From flyers to text messages to word of mouth, real estate professionals are taking advantage of every possible channel to interact with prospects and clients. But managing various traditional communications alongside new media channels creates huge challenges for industry professionals.
This is especially true when it comes to documenting and tracking customer conversations, often hindering efficient and effective customer service.
The following are some of the most common pitfalls agents make when managing prospect and client communications — along with solutions that ensure their next deal never slips through the cracks.
Most real estate professionals can’t track leads from traditional marketing efforts
If you’re not already using tools to track digital marketing efforts, you need to be. But what about tracking leads from mailers or out-of-home marketing? If someone calls you after seeing your bus ad, yard sign or flyer, do you always know which marketing prompted them to reach out? Probably not.
When you incorporate call tracking into your marketing toolkit, you know exactly which ad drove each prospect to reach out — and exactly where they saw it. As an agent, you’ll use these insights to capitalize on your most lucrative marketing efforts, and to course-correct underperforming channels and creative.
Real estate teams still use outdated communication tools like landlines or personal cell phones
With basic tools like landlines, desk phones, or even your iPhone, it can be difficult to get adequate lead intelligence to do your job to the fullest. With a glance at your recent calls, you probably can’t tell buyers, sellers or other agents from family, friends or tire-kickers.
But when you use a cloud-based softphone app like Lead Center, all of your contacts’ histories are stored and displayed any time they contact you. This way, you always know exactly how many times a potential homebuyer called and what you talked about last time. Better yet, each contact is clearly tagged by listing, level of interest, and even budget.
Imagine how much more productive conversations with prospects would be if you could easily reference the ad that drove them to reach out, along with the discussion points of every previous call, text or chat conversation.
Missed calls and dropped leads are costing you deals
Still relying on sticky notes and spreadsheets to track your communications? These low-tech methods make it nearly impossible to know whether you’ve returned every message or picked up every phone call.
Missing calls and texts can cost your agency. If you had a more comprehensive communications system, you’d know whether you or a member of your team had answered or returned every single inquiry. Lead Center can help your team ensure not only that every communication is accounted for, but that you have the context to meet every client’s needs.
Siloed tools make for siloed communications
With multiple people on your team, if one person starts a conversation with a homebuyer, it’s tough for someone else to pick it up later. When they do, the discussion likely starts off with your team member asking the customer to rehash the previous conversation.
With the Lead Center team inbox, all conversation histories, tags, and notes are stored centrally for every team member to see. Representatives can easily help their teammates to field calls and conversations without asking the customer to repeat themselves.
When your team is on the same page, getting more buyers, sellers, or renters to the finish line is a lot easier.
Do your communications due diligence to win more business
As a real estate professional, you may have fantastic communications tools and practices. But more than likely, you may be managing your business communications with forwarded calls, sticky notes, and spreadsheets — because that’s what you know.
Using a cloud-based softphone app like Lead Center can help you and your team measure your marketing efforts no matter the source, get the context you need to turn more conversations into closed deals and ensure no prospect or client communication slips through the cracks.
Gaining control of your communications can be easy. Learn more here.
CallRail is the lead intelligence platform that helps businesses track and attribute each lead to their marketing journey, capture and manage every interaction, and use real-time insights to optimize marketing. We offer Lead Center, a business communications solution for frontline teams.