Your real estate CRM software won’t do you much good if you don’t use it properly, brokers. Take lead assignment, for instance: Fail to designate the right home buyer and seller leads to the right members of your agent team and they will each likely miss out on many closed deals. And remember, their loss is your loss.
If you need further reminders for just how beneficial an organized, structured real estate lead assignment strategy is for your brokerage, check out the seven reasons below that prove how such a process helps your agents’ bottom lines and, in turn, your own.
Your support helps agents’ real estate lead generation and allows them to focus on nurturing.
“I want new real estate leads” is likely the first and foremost thing on your staff members’ minds at the start of each day, so why add the unnecessary burden of having them sort through your lengthy list of home buyer and seller leads on their own, many of whom are not prospects they’re used to working with?
Choosing which real estate leads they should work with means they can focus on the important facets of their day-to-day that matter most: nurturing those leads with their real estate websites (blog posts, area pages, listings pages, etc.), engaging them on social media, and setting up their email campaigns for those prospects.
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With the right real estate CRM software, you can automate the lead assignment process.
Remember that not all real estate CRM systems come with marketing automation built in. If you’re just getting started with using a CRM, this may not mean that much to you now, but it certainly will down the line — especially as your brokerage grows further and you’re left scrambling trying to manually assign leads to your staff.
Make a list of all the features and functionality you want your lead management software to have. Then, research the real estate agent CRMs on the market that fit your criteria. Common factors many brokers take into account with their CRM selection include price, integrations (not just email, but also leads from other lead sources, like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com), and buyer and seller lead-scoring capabilities.
You can continually learn more about your agents and which leads they work best.
Daily catch-ups, formal meetings, and quarterly reviews are some of the most common ways you can learn just how well your agents perform (well, outside of your finance management hires who track revenue, expenses, and other fiscal matters). Another way you can track your team’s progress, though, is your CRM.
After months of having your real estate lead assignment strategy in effect — meaning you’ve been steadily sharing leads with all of your agents, seeing which ones pan out (and which don’t) for them, monitoring how they handle nurturing those prospects, and improve upon your own lead-assignment processes — you can accurately gauge which agents are making the most and turning their prospects into new business and closed deals, and which aren’t doing as well.
In some cases, it may be the lead quality that affects agents’ performances. In others, it might be a lack of dedication to working those leads on the agents’ parts. Either way, you should be able to discern what’s working for your team and what isn’t by consistently iterating on your assignment best practices.
Agents on your team can develop niches with specific types of buyer and seller leads.
Aside from the ability to keep tabs on how well your agents work the leads you give them each week, lead assignment also allows you to get a sense for which types of prospects work best for each team member.
For example, if one of your agents proves to close deals on selling units for one of your developer partners — perhaps at one of their new residential apartment buildings in town — keep tossing those types of leads their way. Conversely, if one of your team members has failed to finalize any deals for the high-end home sellers you provide them, try sharing a different lead niche with them, like those looking to sell homes in a more moderate price tier, to get them back on track.
The great thing about most real estate CRMs is you can make notes about your agents in the software, including which leads tend to work best for them, and keep tabs on their nurturing efforts to make sure they attempt to make the most of their assigned leads.
You will earn agents’ trust as you consistently assign them great leads, which helps with retainment.
As many real estate brokers can attest, retaining agents is one of the most difficult tasks to accomplish, as it requires brokers to spend time training and supporting their team, ensuring they set and achieve their sales goals, and making sure they know they’re valued at the firm (among other important tasks). Little do some brokers know, though, that an effective and efficient lead assignment process can be one of their primary drivers of retainment.
The reason is simple: When agents don’t have to worry about prospecting on their own (more on that below) and get a steady stream of fruitful leads from their broker, they have a strong system in place that, frankly, would be hard to find at many other brokerages. Dedicate yourself daily to finding and assigning the most appropriate leads to your team, and, over time, you’ll gain their trust and, in turn, have one of the best recruiting tools to boot: you, the person who gains a reputation for helping their agents in the area in which they arguably need it most. Speaking of which …
Your lead assignment process can be used as a recruitment tool to bring on new agents.
Ask any other broker (preferably not the ones in your own market) what they do to find the best real estate agents around and convince them to join their companies. The answers you get will range from “I post my sales rep openings just about everywhere online” to “I offer slightly above-average commission rates.” Those are certainly optimal means to get noticed from the local agent community, but you can’t forget that agents want to work for brokerages with top-tier systems and processes that help their agents steadily grow their bottom lines — including and especially seasoned ones with already strong careers.
Enter your lead management system, which can serve as one of the best recruiting tools at your disposal. When posting job listings online and interviewing prospective agent hires, be sure to mention how you help them with one of the most time-consuming tasks there is in real estate and how your staff has thrived because of your lead assignment setup. Given one-third of agents would pay to get scrubbed (that is, vetted) online leads from their broker or an external source, you have a clear opportunity to stand out in your recruiting and even snatch the premier agents in your market from competing firms by offering intelligent lead assignment.
You don’t have to worry about agents spending too much of their valuable time prospecting.
With you handling the bulk of lead generation for your team, you can save them the one resource many agents cite they lack the most: time. That time can be used to automate their social media strategies, create all kinds of content for their niche audience, work on their drip real estate email marketing campaigns, plan for listing presentations, and prepare the myriad other sales and marketing tasks they need to handle on a daily basis.
Never underestimate just how important time is for your agents, as it can lead to better relationships with their clients, greater satisfaction with their jobs at your firm, and more money coming in the door for your team and firm.
