Customers Are Your Most Valued Assets

Many brokers struggle to recall that sales come from customers and that marketing is the sourcing and harvesting of those sales. Regardless of the number of transactions that your business processes each year, you are building your customer lists and creating an asset base important to your real estate marketing efforts.

Perhaps the best way to position the understanding of this notion is in terms of the lifetime value of the relationship that your broker has with the customer. What happens all too often in real estate is that the relationship that begins as a lead and ends at the conclusion of the transaction.

Savvy brokers are taking a different approach to managing the lifetime relationship with the customer. They are investing in managing that relationship. In technology terms, the body of managing the lifetime of the relationship is called Customer Relationship Management, or CRM. There are many real estate CRM software solutions to help manage these relationships systematically.

Customers are the lifeblood of any brokerage. Countless studies have indicated that referral and repeat business generate the lion's share of real estate transactions.

According to most brokers, the biggest challenge in effectively managing customer relationships is the agent-customer relationship. Many agents believe that they own the customer relationship. Perhaps they are right, as they are delivering the customer service. But in many ways, this construct diminishes the role of the broker in the transaction and support of the relationship.

In order for brokerages to join agents in managing the customer relationship for life, brokers need to provide agents and/or consumers with incentives. Here 6 suggestions.

1. A broker who buys a real estate CRM solution for agents has the rightful access to the data in it.
2. Brokers who provide email services that agents may use to keep in contact with their clients has the rightful access to the customer email address.
3. Brokers who provide a facebook page for the company gain deep access to the consumer who Likes their page.
4. Brokers who provide closing gifts requiring complete customer contact information can build their customer database.
5. Brokers who host client events, or tickets to community events, can build their customer database.
6. Enroll agents/clients in a real estate marketing program such as www.ePropertyWatch.com that acts as a long-term drip marketing campaign.

Brokers who work hard at building a customer database and remaining engaged in the relationship for life will realize long-term success in their business. To calculate the return on the investment, you will need to collect data on a client-by-client basis attributing future sales and referral business in your calculation. Each brokerage will find a different ROI relative to their ability to execute this strategy effectively. Start by setting a goal, like converting 1 transaction for every 5 customers every 4 years.

We can be certain of one thing. Brokers who make no effort to treat customers as a valued asset will not have customers for long.

Learn more about CoreLogic MarketLinx.

To read the original article by Harper Thorpe, click here.

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