December 21, 2021
Ginger Crosbie
CRMs Are Awesome, But They Can't Do This!
Imagine living in a Jetsons-style future where we all have a Rosie that can take care of all of the mundane and tedious tasks in life…
The tasks that you don’t always enjoy doing, but that you know need to get done.
How nice would that be? Especially around the holidays.
She could go out and do all of the holiday shopping, decorate the house, and even remember to move that darn Elf on a Shelf!
Though Rosie the robot isn’t in every household, we do have a ton of modern-day conveniences that exist to make life simpler. Things like:
All of these tools exist to make your life better, but no one product solves all of your needs or wants.
In the world of real estate, your CRM is a powerful tool. It’s a Customer Relationship Management system. Think of it as an address book on steroids. It can help you organize and manage your leads so that you can create systems to support your growing business..
And although it is an incredibly powerful tool, your CRM alone isn’t the Rosie-style robot that answers all of your lead follow-up and conversion prayers that many agents believe it to be.
(Editor's Note: We break down what a CRM is and isn’t in this article, Add This To Your CRM For Massive Results)
Here are three things that your CRM can’t do for you that many people don’t realize when they start a lead generation program and want to grow their business.
Your CRM isn’t a follow-up system. Your CRM is a tool that allows you to store, sort, tag and filter your real estate leads and contacts so that you can stay on top of all of the people you interact with in your business.
Imagine if every person you ever reached out to in your real estate career was stored in your contacts on your phone. Yikes! It would be a nightmare.
Think about how much easier it would be to sit down and follow-up with all of your no-show appointments or people you haven’t been able to make contact with if you could automatically filter and create a list of those contacts.
That’s powerful.
And although your CRM allows you to organize all of the contacts in your business, it doesn’t do the work of following up with your leads, past customers, or fellow industry professionals.
You still have to do that and you still need compatible tools that will work with your CRM to support your business.
Email automation can help you keep in touch with and nurture relationships with past clients. Meanwhile, a real estate ISA or real estate ISA company, such as Smart Alto, can follow up with your database of leads and set appointments with them to help you increase your revenue earning potential.
The point is, you need supporting tools and programs to work with your CRM and follow-up with your leads.
In that same vein, your CRM can’t convert your leads for you. You and your team still have to put in the work to build your business and maintain relationships.
A bomb CRM that can filter your real estate leads using a variety of different filters, such as:
However, if you don’t do anything with those filtered leads, it doesn’t matter.
It’s like buying all of the ingredients you need to bake a cake and then setting them all out on the counter and just looking at them. You can have your Google Assistant dictating the recipe to you, but if you aren’t there to perform the steps and do the work, the cake won’t get baked.
To be successful at converting new leads, you will still need to make sure you:
Check out this chapter, The Best Follow Up Strategies For Real Estate Leads in the The Ultimate Guide To Real Estate ISAs to dive further into Smart Alto’s best practices for connecting with your online real estate leads.
Finally, a CRM won’t make you more money. It won’t bring you new leads. And it won’t make you a better agent.
That’s like thinking the newest and most expensive gear will make you a great photographer or a better videographer.
Sure, the latest tech can give you an advantage but it’s more about how you use the tech.
We’ve said this before and we will continue to say it, “your fortune is in the follow-up”.
Ultimately, your performance and success will be based on your tenacity and the systems you have in place to support you along the way.
A great CRM is a powerful tool, but a CRM alone will not skyrocket you into the next sphere of business. You need more.
You need to ask yourself:
Your CRM can be the hub of your business. All of your real estate leads flow into the hub, get filtered and sorted and then the real work starts.
From there you can use a series of add-ons to help support you and your lead nurturing, such as:
In case you didn’t realize, Smart Alto is the only Add On that can help you set more appointments so you can close an additional 5 deals per year, without cold calling.
How?
Smart Alto gives you access to a network of talented human ISAs across the UK and US that are ready to respond to your leads within 5 minutes of registering. We have real people and a proven strategy that yields results.
If you’re ready to see how Smart Alto can work with your CRM, schedule a demo today.
The Smart Alto Appointment Setting System guarantees your team never misses another sales opportunity.