The ability to calculate and determine the effect of marketing on sales is important. And the marketing team needs to be able to work closely with sales team with the common goal: Sell more homes. Closed loop marketing helps you accomplish this by uniting marketing and sales and allowing the team to put a process in place that combines key activities for both.
You won't have sales yelling "Where are my leads?" and marketing yelling "You've got 500 of them waiting to be followed up on!" Instead, it's understood what the process is, from when a lead first enters your ‘system' right through to the ultimate goal of becoming a purchaser.
Closed loop marketing enables you to track and manage your leads from start to finish. So you can analyze and determine your best lead sources (pay-per-click, search engines, websites, email, etc.) and track the leads from their source to conversion. Plus determine which lead sources get best results.
This is where your Real Estate CRM comes into play and is really important! Lasso's Real Estate Software will provide the information so sales and marketing can track their activities together. A CRM system is a key piece in the closed loop marketing process.
Standard sales and marketing processes can be setup to be automated and email can be tracked and monitored to see which leads are engaged and moving along through the buying process.
Using a CRM for your real estate project is important now more so then ever. There are a lot of options available to you with respect to CRM and here are a few considerations:
- Review your own work flow and your processes. How are you capturing leads today? How are they being followed up? What marketing campaigns do you have in place? What is working and what isn't. Do your due diligence to ensure that you don't need to reinvent your processes.
- Reporting - one of the key areas of importance with a CRM is the ability to report on the data. Using a CRM give you the ability to aggregate your data in one common database and simplifies getting the information you need for timely analysis and decision making.
- Tracking - by continuously tracking the response and effectiveness of a campaign, the marketing team can be far more effective in identifying the prospects' wants and needs and provide sales with a much better picture of not only the current purchasers, but the attributes that make up a purchaser of a new home.
Utilizing a Real Estate CRM such as Lasso, for standardizing common Sales Processes and Activities, prospect Ratings and Source Types, along with Email Marketing all integrated together, will help you in selling your new home developments faster and easier.
Thanks to our many new clients for their strong endorsement of Lasso since
we bundled our software into two editions - QuickSTART and Professional - a few months ago. QuickSTART, specifically for marketing & sales of new home developments, has resonated extremely well with builders all across North America - from luxury hotel residences like W Hollywood Residences, to leading multifamily developers like Concert Properties, to active adult community specialists like Paramount Homes.
We are finding that builders, more than ever, have recognized the necessity and are now acting to capture every lead and nurture their home buying prospects -- from initial interest stages through the buying cycle to purchase and occupancy. Our feedback has been particularly strong in four key areas:
 | - Capturing leads. Every one. From multiple sources, whether it is from website, kiosk, landing pages or external directory listings. Then being able to evaluate ROI of which sources deliver best results.
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 | - Nurturing prospects. With extended buying cycles now the norm, the ability to incorporate a scheduled series of marketing tasks and activities for regular communication to build trust with prospects over a period of time.
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 | - Email Marketing. Being integrated, having a template library, campaign manager and real-time reporting of open and click through rates makes it easy for targeted professional campaigns.
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 | - Lead Intelligence & Web analytics. The functionality to learn and understand the online interests of prospective homebuyers, for everything from popularity of floor plans and models, to key words and time spent on the site makes personalized prospect follow up much more effective.
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Just like homebuyers want choice, we think homebuilders should have the flexibility to choose the feature sets they need along with pricing that delivers leading CRM for as low as $200/month a community or the option of unlimited projects and users at a set predictable monthly fee.
January 1st marked not only the start of a new year and new a decade. It also marked Lasso's official five-year anniversary; the launch of Lasso CRM across North America. I say official because we had been doing R&D and test marketing regionally for a couple of years prior. Wow, five years has flown by - it seems like just yesterday we launched.
As I look back and reflect on the triumphs and challenges that we have encountered I'm extremely proud of three things:
- The market acceptance of our CRM for real estate across the globe. Builders and developers across the USA, Canada, Mexico, Caribbean, Europe and GCC have all embraced our solutions and helped us get better along the way.
- The people we serve across the industry are terrific. By far our biggest source of new business are referrals from existing clients; sales agents, marketing, managers, and executives.
- The commitment and passion of our employees. The last year or so has not been an easy one for the real estate industry and I love being a part of such a great group of talented, positive and down-to-earth people.
Looking forward, 2010 is going to be an exciting year for Lasso on a number of levels. As a business headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, we are excited to be "hosting the world" in a few weeks when the Winter Olympic games begin in February --- our love of hockey and beer is a perfect fit for the upcoming Olympic experience. We are also excited about the opportunities that lay ahead this year in real estate project marketing, sales and customer service. As much of the world begins to recover from recession and the housing crisis, Lasso is well-positioned to become the CRM real estate software of choice for new home builders and developers of all sizes - we just need to make sure we are relentless in innovation, client service and making it easy to do business with us.
Over the past few years Lasso has accomplished a lot. Here are some interesting Lasso tidbits:
- Over 1,000 real estate projects implemented
- Projects in over 35 countries - as nearby as a few blocks from our Vancouver office and as far away as Dubai, Montenegro, and Jamaica
- Accessed by users from over 50 countries every month, 7x24
- Smallest project - 6 waterfront lots
- Largest project - over 20,000 homes
- $ Billions in inventory sold through Lasso
- Millions of emails sent every month on behalf of our clients
- 250 software features & enhancements in 2009 alone
Statistics aside, my personal goal as CEO is that you, our clients, will think of us as a great customer service company rather than as a software company in the year(s) to come and that we really do help you turn prospects into purchasers!
I look forward to the challenges and opportunities that the next five years will bring to Lasso.
Happy New Year!
We all know that email marketing is a powerful way to generate leads and build lists. Email marketing can also be used to increase conversion rates. I'm not referring to massive email blasts to everyone in your database, but rather a careful, thought-out email strategy that keeps your prospects engaged and moves them along the sales process.
Research has shown that many leads are not adequately followed up on and in market conditions where there is fierce competition over leads, many homebuilders and real estate marketing and sales professionals have developed, or need to develop, lead nurturing strategies that keep the prospect interested; and, importantly, build a system where leads are not able to fall through the cracks. We have come to accept low conversion rates for various marketing efforts. In the new home development industry, it's very apparent that marketing efforts like print advertising and sales center launches that may have worked a couple of years ago, are not as effective today. Using a Real Estate CRM system, like Lasso, can ensure that leads are being managed and consistent sales processes are in place for lead nurturing and targeted email campaigns. Marketing efforts can be tracked and analyzed and adjustments made as you learn what works and what doesn't work as well.
Prospects should be nurtured using email marketing (Lasso combines email marketing and lead management into one integrated solution). But an email marketing strategy does not consist of sending email after email to your entire database to see what sticks. Relevancy is the key to the success, along with timing and frequency. Segment your lists and put yourself in your prospects' shoes. What's important to them?
Lead Nurturing is a powerful strategy to be used with email marketing. Lead ratings (such as A, B, C, etc ) and scoring methods can be used while using email marketing as a follow-up communication tool. You can also review the ‘behaviour' of the prospects such as whether they have been opening emails, what they have clicked on and if they've forwarded the emails on.
Don't forget the human touch. What did we do before email? We made more phone calls, visits and used direct mail. Email provides a great mechanism to get information out quickly and at a fraction of the cost, however, it doesn't mean that human intervention is not needed. But if you incorporate effective email communication and take time to analyze and gain intelligence about prospect online behaviors such as website session tracking and email analytics, sales professionals can determine when they should pick up the phone and will be able to engage in home buyer prospect in a much more effective, relevant and personal way. And sell more at higher conversion rate!
A great sales and marketing site is www.gtms-inc.com. The company is Go-to-Market Strategies. It is a sales and marketing resource center to help companies "achieve big aspirations with limited budgets". I recently came across an article on their site called "The truth about selling value . . .".
The article speaks to the definition of value during the selling process - "the amount of money or relative worth that is considered to be the fair equivalent for what is to be received in return."
The challenge, GTMS states, is that value is in the eye of the buyer, not the seller. And, buyers want to be assured that what they are buying is worth more than what they are paying - they want value-add.
This article rings true for the current new home market. It refers to ways to determine what your prospects value and then market to them. Using functionality within your CRM software, you can survey your prospects and determine what's important to them and then sell to them accordingly.
Determining your prospects' priorities and then being able to segment and market to them is critical. For example, some of your additional questions to your Registrants may be whether they prefer the idea of being close to great restaurants or if a new organic grocery store is important; or whether providing free bike storage is important because the majority of purchasers prefer to walk or bike rather than drive a car. Your CRM software can capture all this information, the key here is to use the information so that as you progress through the sales cycle you will be able to show value and value-add and hopefully turn prospects into purchasers.
Remember that your CRM technology can capture an amazing amount of information that can be cleverly used to ensure that what your client values, is what you propose. Think about what information you need that would help you provide value. Use technology to capture this and more.