As the leader of a growing real estate team, what keeps you up at night? For many, it’s that nagging feeling that you don’t know exactly what’s happening in your business. Is there enough volume in your agents’ pipeline to meet monthly goals? Which team members are performing, and who needs a pep talk?
Even with systems in place, team leaders find themselves having a tough time holding agents accountable for their sales funnel. It’s hard enough just getting accountability to put the right numbers in the system to track activities and progress!
Converting appointments is just the start
Converting internet leads starts as an activity volume game. Given extremely low costs for website leads, success begins by populating your nurturing system with hundreds, or even thousands of leads to find those “ready to buy” clients and to nurture the rest until they are agent-ready.
Much of the focus for your agents is on managing those leads: keeping up their calls, texts, and emails to get to appointments. As a leader, you may be using your CRM tool to track those activities to ensure the volume supports your teams’ goals.
But what about once a lead converts to an active client in your pipeline? Understanding the potential of your book of business and your agents’ effectiveness at moving active clients to sales is just as crucial.
Accountability depends on visibility
Achieving success running an operation depends on visibility into your sales funnel. You need to know what’s happening in real-time – your showings, offers, pendings, closings, and your fallouts.
While many real estate CRMs do an excellent job of managing leads, they rarely provide the same visibility into managing opportunities. Team leaders struggle with workarounds such as trying to keep spreadsheets up to date with active clients and constantly checking in with agents to keep the pipeline data current. You might be finding yourself taking data out of your CRM, then manually entering that data into another system and another — creating redundancies and a process that’s simply too difficult to keep up with.
Ideally, you can see your sales funnel at-a-glance, in the same system in which you manage your lead activities.
To be an efficient manager, you want to see where your pipeline stands at any moment in time. Nobody likes wasting their time chasing down agents to provide those numbers. And the more natural it is for your agents to keep their opportunities up to date, the easier it is for a leader to spend their time analyzing and coaching.
Solving opportunity management with CINC
To gain control of your sales funnel, it’s important to have a solution in place that enables you to see your pipeline in real time, without having to re-enter data manually or to beg your agents to update intake forms. This ensures that your sales funnel is accurate and you can spend your time making sure that your team is effectively progressing opportunities to sales rather than chasing data.
For instance, the new “Deals” functionality from CINC provides real estate teams with real-time visibility into Opportunity progress in the CINC CRM platform.
With the Deals dashboard, team leaders can see how their book of business is trending, view potential GCI by funnel stage and quickly review active, won, and lost opportunities.
An advantage of managing opportunities within the CRM rather than a separate tool is that’s where agents are already spending their time managing leads (and where you want them focusing). In the CINC CRM, agents are prompted to create the deal when the lead gets to the Appointment Met stage, so no extra data entry is required to start the opportunity tracking.
Deals functionality also allows agents to associate multiple deals with the same lead. Purchase and listing transactions can be managed with separate pipelines and to-dos, all under one contact in the CRM.
And with reminders and to-dos specific to each deal, agents can stay on top of their commitments and actions to be more successful moving opportunities through the funnel.
Consider how much time you spend in your business moving data around as opposed to. analyzing your results and making decisions. How effective is your team at moving leads from the all-important “Appointment Met” to “Transaction Pending?” With effective Opportunity Management, what you track is what you are going to grow.