Marketing Best Practices
A lead management system or a customer relationship management system (CRM) should make your daily work easier.
It should streamline and remove extra steps that consume time you could use to engage with prospects and grow your business. If your CRM doesn’t do that, or if you are still using Excel to manage leads, consider the benefits of a dedicated lead management system designed for commercial real estate companies.
But how do you ensure you’re getting the most out of your CRM, and that it’s working for you instead of against you?
If you have an expensive CRM, and your team has spent hours migrating contacts and setting up rules, but isn’t following best lead management practices, you’re probably wasting both time and money.
Let’s take a closer look at key best practices to get the most out of your system and how the right software can support your efforts.
There are hundreds of lead management platforms out there, but in the commercial real estate industry, few of them are designed for the specific needs of your business.
When choosing a generic CRM, there are several challenges you’ll need to address:
Salesforce is a prime example. It’s well known because it’s the world’s largest CRM, but that popularity means it’s designed to fit the needs of everyone. You don’t need a system that fits the needs of everyone. You need one for commercial real estate.
When choosing a platform, ask yourself how much time and resources you have to invest in adoption and implementation. If the answer is “not very much,” consider a more intuitive solution designed specifically for your business. A lead management system for CRE, for example, allows you to assign new contacts to specific properties.
This is a universal problem that plagues almost all types of businesses.
Every salesperson has their own process, which in turn makes reporting, lead management, and data transfer incredibly difficult. A standardized lead management process helps to minimize errors, streamlines operations and builds a foundation on which you can build future sales, marketing, and tenant management processes.
To ensure everyone is on the same page, gather your entire team, and craft a comprehensive process for lead management in your organization. Cover the following areas:
No two leads are the same. Everyone in your sales funnel is at a different stage, with different needs and different follow-up requirements. This is a good thing. This means you can create segmentation in your lead management process that helps to streamline a lot of the things you do every day.
For example, you can organize your leads by:
The benefit of a CRM is that, no matter how intricately you want to segment and communicate with your leads, the tools are there to do so.
One of the quickest ways to undermine your lead management processes is to ignore your data for too long.
Messy data with outdated records, inaccurate assignments, and missing information can make everything else you do less effective and more time-consuming. Create recurring tasks for each of the following:
Another major stumbling block for even the best lead management processes is adoption. In a fast-paced environment like commercial real estate, it can be difficult to get buy-in from every member of your team overnight. But the more resources you provide and support you offer to those who are new to the system, the faster they will adopt the new processes, and the more effective your systems will be.
How do you do this?
You focus on collaboration. No one is the “sole owner” of a lead. At any point, someone in marketing might use contact properties to populate a campaign. Someone in tenant management might review a record or leave a note. So it’s important to emphasize that this is a collaborative effort and that everyone is helping the team as a whole to perform better by using a CRM effectively.
If more users can add notes, comments, and activities, more information is available for every lead, and each person can do their job better.
The right commercial real estate lead management system can help improve almost every aspect of your business. It provides an easy-to-use system with only the tools and features needed for commercial real estate transactions and tenant management.
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