at a bookstore instead of at a random Starbucks.
4. Send soon-to-be empty nesters your “Downsizing tips from the pros” guide. Moxi Insights informs you when people are probably thinking of downsizing.
5. Buy a suite or even a few seats to the next game. Invite your sports fans or send the tickets to them as a special treat.
6. Send all the highly-likely-to-sell people your “How to list your home” guide. Moxi Insights lets you know when someone is highly-likely-to-sell. Maybe they just had another kid and are going to need more room, or maybe they are living well below their means and are looking for an upgrade.
7. You get internet leads and you don’t know anything about them. Having a little background info on them shows you’ve done your homework. Everyone does the same thing before they get interviewed for a job – this is no different.
8. If anyone has a badge (which many likely will), send an unsolicited CMA, a handwritten note, or text or Facebook message them for a coffee or cocktail date just to chat and catch up. Spend extra time with them – not necessarily talking about anything on the Insights report but reconnecting with them at the perfect time.
Customer data is an extremely powerful tool – it’s time to implement it into your marketing strategy. Remember, knowledge is power. If you need more ideas for how to use public data for your marketing and real estate business, we’ve put together a list of 100 ways to use Moxi Insights to make the most out of your marketing efforts. You can download the entire eBook here.
Why Non-Sphere Leads are Worthless
By Maddie Jostol
Everyone needs more leads. The constant search for the most cost-effective, quality leads generates a constant buzz across the real estate industry. But what if the best leads are hiding right under your nose?
Growing your repeat and referral business is what will keep you afloat in this competitive market. Agents across the nation are thirsty for leads and end up competing over low-quality purchased leads. When you have a base of contacts that you nurture and stay in touch with, you have a sustainable business.
Growing and nurturing your sphere means that you have to rely less on low-quality purchased leads.
Don’t get us wrong… it’s all about balance, and we realize that purchasing leads can be vital in supplementing your business growth. The difference is: you know more about leads that come from your sphere. You’re leveraging a relationship that already exists, even if it’s simply familiarity.
When leads are generated from your sphere, you already have a huge leg-up because you have some level of knowledge about them. Contacts that are in your database have information you’ve aggregated over the years, but they also allow you to leverage data to learn more about the person. Moxi Insights, for example, aggregates public data for every person in your sphere. What’s this mean, exactly? It means you now have an idea of whether or not John Smith has kids, or that Sarah Miller likes to donate to environmental causes, or that David Johnson’s kids are now teenagers, so he might be thinking about downsizing in the next few years.
This gives you power.
The more you know about a person, the better experience you’re able to deliver them, and in today’s world that experience means everything. Access to public records doesn’t mean you act as a psychic who knows the ins-and-outs of someone’s life. It simply means that when you host a golf tournament, you can make sure you invite those who are actually interested in it. That means you have a better understanding of what someone might be looking for when it comes to searching for a new home. It means you’re able to reconnect with people from your sphere at exactly the right time.
With insights like these, you can easily identify who in your sphere is likely to have a transaction in the near future (if you use Moxi Insights, a badge will actually appear near contacts when they’re likely to buy or sell). This is incredibly valuable in knowing who you should be reaching out to today, so that you can reconnect with those contacts and be top-of-mind at the exact right time.
Sphere-based leads will ensure your business growth moving forward. The competition is only heating up, so agents need to strengthen and leverage existing relationships to achieve success and growth. That, paired with a valuable source of data, is the recipe for valuable leads, and in turn, sales.
How Advertise Your Listing Earns More Listings
By Maddie Jostol
Win more listings by marketing your current listing. What’s that mean? Your marketing efforts do more than just promote a given listing, they contribute to the long-term growth of your business. That may sound a little convoluted, so let’s break it down.
Win a listing, market that listing, impress your clients, grow your sphere, win more listings.
Facebook is the largest social media network, with a higher user count than the population of China. Using the network, you can quick reach tens of thousands of people, inexpensively. Now imagine showing your client that you put their listing in front of that audience. The truth is, ads boost client satisfaction, which increases repeat and referral business. Of course, advertising your listing will help to sell the home quickly, as it will be exposed to thousands of people. However, there’s more to it. Your marketing is no good if your client doesn’t know about it. Your clients want to see that you’re a digital-savvy agent who is going the extra mile to get their home sold.
Digital advertising can be time consuming and frustrating to navigate though. The complicated process was built for digital marketers, so it can be a huge burden for busy agents. We created Advertise Your Listing to make promoting your listings on Facebook a breeze. Agents can advertise a listing on Facebook in just five minutes, by following three easy steps, directly from their Moxi Works account. Sound easy? It is. You can easily up your marketing game, without dedicating extra time or investing in training.
Do you need to be a social media marketing expert? No. Do you need to have a Facebook business page? No. Do I need to connect it to my personal Facebook page? No. In addition, you get to select your own budget, target audience, and the duration of the campaign. Since it’s part of your Moxi Works account, your MLS data is integrated, which means when you go to start a new ad, you select your listing and all of the information and images auto-fill. Just swap out photos or adjust text as you see necessary.
When you use Advertise Your Listing, automated reports are sent directly to your clients (you can even change the settings to select how often you’d like them to receive reports). Your clients will see the effort you’re putting in and appreciate that you’re going above and beyond. At the end of the day, it’s all about making your clients happy because, in turn, it’ll grow your business.
Why should you be expanding your pool of repeat and referral business? In today’s competitive market, sphere selling is gaining importance each and every day. When you nurture a sphere that leads to repeat and referral business, you are able to rely less on low quality purchased leads. Sounds ideal, doesn’t it? Click here to learn more and try Advertise Your Listing!
Use Automation to Stay Connected with Clients
Day-to-day life for a real estate agent is hectic to say the very least. Work/life balance is a hard thing to come by when you decide to plunge into the world of real estate and start your own sphere-based business. Having to juggle clients, leads, business growth, family, friends, and often children, means real estate agents could use a few more minutes in the day, everyday. Agent marketing automation can get those minutes back. Here are some easy ways to go about using agent marketing automation.
Marketing automation comes in various shapes and sizes. It can be something as simple as planning and scheduling out your social posts for the week or a monthly postcard you pre-planned at the beginning of the season or year. But wait, it can be even simpler. You can click a button that allows you to stay in flow with all of your clients and leads every month. Yes, all you have to do hit the (easy) button one time, and your clients are forever in flow.
Neighborhood News
Do you use Moxi Engage CRM? Then you’re in luck. Neighborhood News sends automated market snapshots and overviews, personalized for each subscribed contact in an agent’s Moxi Engage account. These monthly emails keep your sphere up-to-date on market happenings in their neck of the woods – or wherever they’d like updates for. Clients can even change the area they get each month by putting in a new zip code. You can even see when they make these changes as well. #Winning.
Just Listed/Just Sold
Gently let your sphere and prospects know when you list and sell. Just-Listed & Just-Sold is another Moxi Engage feature that automates notifications to select members of your sphere to keep them in the loop. Automated email updates as you close transactions are a great way to keep your sphere (or those you want) in the loop. Manage all of the subscriptions directly in Moxi Engage CRM.
Besides saving extremely valuable time, these are some other key benefits of exercising agent marketing automation:
Be more effective. Having an email that your clients can expect and look forward to each month is much more effective than emailing them something random when you find the time to do so. Consider the market snapshot, you “checking in” with them, while providing them valuable content.
Know exactly when to call. If someone changes the zip code on their market emails, chances are they’re thinking of moving. Looks like it’s time to pick of the phone!
Automatically follow-up with leads. A study on the Harvard Business Review suggests that you’re 60x more likely to qualify a lead if you follow up within one hour, compared to waiting 24 hours. Set it up so all of your leads are instantly signed up to Neighborhood News.
Agent marketing automation is one of the easiest, most effective way for real estate agents to have a little extra time, with a lot less stress weighing them down.
Ten Ways to Turn Public Data into Listings
An agent’s sphere is the lifeblood of their business, but staying on top of hundreds of clients and leads can be exhausting and time consuming. Wouldn’t it be great to immediately know details about their sphere and know when they are likely to list their homes? Public data can make all the difference.
Enter Moxi Insights
Moxi Insights is a newly released feature of our Moxi Engage CRM and is no doubt changing the game for sphere marketing with the help of public data. Moxi Insights gives quick and organized client information to agents through their CRM, from general demographics, housing info, lifestyle choices, financials, and hobbies to where clients/prospects donate and invest their money. Agents can potentially see if their clients have pets, certain cars, or if they’re a value shopper.
Notifications and badges let you see when people in your sphere are looking to downsize or could afford a larger home, and if they’re highly likely to buy or sell. All to make it easier for agents to maintain control of their sphere, and of course, save them some precious time.
The public data is there, but how are you going to take full advantage of it?
We’ve put together a list of the top 10 ways to use Moxi Insights to its fullest:
1. Send investment opportunities to investors.
2. Invite all your sports fans to a night out at the ballpark. Buy ’em a ticket, a beer and a hotdog. Save some money by taking them to a minor-league game (which are typically very fun and engaging BTW).
3. Send all the highly-likely-to-sell people your “How to list your home” guide. Moxi Insights lets you know when someone is highly-likely-to-sell.
4. Send about to be empty nesters your “Downsizing tips from the pros” guide. Moxi Insights informs you when people are probably thinking of downsizing.
5. Send invitations to the local gallery walk night to all the art fans. Do a meetup with them. Offer to buy them a glass of vino.
6. Got a boat and a bunch of boating fans? Invite them to a meet up on the lake. Have everyone tie up together and do a barbeque on your boat.
7. Quickly and easily learn more info about the internet leads you receive.
8. Learn the interests of your client or almost-client to buy them the perfect “thank you”, “happy birthday”, or closing gift.
9. Got a bunch of literature fans? Invite ’em to a local bookstore with a cafe and offer to buy ’em coffee and a scone.
10. If anyone has a badge, send an unsolicited CMA, a handwritten note, text or Facebook message them for a coffee date just to chat and catch up. Spend extra time with them – not necessarily talking about anything on the Insights report, but reconnecting with them at the perfect time.
The goal is to keep it real and find the human connection when you are working to engage and convert new leads or keep in touch with your sphere. Moxi Insights helps you do just that with the use of public data.
Here’s another look at Moxi Insights:
Like all Moxi Works products, Moxi Insights is mobile optimized through the Moxi Engage CRM and can be accessed on any handheld device, laptop, or tablet.
Find out more about Moxi Insights, our other products, and what the Moxi Cloud is all about right here.
Choosing a Real Estate CRM for your Brokerage
Photo Credit: amsfrank
Not all real estate CRM platforms are equal. So how do you make sure that you invest wisely in such a vital system for your brokerage?
Victor Lund of WAV Group addresses key factors brokerage owners should consider when selecting a real estate CRM.
Key considerations you will find in
– Setting agents up for success with goal tracking
– Why agents need 500+ contacts records in their CRM
– Why a sphere-centric CRM exceeds a leads-centric CRM
– The role that CRM plays in forecasting brokerage revenue
– How a real estate CRM impacts consumer engagement with your brand
– The importance of integrating email, calendar, and contacts with your CRM
Choose a real estate CRM that helps agents grow & nurture their sphere
The white paper details how to think about each topic above and what brokerages like Long & Foster and Windermere Real Estate have done, and the success they’ve seen.
When you look at the activities that drive their success they tend to revolve around helping agents getting better at:
- Prospecting
- Building a sphere of influence
- Being a great consultant
- Performing an excellent transaction
- Staying connected to that customer for life
The roll your CRM plays in this process is huge. To build a brokerage that will thrive equip your agents with a CRM that let take care of their customers for life. This is what makes a great CRM tool. If you are a brokerage owner or manager read this white paper. It will change the way you think about CRM.
Earn 105% More Repeat and Referral Business
In 2014 a survey by National Association of Realtors (NAR) found that 70% of home buyers couldn’t remember the name of their agent 12 months after transaction. Additionally, when polled 86% of buyers and 82% of sellers say they would use their agent again, yet for the average NAR agent, only 22% do.
The reason? After agents cash their check they tend to forget about the client.
There’s a cold reality of not maintaining a relationship with past clients; it forces you to work a ton of new leads. And new Internet leads convert only at 1%. Whereas leads from your existing sphere of influence, people who already know and trust you convert at 80%. Big difference. You can engage 100 strangers to get one sale, or you can engage with a little over 1 person to get a sale. Which would you rather do?
Of course, staying top of mind with past clients also takes effort, but we’ve got the tools to help make that as easy as possible.
Stay Top of Mind with Listing Announcements
Agents with Moxi Works can now email agent branded Listing Announcements to their contacts every time they list or sell a home. To save you time we’ve done all the designing and coding so you look great with almost zero effort on your part.
105% More Repeat and Referral Business
The average NAR agent generates 20% repeat business and 20% referral business, a combined 40%. Agents embracing the Moxi Works Listing Announcements tool? On average 82% repeat and referral business. That’s 105% more!
Incredibly Easy
Sending a listing announcement is incredibly easy and fast.
Step 1
Got the listing? Great! Moxi Engage automatically generates a new task reminding you to send a “Just Listed” email to your contacts. Oh, and “Just Sold” works the same way.
Step 2
Add a custom message if you’d like, preview the email and then hit the send button!
Congratulations. You just reminded 479 people that you’re the type of agent who gets results and who people like to work with. And who knows, you might even generate a couple of sphere leads (the ones that convert at 80%).
