“I’m not able to make that appointment. Can you go? I’ve got a personal emergency.”
My acquisitions manager was asking me to go on an appointment to meet a motivated seller because he wasn’t going to be able to.
No big deal….or so I thought.
I’ve got no information about this lead other than the name and contact information of the seller and the address of the property and I needed to jump in my truck and head over there now. Guess I’m going to have to wing it…
“Aaaahhhhhhhh!!! We need to be more organized I screamed to myself. This is ridiculous!”
Who Said What and When?
When we are working this business as a lone wolf, this isn’t as much an issue…unless we are generating a lot of leads. I should probably say “until” we are generating a lot of leads. To sustain this business you will need to be generating a good amount of leads.
As we grow our business, it’s inevitable we will bring on help. It’s either that or try to do more and more, get burned out, overwhelmed, and quit.
I’ve seen it happen and it’s not pretty.
With even a small team we need a system to store our leads and all the information attached to them. In order for there to be a clear workflow as a lead comes in and goes from lead manager, to acquisitions manager, to transaction coordinator, to dispositions manager, etc there are a lot of people that need to know everything they can about each lead and deal.
Even if this is you handling all of these steps, you would do better to start setting this up so that you can hand off pieces in the future. You wouldn’t want to hire somebody without being able to drop them into a system that you’ve already proven.
I Don’t Like Losing
Without a central source of truth for all information gathered about a lead, we are at a huge disadvantage. If our competition is able to build rapport over the phone and arrive at the appointment to see the house with knowledge of their situation and true motivation, they will win the deal a majority of the time.
After going on thousands of motivated seller appointments myself, I know for a fact that I’ve landed deals where I offered less than a competitor due to the fact the seller “felt” better about going with us.
Why on earth would a seller go with a lower offer that was similar in all other respects?!
Because working directly with sellers involves building credibility and trust.
You earn credibility and trust by operating professionally.
How do you operate professionally?
You guessed it, you run a tight ship that runs on systems and processes…EVEN WHEN IT’S JUST YOU OR A SMALL TEAM.
All Lead Information In One Place, Easily Accessible
Fast forward. We now operate using the Forefront CRM platform. My acquisitions manager tells me last minute he can’t make it to a scheduled appointment with a truly motivated seller.
No sweat!!! I don’t even need to ask him for the address. I login to our Forefront account and check the active appointments on the Up Next page for the next appointment assigned to him. Got it!!
On the way to the appointment, I read through all of the notes and activity history and listen to recordings of the calls my team has had with the seller using the iOS app.
I’m able to comfortably talk to the seller because I am up to speed on the entire timeline of our interaction with them.
I make an offer.
They really like our company and how we’ve handled ourselves but need to get approval from relatives in another state to sell their inherited property.
No problem! I add notes to the lead in the iOS app and set a task for my acquisitions manager to follow up with the seller the next day.
We’re all on the same page in real time! I know this lead won’t slip through the cracks and I know my acquisitions manager will not drop the ball because I assigned the task to him.
One location, easily accessible.
Professional Communication On A Whole ‘Nother Level
We gained serious “Professional” points working the above transaction due to the fact that each time we communicated with the seller we did so from the same phone number.
The typical motivated seller experience involves a seller seeing advertising about how they can get cash for their house. They decide to call and see how it works and hopefully get an offer on the house.
More often than not, hopefully this is your competitors and not you, the real estate investor doesn’t answer the phone call. They’re busy and being that they are using their cell phone on their marketing, they don’t know if it’s a personal call or someone calling on their marketing.
They are busy so they ask someone on their team to return the call.
Their team member calls the seller. The seller asks, “who’s this?”
The seller doesn’t know who is calling because they never dialed the number they are receiving a call from!
Let’s take this a step further and get to the stage where this team has made an offer and the seller doesn’t accept it. They need to do follow up. So they make notes for each other to follow up periodically.
Now the seller is receiving texts and phone calls from potentially other different phone numbers. There is no context!! This communication is likely doing more damage than good because from the seller’s point of view all of this communication is coming from different companies.
If an investor is smart, they are using an incredible phone tool like CallRail to provide separate phone numbers for their marketing campaigns.
With Forefront CRM, we integrated our CallRail account so the seller called using one of our campaign numbers so we knew immediately that it was a potential lead.
In addition to that, we set up the campaign numbers in CallRail to forward calls to our lead manager first. If they didn’t answer the phone right away, the call gets forwarded to our acquisitions person.
We’re going to answer the phone because we set ourselves up to ensure we have more than one chance.
Now, every time we need to communicate with the seller, Forefront knows based on campaign which phone number to use to send texts and make calls from with that seller.
How cool is that?!?! The seller will receive cohesive communication and will know it’s all coming from one company!
Forefront Ties Communication To Each Lead
Even though CallRail shows call logs, you still don’t know which leads those communications belong to.
The integration of CallRail with Forefront allows you to see all communication with the seller in the context of the lead itself. All of your data and communication about a lead in a single place!
Recap
It’s vital you have a way to keep all of your lead information in one place so that you can start growing a team that can work seamlessly.
The professionalism of everyone on the team being able to know the history and all communication with the seller brings a level of professionalism that gets more deals!
It’s time to up level your real estate investing business.
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