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.
Lasso has been selected by New Jersey-based new home builder, Paramount Homes, as their sales and marketing software solution for new home developments, including Paramount's newest project, Escapes Ocean Breeze, a 55 plus active adult community in Ocean County, New Jersey.
"Our decision to use Lasso was based on several factors, including Lasso's solid reputation in the homebuilding industry and their customer service and support," stated Richard Selikoff, Vice President, Sales and Marketing for Paramount Homes. "Lasso provides the flexibility for us to personalize the application to meet our needs today as well as allowing us to easily upgrade and add on more features & functionality down the road," added Selikoff.
"We are delighted to add Paramount Homes to our growing list of clients on the U.S. east coast", stated Dave Clements, CEO of Lasso Data Systems. "We are excited to work with the team at Paramount to provide the CRM infrastructure for managing their relationships with home buyer prospects and purchasers."
Lasso has introduced more options for homebuilders and developers that accommodate from basic to advanced business needs - Lasso QuickSTART Sales, QuickSTART Sales and Marketing, and Lasso Pro versions. "We have a solution for new home developers and builders whether they have one project or multiple projects across several geographic regions, reported Dave Clements. "We are receiving strong response from the marketplace. Our goal is to deliver great value, make decision-making easy and offer a setup process so clients start getting the benefits of using Lasso in days rather than weeks or months", added Clements. Read more . . .
Learn more about Lasso's recent news and announcements here.
Startling, but true! 64% of sales agents did not follow-up even though these were ‘motivated' prospects who visited the sales center. This, according to a blog post written by Mike Lyon that includes a whitepaper from a study by Qgenisys and Red Tree Resultants conducted in the Denver area in 2008.
This study was conducted at mostly US big production home builder sale center sites and may not be indicative of your company.
But interestingly, the results are similar to ad hoc tests Lasso conducts every few months in which we register on new home project websites ‘Register here' and Contact us' pages in cities across North America. Often, upon registration, there is an email confirmation (not always) stating ‘you will be contacted' by the sales team. Too often, there is never another follow up, by phone or by email.
The findings are troubling because builders spend $1000's in marketing and advertising to attract the interest of potential buyers. And companies like ours exist to help builder marketing & sales teams:
- Capture every lead, then;
- Nurture prospects from interest to occupancy, and;
- Deliver ‘prospect intelligence' so the marketing or sales person can differentiate themselves (and their company) from the competition.
First let me state that CRM software for home builders should never attempt to replace good people or processes. But it can and should be the plumbing, the infrastructure to at the very least:
- Deliver a high quality thank you email.
- Support a step-by-step sales activity process to nurture the prospect from interest toward close.
- Provide key information about website visits (and repeat visits) and page popularity (think of it as online digital body language).
- Inform about who opened your emails (and who did not) from your latest campaign.
- Report on whom and what was the last contact date and activity.
- Provide a history of every prospect communication.
Changing tradition and old habits in marketing and sales can be challenging. But recurring studies like the one above reiterate that change is a needed recipe for sales success. The recipe includes some leadership, some discipline and a little time. It costs a little too, but literally a fraction of what is spent on advertising and promotion to attract potential buyers in the first place.
MAC's innovative approach to selling standing inventory moves hundreds of units in a down market-and relies on Lasso CRM to help manage overwhelming interest.
As we all know, market conditions have created an uphill battle for even the most experienced, recognized, and quality-driven developers and home builders to sell homes and keep positive cash flows. Leading Canadian home builders called on MAC Marketing Solutions to develop a marketing program that called for a sweeping gesture to trigger quick sales and move many units quickly. MAC created "MAC Bulk" and, using Lasso CRM as their technology touch point, delivered the single largest real estate sales success story in Canada in the last nine months.
Click here to read the entire story.
Read more Lasso Case Studies and white papers here.
When it's your money on the line, it's a little easier to swallow spending time and money doing research on major personal investments before dropping the actual cash.
Sometimes, it's harder to make that time for business technology purchasing decisions. Maybe the schedule has just fallen out from under you, and you need a technology solution up and running yesterday. Or, more common in today's world, there's a budget crunch going on and your first choice is to go with the cheapest vendor, whether it's a good fit or not.
Ultimately, if there's any way you can make the time to fully research and perform due diligence on your technology vendor, you should do so. Here are a few tips on what to keep an eye on as you make your business decisions.
1. Determine your needs and requirements. Before reaching out to any vendors, spend some time taking a close look at what is motivating your drive to purchase the real estate software in question. Always match the technology to the business requirements - not the reverse. What are the biggest sales and marketing challenges you are facing right now, and what are the biggest opportunities you are passing by? Create a brief one to two-page outline of prioritized list of needs and wants. Such a document will help guide your selection process and keep you from being seduced by the wide variety of technology features and capabilities.
2. Generate buy-in from stakeholders. From the top of your organization down to the front lines, there needs to be a commitment to utilizing technology to support sales and marketing initiatives. Inevitably, there will be push back from those who are perhaps not as technologically savvy as they should be, or those who see a system in place that is "working" already and don't understand the reasons for change. Respond to those arguments intelligently when possible, and ignore them when not possible. Keep the path clear and stay confident in your purpose.
3. Don't be afraid of sounding stupid. That may seem harsh, but it's true - you need to ask "dumb" questions of vendors in order to get every vital detail regarding the money you'll be spending. If you need to, recruit a tech-savvy advocate to help you in vetting vendors and understanding the minute details of their presentation and solutions. View every vendor presentation as a learning experience - even if a vendor comes in with a quote that falls out of your budget, they still may have insights on their products that can help guide your decision-making process.
4. Decide between software as a service offered via the internet or "on premise" software. One of the most popular trends in technology in recent years has been the rise of "Software as a Service," or SaaS. Through this delivery method for software, the software functionality is provided through a high-speed Internet connection. All maintenance, enhancements, upgrades, and customer support is managed by the vendor for a recurring monthly service fee. There is no hardware, networking, storage, or database technology investment required.
The simplicity, the lower financial and technical risk plus the inherent accountability of SaaS vendors can be quite compelling, but your specific needs will dictate whether a SaaS deployment is more cost effective and appropriate than an on-premise installation. Research should be devoted to this area in order to determine the best solution for your corporation.
5. Insist on the best customer service. Your business is building and selling homes. Your provider is in the technology business. Any vendor should understand this and be well equipped to bridge that gap and have a level of expertise about your business. Customer references to validate the vendors implementation approach and support responsiveness should be a given. If not, simply continue the search - you deserve the best value, service, and functionality for your sales & marketing software investment.
Carol Ruiz of red rocket LA recently wrote an article - CRM Can Help Build Quality Customer Relationships - published in NAHB's online weekly newspaper, Nation's Building News. In this article, three companies who use CRM real estate software - CamWest Developments, MAC Marketing Solutions and WestStone Properties - provide examples of how today's technologies offer a cost-effective path toward building strong customer relationships.
The following three areas are referenced:
- Email Marketing - emailing is more than just a powerful marketing tool, emails provide a constant, steady opportunity to communicate with customers and maintain that critical relationship via a low-cost, high-impact means.
- Inventory Management - having inventory at hand and updated in real time is a powerful and understated tool for pricing and buyer satisfaction.
- Customer Service - CRM software is used to maintain a single, comprehensive database of company's customers as every interaction is an opportunity for customer service and relationship building.
Click here to link to the full article.
Back when George Carlin created his infamous "seven dirty words," he couldn't have realized that if you scroll through basic cable, you can hear most of them somewhere along the dial before 11 p.m. on any given night. And he probably never for a second considered including the word "accountability."
Yet the word can send shivers down the spines of sales teams and executives alike. Salespeople hear "accountability" and immediately assume that their strategies aren't working up to snuff, or that they'll have to meet new quotas to pass muster. Most executives don't want to be the villain, so to them, "accountability" means having to follow their team's every move down to each individual phone call and e-mail.
For those willing to embrace the concept of accountability as more than just a dirty word, there are numerous advantages to developing a close relationship between salespeople and sales managers across the life of a development's sales cycle. Managers benefit from an enhanced awareness of activity in the sales center, and salespeople benefit from the advice of experienced professionals, who can offer guidance on how to address objections, mitigate expectations, and close deals.
Here are a few best practices for implementing an ongoing accountability strategy for your sales team.
1. Encourage the fundamentals. All too often, it seems easier to blame a failure in completing home sales on anything that's handy-a failure in marketing, the position of the planet Venus related to Saturn's second moon-in other words, anything but the mundane truth. Sales succeed and fail based solely on the fundamentals of good communication, strategic pricing, and a quality product. Incorporating accountability into a sales strategy isn't about finding a magic formula that will enable your team to make more sales with little to no work. It's about using hard data to examine the fundamentals of new home sales.
When a new lead enters the system, is the assigned salesperson executing follow-up in a timely fashion? What methods of communication work best for each particular lead-does one prospect respond better to e-mails than phone calls? How many leads were driven by marketing's last direct mail campaign, and what did sales deliver on those leads? These are simple, basic questions that should have simple, basic answers.
2. Utilize a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. By its very nature, accountability for a sales team requires aggressive and active tracking of each sales lead, along with all contact between the sales team and each lead. There is no better way to track and manage leads than through a robust customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Without a CRM solution, your sales team will be forever left in the limbo of disorganized spreadsheets and other ad-hoc "tracking" systems, and no true accountability can ever take place with the incomplete information these imperfect methods provide.
3. Accountability reaches across the organization. A robust CRM solution will enable stronger strategies not just for the sales team but for departments across the organization. Marketing will be able to more effectively determine which campaigns brought in the most leads and which haven't had a strong impact. Customer service reps can note each contact they have with a buyer and build a relationship that extends far beyond just the final contract signing.
According to The Yankee Group, a consumer trends research organization, up to 80% of sales leads go stale, are lost, or are simply never followed up on. That means as many as eight out of ten inbound leads for a new home community-whether delivered via the project's website or through traffic into the sales center-do not receive the attention they need to convert them into home purchases and realized revenue.
Taking these steps will insure that "accountability" is no longer a dirty word, and that the gap between properly executed leads and fumbled leads should continue to shrink down to nothing.