Good technology should be a driver of efficiencies, capacity and profitability for agents and, by default, brokerages. A good evaluation baseline when assessing any technology is to ask yourself: “Will this technology help my agents manage more, sell more and/or list more?”
We believe that the best and most critical technology that you can provide agents falls into two broad buckets:
Sphere Management – Lead ingestion, managing and growing new and existing prospects
Promotion – Agent, expertise, results and properties
The business fundamentals of an agent require them to manage and grow their sphere of prospects and to market themselves, their results, their expertise and their properties.
Sphere Management
More and more brokerages and agents are realizing the power of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms as an effective way to manage relationships across a growing pool of prospects.
Your CRM selection should be based on ease of use, fun to use (if possible) and its ability to be as integrated as possible with lead generation sources to allow the seamless ingestion of new prospects. Your CRM should add to an agent’s day, rather than absorb big chunks of it.
A good CRM should also provide open-API access so that an agent can seamlessly synchronize their prospect list with other technology tools and allow for a two-way flow of data and actions between/across the chosen tech ecosystem.
Another area that’s gaining increased interest is that of the Virtual Assistant (VA). VAs can play a crucial role in the qualification of new prospects/inquiries, with the added benefit of never sleeping.
Promotion
How you will help the agent promote themselves, their results, their expertise and their properties will go a long way toward retaining existing agents and attracting new ones.
There are a million ways in which you can promote an agent and their properties, but what’s the best tech you can select to assist in this area?
Email should be the foundation to your promotional tech stack. It’s proven technology that’s stood strong against all other comers. It remains, by far, the highest ROI-grossing area in digital marketing with returns of 3,800 percent (DMA).
Your email solution should be integrated with your CRM and deliver agent outcomes such as:
- Prospect profiling
- Automated “Just Listed” emails to their sphere, as well as other agents and brokers
- Weekly or biweekly automated summaries of properties for sale (matched to prospect profiles)
- Open house notifications
- Market reports unique to each prospect’s location
- Sold property reports
All communications should be dynamic and unique to each prospect. Your email solution should also allow an agent to establish drip campaigns that nurture prospects between transactions, keeping the agent front of mind when the next move is about to happen. For all industries, personalized emails average 5.7 percent greater open rates than non-personalized emails (Statista), while nurtured leads improve deal win rates by 20 percent (Annuitas Group).
Your email solution should also provide seamless integration with amplification tools that simultaneously boost the promotion of a property (or an agent) across other digital media channels.
It’s a complex and bewildering time to be in real estate. The above, we believe, are the core components to any successful tech stack that will empower your agents. There are, of course, many other tech tools and applications out there—a dissection of which would take up this whole publication.
Ashley Farrugia is the CEO of ActivePipe, a leading marketing automation platform built specifically for the real estate industry. For more information, please visit www.activepipe.com.
