From managing your contacts to conducting marketing initiatives to improving customer engagement, a good Real Esate Software CRM is an invaluable tool for every organization. But niche industries like real estate have specific challenges that often go unaddressed with off-the-shelf CRMs. To help you pick the CRM for your Real Estate business, we’ve put together a checklist of the most important features that your ideal CRM solution must include.
1 Customization
Even in the same industry, businesses have unique needs, and your CRM must allow you to tailor it to suit the needs of your processes, departments, etc. Without the ability to easily customize aspects like contact fields or the ability to choose what data to show, or to create custom reports, your Real Estate CRM will not serve your needs, So ensure you pick a CRM solution that caters to your business’s unique needs. For expanded capabilities, your CRM should offer advanced API integration capabilities, this will allow you to extend your CRMs capabilities in ways that enhance marketing, reporting, operations, and customer service.
2. Generate 50 demand letters in under 30 seconds
One of the most fundamental tasks in a real estate organization is collection of timely disbursals, Since these are made on pre-decided slabs, they require demand letters to be generated for all the properties affected by the slab. Manual documentation is just not a feasible solution. Not only is time-consuming, it is also prone to errors. Ensuring your CRM is able to churn out at least 40-50 demand letters in under a minute as a good way to save time and money.
3. Automatically send birthday and anniversary greetings to clients
The relationship between a developer and his customers doesn’t end once the booking is made; in fact that is actually the beginning. Construction of a project takes years—decades, even, in the case of larger townships. Ensuring you have a strong customer rapport can help both the business and the customer in several ways: referral schemes, quality assurances, upgrades & repeat purchases…these are just some instances of how a strong customer relationship can boost business. One of the easiest and most telling ways is through greetings. Who doesn’t appreciate receiving a birthday or anniversary wish? It shows you care, and are invested in your relationship with the customer. And that’s a great place to start working towards brand advocacy.
4. Send scheduled MIS report to management
Data is the fuel that drives all business, but to make sense of that data management needs an easy to understand report that contains all the essential data from all the concerned departments. This is you Management Information Systems Report and it involves gathering data from disparate, relevant sources; processing of the data, and delivering the data to the management. A really effective CRM will be designed to automate this process so no time is wasted in getting the intelligence in front of the business’s stakeholders, nor is any data old or irrelevant.
5. Generate and send personalized emails & SMS of demand- and reminder-letters
Debt collection can be a tricky affair. While the owed money is crucial to the business’s health, so are the customers, and no business want to choose one over the other. A good way to keep your receivables coming in, while keeping your customers happy is to send personalized emails and SMSes and, even better, automate the process of generating the reminders and dispatching them. So, it is important that your shortlisted Real Estate CRM software is capable of doing this without too much tinkering under the bonnet.
6. Generate global reports for multiple projects
Unless the business is a one-off construction, most real estate players have multiple projects going on at the same time—each on a different timeline, i.e. in various stages of completion.
Keeping track of where each one is, and the various related dependencies can be a monumental task. A really good CRM should be able to generate global reports that pull relevant data related to all the projects in one report. If the ones you’ve shortlisted can’t handle this. Move on.
7. Go live in less than one week
Implementation of CRMs takes weeks. Some can take months. While it is impossible to generalize, as it depends on the complexity and size of the organization; it can often go on for years and still have hiccups. The longer it takes, the more it will need to evolve as your organization itself changes and grows. Business goals change, people may change, the business itself may undergo restructuring. So, it is critical that your CRM is up and running as early as possible. How soon? How about less than a week. Yes, there are niche, CRMs purpose designed for Real Estate players that can hit the ground running in as little as a week. eBuildAuto from Richtech IT is one such. Before you read any further, make sure you put it on your shortlist.
8. Enable API integration with disparate web applications and portals like 99 acres, Magic Bricks, FB, etc.
Your CRM database is a vast storehouse of vital information, including customer contact information, activity, dates of importance, such as site visits, etc., other transactions and data relevant to your business. This information is what allows businesses to run marketing campaigns, stay in touch with customers, and ultimately generate revenue. But to do all this effectively, you need to pipe this information into multiple applications, such as email, WhatsApp, etc. This is where CRM integration makes all the difference. Ensuring your CRM can connect with different third-party applications can benefit your business in a variety of ways, including:
- Keeping your teams up-to-date
- Streamlining marketing campaigns
- Managing leads
- Keeping your teams connected and up to date for better sales performance
- Avoiding data replication
- Improving overall productivity
9. Handle Pre- and Post-Sales under same roof
As we mentioned earlier in this article, the customer journey is a contiguous one, even if your process of handling them is split into pre-sales and post-sales. And there are many milestones in this journey, from receiving the enquiry to the first meeting, to the site visits, follow-up visits, to booking to stage-wise payments, to possession and beyond. Imagine how tedious it would be—not to mention prone to errors—if you had to constantly switch between pre-sales applications and post sales. Make sure your selected Real Estate CRM can handle both these aspects seamlessly.
10. Automation
A good CRM software should enable easy automation of workflows. In other words, it should let you set up your own custom rules so your teams can be more productive. For instance, you should be able to set up rules so the CRM software can automatically perform a certain action connected to certain events. For example:
Did u know!
You can generate unlimited numbers of customized letters and reports using eBuildAuto’s UDF features
When a visitor enters contact information on a form in your web application, the CRM can automatically notify your sales representative.
It can then be set up to automatically send a response to the visitor acknowledging their message.
If the visitor/lead doesn’t respond, the CRM can then—after a pre-set interval—automatically dispatch a follow up message.
Simultaneously, the CRM can log in the data, generate reports, keep track of communications, etc.
Workflow automation such as these save time, and take out the drudgery associated with tedious tasks.
eBuildAuto, from RichTech IT is the ideal solution for real estate requirements. Designed and built by experts with hands-on experience in real estate, it addresses real pain points, improves productivity, helps avoid manual errors, and builds excellent customer centricity.
For more information on eBuildAuto, visit: https://richtechindia.com/real-estate-crm-post-sales-ebuildauto/
For more information on eBuildAuto, visit: https://richtechindia.com/real-estate-crm-post-sales-ebuildauto/
