This article was updated on Aug. 26, 2022
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Chime is a broad-featured CRM, marketing and sales support solution for individual agents, teams, brokerages, and large multistate enterprise organizations.
Top selling points
- Array of flexible account levels
- Lead-gen and quality scoring
- Smart Plans for long-term nurture
- Enterprise Platform for large brokerages
- Built-in web content management system
Things to consider
Chime continues to grow in the right ways, filling in functionality gaps with smart partnerships and adding features as user needs demand. My only concern is risk of acquisition and any change in functionality that would entail, and that’s not likely even in that scenario.
Chime is a broad-featured CRM, marketing and sales support solution for individual agents, teams, brokerages, and large multistate enterprise organizations. It offers IDX website creation and editing, digital advertising and email, Smart Plans for automating lead nurture, as well as lead generation features, transaction task management plans, a power dialer and even direct mail facilitation. It’s a modern, flexible software that can scale well and serve as an everyday login.
Chime has been active in forging partnerships with companies to support immersive home tours, online advertising, SEO and SEM, content marketing and lead quality analysis.
On the back of a recent $1 million investment in customer support and account management, Chime announced it’s getting into the enterprise game, meaning it plans to go toe-to-toe with the likes of kvCORE Enterprise, Lone Wolf and other brokerage-developed offerings, like KW Command and Compass’ suite of software.
This rounds-out Chime’s easy-to-understand, experience-based account levels, which range from Starter to Enterprise. In between, Core and Premier are designed to address the business needs of evolving agents and teams. Thus, there’s almost no level of real estate professional the company can’t serve.
Additionally, this tranched approach helps users avoid paying for what they don’t need. This is what’s meant by “scaling,” and it’s not always pulled off this well.
Its advertising functionality offers creative, geo-centric Facebook and online portal campaigns to ignite interest in an agent’s or brokerages services. There’s retargeting, and lead forms do a good job of pulling in personal data, streamlining data capture and quickly increasing the depth of your prospect farm.
Converted prospects, once part of the system, are then actively monitored by Chime, alerting users to activity. System-wide, the software leaves few decisions to the user, alerting them to when it’s best to follow-up and how to reach out.
Chime watches prospects probe your website, recording properties viewed and for how long.
Each database record is then given a lead value score presented in a clean, “lead card” that summarizes a person’s value to your sales pipeline. Chime will happily tell you when a person isn’t worth the time.
Leads can be pulled in from Zillow accounts and agent websites. They can also be manually populated.
Chime does more than follow your leads around the web; it also builds agent websites, executes drip campaigns, and generates a plethora of concise reports on agent and team activity, sales closed, completed tasks and emails sent. And, it offers an array performance goal setting and juxtaposes those goals against ongoing marketing efforts.
There is a good deal of automation going on in Chime, all to the benefit of the user.
Smart Plans, for example, are system-generated lists of next steps after each interaction with a prospect. They can be customized and saved, too, and help in monitoring transaction process, too.
There’s a newsfeed view of all client and lead activity, consisting of things like “last contact” and “properties viewed,” among other telling reasons to reach out.
Comparative market analysis tools have become hot of late, mainly because of how easy it’s become to access current market data. Chime has taken advantage of that, creating a tool that connects directly to its CRM records, allowing agents to marry CMAs directly to prospects. It uses visualizations and automated comp collection to streamline presentation creation, and its Intelligent Pricing feature matches available homes to your contacts’ budgets. Again, because of its deep CRM integration, it even peruses your database for potential seller clients and offers marketing templates to flush them out.
Chime is without doubt one of the better marketing-integrated CRMs I’ve come across, even years after its debut. It’s evolved as it should, delivering solid, smart updates and keeping its users on the cusp of modern real estate business.
Lastly, Chime was built mobile-first, meaning its ready to roll from desktop monitor to meeting to showing and home again.
Mobile users will enjoy the prospect activity alerts, super-clean, tap-friendly interface, and the team and customer chat features.
Chime hit the market with a lot of promise a few years back, and continues to keep it. From the national brand with hundreds of offices to the up and coming independent, Chime is the type of technology partner that is willing to commit to its customers as strongly as you commit to yours.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe.
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
