CRM by Delta Media Group

Why Now Is a Great Time to Clean Up Your CRM!
When I switched from my commercial business management career 20 years ago to work in the real estate support industry, I was amazed at the number of standard business practices many agents didn't use. I was coming from a world of mission statements, six-month, one-year and five-year forecasting, making a quarterly pro forma, plus doing all the different managements of contact, time and information. We didn't call it a "sales funnel" back then. I'm not sure how we referred to our customer/contact list, but if somebody wasn't buying, we sent one of our outside sales people to see

3 Things Every Agent Needs in Their 2020 Marketing Arsenal
It's amazing how many companies are vying for the real estate agent's dollar. From trying to sell you leads to showing off the latest shiny object guaranteed to boost your marketing power, it seems like everyone wants to stick their fingers into your pocketbook. What good do these wonder tools do, though, if you lack the systems to put them to work? What is the benefit of marketing to attract new clients if the chances are really good that they'll fall through a crack in your system? If you don't have the basics of your arsenal in place, it's time to concentrate on doing so. 1. A cleaned-up, organized CRM New agents often ask what tools they'll need when they first hit the ground in the real estate world. Aside from a smart phone and a mentor, a robust customer relationship management system (CRM) is a must. Established agents understand the value of a CRM but many allow theirs to become cluttered, disorganized and, very often, ineffective. "Garbage in, garbage out" is what they end up with. Take the time to thoroughly clean up your CRM. This includes: Categorizing the entries in a way that makes sense to you. This may be something as simple as categorizing each entry by their location within the sales funnel (lead, prospect or client) and whether the lead or prospect is cold, warm or hot. Sellers and buyers should be segmented as well. Checking for duplicate entries and then merging or deleting them. Removing contacts that are impossible to contact. These are the ones who submitted a phony email address or phone number, have been in your database for some time and there is no hope of ever contacting them. Ensuring that every contact is on an appropriate touch campaign. 2. A powerful, lead-generating website While the NAR doesn't tell us how many of their members own a website, they do let on that 51 percent have had a website for at least five years. That's a rather paltry number, considering that a website should be one of the main tools in an agent's marketing arsenal. A real estate website can be a giant lead magnet, if done right. By blogging consistently and promoting your posts on social media, you drive traffic back to your site where you can employ additional magnets to capture those leads. But there are other bonuses offered by an agent website: A website offers a place to showcase your testimonials. It helps build awareness of your brand. A website provides a place for potential clients to get to know and trust you. It offers a spot for you to demonstrate authority. Agent websites offer value by providing information that real estate consumers are seeking. Your website can be a tool to help build a targeted mailing list to stay in touch with your sphere of influence. 3. In-depth knowledge of your target market If your target market is "likely buyers and sellers," we feel for you. "Everyone" isn't a target audience and appealing to "everyone" is almost impossible. For marketing to be successful, you simply must know who you are trying to reach. And this determination must be the result of a carefully thought-out process. There are many ways to choose a target market. The easiest is to target the type of client you've most enjoyed working with over the past year or two. Are they members of the military or landlords looking to sell? Maybe they were the first-time homebuyers or downsizing baby boomers. Add to your knowledge of this group of real estate consumers. What is the market like for them right now? Look for pain points that you can address and solve. Where do they hang out online? These are advertising mediums that present an ideal way to reach your audience. Even if you choose only one of the three aforementioned tips, you'll be ahead of your marketing game in

Success Story: "Nightmare" Breakup Leads to Happy Ending
This week's Success Story has a plotline like a romantic comedy: it involves a breakup, the realization of a mistake, and a happy ending. Our hero in this week's story is Veronica Figueroa, leader of top Orlando real estate team The Figueroa Team. Find out how she met her ideal real estate match, what happened when she left that real estate platform to try something new, and how a reunion got her business back on track. Playing the Field Veronica partnered with real estate CRM and marketing platform BoomTown in 2012. After five years, she decided to leave BoomTown to try something new—and to make sure she was providing her team with the best technology possible. At the time, she was seeing new features, like text message marketing, crop up in other CRMs across the industry. But communication is important in any relationship, and rather than checking to see if these new features were in development at BoomTown (which they were), she moved her team to a new platform. In fact, BoomTown had recently released two game-changing new features. Success Assurance offers the perfect mix of tools and services to handle lead generation, expert lead qualification, and lead management, serving conversation-ready prospects to agents. Additionally, Marketing Central allows clients to generate more leads and listing opportunities through a self-serve advertising portal. "I didn't dive deep enough to say, 'When is it coming? How do we make this still a part of our future even though we don't have it now?' I was impatient. I fell victim to just chasing that shiny object," she says. The Grass Isn't Always Greener Unfortunately for Veronica's bottom line, those shiny objects didn't do her team any favors. Rather than the 500-600 transactions they typically completed in a year, The Figueroa Team plateaued at just 300-350 transactions after the technology change. "I didn't realize how much we damaged our business by making the switch. I mean, it meant removing everyone off our website—people that we have been nurturing for so many years. It meant disrupting my team. It meant losing the opportunity to stay connected with consumers—trying to shift them over to another platform," she says. Not only that, Veronica couldn't help but compare the new platform to her ex-platform—and the comparison didn't leave the new platform looking so good. "I was basically measuring them to the standard of BoomTown and that's when I knew instantly. This is a nightmare," she says. "We could have done so much more, and how many lives could we have impacted? How many more careers could we have helped if we would have stayed put?" Returning "Home" to the Right Partner "Partner" is the key word in Veronica's reunion with BoomTown. Rather than just being a useful technology tool, BoomTown acts as a partner that offers support services, success management, coaching, and more. "That's why we chose to go back to BoomTown. We knew we needed a system we trusted. We needed to feel protected and safe in that area of our business with our team, making sure that business was just flowing naturally, organically with the new changes that we were going to make," Veronica says. "I guess I felt like I had to be doing something new and fresh at all times, but I realized that can be a part of our business, but it can't be a part of disrupting our systems, because our systems are the foundation of our business. We came back to BoomTown because BoomTown was a solution for me to be able to run my business with ease, and for me BoomTown is home." Watch this product tour to learn how BoomTown can become your partner in success. Can't decide which BoomTown product is right for you? Compare