Muhammad JahanzaibChoosing the right CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software may make the difference in helping you scale your business, but the wrong system for your specific way of operating may only serve to magnify the inefficiencies of your business.
What Is A CRM System?
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system helps manage customer data. It supports sales management, delivers actionable insights, integrates with social media and facilitates team communication. Cloud-based CRM systems offer complete mobility and access to an ecosystem of bespoke apps.
Why Do You Need A CRM For Real Estate Investors?
Being a real estate investor comes with a variety of unique challenges. You need a CRM that seamlessly integrates into your business and works for you. It should not be a barrier for your efficiency. You should be able to automate time-consuming tasks, generate reports in real time and convert prospects into paying clients.
Before reviewing some of the best CRM systems for real estate investors, it is appropriate to first put forth three key criteria that you should consider before making your selection.
Criteria 1: Stakeholders
Your CRM needs to support your sales and marketing efforts. Your stakeholders need to be able to access and contribute to the CRM system. The system should support your full sales cycle processes and put an end to the back-and-forth movement of information.
Criteria 2: Processes
How do you work? What steps do you usually follow to deliver results? Your CRM should do the same. It should support the way you conduct business. Your CRM should follow the same workflow as your team.
Criteria 3: Technology
Is your CRM cloud-based? Is it web-based? Most importantly, do you have access to it from any computing device?
CRM systems for real estate investors do not differ much from standard CRM systems. A good real estate investor CRM system should help manage your business and accurately convert prospects into clients.
Review some of the most popular CRM systems for real estate investors to determine which one will help raise your business to the next level.
Keep in mind that these CRM systems are not made for the highest volume of sales, but instead, for the most lucrative conversions and the most diligent of sales cycles. They are built for real estate investors who have:
- An open-arm approach to new prospects
- An established and time-consuming sales process
- A solid background in real estate investment
- A thorough and automated real estate sales funnel
What To Look For In A CRM For Real Estate Investors?
The best CRM systems for real estate investors should excel in the following categories:
Lead Capture
Your CRM should help you collect all the necessary information about prospects before you start working with them. Every bit of contact information including a prospect’s: contact details, phone number, address, emails, calendar events, Pages visited, and more should be captured.
Lead And Contact Management
You need a CRM that will help you maintain your network of clients and prospects. You should be able to track and monitor your prospects from registration to conversion. You should be able to discover their buying cycle and spot business opportunities. You should build and nurture relationships from leads to customers and assist in strengthening your online presence.
Reporting And Analytics
Your CRM should help you track and analyze your business metrics. You need a CRM that will provide you with deep insights and help you make better decisions.
Referral Management
Each business relationship is important. Your CRM should be able to store and manage your network of contacts and be able to create the appropriate referral opportunities. It should help you take advantage of shared contacts to make connections with prospects and/or to help clients. It should help you create referral networks and establish a solid referral marketing campaign.
Scheduling And Collaboration
Setting up meetings with prospects and clients is crucial. You should have access to a calendar that will help you manage the meetings as well as remind you of your commitments. If you are working with a real estate investment company (that has people from around the world) and/or a team of in-house investors (that are working remotely), your CRM should be able to facilitate collaboration and allow you to share information.
Bid Management
Real estate investing is a competitive business. Whether you choose to outsource part of your work or you do it yourself, your CRM should support your negotiation workflow. It is important that your CRM speed up the bid management process, as the longer it takes to manage bids, the less time you have to manage leads.
Apps
In today’s business world, your CRM is a gateway to various apps and services such as Gmail, Outlook, Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, Salesforce, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, Office 365, and so on. These tools will help you streamline your workflow, upgrade your productivity and make the most out of your workday.
Continuity
A successful CRM shouldn’t be chosen, but built. Your CRM should be flexible, reliable, and easy to use. It should be able to adapt to the ever-changing needs of your business. No matter which CRM you choose, you will always need a reliable team behind it. There isn’t any software available today, that can replace a competent team of real estate investment experts.
Some Of The Best CRM Systems For Real Estate Investors.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM offers a wide range of CRM services and solutions for different requirements. It is a highly customizable CRM that gives you absolute control over the entire CRM process — from lead management, to sales and marketing, all the way to customer support.
Sugar is the cornerstone of modern business processes with the cloud-based software as the foundation that helps businesses run more efficiently, enabling them to focus on real growth opportunities. The CRM system allows you to seamlessly scale to meet your growing demands and provide a higher level of service to your customers.
What It Offers For Real Estate Investors
SugarCRM helps you better engage with your prospects and nurture them into clients. It allows you to add an additional layer of professionalism and higher value to your business.
SugarCRM focuses on 5 main aspects of real estate business:
Lead capture Lead and Contact Management Reporting and Analytics Customizable online reports Referral Management
While Lead Capture is a core aspect of every real estate investor’s business, SugarCRM goes several steps beyond and offers everything from client lifecycle management to online real estate reports to flexible campaign management.
What Makes SugarCRM A Good Choice For Real Estate Investors?
SugarCRM is a well-established and trusted CRM system for small to medium business across all industries. It offers a very wide range of updates to meet the needs of both real estate investors and software developers. It works smoothly with most B2B and SaaS applications, which makes it easy to connect various tools and platforms to streamline your business processes.
SugarCRM is continuously striving to develop their software in an effort to stay relevant among the current SaaS competition. SugarCRM has also been improving their engagement with the developer community, making sure their CRM platform is open to everyone.
Companies like NREL Capital, RealCAP, Eucalyptus Partners and property management software, RealWorks, all use SugarCRM to power their real estate business.
What Do You Get With SugarCRM?
Sugar offers a wide range of solutions to meet different business requirements. As a real estate investor, you probably need more than just lead generation and CRM services, so here are some of the features SugarCRM offers:
SugarCRM covers all of your CRM needs from lead capture to analytics to CRM reporting.
The CRM system allows you to build individualized workflows to ensure your team members are able to work as quickly as possible. You can do this by assigning tasks, creating calendars, assigning leads to a prospector (or a team member) and so on.
Lead Management And Tracking
SugarCRM allows you to place tags on lead and convert them to opportunities or cases with the ability to attach documents.
The CRM system also allows you to set up different types of leads: a marketing list, a hot or cold lead, a qualified lead, and so on. It’s also possible to set up different types of products or services. SugarCRM allows you to manage many aspects of each and every lead including:
- Prospects
- Clients
- Opportunities
- Orders
- Invoices
- Cases
- Events
- Quotations
- Quotes
It’s possible to view and manage leads online via a web browser, mobile app, or a desktop app. You can even embed Sugar into your WordPress blog or website.
Contact Management
Contact management is another area where SugarCRM excels.
Similar to Lead Management, there are different types of Contacts in SugarCRM — People, Companies, Contacts, and so on — that can be assigned to different Deal Types, such as a proposal, an invoice, an order, a sale, a quote, and so on.
You can also set up different actions with each of these contacts– for example, once a prospect is converted to a client, you can set up a different action: a call, an email, a spreadsheet, an action, and so on.
Reporting And Analytics
SugarCRM has a powerful reporting and analytics module that is designed to help businesses with important business decisions. The reporting module is called Sugar Metrics, and it allows you to create custom reports and give your reports a professional look.
It’s possible to create a dashboard, which will allow you to keep track of developing trends. Not only that, but you can create complex logic-based reporting and pivot tables.
Traditionally speaking, a good dashboard is designed to allow the user to keep track of the most important business metrics, straight from the user’s current position (usually a drop-down menu), rather than having to navigate through a website. Since it’s only a one-click-away operation, it’s easy to check on trends and performance at any time of the day.
