As a real estate investor, you are meeting new people all the time. People who can:
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Help you find deals
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Provide funding for deals
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Buy your deals
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Fix up your properties
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Rent your properties
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Mentor you
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Be mentored by you
How do you keep track of them all? Do you just have a big box of business cards? Or maybe sticky notes? An Excel spreadsheet? Sounds pretty disorganized.
It also sounds like a great way to have deals and opportunities fall through the cracks.
The Fortune’s in the Follow-Up
People meet people all the time. All those leads you met are meeting a ton of people after they meet you. If you don’t relentlessly follow up with them, you will lose them. They will give their great deals to someone else who did follow up with them.
Only a small fraction of your contacts will turn into great deals. That means you have to follow up with a lot of people. Just a few have the ‘gold mines.’ As your contacts grow, keeping track of them will become more and more important.
When you follow up with those contacts, you will need to remember things like:
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When you met them
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What you discussed
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What they are interested in
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How you might help them
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How they might help you
You will quickly find that the business card box, the sticky notes or even the Excel spreadsheet will become unmanageable.
Time to Become Organized
Naturally, computer programs have been created to improve these issues. Sales people have had this kind of problem since there were sales people. A whole industry has sprung up around it. It’s called Customer Relationship Management or CRM.
CRM tools are basically databases that help you keep track of all the people you meet...
But they are more than a glorified address book. Good ones will link contacts together, group them under certain categories (Buyers, Sellers, Investors, etc.) and provide reminders to follow up.
You can then pull up whole categories of people at once, especially when you want to do a mass communication for them.
We found a tool that is pretty cheap (or even free) that will help you keep track of all your contacts and deals in one place. The tool will also allow you to view all the information from your phone, tablet or anything else that accesses the internet.
Gain ‘Insights’ from Your Network
The tool is called Insightly. We mentioned it in another Mogul Lesson dealing with capturing referrals, which is a great use of CRM. Now it’s time to expand on its use…
Insightly has a whole lot of features to be your one-stop shop for controlling your network. If you have your network tracked in other ways, Insightly can make it easy to import them through a .CSV (Excel spreadsheet file).
When you put your contacts into Insightly, you have lots of different options to keep track of them. You can enter:
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An organization they belong to
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Dates to remember about them
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Background on them
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History you have with them (different meetings, what was discussed, etc.)
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Links to other people and other organizations
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Other customized fields
Once you enter the contact’s basic data, Insightly will also search the web to find all the contact’s social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). Now you can learn a lot more about your contact and make them feel like you really care about them – which you should.
A CRM is about much more than loading your contacts – it’s also good for keeping track and following up.
The first thing you might want to do with your contacts is set up different tasks for them. Tasks might consist of:
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Setting up a meeting
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Following up with a phone call
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Sending out a thank-you card
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Creating and/or giving a presentation
You can set each of these tasks and more in Insightly and schedule them for the right day. Insightly will then send reminders to make sure they get done.
Similar to tasks, Insightly also has a section for ‘Opportunities.’ This is the area you would want to track leads you have. Insightly allows you to input:
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A description
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The chance of winning
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The potential value of the lead
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Who might be responsible for following up (if you have multiple members of your team)
One very nice feature of Insightly is its email feature.
Every time you send an email to a contact or an opportunity, you can BCC (or CC) your Insightly email address, which is given to you when you sign up. The email will then go to your Insightly account. Insightly will automatically scan the email header, and link it to whatever contact or opportunity matches the addresses.
If there are email addresses or contact information in the email that Insightly does not recognize, it will automatically set up a new contact for that address. That way, it’s very easy to track communication with your contacts.
Sounds Expensive?
Insightly’s pricing really isn’t that high. You can sign up for a free version for 30 days. After the trial period, the free version significantly cuts down the amount of storage you can have.
If you’re doing any significant business, you will probably have to pay for one of the monthly subscription plans.
For just $12-$15/month (depending on if you pay a lump sum or are billed monthly), you can store up to 1GB of information. That’s a lot. And if Insightly saves one deal from getting away from you, it will pay for itself many times over.
Share
There are other CRM platforms out there. What’s your favorite? Share it in the comments section below?
Get Organized – Real estate investing is a complicated business. In order to succeed, you have to be organized.
Follow Up - The worst thing you can do is find a good deal, and then let it slip through your fingers. Most of your competition won’t follow up. Be the person who does.
Network, Network, Network – No matter where you are, tell people what you do. It’s amazing the opportunities that are triggered when you bring up real estate investing.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.