4 Legs Of The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Table
The last 12 months, since we started to offer the Realtor CRM workshop in Denver, Colorado, we would open up the last section of the day to questions. As our attendance grew and the classes became more diverse with new licensed Realtors, Realtors who want to expand and build their businesses aggressively (over 150%) and Realtors ready to sell their business (exit strategy), our high energy exchanges always came back to many “catch phrases”, our students kept hearing about in the CRM landscape that felt confusing.
Many of these “catch phrases” were, what is sales force automation, what does CRM tasks mean, what’s the difference between email marketing and social media marketing? How do they apply to the Realtor’s business and the implementation of their business strategies and goals?
Because of these robust and fun discussions I changed the first 5 minutes of our workshop with an overview of the CRM landscape that helps organize these perceived ambiguities. I call these, the 4 legs of our CRM landscape.
The 4 legs of the CRM include:
SALES FORCE AUTOMATION
Our first leg is Sales Force Automation. This is for the sales person to automate and prioritize their workflow to push their leads down the sales funnel. In its simplest form, these tasks allow the sales person to manage their contacts, identify their leads, nurture their leads into opportunities, and then facilitate a quote/proposal for a winning bid!
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM) TASKS
Our second leg, CRM tasks. These tasks are all of our interactions with our sales funnel; before, during, and after processing a sale/transaction. These interactions include our calls, notes, documents, meetings, and emails with each contact into their account history for easy memory recall. As is often laughed about in our workshop, “we can’t remember what we did 5 minutes ago”, so our CRM is our memory recall.
EMAIL MARKETING
We all need to stay in touch consistently and professionally. To accomplish this goal, we use email marketing which allows us to automate our e-newsletters, announcements, and blog/articles to our contact lists. We are able to build campaigns to both nurture and stay top of mind, so our leads and clients don’t forget our company’s name, products or services. Email marketing also includes building an activity plan (or checklist) with automation to stay on task during and after our transaction efforts. These efforts can include a reminder for a simple phone call to say “hi”, sending a great coupon or just sharing the awesome farmers markets in your area.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
This is the leg that is growing and getting crazier. These are the processes of building leads through our website traffic, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the other “billions” of social media sites. The craziness is the magnitude of data that is mined from these efforts to tell us the traffic’s demographics, page views, how long for the views, which products viewed, and making recommendations what to push to our contacts. These capabilities, that we have all experienced through Amazon, for instance, are becoming accessible to the mainstream user. This data-rich phenomenon is what will change over the coming years as the ability to access this data easily and know what triggers to push, to get the right message at the right time and in the right moment to your leads for a winning conversion rate.
All of these efforts build your brand of professionalism and authority which only builds confidence in any prospects or previous clients who will need you or your product again.
Happy Business Building!
Jeanne
All text Copyright © 2018 by Jeanne E. Reynolds – All Rights Reserved
