In order to take your real estate investing business to the next level, you will no doubt need an automated CRM (Customer-Relationship-Management). A CRM is what companies use to store, analyze and manage customer interactions and data throughout the customer/contacts client journey. A CRM helps us to build customer relationships, assist in customer retention, improve follow up tendencies thus allowing for automation and improved team communication within your business.
When it comes to your real estate investment business, a software like Podio (CRM) works well for our intentions. Podio is very customizable and integrates well with other softwares which allows us to bring together different aspects of our business to accomplish one goal - Business Automation. For beginners, we can use this software for a couple key areas within our business, such as;
Seller Leads
Appointments
Offers
Contracts (Subcontractor, Rental Agreements, etc)
Marketing Campaigns
Property Management
Contracts (Cash Buyers, Wholesalers, Contractors, Lenders)
No matter the size of your real estate investment business, you will find a CRM to be a very beneficial tool for your business. When setting up our CRM, we want to have the mindset that we are going to organize our business around systems, not people. We are going to have systems run the business and people run our systems.
Before we move forward, I want to get past the "infamous" word "systems". The word system typically has a persona surrounding it, that it is only meant for MBA's or high education folks. This is not true. If you operate a business, I am certain that you have specific ways you do things. These "ways" can be turned into "systems" and created to simplify, organize and automate your operation.
SYSTEM = SAVE YOURSELF TIME, ENERGY & MONEY
Here is a simple definition to help you better understand. A system is a set of processes designed to produce an outcome.
How To Get Started Using A CRM like Podio
Before using and implementing a CRM, we need to have a couple prerequisites completed. It is very beneficial to first begin by breaking down your real estate investment business into what we call "departments". This will help simplify your business and give you the mindset that your business is not as complicated as you once thought. (this will also help you organize your business and allow you to create systems around these departments to streamline them to the start of the next department's activities, creating a clean hand-off). Once we have our departments created, we need to determine which systems we can use our CRM for to help automate and streamline this process. Here are some of the departments / sub categories within our departments that we will need create systems around;
1) Marketing
Inbound Leads (website, social media, craigslist, etc)
Outbound Leads (direct mail, inbound calls, etc)
2) Acquisitions
Seller Leads
Appointments
Offers
Contract Board
Calendar
3) Construction
Scope of Work
Estimate
Budget
Material Lists
Contracts
Contractors
4) Funding / Financing Partners
Private Money
Hard Money
Institutional Money
This is a small sample size of how we set up our Podio (CRM) in order to store and streamline systems throughout our business. (There are a couple other departments that we did not include in this post).
As an entrepreneur, we need to understand that about 15-20% of our daily actions lead to 80-85% of our business results. This means that when we start brainstorming about what we need to systemize first, we need to think about streamlining the 80% of the work that does not make us money but is necessary for our business to function. If we can systemize/automate this 80%, we will be able to spend our days focusing on the 20% while not feeling overwhelmed or bogged down. Here is a quick breakdown from InvestorFuse detailing the tasks that you should and shouldn't be spending your time on.
As you can see from the chart above, we want to be spending the majority of our time on the right side of this chart, rather than the left side of this chart. So the left side of the chart will be our priority when creating systems/automation in Podio.
Why Is A CRM Necessary For A Successful Real Estate Investing Business
If you are not using a CRM currently, we hope that we have thus far at least convinced you to consider using one. A good CRM can be a game-changer for your business, profits, revenues and bottom line. Within any business, not just the real estate investment business, it is always beneficial to be more organized, have better communication with your stream, streamline low dollar value tasks and maximize your time on high dollar tasks. Our customers/Leads are important. They are the lifeblood of our business. We need to make sure that have as much information on them in order to provide great customer service and follow up. With that being said, here are a couple reasons why a CRM is necessary for a real estate investment business to succeed;
1) Allows you to store/register/ track leads and contacts
In our business, we never know exactly when a lead is going to sell. If we can get our message in front of a potential client at the right time, we exponentially increase our odds of closing the deal. By creating categories to track our leads/contacts, we will have a reference of all previous clients, their buyers persona, increased ability to follow up and an organized way to contact them.
2) Team Communication/Technology Automation
Setting up your Podio (CRM) is just the starting point. Once we get all of your apps created we can begin to automate processes within our CRM through a software called GlobiFlow. GlobiFlow allows us to create flows that trigger certain items within our CRM to move leads through the sales process, automate your Direct Mail campaigns, create offers, track offers, create CMA's, create tasks, action items and much more. Through Podio and by creating these flows we can increase the communication level of our team to ensure that we are always on the same page. I like to look at it as our own personal social media platform.
3) Minimizes Overhead
In our past lives, in order to streamline processes to create systems we would most likely need humans to implement. Nowadays we have technology. Instead of paying a person $10-$12 bucks and hour to do certain admin tasks, we can pay $10-$12 a month and create the front and backend systems to work off of each other and produce the same result (most likely with less error). So in short, this technology/software will allow you to minimize your employee costs while increasing production in your business.
4) Create a 4 Hour Work Week
Didn't I just say that implementing a CRM and the integrated software will allow you to minimize overhead thus not hiring as many "employees"? Yes, I did but with that being said, we all know that we are going to need employees in order to scale and remove ourselves from the business. These systems and processes that we are creating (if created & managed right) will allow us to remove ourselves from the operation, in essence freeing up as much time as necessary for ourselves and our families.
In Conclusion
As you worked through this post, we hope that gave you a starting point on what is needed to properly set up a CRM and how important it is for your business in order to succeed. Having a great CRM offers several benefits to your business and can allow you to focus on key activities in order to grow and scale your business. Podio, a CRM is a very customisable software that allows you to create a CRM that works well with your specific industry.
If you guys have any questions as to how we set up our podio account, you can email me at dan@hspropertyfunds.com or just leave a message in the comment section below.
HS Property Funds, LLC
Funds to Help, Problems to Solve
(315)516-8023
www.hspropertyfunds.com