Discover how to do more deals by consistently staying in touch with sellers to stay top of mind…all without doing more work or having to reach out yourself over and over again!
Forefront CRM automated follow up sequences allow you to “drip” messages to sellers over time so they think of you first when they are finally ready to sell.
Fortune is in the Follow Up
I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times over. But, I wager that only 2% or less of active real estate investors are consistent with their follow up.
Sellers become more motivated over time.
If you stop communicating with them if they do not accept your offer within a couple days, YOU ARE MISSING OUT ON DEALS THAT ARE RIGHTFULLY YOURS.
I get it. It’s difficult to continue following up because we trick ourselves into believing they just will not sell to us. That gets justified by the logic that it just takes too much time to follow up with these “old” leads.
Who wants to spend time calling people and being rejected instead of chasing that super easy home run deal that is right around the corner with your new marketing efforts???
Throwing Away Money If You’re Not Following Up Consistently
If you’re not consistently following up, you’re throwing away money…left and right, all day every day, 24/7…you get the point.
There are so many sellers that will eventually sell their house that were not ready when you first interacted with them.
You don’t want to be pestering them to sell or be pushy in any way, you simply want to nurture them. This means to just stay in contact with them and let them know you are still interested. That’s it.
You don’t have to “convince” them to sell. You simply want to wait until they convince themselves.
If you don’t add this lead nurturing to your day to day, you will need to do more marketing, handle more calls, go on more appointments, make more offers to do the same number of deals you could do by simply following up with sellers you already talked to.
This becomes a no-brainer when you utilize a real estate investor CRM like Forefront to handle this follow up for you.
Forefront CRM Makes Follow Up Dead Simple
We created Forefront CRM to address this issue of follow up being too time consuming and painful to remember to do.
What if you could simply create (or even better copy proven ones that have already been created – see below) follow up messages that can be sent out automatically by your CRM in a thoughtful way that does not feel salesy/pushy or automated in any way?
You can!
Proven Follow Up Sequences for Real Estate Investors
Hit the ground running with follow up sequences that have already been proven. These sequences were developed in my own real estate investing business (flipping/wholesaling nearly 1,000 deals since 2003) and tweaked with input from John Martinez from REI Sales Academy.
To add any of these proven sequences to your account simply add them from the Forefront Store (don’t worry, these are all free).
Now, you can head over to your Follow Up Sequences to customize it.
Customize Your Follow Up Sequences
Customizing your sequences is super simple. You can add/modify steps that are SMS, Email, Task (fire off a task for you or your team to manually contact the seller), Send Webhook (to do things with other systems to send a direct mail piece, Bonjoro video etc).
Click the ‘manage’ button for the sequence you want to customize
Click the ‘+ New Step’ button to add a new sequence step or click the ‘Manage’ button for any step to edit.
Editing a step allows you to change the details like how much of a delay since the last message there should be before sending this message (see ‘Day Offset’ in the image below. Read on to find out how to personalize each of these messages so they don’t seem automated!
Personalize Your Follow Up Messages
Personalize the messages for better deliverability and likelihood of a response. You can set short codes in your SMS and email messages that will get replaced with the information from the lead before being sent.
If you type a ‘[‘ character, a list of short codes appear that you can select from:
This dramatically increases your odds of a response and makes the seller feel you are actually taking the time out of your day to send them a friendly message. This is huge. If you are doing automated follow up, you must have this capability.
This also dramatically increases the odds of your SMS’s and Emails being delivered instead of ending up marked as spam as each message that goes out will be different.
Forefront CRM also accounts for the timezone of the contact. The time you set for messages to go out will be based on the timezone of the person the messages are being sent to. Yeah, we pretty much thought of everything. 🙂
Send Messages From Familiar Phone Numbers
This is where so many other real estate investor CRM’s drop the ball big time.
If a seller calls one of your marketing phone numbers and you send them SMS messages from a different number, how are they going to know it’s from you?
With Forefront, you can specify to have the follow up sequence use the phone number associated with the campaign the seller contacted you from!
Just toggle the ‘User Campaign Number’ switch to on. If you prefer to have a particular phone number used for the messages, you can choose that in the ‘From Number’ dropdown instead.
What Happens When A Seller Responds to Your Follow Up Messages
So what happens when a seller responds to one of these SMS messages or emails?
We certainly don’t want to continue sending messages if you are talking with them again. It’d be weird to talk to the seller and then that afternoon they get a follow up SMS that says, “Haven’t talked in a while. Do you still own the house?”
For this reason, when a seller responds to one of these messages, Forefront CRM automatically pauses the sequence for that lead.
How do you know about this reply though?
Since leads put in automated follow up in Forefront are no longer on the Pipeline, you need a way to tell Forefront where to move the lead now that it is considered active again (as they replied). You can set the location the lead should be moved when they reply here:
If you want to manually pause a sequence or unpause a paused sequence, you can do that on the lead:
Unpause a paused follow up sequence for a lead:
Create New Follow Up Sequences Quickly
The fastest way to create new sequences is to duplicate existing ones. Most of the time the only changes to your sequences are the delays in sending the messages and some slight tweaking to the messaging.
You’ll likely want separate sequences for sellers with different motivation levels. A motivated seller you just made an offer to should get more frequent messages whereas a seller that isn’t motivated in the least should get much more spread out messages.
Click the ‘Duplicate’ button for the sequence on the Follow Ups page
Chain Your Sequences For Long-term Follow Up
When a sequences has run through you can elect to have the lead automatically start another sequence! This allows you to chain sequences for very long-term follow up.
I once bought a house from a seller that I followed up with for 8 years!!! Do not EVER stop following up!
The recommended approach is to start a lead on a shorter term sequence with messages that only have a few days to a week delay between each. Then chaining that one to a mid-term sequence that has messages with a couple week delay to a month in between each message. Then chain that one to a sequence with messages that are spaced out every 2 to 6 months or so.
To have a lead go into a new sequence once it’s gone through a follow up sequence, set it here:
Recap
Land more deals by allowing your CRM to follow up consistently for you. In most cases, motivated sellers are not motivated enough to sign a contract immediately. Time has a way of increasing motivation for sellers as circumstances will change.
You want to be top of mind for those sellers.
Your competition is almost guaranteed to not be doing this. Imagine how much your business will change if you can do 30-60% more deals without having to generate any more new leads than you’re already generating.
How much in profits will that translate to?
Head over to the Store in your Forefront CRM account and add those proven follow up sequences to your account. Click here to login and get your sequences
Try Forefront CRM for Free
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