You have to talk to a lot of people to find a great deal. Networking, mailings, bandit signs, Craigslist… the list goes on and on. Not only are there so many people to track, but you usually have to contact them several times before they are ready to make a deal.
The last thing you want to do is forget what you said to a lead the last time you interacted with them. They start thinking you don’t care about them. They think you just see them as a number.
Wouldn’t it be better to interact with your leads as if they were the only person you ever contacted? Even if it’s been 7 months since you talked to them, do you remember every interaction you ever had?
The Magic of CRM
There’s a whole industry that’s grown up around helping you interact with leads and close deals. It’s called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and it helps sales people in all businesses – not just real estate. But it sure can help real estate investors.
Like so many service products these days, most CRM systems are in the form of software you can buy or sign up to use on the internet.
In their simplest forms, CRM systems can be built by a user out of existing programs on most computers. Some examples of a CRM system include:
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A list of leads that come in (could be an Excel spreadsheet)
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An email program like Apple Mail or Outlook to stay in touch with your contacts
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Details about each contact to include a history of all your interactions (could be an Excel or Word file)
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Integration with some kind of calendar to put reminders such as customer meetings or follow-up mailings for your campaigns
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Some way to track the success of your marketing efforts
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A way that other people in your team could interact with the program from anywhere (like Google Docs)
Building your own CRM out of A bunch of different programs will take time. You will also probably modify as you go to remove problems that you didn’t see when you developed it.
Why Spend Time Developing When You Can Have it for Free?
Most ‘CRM in a box’ software is pretty expensive and designed for large corporate sales forces (in fact there is a CRM company even called ‘Sales Force’).
But many Real Estate Moguls don’t own large corporations. They like to run lean.
Fortunately there is a CRM program ready to go for ‘lean’ investors. It’s called Zoho. In fact if you have less than 10 people on your team, the software is free.
The basic Zoho has the features for a generic CRM system. You can customize it for your specific real estate business.
Zoho also does some of the custom work for you. They have a real estate version that they’ve already customized. You’re allowed one project for free with this software, such as a flip, but then you have to pay up.
Instead of paying for their out-of-the-box software that you might end up customizing to your business anyway, let’s look at customizing the free basic version.
It’s Wise to Customize
There are a ton of videos out on YouTube to help you customize the Zoho software. We won’t get into a lot of depth here… but it would be good to see a quick overview.
The heart of the Zoho CRM system lies on the module menu at the top of the screen:
You can use the basic one they have set up or edit the names of the screens. Reading from left to right is supposed to mirror the sales process:
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You send out some form of marketing (letters, bandit signs, etc.) and keep track of people in your ‘campaign’ – Feeds
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Some of the people you contact call you back – Leads
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A few of those calls turn into prospects – Contacts
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You end up making deals with some of those prospects – Accounts
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The deal is taken to its conclusion (buy the property, sell the house, or it falls through) – Potentials
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When you have some time, you analyze the results from your marketing campaigns to determine how to improve them – Reports
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The process is complex. It would be good to have a high level view of it – Dashboards
Don’t worry if you’ve been using other software to track all your marketing up to this point. If you can export your data to an Excel or CSV file, you can then upload it into Zoho all at once. You will have to do a little ‘mapping’ so it knows which columns go to which fields, but once you have it down, you can quickly and easily transfer a lot of data.
The basic sales process translates really well to finding real estate deals.
Creating marketing campaigns is what wholesalers live by. Then they receive some phone calls of people wanting to sell their home. Oftentimes, a wholesaler will have to follow up with the people several times until they reach a deal. Plus a wholesaler has to stay in touch with their cash buyers...
Are you starting to see why Zoho might come in handy?
Holla at Us
What do you think about Zoho? Share with your fellow Moguls in the comments section below.
Follow Up – Sometimes it takes 6 or 7 contacts before a deal is made. Don’t give up on a deal because it didn’t happen on the first meeting.
Track Your Contacts – Be organized enough to know what happened during your last contact. Show your sellers and buyers that you care about them.
Look for Improvements – Periodically analyze your business. See what’s working and what’s not. Double down on what’s working. Kill off what’s not.
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.